The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Conference Topics’ Category

Examples by b0rk of problems with integers and floating pointing point numbers

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/12

From quite a while back but still very relevant today, especially when debugging problems (most people would post them in the order integers, floats, but Julia did it in the opposite way):

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “had a great discussion of how floating point arithmetic can betray you on Mastodon yesterday, there are tons of good examples in the replies”

    [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “today I’m thinking about how floating point numbers can be treacherous — what are specific examples of when they’ve betrayed you?so far I have:…” – Mastodon

  2. [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “examples of problems with integers”

Usually I tend to explain integer versus floating point math as lossless versus lossy data compression (for instance WavPack and FLAC versus MP3 compression of PCM audio data, or BMP versus JPEG compression of 2D digital image data).

Either way: floating point and integer problems cause real harm. One interesting comment illustrating that was [Wayback/Archive] Ian Kirker on Twitter: “@b0rk I didn’t see this one in the list, which sticks in my memory: science.org – Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud”

[No wayback/Archive] Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud | Science

If you like listening instead of reading, then [Wayback/Archive] 452: Numbers on Computers Are Weird — Embedded is a great podcast episode where Julia gets interviewed by Christopher White, and Elecia White which I found via [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “was on the @embeddedfm podcast this week talking about our upcoming “How Integers and Floats Work” zine, plus some meta discussion about making zines

Either way, be sure to read the other replies to b0rk’s posts too as many interesting tidbits did not make it in her underlying blog posts:

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

A few pfSense quirks I got used to over the years

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/06

Everytime when installing a pfSense router from scratch, I seem to re-learn a few of the below quirks. So it was finally time to document them (:

Quite a few of my pfSense configurations are just doing routing between various networks, should not provide DHCP leases and do not always need or have a WAN connected (i.e. they are LAN-only).

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Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Cyberchef, Development, DHCP, Encoding, Event, Hardware, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers, Software Development, SSH, TCP, TLS, UDP | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

rcmcdonald91/pfSense-pkg-WireGuard: This is a port of the original WireGuard UI bits as implemented by Netgate in pfSense 2.5.0 to a package suitable for rapid iteration and more frequent updating on future releases of pfSense.

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/25

This is actually the WireGuard package you can install on pfSense CE 2.5.2 and higher: [Wayback/Archive] rcmcdonald91/pfSense-pkg-WireGuard: This is a port of the original WireGuard UI bits as implemented by Netgate in pfSense 2.5.0 to a package suitable for rapid iteration and more frequent updating on future releases of pfSense.

Note that the source code mentions a lot of web-technologies but that is because the majority of the code is the pfSense plugin. Underneath it pulls the actual build from [Wayback/Archive] git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-freebsd/snapshot which is almost exclusively C code.

Like WireGuardNT on Windows, it uses a high performance kernel mode driver.

Some more links on it:

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, GitHub, Hardware, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers, Software Development, Source Code Management, Tailscale | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

version control – How can I see the changes in a Git commit? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/16

[Wayback/Archive] version control – How can I see the changes in a Git commit? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] laktak, [Wayback/Archive] Nevik Rehnel, [Wayback/Archive] Juuso Ohtonen and [Wayback/Archive] User c z – Stack Overflow)

This looks like a valid question, but in reality it is not.

The thing is: in git, think of a commit not as a diff but as a snapshot*.

A diff is the difference between two commits.

Since most commits have just a single parent, so that’s why many people call a commit a diff. But that’s not true, especially not for merge commits that have at least two parents.

Anyway, the question, answer and comment from the link above already give some insight (note COMMIT everywhere below has to be replaced with the commit hash):

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

PlantUML network diagrams

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/11

Despite UML (Unified Modelling Language) not having a specific diagram mode for computer networks, PlantUML does support a computer network diagram mode.

Here are some links that got me going to design a site to site VPN situation that I will document in more detail later on this blog.

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Diagram, Event, PlantUML, Software Development, UML | Leave a Comment »

How could i get a permanent link for raw file? · community · Discussion #22537 · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/04

I used [Wayback/Archive] How could i get a permanent link for raw file? · community · Discussion #22537 · GitHub to go

The reason I needed it is that for quite a while now, GitHub has started to display PDF files as preview, and modified the download behaviour to get a blob: link instead of the actual raw file download location.

On the to do list:

  1. figure out the same for raw files in gists
  2. figure out the same for GitLab
  3. convert these into Bookmarklets (fiddle with the bold parts in the above URLs)

Thanks [Wayback/Archive] Lotaristo (Czeslaw Meyer) and [Wayback/Archive] byrneh (Hugh Byrne)

--jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, gist, git, GitHub, GitLab, Hosting, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Source Code Management | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Online x86 and x64 Intel Instruction Assembler

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/25

[Wayback/Archive] Online x86 and x64 Intel Instruction Assembler

The source starts in these two files:

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Posted in Assembly Language, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »

Merging Git repositories without losing history – The Continuous Improver

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/06

For my link archive: [Wayback/Archive] Merging Git repositories without losing history – The Continuous Improver

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Having some Technical Debt is OK as long as you keep paying the debt: Refactoring Is Not Just Clickbait – Kevlin Henney – NDC Oslo 2022 – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/28

[Wayback/Archive] Refactoring Is Not Just Clickbait – Kevlin Henney – NDC Oslo 2022 – YouTube

Via:

–jeroen

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Posted in Agile, Code Quality, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Refactoring, Software Development, Technical Debt | Leave a Comment »

Exercism: Get really good at programming, fun, effective & 100% free

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/23

Get really good at programming.

Develop fluency in 66 programming languages with our unique blend of learning, practice and mentoring. Exercism is fun, effective and 100% free, forever.

[Wayback/Archive] Exercism

Via [Wayback/Archive] Stephan (TheTraveller@sw-development-is.social) on Twitter: “Would you like to improve your programming skills online? I recommend trying exercism.io. It’s free and you can get feedback from real humans (if you’re in the #Ruby track, may be even from me 😀 ). #exercism #ISupportExercism”

–jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »