miniblog

Wilfred Hughes

It's common to be pessimistic about block-based programming, usually due to the scaling difficulties. https://kakaroto.homelinux.net/2017/11/introduction-to-reverse-engineering-and-assembly/ comments how valuable (and common!) block-based visualisation of logic is!

Introduction to reverse engineering and Assembly. | KaKaRoTo's Blog

X / ?

Jan 26, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

Cognitive technology, thought augmentation and reifying interfaces: https://cognitivemedium.com/tat/index.html

Thought as a Technology

Jan 26, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

Address Sanitizer is a great debugging tool, but apparently you shouldn't use it for hardening release builds: https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q1/363

oss-sec: Address Sanitizer local root

Jan 25, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

I miss the usize type when I'm not coding in Rust. I find distinguishing between 'an integer representing a quantity' and 'an integer representing an array index' to be very helpful sometimes.

Jan 23, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

org-mode has a lovely high level introduction, with basic usage, screenshots, and a few pointers on more advanced features: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/orgtutorial_dto.html

David O'Toole Org tutorial

Jan 23, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

Elixir 1.6 introduces a code autoformatter, reformats the entire stdlib, and adds an elegant pattern match syntax for defining breakpoints! https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2018/01/17/elixir-v1-6-0-released/

Elixir v1.6 released

Elixir v1.6 includes a code formatter, defguard, dynamic supervision and new module attributes that improves code quality and the developer experience

Jan 23, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

Git is rather timid with merge conflicts. If you change two adjacent lines, it assumes they conflict! https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/194788/why-doesnt-git-merge-adjacent-lines-without-conflict In my experience they don't, and it causes problems when library imports change at the top of the file. Interestingly, Subversion happily merges.

merging - Why doesn't git merge adjacent lines without conflict? - Software Engineering Stack Exchange

Jan 22, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

Writing setq in Rust for Remacs! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/600 Today I learnt that (setq) is legal Emacs lisp.

Port setq by shaleh · Pull Request #600 · remacs/remacs

Add support for a DEFSYM replacement in Rust. The dummy Rust macro is called def_lisp_sym. Add tests.

Jan 22, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

Regular expressions being greedy seems like a bad default. They tend to work fine on small inputs but capture too much on larger inputs. Too late to change in most situations though.

Jan 22, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

I see mypy more as a refactoring tool, but I'm always pleasantly surprised when it catches issues. It caught a bug here! demo.py:96: error: Unsupported operand types for >= ("int" and "Optional[int]") (In the code I've checked max_val is not None, but used min_val.)

X / ?

Jan 21, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

When I look at tools like Tor and other strong anonymity tools, the complexity is daunting. Only one mistake and suddenly you've outed yourself. I used to suspect that strong anonymity is essentially impossible, but Satoshi Nakamoto has demonstrated otherwise. Remarkable.

Jan 19, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

What Developers Want and Need from Program Analysis: An Empirical Study https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ase-2016.pdf Static analysis tools should have very few checks enabled by default, and great editor integration!

X / ?

Jan 19, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

jq is an awesome tool for manipulating big blobs of JSON, which are increasingly common outputs from dev tools. Today I learnt that jq even supports TCO! Impressive!

Releases · jqlang/jq

Command-line JSON processor. Contribute to jqlang/jq development by creating an account on GitHub.

X / ?

Jan 19, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

How would you describe the architecture of real-world compilers? https://mrale.ph/blog/2015/03/29/browser-as-an-interactive-disassembler.html sums it up as a structure that should be treated as a black box until you know your way around!

Browser as an Interactive Disassembler

Jan 19, 2018

Wilfred Hughes

Defining if, cond and progn in Rust in Remacs! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/598 The lispiest code I've read in ages :)

Port if, and, or, cond, and progn by shaleh · Pull Request #598 · remacs/remacs

Move original eval.rs to eval_macros.rs.

Jan 18, 2018