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


What does the Build Team Do - An Overview of Builds and DevOps

April 2, 2021

In my undergraduate in Computer Science, I got the opportunity to work at IBM as a member of the Build Infrastructure Team. I had absolutely no clue what the Build Infrastructure Team is or does. Though I am no expert and I still have a difficult time explaining what I do to friends and family, I’ll try to tackle the subject to the best of my ability. This post is a precursor to an education session titled An Overview of DevOps and Builds I plan to give to new interns of the Build Infrastructure Team at IBM this May. I...

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Software Ports

March 13, 2021

Software porting is the process of adapting a program to be able to execute in another computing environment that differs from the originally intended computing environment.

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printf - Reordering Arguments using $

February 28, 2021

I was recently watching a video by Live Overflow helping a person troubleshoot a format string exploit through Twitter, and saw something I was very curious about. In the video, the Yotuber poses a question to the person if they could describe how %2$s prints a string. I have never seen this syntax before. What does the dollar sign ($) serve in the format string? This got me curious so I went searching on the internet and the man pages to find out.

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Misconfigured hostname

February 25, 2021

Reminiscing another problem I encounter during my internship at IBM, I encountered an issue with some internal tools during a server migration.

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ct - Bad Phone Number

February 14, 2021

During my internship at IBM a while back, I recall encountering an error on some HP UNIX machine when I was trying to checkout a file using the CLI tool cleartool for the version control system Clearcase.

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My 2021 Reading List

January 29, 2021

Having no good topic to write for this month’s blog post, I decided to write about the books I plan on reading for the year and why I chose to read them. I never was an avid reader. The books I read in Highschool for fun were typically old computer books I could find in the library or get as gifts. Although there were better books to read from, I learned a lot from them. I started to read and explore books of varying genres during my internship, which led me to read on a somewhat regular schedule. Visit the...

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Debugging expr with ldd

December 31, 2020

TOC 1. expr failing to perform simple multiplication 2. Investigating expr 3. Looking at the libraries used by expr

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Dangers of Improper Macro Naming

November 1, 2020

TOC 1. A random promotion 2. Expected unqualified-id before string constant Error 2.1. Verifying the Error is not Environment Related 3. The Dangers of MACROS

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A look at Double Pointers

October 25, 2020

I was randomly browsing r/CarletonU community on Reddit since it’s one of the schools I may attend next Fall. A particular post interested me due to the title: For anyone in Computer Science. As a recent graduate in Computer Science (undergrad), this post caught my attention. This blog post is inspired by my response on reddit about double pointers.

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Another Look at scanf - scanset

October 15, 2020

It came to my attention from an embedded course on udemy the existence of scanset in scanf

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