dfox

74 ms·

931.
by dfox 7y ago
Abort, retry, ignore(, fail) is perfect example of UI, that was good when it was designed, but very fast became nothing else than source of confusion.
932.
by dfox 7y ago
The issue is that Linux’s kernel-only “fast” CSPRNG is just thin wrapper around arch_get_random() (ie. RDRAND) when it is supported.
933.
by dfox 7y ago
get_random_u32() which is the function in question uses RDRAND if ut is available regardless of what RANDOM_TRUST_CPU says. It is meant of fast source of “good enough entropy” for short lived secrets. Short circuiting to RDRAND arguably bre
934.
by dfox 7y ago
For storage of structured data (and probably even for loosely coupled RPC) you want format that is efficient and schema-oblivious. The bad choice 15 years ago was XML, bad choice today is JSON (the parsing overhead is not negligible) or P
935.
by dfox 7y ago
DocBook is originally an SGML DocType and most of the DocBook formatters are written in DSSSL. Large amounts of documentation for open source software (and large amounts of O’Reilly books) is still SGML DocBook.
936.
by dfox 7y ago
The issue with all the XML sophistication is that essentially only environment where all that really works is when you use XML as a markup language for technical publishing (ie. DocBook, DITA, ...) and in fact as a less convenient but more
937.
by dfox 7y ago
That is what essentially every WYSIWYG text processor does. And also the reason why getting sane HTML out of text processor is somewhat non-trivial, as the separately indexed spans can very well overlap, contradict each other or contain com
938.
by dfox 7y ago
You can meaningfully decode any DER encoded ASN.1 structure and serialize it back without any knowledge of the schema. Somewhat surprisingly you cannot do that with all instances of XML documents.
939.
by dfox 7y ago
From cursory look at the code wireguard relies on Linux's get_random_whatever() internal APIs, which are kernel-space interface to same PRNG as userspace (u)random/get_random()/get_entropy(). It even seems that there is not a
940.
by dfox 7y ago
The conceptually same thing will also work on bourne shell. But as in the Windows case only as a script stored in file, the original with inline function definition is self-contained oneliner.
941.
by dfox 7y ago
One thing of note is that the pins are not exactly on 1/10 inch centers, the spacing is slightly larger than that.
942.
by dfox 7y ago
In my experience the higher-spec DSubs are actually more prone to broken pins. The connector is actually meant as cable harness connector for aerospace-ish applications, the whole concept of dsub shells and using it for external cables is l
943.
by dfox 7y ago
DSubs are robust when they are connected, but fragile in applications that require frequent reconnections.
944.
by dfox 7y ago
The amount of bits you need to modify is not “one byte” but the same as the degree of used polynomial. And producing two strings with same CRC is trivial to the extent that it is how you are originally supposed to use the algorithm. Notice
945.
by dfox 7y ago
Not only the transflective LCDs are still LCDs, but the transflective LCDs tend to have most pronounced effects of extreme temperature. On the other hand such effects mostly means that the display looks ugly and updates really slow, but is
946.
by dfox 7y ago
Almost any GNSS receiver is by design power hungry. Modern mostly SDR constructions have faster time to (reasonable) fix, but still it involves large amounts of essentially opportunistic computantion to acquire and track the CDMA downlinks.
947.
by dfox 7y ago
Unicode has two additional copies of whole ASCII, fullwidth and halfwidth with the expectation that the widths would match the Han character grid (strictly speaking the halfwidth variant is somewhat redundant, but it is there). On the other
948.
by dfox 7y ago
This is somewhat good idea of how standardization works, but in this case it is not entirely correct. The argument there was essentially that ATM with E1-like framing (and thus somewhat different and longer header) could be used across whol
949.
by dfox 7y ago
Slight clarification: at that time, there was no ITU, but CCITT, which is decidedly french acronym ;)
950.
by dfox 7y ago
GCN comes from the part number prefix that was used by the ODM (almost certainly BroadOn) in development and “Game Cube (for) Nintendo” makes sense in that context. In similar vein, Wii is REV, as in “REVolution”.
951.
by dfox 7y ago
More sane backronyms are Universal Time Coordination (which seems to be used by various metrology people) and Universal Time - Coordinated, which makes sense given the UT0 and UT1 timescales.
952.
by dfox 7y ago
There was one big application for tunnel diodes: fast comparators. IIRC many classic Tek scopes use tunnel diode based comparator in their trigger circuitry. On the other hand doing the same thing in some modern bipolar process is significa
953.
by dfox 7y ago
defadvice is ugly elisp hack that implements just enough of CLOS that you need for some interesting subset of aspect oriented programming.
954.
by dfox 7y ago
You can implement sane exception handling in C by the means of few simple preprocessor macros. In fact, this is how exception handling is implemented in ObjectiveC and how it is done in Windows (and this hack is also the reason why Windows
955.
by dfox 7y ago
That depends on what you use the PRNG for. For cryptographic applications what you want is as previously noted just some arbitrary secure stream function (with block cipher in OFB or CTR mode being particularly convenient way to obtain such
956.
by dfox 7y ago
This screenshot shows only the right part of the color selector dialog, which is otherwise exactly same as the W95+ version. CHOOSECOLOR.Flags has few bits that determine which variant is shown, and this particular variant is not documented
957.
by dfox 7y ago
Most manufacturers’ datasheets specify 20 or less years of data retention (even when powered on). This might seem like random sufficiently large number, but there really are devices made in mid-90’s (notably early FastEthernet cards) that d
958.
by dfox 7y ago
Few years ago I wrote this thing: https://github.com/adh/py-clos It can also do dispatch on multiple arguments and on equality and has dispatch cache implemented as C extension (from my rudimentary measurements it seem
959.
by dfox 7y ago
Larger issue is that Excel formula language has different separator characters depending on the locale. This would not be that bad if this would be case only for presentation in UI (.xls contains parse tree and .xlsx AFAIK always contains e
960.
by dfox 7y ago
What probably helps is that only real competition for Hamamatsu are people peddling cold war era new old stock (usually Soviet made) military grade parts.

More ›