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Multi-threaded Visual C rand
I was helping out a friend who was trying to generate random numbers in several threads and he was expecting those numbers to be (at least somewhat) different. After getting the obvious problem resolved (you must call srand to initialize the seed – using for example the current time), we were still getting threads which…
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Stop thinking in stereotypes!
Stereotypes may help you form a quick opinion about matters, however you almost certainly would be wrong. Romania has a few such associated stereotypes (like orphans), but the one related to IT security is East-European criminals. In-line with this perception we have the latest F-Secure blog post Romanian Whack-A-Mole and Linux Bots (disclaimer: I work…
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The human aspect of security
The weakest link in security are humans. This is both good (when you have a system where the weakest link isn’t technology means that you succeeded from a technological standpoint) and bad (because you must learn new skills to try to mitigate the new threat). A couple of days ago I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.04…
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The new rm -rf /
There are many urban legends out there talking about n00bs asking a *nix related question and getting the answer just do rm -rf / from the terminal (by the way, you don’t want to do that – it tries to recursively erase all the files from your hard-drives – in general when you get advice…
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Kernel 2.6.24 + PostgreSQL != love?
It seems so. The sad thing is that at the moment Ubuntu Server 8.04 (LTS) comes with 2.6.24… Ouch. Hopefully the patches will trickle down quickly. Also, note to myself: newer is not always better. Update: back to the future – 2.6.24. Thank you Marcin for pointing it out. Also corrected the tags.
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Installing Perl 5.10 on Ubuntu
So I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 and I’m not very impressed unfortunately. I got Compiz working, thanks to Compiz-Check (it works only at lower resolutions, so I switched it off, however it’s nice to have the option) and also Monodevelop 1.0, however the installed Firefox is slightly outdated (Beta 5 rather than RC1) and sound…
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Test for available modules in Perl
As I mentioned earlier the difference between use and require is that the second is evaluated only at execution time, making it possible to test if a given module was imported successfully. One possible use for this is to make your script deployable on multiple machines where you might or might not have the option…
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Mixed links and commentary
MS Office took a page out of IdeaJ’s book and uses every available method to annoy users (check for valid licenses) – on the bright side hopefully I will time to update my machine to Ubuntu 8.04 today
The Backup Song. Very, very funny! Writing a small web crawler in Python. Why it demonstrates… -
Perl split gotcha
One of those things which are spelled out in the documentation, but most people (including myself) don’t really read the fine manual, until really, really forced to, and from the way it’s described, it’s not immediately clear how it can byte you. From perldoc: Empty trailing fields, on the other hand, are produced when there…
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The difference between use and require in Perl
Contrary to PHP (if you ever used it), require is the more dynamic one of the two. Both statements are used to import modules, however use is executed compile time (ie when the parser runs through the script), and require is executed when the actual line is evaluated. Generally speaking you should use use (:-)),…