Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/24
Before Firebird version 1.0 got released, a gaping security hole that InterBase introduced in 1994 before InterBase 6.0 (mostly written in C) got open sourced in 2000 was detected by the team that frantically tried the Firebird fork to first get building on various platforms, then released.
It had a maximum CVSS score of 10.0 because it could access the security database in read/write mode, thereby allowing adding users with SYSDBA privileges.
The detection is now about 25 years ago; on 20260109 the publication (by IBPhoenix) of the bug will be 25 years ago too.
So below are some links, including the original InterBase 6 source which was hard to find as the attachments of the original release links had not been archived in the Wayback Machine.
But first some of the code parts, which also shows the source file I did find back:
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Posted in C, Database Development, Development, Firebird, History, InterBase, Software Development | Tagged: define | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/29
Besides the August 2025 XKCD infrastructure dependency inspired cartoon on the right, the more recent and great [Wayback/Archive] XCKD: Dependency derivative below is a monumental piece as it combines the recent:
- fiber outage of the Internet Archive
- DoS of Cloudflare by itself
- AWS us-east-1 dependencies outage
- Crowdstrike DoS of Windows machines
- framework-du-jour mentality in the JavaScript world
- many more¹
Image [Wayback/Archive] 36247840bf294a9d.png (1080×1389) from [Wayback/Archive] xyla 🐀🪇: “someone pls alt text this shit…” – buy shitpost cheap:
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Posted in *nix, Amazon.com/.de/.fr/.uk/..., AWS Amazon Web Services, C, CDN (Content Delivery Network), Cloud, Cloudflare, cURL, Development, Fun, Hardware, Infrastructure, ISP, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Network-and-equipment, Node.js, npm, Power User, Rust, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development | Tagged: Meme, ProgrammerHumor | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/25
The libc C standard library memcpy function is very fast, but because of that also very dumb and with a list of circumstances where its behaviour is undefined (a great opportunity to introduce vulnerabilities in your code). The specs of those are in [Wayback/Archive] memcpy, memcpy_s – cppreference.com, including:
The behavior is undefined if either dest or src is an invalid or null pointer.
With C compilers becoming smarter and smarter, their optimisations can hide the fact that you call memcpy with parameters causing undefined behaviour.
This is a nice example of that: [Wayback/Archive] Fix a crash trying to save an empty AudioStream by hpvb · Pull Request #100422 · godotengine/godot · GitHub
The change is relatively simple, but hardly shows why the change is there. Only one line got changed in [Wayback/Archive] Fix a crash trying to save an empty AudioStream by hpvb · Pull Request #100422 · godotengine/godot · GitHub
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Posted in C, Development, Software Development | Tagged: 100422, 97720, 97790 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/10
[Wayback/Archive] What Every Programmer Should Know about How CPUs Work • Matt Godbolt • GOTO 2024 – YouTube
Main takeaways for me:
- CPU pipelines have grown a lot longer than I was aware off
- there are many more internal registers than I was anticipating
- clever ways to convert if statements to non-jumps
--jeroen
Posted in .NET, Assembly Language, C, C#, C++, Delphi, Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20
With the constant influx of JavaScript programmers, it keeps worth repeating that you should always run JavaScript in strict mode via "use strict"; (like in the past Visual Basic 6 developers should use option strict and option explicit) to forget risky JavaScript syntax like implicit ocal constants (which were removed from the documentation in the 2009 ECMAScript 5 specification for JavaScript), and every codeline should have a test code covering it, especially for comparisons involving non-strict behaviour like the use of leading zeros.
As of the succeeding 2015 standard (ECMAScript 6), octal numbers in JavaScript start with 0o or 0O followed by a series of octal digits.
Oh, and the history of octal in computing of course has to do with 6-bit systems and also lead to 6-six bit character codes including BCD character encoding..
My tweet back earlier this year: [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”
Inhteritence:
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Posted in B, BASIC, C, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MarkDown, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development, VB6, Visual BASIC | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/16
I originally missed this as back then I was in the midst of managing trouble in my parental family, unaware I was already having rectum cancer. Then things went fast, not even including the Covid-19 years, so I was glad last year I got reminded of this mid-2019 article:
[Wayback/Archive] Alan Turing Wrote Object-Oriented Code In C And Ran It On BEAM – De Programmatica Ipsum writes a lot of interesting things on programming paradigms, starting with
In his rare 1994 book “Object-Oriented Programming In C” Axel Tobias Schreiner explains how to do inheritance, class methods, class hierarchies, and even how to raise exceptions using nothing else than pure, simple, pointer arithmetic-filled, ANSI C.
then arguing basically most of not all modern languages share the majority of programming paradigms and all these paradigms are repeats of the past:
But none of this is new. Smalltalk, arguably the precursor of object orientation, had collect and select methods which were the grandparents of our more common map and filter functional friends.
What sets modern languages apart is that they the majority covers all the paradigms you might need, just differing in how well they support the paradigm-du-jour.
It means programming language wars should have been a thing of the past for about two decades now.
Please let that sink in.
Oh: if you look for that ANSI C book, here it is: [Wayback/Archive] https://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf [Wayback PDF View/PDF View]
Via: [Wayback/Archive] De Programmatica Ipsum: “”In his rare 1994 book “Object…” – mas.to
--jeroen
Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Cloud, COBOL, Containers, Design Patterns, Development, Docker, Erlang, F#, Go (golang), Haskell, Infrastructure, Java, Java Platform, Kotlin, Kubernetes (k8n), ObjectiveC, OOP (Object Oriented Programming), Perl, Scala, Scripting, Software Development, Swift, VB.NET | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/25
The manual process of getting back to the earliest commit of a GitHub repository is easy for small repositories, but for a large one it is very tedious.
TL;DR: there are various ways, but the easiest was the INIT Bookmarklet below.
Note: 2 weeks before the scheduled post made it to the front of the queue, I got a report¹ that it started to fail. Here it still works.
It’s hard to debug because of the functional programming approach taken.
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Posted in Bookmarklet, C, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, GitHub, Go (golang), JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Source Code Management, Web Browsers | Tagged: 1, 18, 7 | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 