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.

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

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.

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 last section, if you want to see the list without any commentary.

TOC

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

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