The Meditative Coder

This happens to me more often than I like to admit: there's a bit of programming magic that I don't understand, and almost never nee...

 I don't know why I keep forgetting about this technique. I guess it's because while it is worth its weight in gold when you need it...

 I'm not crazy after all! Well, ok, I guess figuring out a difference in "sed" between gnu and bsd is not a sign of sanity. (T...

 The "strace" tool is powerful and very useful. Recently a user of our software sent us an strace output that included a packet se...

How is it that I haven't sung the praises of Wireshark in this blog? It's one of my favorite tools of all time! I can't get over...

The scanf() family of functions ( man page ) are used to parse ascii input into fields and convert those fields into desired data types.  I...

A Slashdot post led me to some good pages related to C safety. https://outflux.net/slides/2018/lss/danger.pdf  - slides from a presentati...

Here's a fragment of code that I recently wrote.  See anything wrong with it? #define VOL(_var, _type) (*(volatile _type *)&(_var)...

Once again, the mighty Dave Zabel (of two different fames) has found another Multicast-related bug, this time in Solaris.  I think that re...

I'm not a security researcher, and I don't follow the subject very closely.  But here is an interesting read by the person who slowe...

UPDATE: after upgrading the IOS our "MDF" switch, this problem went away.  None of my readers (all 2 of them?) have reported seei...

Pop quiz time! When you use snprintf() instead of sprintf() , are you:    A. Writing code that proactively detects bugs.    B. Writing ...

Many people despair at today's "throw away" society.  If you don't want it, just throw it away. Programmers know this is...

We just discovered that under a somewhat unlikely set of circumstances, Microsoft's Windows 7 (SP 1) will corrupt outgoing UDP datagram...

A long time ago, I mentioned an event logger that I promised I would create a downloadable package for.  I obviously never did. I've ...

I had what I thought was a pretty simple piece of code, transferring a structure from one thread to another.  Without describing it blow-by-...