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un1xl0ser

59 karma · joined June 9, 2011

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un1xl0ser··on Tell HN: the best thing I did this year
I quit FB years ago and never once regretted it. Other communities (HN, although I don't participate much) and real-life encounters can be just as good. I get my community and communication through real-life personal interaction, mailing lists and Jabber.

If you have time to read non-technical (or meta-technical) books, I highly recommend "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan (who coined the term surfing) to get some perspective on electric media. In addition "Alone Together" by Sherry Turkle covers some of the peril of communicating in this fashion.

un1xl0ser··on Siri meets Eliza
My Hobby: Proxying conversations with my cow-orkers to Eliza.

Try it, great stress relief. I've only done this once, and they did realize what was going on. Will try to dig up the chatlog, but I doubt I can find it.

Appy polly loggies to the xkcd guy. ;)

un1xl0ser··on Dmr: Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix
In regards to /* You are not expected to understand this */, the most resonating part of the example was the fact that it didn't work at all the way the implementor expected it to. I sometimes come across comments that were written when the code was meant to be consumed by one person where a well needed explanation is missing. This is a mistake that I sometimes make myself; I feel we all do.

What I sometimes don't realize early enough, in testing and debugging strange behavior is that the code may not have ever worked the way the person expected.

I had a need to implement some fairly trivial case folding in C (I was/am a noob at C). The code was meant to check a policy database to see if something was allowed or denied. Some policy decisions were deemed critical and therefore hard coded, and they happened to be the easiest ones to test with so I changed one character of each case and expected it to fail the static check and move on to the database lookup. After an hour of testing without a debugger and reviewing only my code that changed, I broke out GDB and noticed where the problem was. The code that I assumed working was broken. The code had an || where an && was desired in an optimization to avoid comparing the strings if the length wasn't the same.

If I had added a character, I would have never noticed the bug.

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