Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 28, 2022

• powerctl: A small case study in Hare for systems programming

  powerctl is a little weekend project I put together to provide a simple tool for managing power states on Linux. I had previously put my laptop into suspend with a basic “echo mem | doas tee /sys/power/state”, but this leaves a lot to be desired. I have to use doas to become root, and it’s annoying to enter my password — not to mention difficult to use in a script or to attach to a key binding. powerctl is the solution: a small 500-line Hare program which provides comprehensive support for managing power states on Linux for non-privileged users.

• [Repeat] Security and Cheap Complexity

  I’ve been saying that complexity is the worst enemy of security for a long time now. (Here’s me in 1999.) And it’s been true for a long time.

• It's Harder to Read Code Than Write It

  When you read code, you’re often reading the finished product - edge cases, error handling, and more that obscure the main idea.

• Magnifier: An Experiment with Interactive Decompilation

  Decompilers are essential tools for researchers. They transform program binaries from assembly code into source code, typically represented as C-like code. A researcher’s job starts where decompilers leave off. They must make sense of a decompiled program’s logic, and the best way to drill down on specific program paths or values of interest is often pen and paper. This is obviously tedious and cumbersome, so we chose to prototype an alternative method.

• OpenTally dev log: Battery of optimisations leads to 108% performance improvement

  Using rational arithmetic, OpenTally e825ca1 processes the 3,821,539-vote 2022 Australian Senate election for Victoria in a mean 11.34 (95% CI ± 0.03) seconds on my Intel i5-7500. This week I put some time into cutting this figure down.

• Heroku’s Next Chapter | Heroku

  Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users.

• Heroku cancelling free and inactive accounts

• Building an IRC archiver bot for the IndieWeb community | James' Coffee Blog

  A few weeks ago, I learned that the IndieWeb community aims to archive all of the Etherpad documents from meetups on the wiki. Etherpad documents are made available at online meetups so participants can document ideas and what happened in the call. Archiving these documents to the wiki makes them easily searchable and ensures their contents are preserved not only in a document that could be edited further down the line.

• Corona-Superspreading or just “Wiesn-flu”? Should the Oktoberfest be cancelled again?

  The Oktoberfest in Munich, also called “Wiesn” in the local Bavarian dialect, is the world’s largest Volksfest. It had been cancelled for the last two years due to COVID-19. Stakes are running high whether it should be cancelled again this year. To get some perspective, read on!

• Difference Between cat() and paste() in R | R-bloggers

  If you are interested to learn more about data science, you can find more articles here finnstats.

  Difference Between cat() and paste() in R, you can concatenate strings together using both the cat() and paste() functions, however, they differ differently in the following ways: