ν42: It is geek and cliché, but I like geek and I like cliché
Bleach your files faster! A. Sinan Unur October 22, 2021 This is a quick follow up to my previous post “ Another optimization story ”. It was inspired by Greg Foletta ’s “ A Tale Of Two Optimisations ” and subsequent commentary on HN . Briefly, we are trying to find ways to encode bytes using four whitespace characters and decode them back. Encoding is done half a nibble at a time and corresponds…
Another optimization story A. Sinan Unur October 15, 2021 I quickly skimmed through “ A Tale of Two Optimizations ” a couple of days ago on a phone after noticing the title on HN . As the author mentions in the repo : I’m not sure there are many useful applications of this program. But it was a fun little project with a small scope. Indeed, it is not easy these days to find fun, well defined…
Perl's File::Find on Windows: A path forward? A. Sinan Unur September 22, 2021 In Implementation by Wishful Thinking , I looked at a problem caused by a simple change to how File::Find handles symlink related options. The problem itself was moved several steps from the actual change in File::Find and manifested itself in Module::Pluggable not being able to find plugins. Before the change that gave…
Implementation by Wishful Thinking A. Sinan Unur September 15, 2021 It is natural to want the world to be simpler. To wish legacy code away. To want to avoid dealing with platform specific differences. It is natural. But, in most cases, it also not possible for the world to be simpler. Legacy code is always there. And, there are unavoidable platform specific differences. I brought up the fact that…
Who's testing the tests? The case of an interesting false negative A. Sinan Unur September 14, 2021 I still follow Perl releases and build them from source using the most recent version of Microsoft Visual C . Each new version of Perl brings in some improvements, interesting features, and some new curiosities to deal with. After building 5.34 , I tried to install JSON::MaybeXS which is a layer of…
Some principles of unit testing A. Sinan Unur September 13, 2021 Much pontification exists when it comes to unit testing. Developers get introduced to the idea of TDD with simple code such as testing a method that adds two numbers etc so that they can learn the mechanics, but such motivators obscure away the very real tradeoffs that arise from the fact that tests are also code. No one writes code…
Use your own WiFi connection test server in Windows A. Sinan Unur September 13, 2021 This post describes changes to the Windows registry . Here is Microsoft’s warning about that: ⚠️ Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot…
UTF-8 everywhere and command line argument expansion on Windows A. Sinan Unur July 22, 2021 UTF-8 Everywhere is a good idea. In particular, see their advice on how to do text on Windows . It is possible to follow their advice manually. This morning, I thought of a utility I could write very easily in any scripting language, but decided I would implement it in modernish C++ . In writing the…
Upgrading from Intel 7260AC to MPE-AX3000H A. Sinan Unur July 18, 2021 I had first installed this Intel 7260AC card in my old Lenovo 300 N100 . When that died , some of its internals, including this WiFi card, moved to the T400 I got on Ebay. The card served me well for a while through Windows 8 and 10 upgrades, different router + OpenWRT combinations etc. But, recently, with drivers no longer…
Reading the state of the 4x4 keypad on the HC-35 using an ATtiny85 A. Sinan Unur February 13, 2021 This post is third in a series where I try to figure out how to use the three main functional components on the Liyafy HC-35 using an ATtiny85 . In the first part , I discovered how to drive the LEDs with the ATtiny85 driving them using a 74HC595 serial to parallel shift register. That allowed me to…
ATtiny85 chirping in response to red key presses on a Liyafy HC-35 keypad A. Sinan Unur February 7, 2021 For background on this post, please see “ Fun with an ATTiny85, Liyafy HC-35 keypad with eight LEDs, and a serial to parallel shift register ”. Last time , I was just excited to get some lights to blink. Since then, I’ve figured out a few things. For example, if a bit in the output is set, the…
Fun with an ATTiny85, Liyafy HC-35 keypad with eight LEDs, and a serial to parallel shift register A. Sinan Unur January 31, 2021 Some months ago, I got curious about ESP32 microcontrollers. The exact reason is not important. I ended up learning about NodeMCU , MicroPython , I 2 C . In the end, I was able to wire up an ESP32 to an OLED screen which showed a small set of rotating fortune cookies.…
Small is beautiful A. Sinan Unur December 6, 2020
Don't complicate things A. Sinan Unur March 13, 2018 Every week, I look forward to receiving Gabor ’s Perl Weekly . I noticed Forking tests in the latest issue . The author has written a password generation module, and wants to ensure that child and parent processes produce different sequences of pseudo-random passwords following a fork . That, in and of itself, is a commendable objective.…
What is Perl 6 to Perl? A. Sinan Unur March 13, 2018 From time to time, people I meet ask me if they should learn Perl 6 since that is the “latest” Perl. For the most part, they have not written a line of Perl in their lives. They also ask me how Perl 6 relates to Perl. I think everyone should at least dabble in a variety of languages, and I would be the last person to dissuade someone from…
Another look at stock market behavior around "change" presidential elections in the U.S. A. Sinan Unur April 12, 2017 Nothing discussed herein should be taken as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding any particular investment vehicle or course of action. All statements herein are statements of subjective opinion and for information and entertainment purposes only. Seek a duly licensed…
Data work is dirty work A. Sinan Unur March 29, 2017 "The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the chowky dar (village watchman in India), who just puts down what he damn pleases." Stamp's…
For your 'İ's and 'ı's only A. Sinan Unur February 27, 2017 I have been poking around perl ’s internals in my quest to help perl see interesting characters in names and values of environment variables. The first step was to translate the UTF-16 environment which wmain received to a UTF-8 encoded one. The next step will be to ensure that the relevant parts of the code know about this. This requires…
Fixing Perl's Unicode problems on the command line on Windows: A trilogy in N parts A. Sinan Unur February 18, 2017 I have used Perl on Windows for decades without being seriously hampered by any of its past or current limitations. Still, it would be nice to solve some of the issues, if only so I can post cute screenshots . Here are some problems with Perl and Unicode on the command line in…
Deception in tests considered harmful A. Sinan Unur February 16, 2017 I felt really good after finally ironing out all the kinks in PR #528 which added support to Perl 6 on MoarVM for handling Unicode script names, command line arguments, and environment strings on the Windows command line. (As a side note, I am indeed working on a similar fix for Perl, but that is going to take a bit more than 60…
Notes on Unicode on the command line in Windows with applications to Perl and Perl 6 A. Sinan Unur February 8, 2017 Handling of interesting characters on the command line in Windows or DOS environments has never been an annoyance-free experience. Heck, 30 years ago, I was patching lookup tables in keyboard drivers for IBM PCs and compatibles at METU so we could write stuff using Turkish…
\c[PERSON FROWNING, ZERO WIDTH JOINER, PROGRAMMER] A. Sinan Unur February 1, 2017 In December 2015, I was rather looking forward to the release of Perl 6 . I went ahead and tried to see if it would build with Microsoft’s tools on Windows. I immediately ran into some issues which I detailed in that post. One of the issues was a discrepancy between the specifications and the specification tests that…
Stock market behavior around "change" presidential elections in the U.S. A. Sinan Unur January 17, 2017 Nothing discussed herein should be taken as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding any particular investment vehicle or course of action. All statements herein are statements of subjective opinion and for information and entertainment purposes only. Seek a duly licensed professional…
Does past behavior of S&P500 indicate 'selling the inauguration' is a good idea? A. Sinan Unur January 16, 2017 This post is an exercise in chartsmanship. Nothing discussed herein should be taken as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding any particular investment vehicle or course of action. All statements herein are statements of subjective opinion and for information and…