RANDOM BITS

A random site by a random clueless human

Random bits of programming, math, and thoughts By a clueless human

Blogs

Random long thoughts I had over the years...

Topics range from programming, math, to my views of school


A Collection of Comments from my OS Reading Group

May 3, 2026

There is a large online Software Internals Book Club that goes through books covering typically covering topics in databases, distributed systems, and software performance. Currently it is on a pause and likely will resume by the end of the month. The book being read is OSTEP, the best and free OS textbook. The style of writing is very inviting and easy to follow unlike other traditional books. It is also well organised into 3 parts: Virtualisation, Concurrency, and Persistence.

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MATH1052 - A Commentary on Calculus and Introductory Analysis 1

March 19, 2026

This is a commentary to an introductory course to calculus and analysis which I have a course review on if you are interested. The content presented below are from the fall of 2021 which may not reflect what is covered in your class today. Furthermore, the information presented will have the author’s own commentary and is NOT and should NOT be a replacement to attending class. The author simply wishes to review the cotent of the course mixed with their own speculations, views, and emotions as it reflects on the course 5 years later in preparation to their eventual return...

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When Did Programming/Coding Start to Click for You?

January 31, 2026

Months ago on a university Reddit page, a student asked when programming started to click because they are in their second year of their studies in Computer Science and feel lost. This was my response to them (with some edits to expand on certain topics):

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A Look Into Virtual Table via Assembly

August 20, 2025

Polymorphism is an important feature of Object Oriented Programming whereby one can represent an object in different forms, hence the name. However, its implementation between Java and C++ which could bite you if you are not aware. This blog is going to explore the following topics: Static Dispatch The need for virtual functions Dynamic Dispatcher - Looking Into Assembly Virtual Pointers and Virtual Tables

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The Issue With Default in Switch Statements with Enums

July 5, 2025

Reading the coding standards at a company I recently joined revealed to me the issue with default label within the switch statement and why it’s prohibitted when its being used to enumerate through an enum. default label is convenient to handle any edge cases and it’s often used to handle errors. However, when working with enums, it is often the case that the prpogrammer intends to handle all possible values in the enum. To catch this mishap, programmers would enable -Wswitch or -Werror=switch to their compiler. For instance, let’s suppose I have an enum named Suit to represent the different...

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this: the implicit parameter in OOP

February 11, 2025

I was recently reminded that the variable this is an implicit parameter passed to all methods in OOP such as C++. We can observe this by comparing a regular function vs a method belonging to some class:

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view is just vim

January 24, 2025

I recently found out accidentally at work that vim and view were the same thing when I happened to be editing a file on view instead of my beloved vim editor.

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The Sign of Char

January 20, 2025

Note: This is a follow up post from my microblog WARNING: I am no expert in Assembly. The last and only time I ever wrote assembly was computing the Fibbonacci Sequences 8 years ago for the MIPS architecture

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Stack Overflow: The Case of a Small Stack

December 29, 2024

Years ago I was once asked by an intern to debug a mysterious crash that seemed so innocent. While I no longer recall what the code was about, we stripped the program to a single line in main. Yet the program still continued to crash.

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Utilizing Aliases and Interactive Mode to Force Users to Think Twice Before Deleting Files

December 29, 2024

I previously mentioned in my microblog that I lost my file by accidentally overwriting my file using the cp command. This got me thinking as to why this would be impossible on my work laptop since I would be constantly bombarded with a prompt to confirm my intention to overwrite the file.

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