The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,839 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet • The Register

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/11/02

If you run X.org, then patch now because of [WayBack] This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet • The Register

Overwrite arbitrary files? Load arbitrary code? As setuid root? Sure, why not!

This one got introduced in 2016, which is a lot more recent than an issue discovered in 2014 that was “ancient”: [WayBack] ‘Critical’ security bugs dating back to 1987 found in X Window • The Register:

27-year-old flaw and others slain in open-source patch batch

Via eXploit X: Give Me Root” – Computerphile

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Thread by @MaxFagin: “November is here, and that means a massive shift is coming. And by “massive” I am of course referring to the redefinition of the kilogram unit of mass […]”

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/11/02

Good read: Thread by @MaxFagin: “November is here, and that means a massive shift is coming. And by “massive” I am of course referring to the redefinitilogram unit of mass that the world has been building up to for more than 100 years. Let me explain: 1/ I’ve h […]” [WayBack]

via: [WayBack] Das Urkilogrann wird arbeitslos. Es wird durch eine Definition ersetzt, die auf physikalischen Effekten statt auf einem Sample basiert. – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, LifeHacker, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »

Hear Marvin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capella: The Haunting Isolated Vocal Track | Open Culture

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/10/30

Because Marvin Gaye’s mega-hit single, ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine,’ turns 50 this today: [WayBack/Archive.is] Hear Marvin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capella: The Haunting Isolated Vocal Track | Open Culture

Media below.

Via: [WayBack] Meredith Frost on Twitter: “Marvin Gaye’s isolated vocals for “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Simply incredible.”

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History | Leave a Comment »

xkcd: Free Speech

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/10/29

[WayBack] xkcd: Free Speech is worth repeating every now and then:

Title text: I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

Transcript

Cueball: Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say.
Cueball: It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it.
Cueball: The 1st Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences.
Cueball: If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated.
Cueball: It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole,
[A picture of a partially open door is displayed.]
Cueball: And they’re showing you the door.

Be sure to read [WayBack] 1357: Free Speech – explain xkcd too.

–jeroen

Posted in History, Opinions | Leave a Comment »

Map of the internet precursor ARPA network as of May 1973 – David Newbury

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/10/29

Today’s internet day anniversary only started in 2005. But the networks leading to the internet are a lot older and date as far back as the late 1960s. In fact [WayBack] Internet Day, October 29th refers to the first ARPA network communication taking place in 1969.

About two years ago, David Newbury published this piece of history from 1973: a map of the ARPA network (later called ARPANET).

[WayBack] David Newbury: “Going through old papers my dad gave me, I found his map of the internet as of May 1973. The entire internet. https://t.co/0krvYoRGav”

The resulting thread has loads of more interesting pictures which I tried to save in the Wayback Machine as not even Wikipedia seems to have them.

It also includes a discussion on the meaning of the zig-zag line to Hawaii, the connection to London (UK that is, not USA) later that year and even earlier state of the late 1960s.

Worth reading (:

Here are some references to messages and links from the Twitter thread:

via [WayBack] Well, that’s changed quite a bit in the meantime https://twitter.com/workergn…

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History | Leave a Comment »

121 – NOS Teletekst: xs4all and T-mobile internet outage

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/10/28

This time I was not affected, but many people were by the [WayBack] 121 – NOS Teletekst: xs4all and T-mobile outage:

                      NOS Teletekst 121 

    Kort nieuws binnenland              
                                        

 Tienduizenden mensen zijn getroffen  
 door een internetstoring.Abonnees van  
 verschillende providers zoals T-Mobile 
 en XS4ALL,hebben er last van.De        
 problemen begonnen om 2.30 uur en doen 
 zich verspreid over het land voor.Een  
 technisch team van KPN is op zoek naar 
 de oorzaak van de storing.XS4ALL meldt 
 dat 35.000 abonnees zijn gedupeerd.    
                                        
 In Barneveld zijn bij een schuurbrand
 20.000 kippen omgekomen.De brand brak  
 vanmorgen vroeg uit;de oorzaak is nog  
 onbekend.De brandweer wist te voorkomen
 dat een tweede schuur ook vlam vatte.  
 Dit jaar zijn al veel dieren gedood    
 door stalbranden.Zo kwamen bij twee    
 branden in Limburg 35.000 kippen om.   

 volgende  nieuws  weer&verkeer  sport
Ga terug naar de navigatie, het begin van de inhoud.

Trying to grab the above page as PNG, made me find the old teletekst web-interface is directory browseable, but dysfunctional: [WayBack] Directory Listing For /webtekst.html/

Lots of people were affected as you can see at

[Archive.is] Storingsoverzicht | Allestoringen Realtime overzicht van storingen. Problemen? Wij helpen je verder.

They are powered by Downdetector which has a world-wide monitoring service [Archive.is] Status overview | Downdetector, and seems situated in Haarlem. Cool thing: they have similar sites for many other countries:

allestörungen.at | allestörungen.ch | allestörungen.de | allestoringen.be | allestoringen.nl | aussieoutages.com | canadianoutages.com | downdetector.ae | downdetector.cl |downdetector.co.nz | downdetector.co.za | downdetector.com | downdetector.com.ar | downdetector.com.br | downdetector.dk | downdetector.es | downdetector.fi | downdetector.fr |downdetector.hk | downdetector.ie | downdetector.in | downdetector.it | downdetector.jp | downdetector.mx | downdetector.no | downdetector.pl | downdetector.pt | downdetector.ru |downdetector.se | downdetector.sg | downdetector.co.uk | downdetector.web.tr |

Usually uptime robot warns me on time, and this time my connections were OK:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Likely the end of a tradition… ᴊᴏᴏsᴛ su Twitter: “Dear Mr. Juncker, you may not know this but here in Holland we have Dirk-Jan and it is tradition to read this comic twice a year don’t take this away from us it’s the only non-racist tradition we have!!!! Please!!!!!…”

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/10/28

[WayBack] ᴊᴏᴏsᴛ su Twitter: “Dear Mr. Juncker, you may not know this but here in Holland we have Dirk-Jan and it is tradition to read this comic twice a year don’t take this away from us it’s the only non-racist tradition we have!!!! Please!!!!!… https://t.co/wRIkBcQtnV”

It is about moving the clock forward in the Dutch comic DirkJan – Wikipedia by , which is done transitioning to Summer time – Wikipedia:

[WayBack] Annelies Hofstede on Twitter: “… “ posted the mirror image of moving the clock backwards:

I tracked the mirroring down to [WayBack] Reddit: Vannacht moet de klok weer verzet worden! : thenetherlands

Vannacht moet de klok weer verzet worden!
byu/—E inthenetherlands

Posting one of the above pictures was a long standing tradition in The Netherlands, usually resulting in other comics to be posted as well, like at

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fun, History | Leave a Comment »

Retr0bright – Wikipedia

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/10/12

For removing the yellowing of ABS plastics:

In addition to homemade gel mixtures, hydrogen peroxide-based hair bleaching creams available at beauty supply stores can also be used as a ready-made mix.

[WayBack] Retr0bright – Wikipedia

More background information:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

A refefernce to 6502 by “Remember that in a stack trace, the addresses are return addresses, not call addresses – The Old New Thing”

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/11

On x86/x64/ARM/…:

It’s where the function is going to return to, not where it came from.

And:

Bonus chatter: This reminds me of a quirk of the 6502 processor: When it pushed the return address onto the stack, it actually pushed the return address minus one. This is an artifact of the way the 6502 is implemented, but it results in the nice feature that the stack trace gives you the line number of the call instruction.

Of course, this is all hypothetical, because 6502 debuggers didn’t have fancy features like stack traces or line numbers.

Source: [WayBack] Remember that in a stack trace, the addresses are return addresses, not call addresses – The Old New Thing

Which resulted in these comments at [WayBack] CC +mos6502 – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+:

  • mos6502: And don’t forget the crucial difference in PC on 6502 between RTS and RTI!
  • Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: +mos6502 I totally forgot about that one. Thanks for reminding me
    <<Note that unlike RTS, the return address on the stack is the actual address rather than the address-1.>>

References:

[WayBack] 6502.org: Tutorials and Aids – RTI

RTI retrieves the Processor Status Word (flags) and the Program Counter from the stack in that order (interrupts push the PC first and then the PSW).

Note that unlike RTS, the return address on the stack is the actual address rather than the address-1.

[WayBack] 6502.org: Tutorials and Aids – RTS

RTS pulls the top two bytes off the stack (low byte first) and transfers program control to that address+1. It is used, as expected, to exit a subroutine invoked via JSR which pushed the address-1.

RTS is frequently used to implement a jump table where addresses-1 are pushed onto the stack and accessed via RTS eg. to access the second of four routines.

–jeroen

Posted in 6502, 6502 Assembly, Assembly Language, Development, History, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »

God is real unless declared integer, 

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/07

Kristian Köhntopp commended:

GOD IS REAL UNLESS DECLARED INTEGER..

In some versions of Fortran, the default type of variables starting with I, J, K or L is integer, while other varianles are by default typed as real. The Fortran statement DECLARE can be used to explicitly declare a variables as being of a specific type.

The variable GOD stats with G and hence is implicitly real, unless you add an appropriate declare statement.

He reminded my of my FORTRAN 66 days at university when studying “computer usage for chemists”:

I remember a “computer usage for chemists” course during my studies where (end of the 1980s!) were supposed to program in FORTRAN 66.
Luckily the VAX/VMS machine supported a much more recent FORTRAN version and had support for 132 columns as well, which allowed me to indent properly (like I was used from my Pascal background).This tremendously helped me solve basically this problem:

  • import tables with
    1. atom code, radius and valence (bonding count)
    2. atom1 code, atom2 code, minimum distance, maximum distance
    3. atom code, X/Y/Z coordinate
  • determine which bonds can occur
  • walk the bonds and determine the atomic structure, including cycle count

Especially the last one was easiest to solve with recursion, which FORTRAN does not support. So I wrote my own stack structure and solved the problem.

The student coach was mad when she found out I had printed the full documentation on continuous form paper which took the printer about half an hour for printing the ~100 pages.

Next morning, I had read it front-to-back and colour-indexed all the sections so it was far easier to find what the compiler could do for me. She could not believe I had done that.

All my co students were on a (non shielded!) 300 meter multiplexed serial connection with VT-120 emulators from PC’s with all sorts of connection problems.

I discovered a small room right above the VAX/VMS machine having a couple of terminals with direct connections that were hardly used. A few of them were VT-240 that had a session switch allowing for maximum 3 interactive sessions running at far higher priority than the compiler/linker batch queues provided.

This allowed me to perform quick release cycles of my project: 1 session for editing and inspecting logs, 1 session for compiling my last version, 1 session for linking the previously compiled version.

I was about the only student that delivered the project on time (:

Via: Archive.is Check out @chicaScientific’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/chicaScientific/statu… having

“Why did the integer drown?”

“Because he wasn’t a float”

–jeroen

 

Posted in Fun, History, Quotes, T-Shirt quotes | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »