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Fixing CVS annotate
Yes, some of us work on projects started almost a decade ago and as such we use CVS (yes, CVS has many limitations and yes, git is better – for a nice introduction see Randal Schwarz’s video about git), but migrating is not directly justifiable (it would involve: training IT staff to be able to…
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Two new challenges
Well, new for me at least… The first one is 0x41414141.com. Just go to the site and you can start directly. As far as I know, this is not time-bound. The second one is spargecoduasta.com (“break this code”). It is put up by BitDefender and I don’t know if it has a time limit. The…
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Careful with that axe^H^H^H static, Eugene!
An other instance from the “bugs which will bite you” series: public class TestStatic { static class Foo { static Foo instance = new Foo(); static String name = Foo.class.getName(); public Foo() { System.err.println("Hello, my name is " + name); } } public static void main(String[] args) { System.err.println("Your name is what?n" + "Your name…
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Spot the error
C++ compilers are notorious for giving error messages which point you in the wrong direction. However even simpler languages can have issues. Can you spot the real problem with the java code below? There is a comma missing between the parameters! Nice, ey? (To be fair, on the sidebar Eclipse shows two errors, one of…
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Perl is everywhere!
Something which is not appreciated enough IMHO is just how much of the interwebs runs on Perl: for example Frozen Bubble is written in Perl. Also, from some error messages I’ve got the impression Yahoo Pipes uses (is written in?) Perl. And just before you accuse me of being a Perl fanboy (which I am…
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Know thy (cryptographic) functions
More than I year ago I mentioned that VNC uses only the first 8 characters of the password to validate it. Today I found an other situation where this happens: the crypt function (to be fair, the glibc version of it has the option of using all the characters, but still we have the issue…
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Patching lcc-win32 so that it runs under Windows 2000
lcc-win32 is a small C (not C++!) for Windows, which comes with a simple editor/IDE. It is free for non-commercial use and is small and quick to install. Unfortunately it wouldn’t start on a fully patched Windows 2000 SP4 box, even though the homepage explicitly mentions Windows 2000 as supported. The problem was that my…
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Why can’t I see the stacktrace under Java?
I recently had a situation where Log4j wasn’t outputting the stacktrace of the logged exceptions. While I’m not sure that the following is the actual explanation, it seems very plausible (since the program was running Java 5). Quote from the Java 5 release notes: The compiler in the server VM now provides correct stack backtraces…
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Review: Polymorphic Podcast
The Polymorphic Podcast is programming related podcast (think polymorphism as in object inheritance) which is somewhat Microsoft centric (.NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, etc). That doesn’t mean however that there aren’t other technologies. For example the latest version talks about jQuery and managed to surprise me, with the mention of LiveQuery and SelectorGadget. An other interesting…
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Goldman Sachs security incident
Allegedly the source code for Goldman Sachs “low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy, and order submissions” systems have been stolen by an insider (via Zero Hedge here and here). Personally I find this (and similar cases) overblown for several reasons: Sourcecode by itself is worthless. The important thing is the mathematical model behind…