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.

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.

Recently on Hackernews, a relations developer from QNX announced that QNX is now free for anything non-commercial. QNX also made an annoncement to the LinkedIn Community as well which was where I learned about it. For those who are not familiar with QNX, QNX is a properiety realtime operating system targetted for embedded systems and is installed in over 255 million vehicles. QNX has a great reputation for being reliable and safe embedded system to build software on top of due to its microarchitecture and compliance to many industrial and engineering design process which gives customers the ability to certify their software in safety critical systems more easily. What makes QNX appealing is a discussion on another time but for me, this is a good opportunity to fiddle around with the system. I was previously denied a license from my university who had an agreement with QNX and my attempts to get an educational license did not go far years ago.

I noticed that the neocities community love using protonmail and some even share their public key to enable full encryption communication. What makes protonmail special is the focus on privacy and security. All emails sent between Proton Mail users are end to end encrypted meaning not even Proton can have access to the messages. However, when communicating outside of Proton ecosystem to non-Proton Mail users like those with Gmail and Outlook, communication between the two are not encrypted end to end by default. This does not mean the encryption utilized by Gmail and Outlook are inadequate. The vast majority of emails are encrypted in transit using TLS encryption, the very same encryption you use to enter your password to your bank or entering your credit card to buy something online for instance.

A friend of mine has been asking me a few questions about encoding for a paper he is working on. While I don’t understand what his research is on, all I can understand from his research is that he is working on analyzing Japanese texts and it involves understanding character encodings. Character encoding is not a topic that most native-English programmers are familiar with. The most that the average programmer will know is the existence of ASCII and UTF-8 encoding. If we are using anything beyond the English alphabets and arabic numerals (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, …) then we can utilize UTF-8, else use ASCII.

August Edition