Hexspeak
April 23, 2008 – 3:11 pmMuch 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.
Text Editors (for Programming)
April 12, 2008 – 1:05 pmI 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.
Welcome to the new GavinR.com
March 18, 2008 – 4:54 pmGavinR.com is now powered by Wordpress. You can find all of the content that was on the old GavinR.com, but in a more organized manor. Please check out the tabs above, and feel free to subscribe to my updates by clicking the RSS link at the bottom of this page.

Ted talks are great. Check out Carl Honore on “Slowing down in a world built for speed”