Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 03, 2023

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)

  A lot has changed in 20 years. In 2003, the main question was: what encoding is this?

• Elliptic cyclide by inversion of a torus

  The R code for this animation is provided in this gist (if it looks complicated, that’s because I start with the cyclide, and I derive the torus and the inversion which yield this cyclide).

• Generative Interfaces

  One more thought — generative interfaces might be best served as a “design in the small” paradigm. That is, instead of trying to generate an entire application, they might be more useful if they generate a single element or piece of the UI. Maybe a foundation of generative UI components that you can assemble together.

• Could we make C arrays memory safe? Probably not, but let's try anyway

  This is a project that I have wanted to implement for a long time. However it has become quite clear that I don't have the time to do it. Thus you get this blog post instead. If someone wants to try to do this on their own, feel free. If you succeed, it would improve computer security by a fair bit.

  Nothing in this blog post is actually new. Similar ideas have been posted in research papers such as this one. AFAICT no-one has done a full scale implementation for C.

  Even if the scheme worked (it is entirely possible that it can not be feasibly implemented), it would still not make C a memory safe language by any stretch of the imagination. There are many other sources of memory unsafety in C. But it would make it somewhat safer, which would be a good thing all considered.

• What would a web app canary look like?

  Recently, I listened to an interview with Haroon Meer, the founder of a company focused on honeypots. Honeypots (also known as canaries or tripwires) are used to detect network intrusions and people nosing around at things they're not supposed to. They are an essential component of modern network security.

  It got me thinking: These are part of network security, so could we use this same concept for application security? What would it look like to setup a honeypot in a web app? How much can I make our pentesters personally loathe me?

• Maintenance release: Godot 3.5.3

  It's been way too long since our previous 3.5 maintenance release! This new Godot 3.5.3 fixes a number of important issues and adjusts to changing platform requirements.

• Mastering Data Visualization with Pairs Plots in Base R

  Data visualization is a crucial tool in data analysis, allowing us to gain insights from our data quickly. One of the fundamental techniques for exploring relationships between variables is the pairs plot.

• Notes from the Git Contributor's Summit, 2023

  It was great to see folks virtually last week at the Contributor's Summit!

  I took a couple of days off at the end of last week, but polished up the notes we took during the Contributor's Summit to share with the list.

• Notes from the Git Contributor's Summit

  For those who are curious about the recently concluded Git Contributor's Summit, Taylor Blau has posted an extensive set of notes from the event. Topics include next-generation backends, libification, backward compatibility, project management, and more.

• Integrating Lab Equipment into pytest-Based Tests

  This article is about integrating lab equipment into pytest. By doing so, we can automate setting electrical parameters and implement sequences such as operating devices in edge cases.

• Assign top-level JSON entries to shell variables

  A recursive version might be useful too. /dev/tty is used to show which shell variables just got defined.