Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/16
I hardly do web development, so every once in a while I encounter something that I forgot about.
In this case it was embedding images with base64 encoding in the HTML of a web page.
The GitHub unicorn page reminded me of that, so I saved it in a gist and a JSFiddle:
You can view the rendered HTML here:
Via: [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “First time I got the GitHub unicorn.…” – Mastodon
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Posted in base64, CSS, Development, Encoding, HTML, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/15
Like many programmers, in my early days I was totally unaware how floating point values were stored. Even seemingly simple data structures are worth explaining, especially when debugging.
So I was glad getting referenced to [Wayback/Archive] Float Exposed and to [Wayback/Archive] Floating Point Visually Explained which I will quote a few bits below.
About bits: did you notice you can flick on the float.exposed bits to flip them? Try it!
The references came from replies to [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “floating point representation”
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Posted in 8087, Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Debugging, Development, Event, Floating point handling, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/14
Interesting, as this seems to handle all actions client-side: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – breakzplatform/downloader.notx.blue
Hosting is at two sites:
The code is a tiny HTML wrapper around about 1000 lines of JavaScript (plus a few hundred lines of minified [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm: FFmpeg for browser, powered by WebAssembly JavaScript code). Impressive!
Via [Wayback/Archive] notx.blue – Projetos do Joselito para o Bluesky
--jeroen
Posted in BlueSky, CSS, Development, ffmpeg, HTML, HTML5, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Media, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Video, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/09
[Wayback/Archive] A bit of perl trickery shows a great example why you should only code you understand.
It explains the innards of a classic trap luring people into execute some obfuscated code, in this case Perl based.
Which makes it yet another testament to not blindly download and execute stuff from the internet.
So be aware when you see obfuscated scripts and things luring you into:
Be even more alert when these require elevated access (like running under sudo).
Via: [Wayback/Archive] Leo Bicknell on Twitter: “@jpluimers @IanColdwater Executes “rm -rf /”. This is ancient Perl monks way of teaching people not to run programs they don’t understand as root. … But hey, these days people “curl -o – url | bash”. It’s surprising that isn’t exploited more.”
Which was response to me asking what the below code did that was fully misunderstood by ChatGPT (which is Large Language Model based on a large corpus of natural language, not a small corpus of evil red-team programming language code snippets) to a series of Tweets by Ian Coldwater.
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, bash, bash, CommandLine, Development, Perl, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Python, RegEx, Scripting, sh, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/08
The very to the point post [Wayback/Archive] Paul Schoe: “@dentangle You are totally c…” – Mastodon
You are totally correct.
Many people confuse the benefits of automation with a perceived need for AI or LLMs.
They don’t want ‘intelligence’ to do things for them. They want to implement a set of rules that they themselves define, to be done automatically instead of having to do it themselves. That is automation.
was a response to a more precise post [Wayback/Archive] Brett Sheffield (he/him): “I see people recommending LLMs repetitive tasks …” – chaos.social
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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, Generative AI, LLM, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 