Viewing profile — dfox

Basically the only thing interesting about the ConcertMaster is that Carmack used it (and that it looks somewhat cool). As for the keyboard itself, it is just a basic OEM membrane …

Do not do this unless you do not have any other choice. Preferrably use whatever native barcode support of the printer involved, if it does not have that, just generate the barcode…

The fact that this is standard practice does not mean that it is not perverse. It kind of works sanely for plain Code39 (and even then you will see effects of doing that in weird p…

It had, another thing is that it used somewhat questionable system for CD key validation, which is stubbed out in this release ( https://github.com/BohemiaInteractive/CWR/blob/main…

The most important fix in SP1 for Office 2007 was fixing exactly that in Excel. Doing ridiculous amount of 4 byte reads made it basically unusable on network filesystems.

One point is that there is no reason for the entire secret to be one element of the underlying field, it can very well be a n-tuple of elements of a smaller field, with GF(2^8) bei…

> cannot start with digit Not only it can, but both CL and Emacs Lisp actually defines primitives with names that start with digit.

It is far from being universal. And the more annoying part of that is that there are at least 4 incompatible "standards" as to the format of the QRcode.

IIRC the really cheap Casio Organizers/DataBanks of 90's used 5x5 font. And then my ex used something like that on linux in order to fit a ridiculous amount of xterms onto 14" CRT …

Gnat Studio just works on Windows.

It uses exactly the same font in the desktop version, and is probably entirely intentional.

The telling part about uselessness of that window is that the most visible difference between StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.0 was that equivalent of this window was removed. …

> running identical software on multiple computer systems is the name of the software-architecture game In the railway signalling industry (which for historically obvious reasons i…

All the magic of Smalltalk is in the development tools that work by means of introspection into the running image, writing source code in text files causes you to lose all that. Ad…

PostgreSQL has this: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ecpg.html

Unles the verification routine (eg. garage) keeps some state somewhere it has no way to prevent replays.

There is this kind of webdev-adjacent niche where the model of using documentation (or even intentionally sub-par documentation) as a marketing funnel for consulting and/or "Pro" v…

If I understand the history correctly then it started as a set of C preprocessor macros.

> Creating obfuscated values using integers While that is often neat solution, do not do that by simply XORing the numbers with constant. Use a block cipher in ECB mode (If you wan…

> Security? MUCH worse. Comparing single-purpose declarative language that is not even really turing-complete with all the ugly hacks needed to make DOM/JS reasonably secure does n…

It is not only that ASN.1 was there before SSL, but even the certificate format was there before SSL. The certificate format comes from X.500, which is the "DAP" part of "LDAP", L …

Mostly no. You do not see the lower layers and for anything sub 1um or so the resolution is too poor anyway.

The reasoning behind the auto-locking feature is that when the doors are locked it adds to rigidity of the car and thus decreases the likelyhood of the passanger cabin collapsing o…

> The specifications document was so long that it would be difficult for anyone else to implement it properly. In contrast to ODF specification that is long, complex and written in…

My experience with Dell is that they are not that focused on selling enterprise support (at least compared to HPE), at most they will push for bundling hardware (cables, cable tray…