Bush Dancing
Saturday, April 26th, 2008Very scary:
Archive for April, 2008
Hexspeak
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008Much better than Leetspeak:
- 0xABADBABE (“a bad babe”) is used by Apple as the “Boot Zero Block” magic number.
- 0xBAADF00D (“bad food”) is used by Microsoft’s LocalAlloc(LMEM_FIXED) to indicate uninitialised allocated heap memory.
- 0xBADDCAFE (“bad cafe”) is used by ‘watchmalloc’ in OpenSolaris to mark allocated but uninitialized memory.
- 0xCAFEBABE (“cafe babe”) is used by both Mach-O (“Fat binary” in both 68k and PowerPC) to identify object files and the Java programming language to identify Java bytecode class files
- 0xDEADBEEF (“dead beef”) is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems’ Solaris, marks freed kernel memory
- 0xDEFEC8ED (“defecated”) is the magic number for OpenSolaris core dumps.
- 0xFEEDFACE (“feed face”) is used as a header for Mach-O binaries, and as an invalid pointer value for ‘watchmalloc’ in OpenSolaris.
Wikipedia: Hexspeak
Text Editors (for Programming)
Saturday, April 12th, 2008I know vi and Emacs are the hardcore editors, but until I have the time to learn those, I’m stuck with mouse-based editors in Windows.
Notepad++ – this is my current editor of choice – an amazing editor with syntax highlighting, and many other options. It also has the amazing TextFX plugin, which among many other things, it does interactive brace matching, tab-to-space/space-to-tab conversion, and my favorite: ‘Reindent C++ Code.’ This will automatically fix the indents of the code you have highlighted. It works amazingly. Notepad++ is also under current development, so it is constantly being updated with bug fixes and features.
E Text Editor – I haven’t used this in a few months because the initial releases were too buggy. I intend to try it out again after a few more versions and the bugs are worked out.
Ted talks are great. Check out Carl Honore on “Slowing down in a world built for speed” 
