Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 24, 2024

• Aral Balkan ☛ New Kitten features: Interactive Shell (REPL), Multi-page Settings, and backup and restore (data portability)

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• Nat Bennett ☛ Reading software and thinking about it

  Books and essays are mostly made by individuals. A handful of people, if you count editors. Advice to an individual about the design of a novel – actionable.

  But writers spend tremendously more time than software developers reading, and reading things that are similar to what they write. Poets read poetry. Screenwriters read screenplays.

  Software developers? We don't read. We don't read software. We certainly don't read the kind of software we actually make. Maybe, occasionally, we read about software, software we wished we made.

• Leon Mika ☛ Don't Leave User Experience For Later

  And this is where my story begins. From the start I’ve been putting off any task that would improve the user experience on one of my side project. I considered such tasks unnecessary, or certainly less important than the “functional” side of things. Whenever faced with a decision on what part to work on next, the user experience work was left undone, usually with a thought along the lines of “eh, it’s UI stuff, I’ll do it later.”

  But I think this was a mistake. Since I was actually using this tool, I was exposed to the clunky, unfinished UI whenever I needed to do something with it. And it turns out no matter how often you tell yourself that you’ll fix it later, a bad UI is still a bad UI, and it affects how it feels to use it. And let me tell you: it didn’t feel good at all. In fact, I detested it so much that I thought about junking it all together.

• The Register UK ☛ GCC 15 nails Xeon Phi and Solaris 11.3 coffin lids shut

  After dropping Itanium support, GCC 15 is set to kill off more ancient platforms, with the Xeon Phi facing the firing squad alongside the penultimate version of Solaris.

  Version 15 of the GNU Compiler Collection – GCC to its friends – continues to cast out and expunge unloved legacy processor architectures. A recent patch to the work-in-progress compiler suite has a simple four-word summary:

• Silicon Angle ☛ JetBrains officially releases Kotlin 2.0 in major update to programming language

  Announced during KotlinConf 2024, the new stable 2.0 version was rewritten from scratch and based on a new architecture that significantly improves performance and will help boost developer productivity, according to JetBrains. The company added that compilation time of projects on K2 are up to two times faster on the new compiler than Kotlin 1.9.20.

• NVISO Labs ☛ Format String Exploitation: A Hands-On Exploration for Linux

  This blogpost covers a Capture The Flag challenge that was part of the 2024 picoCTF event that lasted until Tuesday 26/03/2024. With a team from NVISO, we decided to participate and tackle as many challenges as we could, resulting in a rewarding 130th place in the global scoreboard. I decided to try and focus on the binary exploitation challenges. While having followed Corelan’s Stack & Heap exploitation on Windows courses, Linux binary exploitation was fairly new to me, providing a nice challenge while trying to fill that knowledge gap.

• Rlang ☛ Duplicate and concatenate in R

  Duplicate and concatenate in R, we will explore how to use the str_dup function in R to duplicate and concatenate strings within a character vector.

  The str_dup function is part of the stringr package, which provides a variety of functions for working with strings.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • DEV Community ☛ Linux terminals, tty, pty and shell

    Generally speaking a terminal is a relatively dumb electromechanical device with an input interface (like a keyboard) and an output interface (like a display or sheet of paper).

  • [Old] DEV Community ☛ Linux terminals, tty, pty and shell - part 2

    In a Unix-like system everything is a file, we all have heard this before. A program managing a pty will essentially perform read and write operations on a pair of files, pty master and pty slave.