Viewing profile — ghelmer

> I sat through a conference session in the late nineties trying to understand the difference between an OLE document, a COM object, and an ActiveX control. I wonder if we attended…

That is not my experience.

I find it's helpful to have context to frame what I'm memorizing to help me understand the value.

> one thing that helps me short-circuit it 99% of the time is a high amount of caffeine The med that helped my dad with migraines was Vanquish (aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine…

I have experienced migraines since my teens, usually starting with annoying visual artifacts, facial numbness, difficulty speaking, and progressing to intense pain. The worst of th…

I'm not apologizing for MS, and I have no idea what PII protection Recall actually has. If Recall does have real PII logic, it should recognize that a legitimate VISA payment card …

The barrier to entry for programmers on projects like PostgreSQL and FreeBSD is high, with good and bad results. It seems you have to be very committed to the project (which may in…

Sounds interesting but behind the WSJ paywall. A story I find very interesting is the recovery of a large number of films found preserved under permafrost under a former ice rink i…

"The more things change, the more they stay the same" - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr In the late 1980s, "executive dashboards" were all the rage. Vendors were selling tools to tap d…

I have been unpleasantly surprised when I expect Posix semantics from Windows. Think about parent PIDs. You can't assume a process's parent PID is actually still the parent. Think …

Windows threw off the Posix elephant, and I spend more than half my time working around the resulting mess when working on Windows code.

Saw this effect demonstrated at room temperature by an acquaintance at Ames Laboratory over 20 years ago. Have long wondered about its practicality. https://www.eurekalert.org/news…

Love these posters -- the one referenced in the article, and the other (UNIX feuds) noted in the comments. At one time I had both - lost one on a plane, and lost the other in a mov…

"They just want to win the argument" is a good summary of what I understood from the article. There are people I regularly encounter who have to inject their opposition or correcti…

I've written a lot of TCP deep-packet inspection code, including parsing FTP control protocol. So I was surprised by this post by Robert Graham: https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/08/…

A summer spent testing (and breaking) compilers taught me a lot, including: compilers do have obscure bugs. 99.99999% of program errors are bugs in the code, but the rare compiler …