mct

Joined 19 years ago

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233

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Member since

Jun 16

http://github.com/mct

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Comment · 1 year ago

I love that the networking stack uses SLIP and slattach(1)!

I was playing with a toy TCP/IP stack, and decided using SLIP over a pty on Linux was a great way to interface with the kernel. Unfortunately it looks like macOS previously shipped with slattach(1) a very long time ago, but no longer does.

I'm curios if other people have used SLIP on macOS to get a dead-simple, cross-platform API to the networking stack?

The alternative would be to use tun/tap on Linux and utun on macOS, but SLIP would be so much nicer.

Comment · 2 years ago

Another option is to use the p5.js library. They also have a nice online editor, at https://editor.p5js.org/, which makes it easy for students to get up and running quickly.

Comment · 4 years ago

Very interesting telnet site, thank you for sharing!

FYI, though, I think this may be looking at the wrong object ID. It selected "31", which appears to be the entry for one of the Lagrange points. Voyager 1 and 2 appear to have negative ID numbers, "-31" and "-32".

Comment · 4 years ago

I have a domain I've been using for some 20 years as my primary email address. There are some gmail users I can send mail to without any problems at all. For other gmail users, my messages appear to go into a black hole, not even showing up in their spam folder. Looking at my postfix logs, I can see gmail's SMTP servers don't report any problems at delivery time. It's frustrating.

Comment · 5 years ago

Thanks for the link!

Are there any other court feeds you've found interesting?

Comment · 5 years ago

The post does a poor job explaining it, but the term "gaping security hole" comes from traditional netcat's source code. In order to enable the "-e" (exec) flag, it must be compiled with "-DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE".

Comment · 5 years ago

I'm seeing "You must log in to continue," with no "not now" option.

Comment · 5 years ago

CallerID information. There are a bunch of lookup services available for it: https://www.voip-info.org/cnam/

Comment · 6 years ago

> A “crash” is an unscheduled system reboot or halt. There is about one crash every other day; about two-thirds of them are caused by hardware-related difficulties such as power dips and inexplicable processor interrupts to random locations.

Youch. Was the PDP-11 really so unreliable?

Comment · 11 years ago

The README that Hobbit (author of the original netcat) wrote is a really good read. I learned a lot when I first read it years and years ago. I especially remember it describing how it is possible to get "in front" of another daemon. If the daemon has bound a listening socket to 0.0.0.0, as most do, you can bind to a more specific address on the same port and intercept inbound connections. Fun!

http://sysunconfig.net/unixtips/netcat_readme.html

Comment · 11 years ago

I've been doing the same with vim for years, using this vim script: https://github.com/mct/dotfiles-public/blob/master/.vim/plug...

Comment · 11 years ago

I've been using a perl-based calc for a number of years now. It started as a one liner eval-ing expressions on the command line. My favorite feature is that if symlinked as "hex", "oct", or "bin", it prints the output in hexadecimal, octal, or binary. And, because the evaluation is done by perl, hexadecimal, octal, and binary numbers can be entered using "0x", "0", and "0b" prefixes. A minor improvement was the substitution of commas with underscores, which perl allows in numbers for easier readability. Entering "1,000,000" is much nicer on the eyes than carefully counting the number of trailing zeros.

Two weeks ago, after becoming fed up with having to copy and paste results from one line to the next, I wrapped it in a repl and added bc(1)-like support for "." expanding to the last value. Rather embarrassingly, I started to implement bc(1)-style variables, but then realized this was incredibly silly as you can simply use perl variables directly. :-)

https://github.com/mct/junkdrawer/commits/master/bin/calc

I fully support writing other calc implementations, especially in languages such as C! It's a great exercise, and can become very complex very quickly. bc(1) supports arbitrary precision (try: echo "scale=500; 4a(1) 42" | bc -l), which is super awesome. In C, I've only implemented RPN calculators, never infix, which would be fun to try.

Comment · 11 years ago

It looks like the new XPS models have a single trackpad soft-button area (as all new laptops seem to). Have you been able to middle click to paste in X with this configuration?

Thanks!