Hi, > Natalie wrote: > > A few of the items discussed were:
I've got around to typing up topics mentioned at the other end of the table. _The Cuckoo's Egg_ is Clifford Stoll's excellent entertaining read of tracking down an infiltrator to computer networks back in the late 80s. Has bits of technical description, but is aimed at the layman. A bug in Emacs was the initial way in. :-) http://amzn.to/1Uyp1xF Area Maze, a Japanese puzzle where you have to find the unknown length of a side of a rectangle or its area without using fractions; whole numbers only. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/03/alex-belllos-monday-puzzle-question-area-maze-smarter-than-japanese-schoolchild There's at least one Android app for playing them. HeidiSQL is a cross-platform GUI for accessing databases like MySQL and Postgres. (Written in Delphi!) Been around a while and ships as standard in the Windows release of MariaDB. One nice feature is it will use plink.exe, part of Putty, to tunnel the database connection over SSH into the server so the database's port doesn't need to listen on an external network interface. http://www.heidisql.com/ It doesn't offer a form-view for entering data though, something Microsoft Access has that Nick was asking about. I asked on IRC #dorset and the database part of LibreOffice offers that and can talk to a variety of databases. https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/base/ As MariaDB is descended from the Oracle-owned MySQL, so Postgres, a database that many consider superior!, is descended from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_%28database%29 that began at Berkeley by Stonebraker and others that were interested in IBM's System R, the first database with SQL. LibreOffice's Calc, the spreadsheet, can put the GPU to work. https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/calc_gpu_enabling_a_spreadsheet/ The security bug Tim found in wordexp(3), that he'd written years earlier, was awarded a CVE. http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2014-7817/ Tim had Cockpit running on his laptop, a GUI and command line interface for administration. http://cockpit-project.org/ (Think the site needs to do a better job of selling it.) And his GDM greeter, the login prompt, was using Wayland rather than X Windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29 Wednesday is when those stuck slaving away at home meet up in Bournemouth's Flirt Cafe to work using the free wifi. http://www.uk-jelly.org.uk/jelly/bournemouth-jelly-3/ http://www.flirtcafebar.com/Events.html A hard link in the filesystem, ln(1), is one inode, information node, storing the data's permissions, modification time, etc., and multiple directory entries in the same filesystem referencing it by its inode number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link QFS, Quick File System, part of OpenSolaris, can store the files' data on one set of disks and the metadata on another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QFS You can clear the kernel's page and buffers caches, handy if you're benchmarking how quickly you read stuff from disk. Needs to be done as root, e.g. «sudo sh -c 'echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'» http://linux-mm.org/Drop_Caches Tree's can be searched various ways including iteratively, travelling down as each non-leaf node is encountered, or breadth first, visiting all nodes at this level before descending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth-first_search 1,024 bytes isn't a kilobyte, nor a KB. It's a kibibyte, KiB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte "I think it is shocking that some OEMs are selling machines with cooling solutions that are insufficient to let their CPUs run at their rated speeds. If you buy one of these defective machines you should return it." -- https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/graph-all-the-things-using-wpt-10/ DeepDigest is Nick's GUI Linux file-integrity checker, written in C++ using Qt. Takes digests of files' contents for later comparison. https://sourceforge.net/projects/deepdigest/ https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/107993263/DeepDigest/Help/deepdigest-help.html Because digests are needed so often, lots of work has gone into speeding them up. Libraries like BoringSSL have assembler implementations for common architectures that use instructions designed for the purpose, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions One example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL#BORINGSSL 's https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/master/crypto/sha/asm/sha1-x86_64.pl that combines Perl and assembler! Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2015-09-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread: mailto:[email protected] / CHECK IF YOU'RE REPLYING Reporting bugs well: http://goo.gl/4Xue / TO THE LIST OR THE AUTHOR
