Programming Leftovers
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April 2023 Projects
“Life is what happens in the space between”. Indeed, since the last update article a world pandemic has passed, truces have been signed in some countries, new wars have started in others, climate is going increasingly haywire, and the global political and economic turmoils have led to protests and revolts in countless places. The world keeps moving and I’m but a tiny spec in the grand scheme of things.
Yet, you’re reading this article, so you’re interested about what I’ve been up to! -
Catch-23: The New C Standard: Sets the World on Fire
A new major revision of the C language standard, C23, is due out this year. We'll tour the highs and lows of the latest draft9 and then drill down on the mother of all breaking changes. Sidebars celebrate C idioms and undefined behavior with code and song, respectively.
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Self-Guided Learning through a Wordle Guess Generator: Part 1
My learning project was a Wordle Guess Generator. I will show you how I used this project to create a self-guided learning plan. Motivated partly by my desire to have good guesses for Septle (a seven-letter guessing game), this project has been a crucial part of my journey to learn R. Practicing and learning coding skills were more important to me than devising the optimal strategy; if you are interested in “the best” Wordle strategy, then you will probably find much better answers by Googling.
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Self-Guided Learning through a Wordle Guess Generator: Part 2
I learned how to put functions in a separate file and call them from my many script. This can make long code much easier to read. Here, I’ve included the helper functions in-line and commented out the source("code/helper-functions.R") in the main code. I’ve also set up switchable troubleshooting help with verbose and debug_detail parameters in my functions. Setting them to TRUE provide more info as the functions are executed.
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AI Revolutionizes Infosec
After two and a half decades in information security, I’ve witnessed countless failures in security efforts. Most of them can be traced back to either asking the wrong questions or lacking the necessary context for effective action. Enter AI, which promises to address these shortcomings with two fundamental advantages: Context and Question-based security products.
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XUL Layout is gone
So this week I landed a few patches that completely removed XUL layout from the Firefox codebase.
This means that (modulo a few exceptions documented below) all the Firefox UI is using regular web technology to render (mostly CSS flexbox).
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Python Lambda Functions – A Beginner’s Guide
Lambda functions are a powerful feature in Python that enables you to create small, anonymous, single-use functions. They are often used when a simple operation is required, like sorting or filtering a list.
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10 Practical Use Cases for Lambda Functions in Python
Lambda functions, also known as anonymous functions, are a powerful feature in Python that allows you to create small, single-use functions without the need for a full function definition. They are particularly useful for simple operations, making your code more concise and readable.
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Update: oledump.py Version 0.0.74
A small update to plugin_msi_info to change the output format a bit. And you can select your preferred hash algorithm with environment variable DSS_DEFAULT_HASH_ALGORITHMS. oledump_V0_0_74.zip (http)MD5: FD4D73F0C1A6BE43406381C13C128D5ESHA256: 1683635FD3250DF43E2CA31C60C2C81B507B1E233C5D91C2671D147C7FD8BD14
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Kushal Das: Dear pep582
By now, you know that your idea has been rejected, but it came with suggestions for any future ideas. You thought you could be more useful if everyone gets it in the same way, but that will also cause more maintenance burden to the upstream authors in the future. I personally tried to stay with you during this 5 year+ long journey. A lot happened in life during that time. You helped me to make new friends, and helped many young ones during the workshops.