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Search - "1 byte"
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Interview with a candidate. He calls himself "C++ expert" on his resume. I think: "oh, great, I love C++ too, we will have an interesting conversation!"
Me: let's start with an easy one, what is 'nullptr'?
Him: (...some undecipherable sequence of words that didn't make any sense...)
In my mind: mh, probably I didn't understand right. Let's try again with something simple and more generic
Me: can you tell me about memory management in C++?
Him: you create objects on the stack with the 'new' keyword and they get automatically released when no other object references them
In my mind: wtf is this guy talking about? Is he confusing C++ with Java? Does he really know C++? Let's make him write some code, just to be sure
Me: can you write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 10?
Ten minutes and twenty mistakes later...
Me: okay, so what is this <int> here in angle brackets? What is a template?
Him: no idea
Me: you wrote 'cout', why sometimes do I see 'std::cout' instead? What is 'std'?
Answer: no idea, never heard of 'std'
I think: on his resume he also said he is a Java expert. Let's see if he knows the difference between the two. He *must* have noticed that one is byte-compiled and the other one is compiled to native code! Otherwise, how does he run his code? He must answer this question correctly:
Me: what is the difference between Java and C++? One has a Virtual Machine, what about the other?
Him: Java has the Java Virtual Machine
Me: yes, and C++?
Him: I guess C++ has a virtual machine too. The C++ Virtual Machine
Me (exhausted): okay, I don't have any other questions, we will let you know
And this is the story of how I got scared of interviews29 -
I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.
So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?
This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:
1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!
2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...
3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.
But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.
4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.
There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.
After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.
So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".
So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".
So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.
So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.
If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>14 -
https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/... sure some of you are working on the patches already, if you are then lets connect cause, I am an ardent researcher for the same as of now.
So here it goes:
As soon as kernel page table isolation(KPTI) bug will be out of embargo, Whatsapp and FB will be flooded with over-night kernel "shikhuritee" experts who will share shitty advices non-stop.
1. The bug under embargo is a side channel attack, which exploits the fact that Intel chips come with speculative execution without proper isolation between user pages and kernel pages. Therefore, with careful scheduling and timing attack will reveal some information from kernel pages, while the code is running in user mode.
In easy terms, if you have a VPS, another person with VPS on same physical server may read memory being used by your VPS, which will result in unwanted data leakage. To make the matter worse, a malicious JS from innocent looking webpage might be (might be, because JS does not provide language constructs for such fine grained control; atleast none that I know as of now) able to read kernel pages, and pawn you real hard, real bad.
2. The bug comes from too much reliance on Tomasulo's algorithm for out-of-order instruction scheduling. It is not yet clear whether the bug can be fixed with a microcode update (and if not, Intel has to fix this in silicon itself). As far as I can dig, there is nothing that hints that this bug is fixable in microcode, which makes the matter much worse. Also according to my understanding a microcode update will be too trivial to fix this kind of a hardware bug.
3. A software-only remedy is possible, and that is being implemented by all major OSs (including our lovely Linux) in kernel space. The patch forces Translation Lookaside Buffer to flush if a context switch happens during a syscall (this is what I understand as of now). The benchmarks are suggesting that slowdown will be somewhere between 5%(best case)-30%(worst case).
4. Regarding point 3, syscalls don't matter much. Only thing that matters is how many times syscalls are called. For example, if you are using read() or write() on 8MB buffers, you won't have too much slowdown; but if you are calling same syscalls once per byte, a heavy performance penalty is guaranteed. All processes are which are I/O heavy are going to suffer (hostings and databases are two common examples).
5. The patch can be disabled in Linux by passing argument to kernel during boot; however it is not advised for pretty much obvious reasons.
6. For gamers: this is not going to affect games (because those are not I/O heavy)
Meltdown: "Meltdown" targeted on desktop chips can read kernel memory from L1D cache, Intel is only affected with this variant. Works on only Intel.
Spectre: Spectre is a hardware vulnerability with implementations of branch prediction that affects modern microprocessors with speculative execution, by allowing malicious processes access to the contents of other programs mapped memory. Works on all chips including Intel/ARM/AMD.
For updates refer the kernel tree: https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/...
For further details and more chit-chats refer: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/...
~Cheers~
(Originally written by Adhokshaj Mishra, edited by me. )23 -
//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v2.0.0-beta)
//
After several concepts, about 11 months of development (keep in mind that I released 20 updates for v1 in the meantime, so it wasn't a continous 11 months long development process) and a short closed beta phase, v2 is now available for everyone (as public beta)! :)
I tried to improve the app in every aspect, from finally responsive and good looking UI on Desktop version to backend performance improvements, which means that I almost coded it from scratch.
There are also of course a few new features (like "go to bottom" in rants), and more to come.
It's a very huge update, and unfortunately to move forward, improve the UI (add Fluent Design) and make it at the same level of new UWP apps, I was forced to drop the supported for these old Windows 10 builds:
- Threshold 1 (10240)
- Threshold 2 (10586)
Too many incompatiblity issues with the new UI, and for 1 person with a lot of other commitments outside this project (made for free, just for passion), it's impossible to work at 3 parallel versions of the same app.
I already done something like that during these 11 months (every single of the 20 updates for v1 needed to be implemented a second time for v2).
During the closed beta tests, thanks to the awesome testers who helped me way too much than I ever wished, I found out that there are already incompatiblity issues with Anniversary Update, which means that I will support two versions:
1) One for Creators Update and newer builds.
2) One for Anniversary Update (same features, but missing Fluent Design since it doesn't work on that OS version, and almost completly rewritten XAML styles).
For this reason v2 public beta is out now for Creators Update (and newer) as regular update, and will be out in a near future (can't say when) also for the Anniversary Update.
The users with older OS versions (problem which on PC could be solved in 1-2 days, just download updates) can download only the v1.5.9 (which probably won't be supported with new updates anymore, except for particular critcal bug fixes).
So if you have Windows 10 on PC and want to use v2 today, just be sure you have Creators Update or Fall Creators Update.
If you have Windows 10 PC with Anniversary Update, update it, or if you don't want to do that, wait a few weeks/months for the update with support for your build.
If you have an older version on PC, update it, or enjoy v1.5.9.
If you have Windows 10 Mobile Anniversary Update, update it (if it's possible for your device), or just wait a few weeks/months for the update with support for your build.
If you have Windows 10 Mobile, and because of Microsoft stupid policy, you can't update to Anniversary Update, enjoy v1.5.9, or try the "unofficial" method (registry hack) to update to a newer build.
I hope it's enough clear why not everyone can receive the update today, or at all. :P
Now I would like to thank a few people who made this possible.
As always, @dfox who is always available for help me with API implementations.
@thmnmlist, who helped me a lot during this period with really great UI suggestions (just check out his twitter, it's a really good person, friend, designer and artist: https://twitter.com/thmnmlist).
And of course everyone of the closed beta testers, that reported bugs and precious suggestions (some of them already implemented, others will arrive soon).
The order is random:
@Raamakrishnan
@Telescuffle
@Qaldim
@thmnmlist
@nikola1402
@aayusharyan
@cozyplanes
@Vivaed
@Byte
@RTRMS
@tylerleonhardt
@Seshpengiun
@MEGADROID
@nottoobright
Changelog of v2.0.0-beta:
- New UI with Fluent Design and huge improvements for Desktop;
- Added native support for Fall Creators Update (Build 16299);
- Changed minimum supported version to Creators Update (Build 15063), support for Anniversary Update (Build 14393) will arrive soon;
- Added mouse support for Pull-To-Refresh;
- Added ability to change your username and email;
- Added ability to filter (by 'Day', 'Week', 'Month' and 'All') the top Rants;
- Added ability to open rant links in-app;
- Added ability to zoom GIFs (just tap on them in the Rant View);
- Added 'go to bottom' button in the Rant View (if more than 3 comments);
- Added new theme ('Total Black');
- ...complete changelog in-app and on my website (can't post it here because of the 5000 characters limit)...
What will arrive in future updates:
- 'Active Discussions' screen so you can easily find rants that have recent comments/discussions;
- Support for 'Collabs';
- Push Notifications (it was postponed and announced too many times...);
- More themes and themes options;
- and more...
If you still didn't download devRant unofficial UWP, do it now: https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...
If you find some bugs or you have feature suggestion, post it on the Issue Tracker on GitHub (thanks in advance for your help!): https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...
I hope you will enjoy it! ;)52 -
1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.
3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.
4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC
5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.
6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself
7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.
8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#
9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte
10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache
11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.
12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol
13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.
14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."
15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."
16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."
17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."
18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.
19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.
20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.10 -
The amount of people who don't know the difference between kilobyte and kibibyte is too damn high. So much confusion.
TL;DR : Most people use Kilobyte ( KB ) and Kibibyte ( KiB ) wrong and i am angry about it.
When i first got involved with software as a teenager, i always wondered why we convert kilo to mega with multiplying by 1024, when we do it with multiplying by 1000 basically everywhere else. Our physics teacher called this SI unit system and told us that this is an internationally accepted statement. So why is there a different rule ? Did i miss out something ? Regrettably I didn't ask her about this.
I just didn't get fully as a teenager. Now, as I am a developer now, i understand that dealing with power or ten is troublesome. Due to ease of work, we lazily mess with SI system and use it wrongly. Isn't it the time we end this abomination ?
2 years ago i talked to a friend about this, he said that i shouldn't bother.
I talked to a teacher, he said "you are right but using different brand of unit system can be overkill, since there is not much difference anyways." I said okay and left.
1 mega = 1000 kilo
1 giga = 1000 mega etc
also,
MB = Megabyte ( 1000 Kilobyte )
KB = Kilobyte ( 1000 Byte )
MiB = Mebibyte ( 1024 Kibibyte )
KiB = Kibibyte ( 1024 Byte )
I am writing this because today i saw someone do it wrong on the internet, all of these came into mind. I wonder your approach about this, for research purposes.
Call me dick all you want, but i am the guy who always corrects uncertainty, no matter what. Things should be in place, correctly. No i don't have OCD. If you say something like "I have 1 MB of executable file, which means i have 1024 KB of it", i will find you, and i will correct you.37 -
Me: Hey can I take a byte
Friend: Sure, here
*Gives toast*
*bites 8 pieces*
Friend: Dude I said 1 not eight!
Me: You said I can take a byte :(
Based off my imagination6 -
*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"
For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).
After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.
Well well well welly welly fucking well...
Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)
Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:
God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!
The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.
It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.
If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.
OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.3 -
Some words of wisdom passed on by our Scrum.
1. I am responsible for setting boundaries. Work time, sleep time, family time, me time. If I don't set them properly, things WILL get unbalanced very quickly. (And I would add, burnout will follow closely).
2. Being productive isn't about doing more and more in less time. It's about doing only the most important things well, and either saying no to the other things, or finding another way to get them done. (Prioritize!)
3. I can't win (let alone run) a marathon by thinking of it as a 26 mile long sprint, or a week as a five day sprint. (Eat a digital elephant a byte at a time).
4. Loved ones are good judges of when things are in and out of balance.
5. Taking time off is essential. Vacations, yes, but also nights and weekends. (Or you WILL burn out and hate what you do).
Comments in () are mine.1 -
I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...
#1 - Most expensive lesson learned
Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.
This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...
After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.
Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.
#2 - Hardest to find
This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.
Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.
#3 - Most elegant fix
Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.
My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.
So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.1 -
I have noticed on here, there is a direct correlation between the number of swear words in a post and that posts ++ count. As a programmer who doesn't swear (I know, "just give it a few years" or "YOUR NOT A REAL PROGRAMMER!!" [side note, I also don't drink coffee]), I guess my ++ counter will only ever be allocated 1 byte...10
-
so im deciding to byte the bullet and roll down the angular road.
install node they say, its quick and easy they say... 1 hour later after
./configure
make
im starting to wonder if i made the right decision.10 -
Is obsidian a fucking joke?
Seriously, is it a joke? Why would you ever care so much about indexing literally everything, if the entire thing crashes and/or takes >5min to LITERALLY just open the fucking directory and/or (so help you) if that directory is full of projects/repos or whatever the fuck and the total size of said directory is like >5GB.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU INDEX EVERYTHING? -- "Ohh obsidian's not supposed to be used a fully fledged IDE, ohh obsidian should just handle MD files and normal sized projects, ohh the plugins and ease-of-use" -- Fuck.
There's no fucking real reason to index everything, BY DEFAULT. You open a directory with Obsidian? Doesn't matter, it's 1 byte, it's 100GB, you get indexed. Deal with it. It will use LITERALLY every resource your computer has. I'm surprised it doesn't go galaxy brain and ping if any other computers/devices are on the network and then attempt to connect and use their hardware (obsidian can be like a node!).
How shit can you be at understanding basic data structures and algorithms, where you just revert to based google-chrome brain and let the FUCKING TEXT EDITOR -- OBSIDIAN IS A FUCKING TEXT EDITOR HOLY SHIT -- hog all conceivable memory.
I swear to <some-deity> if anyone fucking says "Ohhhhhhhh actually, it's not a text editor, it has plugins and features and shit, it does all dis cool stff", OR, "Ohhhhh actually, obsidian indexes things for a very specific/rationale/apt/pragmatic/academic reason" OR "ohhhh, I have 100 iphones, 1000 ipads and a trillion desktop computers that each have 256GB of memory, why you hating on obsidian?" then go kick rocks. The fucking lot of you. Are you fucking kidding me.8 -
My first contact with an actual computer was the Sinclair ZX80, a monster with 512 bytes of ram (as in 1/2 kbyte)
It had no storage so you had to enter every program every time and it was programmed in basic using key combinations, you could not just write the commands since it did not have memory enough to keep the full text in memory.
So you pressed the cmd key along with one of the letter keys and possibly shift to enter a command, like cmd+p for print and it stored s byte code.8 -
Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.
What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.
Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.
Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.
So far the theory.
In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.
They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.
configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))
You might immediately guess what has happened here.
DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.
Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.
Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.
But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....
Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....
What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.
This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.
So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.
At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).
It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...
So much joy for such a stupid thing.18 -
The process of making my paging MIDI player has ground to a halt IMMEDIATELY:
Format 1 MIDIs.
There are 3 MIDI types: Format 0, 1, and 2.
Format 0 is two chunks long. One track chunk and the header chunk. Can be played with literally one chunk_load() call in my player.
Format 2 is (n+1) chunks long, with n being defined in the header chunk (which makes up the +1.) Can be played with one chunk_load() call per chunk in my player.
Format 1... is (n+1) chunks long, same as Format 2, but instead of being played one chunk at a time in sequence, it requires you play all chunks
AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.
65534 maximum chunks (first track chunk is global tempo events and has no notes), maximum notes per chunk of ((FFFFFFFFh byte max chunk data area length)/3 = 1,431,655,763d)/2 (as Note On and Note Off have to be done for every note for it to be a valid note, and each eats 3 bytes) = 715,827,881 notes (truncated from 715,827,881.5), 715,827,881 * 65534 (max number of tracks with notes) = a grand total of 46,911,064,353,454 absolute maximum notes. At 6 bytes per (valid) note, disregarding track headers and footers, that's 281,466,386,120,724 bytes of memory at absolute minimum, or 255.992 TERABYTES of note data alone.
All potentially having to be played
ALL
AT
ONCE.
This wouldn't be so bad I thought at the start... I wasn't planning on supporting them.
Except...
>= 90% of MIDIs are Format 1.
Yup. The one format seemingly deliberately built not to be paged of the three is BY FAR the most common, even in cases where Format 0 would be a better fit.
Guess this is why no other player pages out MIDIs: the files are most commonly built specifically to disallow it.
Format 1 and 2 differ in the following way: Format 1's chunks all have to hit the piano keys, so to speak, all at once. Format 2's chunks hit one-by-one, even though it can have the same staggering number of notes as Format 1. One is built for short, detailed MIDIs, one for long, sparse ones.
No one seems to be making long ones.6 -
WHY IS IT SO FUCKIN ABSURDLY HARD TO PUSH BITS/BYTES/ASM ONTO PROCESSOR?
I have bytes that I want ran on the processor. I should:
1. write the bytes to a file
2a. run a single command (starting virtual machine (that installed with no problems (and is somewhat usable out-of-the-box))) that would execute them, OR
2b. run a command that would image those bytes onto (bootable) persistent storage
3b. restart and boot from that storage
But nooo, that's too sensible, too straightforward. Instead I need to write those bytes as a parameter into a c function of "writebytes" or whatever, wrap that function into an actual program, compile the program with gcc, link the program with whatever, whatever the program, build the program, somehow it goes through some NASM/MASM "utilities" too, image the built files into one image, re-image them into hdd image, and WHO THE FUCK KNOWS WHAT ELSE.
I just want... an emulator? probably. something. something which out of the box works in a way that I provide file with bytes, and it just starts executing them in the same way as an empty processor starts executing stuff.
What's so fuckin hard about it? I want the iron here, and I want a byte funnel into that iron, and I want that iron to run the bytes i put into the fuckin funnel.
Fuckin millions of indirection layers. Fuck off. Give me an iron, or a sensible emulation of that iron, and give me the byte funnel, and FUCK THE FUCK AWAY AND LET ME PLAY AROUND.8 -
I never understood the ‚space vs tabs‘ war ...
Tabs can do everything that spaces can plus more:
* look the same as spaces, but its width is configurable (at least in a decent editor)
* the safe space (1 byte vs 3 or 4)
* you can decrease the intendation leven with one bsckspace keypress in every(!) editor.
So the winner can only be tabs? Why would I even limit myself with spaces?
I dont wanna start a flame war, just curious what you guys (especially the spaces lovers) think about it11 -
Dont blame me for making Minecraft plugins, but holy shit i really hate stairs right now.
Im modifying some old code of mine to add extra features, and i just need to be able to rotate stairs 90, 180 and 270 degrees, then im past this bump.
Stairs get their direction based on a byte value that makes no fucking sense to me.
North = 3
West = 1
East = 0
South = 2
Ive been drawingto see if that made me go "oh like that", checking if the bits of each value had a system, and now im here.
Titshit.
I dont know who made it like this, but i really dont want to make some static switch or if/else statement to process this directional trash. I want it flexible.
If you spotted a system to the numbers, please mail me a rock, and then tell me how i fix this.12 -
Why tf people still use anything that is not UTF-8?? I could understand if you are from a language with most of its chars out of the first byte, but still, it is increadible the amount of things encoded using latin-1 and similar others... It is time to STOP!1
-
Halt and Catch Fire is having another great season. Lived those days and it is so true. CompuServe, Compaq, Commodore, 5 1/4", Tandy 1000, Byte Mag, Atari, The Well... The tech you see is really 1985ish. Attention to detail is appreciated by long time technologists.
H&CF is about building a tech business and much applies to today's startups. That two brilliant tech women are leading the charge adds to it. All the characters are great Cameron, Gordon, Donna, the devs at Mutiny and Joe channeling Jobs (in my opinion) is spot on.
Any H&CF fans have an opinion?4 -
PC Trivia-
1. What does a baby computer call his father?
Data
2. What do you call a computer superhero?
A Screen Saver
3. Why did the computer cross the road?
To get a byte to eat
4. Why did the computer get glasses?
To improve its websight
5. Why did the computer sneeze?
It had a virus
6. Where do computers go to dance?
The disk-o
7. Why did the computer squeak?
Because someone stepped on its mouse
8. What happened when the computer geeks met?
It was love at first site
9. What is an alien’s favorite place on a computer?
The space bar
10. What’s the best way to learn about computers?
Bit by bit3 -
mov al, [var]
var db 07h
Error on line 1: undefined operation size.
Silly me defining a byte, using mov on a byte-wide register with said byte-wide variable. What size it could be, the byte-wide variable is soo fucken unknown i'm so sorry.1 -
Ideas I've had over the years that could pan out and be useful:
SMS-DB: Stands for SMS-Data Burst. Used to allow those with low cell signal or no data plan to transfer data between a phone and some client via the standard SMS text space. Would be slow, but would act kinda like dial-up over SMS (as mobile lines are compressed on all service levels, even LTE, so traditional dial-up wouldn't work!) I have a general idea on how packets would be laid out, but that's about it so far...
everything2PNG: Allows one to transpose any file's data into a PNG with a 3 byte per pixel (full color RGB), which allows for a "compression" of sorts (about 91, 93% on preliminary tests) AND allowing further, more efficient compression of the resulting file. (Plus... it's just kinda cool to see files transposed as PNGs.) I actually have a simple transposer to go to PNG, but can't yet go back. Large files (around 600MB) use upwards of 4GB with efficient paging and other optimizations via NumPy so far, so it's not *viable* yet, but it's coming along nicely.
RPi-GPIO Interconnection Bus: A master/slave or round robin method to allow for Raspberry Pis to communicate using GPIO, which can help free up network bandwidth in RPi cloud computing clusters. At most, this'd allow for 4 bits used for pushing to the GPIO "bus", and 4 bits used for pulling from the "bus". 8 pins total are usually unused minimum, so either 3 or 4 pins for upload, 3 or 4 for download, and potentially 1 or 2 for commands, general non-data communication, etc. I made a version of this concept using Round Robin for a client, but it was horribly slow. (I also don't have distribution rights for the code, so i'm working from scratch.) Definitely doable. -
A beginner in learning java. I was beating around the bushes on internet from past a decade . As per my understanding upto now. Let us suppose a bottle of water. Here the bottle may be considered as CLASS and water in it be objects(atoms), obejcts may be of same kind and other may differ in some properties. Other way of understanding would be human being is CLASS and MALE Female be objects of Class Human Being. Here again in this Scenario objects may differ in properties such as gender, age, body parts. Zoo might be a class and animals(object), elephants(objects), tigers(objects) and others too, Above human contents too can be added for properties such as in in Zoo class male, female, body parts, age, eating habits, crawlers, four legged, two legged, flying, water animals, mammals, herbivores, Carnivores.. Whatever.. This is upto my understanding. If any corrections always welcome. Will be happy if my answer modified, comment below.
And for basic level.
Learn from input, output devices
Then memory wise cache(quick access), RAM(runtime access temporary memory), Hard disk (permanent memory) all will be in CPU machine. Suppose to express above memory clearly as per my knowledge now am writing this answer with mobile net on. If a suddenly switch off my phone during this time and switch on.Cache runs for instant access of navigation,network etc.RAM-temporary My quora answer will be lost as it was storing in RAM before switch off . But my quora app, my gallery and others will be on permanent internal storage(in PC hard disks generally) won't be affected. This all happens in CPU right. Okay now one question, who manages all these commands, input, outputs. That's Software may be Windows, Mac ios, Android for mobiles. These are all the managers for computer componential setup for different OS's.
Java is high level language, where as computers understand only binary or low level language or binary code such as 0’s and 1’s. It understand only 00101,1110000101,0010,1100(let these be ABCD in binary). For numbers code in 0 and 1’s, small case will be in 0 and 1s and other symbols too. These will be coverted in byte code by JVM java virtual machine. The program we write will be given to JVM it acts as interpreter. But not in C'.
Let us C…
Do comment. Thank you6 -
Problem: in assembler, i want to proceed an string byte by byte. How can i do this?
My try:
Mov ebx, 0
S:
Mov eax, [var +ebx]
;somethin
Add ebx, 1
Jmp s
But it doesnt cut off the thing rigth8 -
I'm building a script parser to make mods for a game I like. The first step is to write an importer.
The documentation is nonexistent and I'm delving into byte manipulation, which I'm not familiar with - at all. I'm porting existing code from Java to C#, and everything is similar but different enough that I can't always just to a 1:1 transfer.
I get everything working, cleaned up and split into classes so I can write the exporter.
I do an import and the file won't parse. I try all previously know working files and still no good. I clean, rebuild, clean rebuild, run, debug, restart my computer, clear my cache, clean, rebuild. No good.
IT WAS WORKING 5 MINUTES AGO
Proceed to revert to every version from the last hour. No dice.
I was in the wrong folder the whole time.
Navigate to the proper folder, open the filename I know to be good and bingo, works like a charm.
The same project caused me headaches because I had a "== -1", when it should have been "== 1". Between my inexperience with byte manipulation and my untreated astigmatism, I was nearly sent to the shadow realm fixing that.3 -
I am thinking of how I can make data upload reliable. I am sure that I am making it more complex as it could be and I need some pointer.
My goal is to have a pause/resume feature in file uploading.
Here is how it would work.
In order to start uploading , you give the server
1) File Name
2) Folder path you want to upload it to
3) Checksum of the file
Here the server will check whether you can upload it to a folder, whether the file have been previously uploaded (by file name and checksum)
If you could actually upload to the folder , server will return "unique file token" , "folder path" , "unique byte token". Let call it init_upload().
The client will use "unique file token" (to identify the file) , folder path (to know where to upload it to) , "unique byte token" and byte[] (data which to actually upload). Let call this operation data_upload().
If the operation is actually complete , server will return new "unique byte token"
Internally it will actually work like this.Let say we want to upload "file.mp3", when the client call init_upload() it will create
file.mp3 and unique_byte_token.file.mp3.
When the client upload data first time , it will append data to unique_byte_token.file.mp3.
When the client upload data second time , it will check whether the "byte token" that client put is the same as previous "unique_byte_token". If it is same ,
1) we move the data from unique_byte_token.file.mp3 to file.mp3
2) Delete unique_byte_token.file.mp3
3) Create new unique_byte_token.file.mp3
4) Append data to unique_byte_token.file.mp3
The reason I am using "byte token" is because I want to check whether previous upload is actually success.
Let say we need to call 50 part of data_upload() will put 49 part to file.mp3 and 1 part to byte_token.file.mp3.
Finally the client need to call data_upload_complete() which will
1) Put reminding 1 part to file.mp3
2) Remove byte_token.file.mp3 as cleanup6 -
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.Encodings;
//Bitwise XOR operator is represented by ^. It performs bitwise XOR operation on the corresponding bits of two operands. If the corresponding bits are same, the result is 0. If the corresponding bits are different, the result is 1.
//If the operands are of type bool, the bitwise XOR operation is equivalent to logical XOR operation between them.
using System.Text.Unicode;
using System.Windows;
using System.IO;
namespace Encryption2plzWOrk
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//random is basically a second sepret key for RSA exhanges I know there probaley is a better way to do this please tell me in github comments.//
Random r = new Random();
int random = r.Next(2000000,500000000);
int privatekey = 0;
int publickey = 0;
string privateKeyString = Console.ReadLine();
byte[] bytes3 = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(privateKeyString);
foreach(byte b in bytes3)
{
privatekey = b + privatekey;
}
int permutations = random/ 10000;
if(privatekey < 256)
{
while(permutations > 0)
{
foreach (byte b in bytes3)
{
privatekey = privatekey + (privatekey ^ permutations)*20;
}
}
}
publickey = privatekey*random;
Console.WriteLine("your public key is {0}",publickey);
}
}
}
would this be considerd ok HOBBYIST encryption and if not how would I do a slow improvment I used bitwise to edit bits so thats a check :D12