µBlog Archive (2026)
Randombits now live on Github Pages
April 29, 2026
Despite the questionable quality of GitHub’s uptime and the recent incident with pull requests, I have decided to create a Github Pages mirror to increase the site’s availability, not that this site serves any grand purpose nor importance. More mirrors may be coming in the future, but this is something I have been debating ever since closing my previous blog, which has remained in archive-mode. Former visitors of that blog might be confused as to why the site has been completley changed. Hopefully, the merger of my Neocities microblog and my main blog has been seamless, such that visitors of...Multiarchitecture Framework Laptop
April 24, 2026
Two years ago, I had a delusional dream of an OpenPower Framework laptop being released one day. As expected, ARM and RISC-V architecture overshadowed the enthusiast market with a RISC-V by DeepComputing and now an ARM by MetaComputing mainboard being released for the Framework 13 Laptop. Yet there has been no progress to an affordable enthusiast POWER nor SPARC laptop and desktop. The PC NoteBook project that I have been supporting financialy over the years has made some positive progress after shifting their focus to a working desktop first. By focusing on a working desktop, it allowed the team to...Floating Point Numbers are Not Associative
March 15, 2026
Every programmer who has worked with floats know that representing fractions is weird. For instance, suppose we multiply 3.14 with 10. In Python, we get to see some ridiculous number: >>> 3.14*10 31.400000000000002 This behavior can have unintended consequences which I intend to explore a bit more in a future blog. But what I want to share with you is about the additive associativity property that we come to love when operating on a field. For simplicity’s sake, especially for those without Mathematical background, think of the field as the number system you use in your everyday life that has...Site Update
February 28, 2026
As returning visitors may have noticed, the site has changed for better or worse with a few new sections in the past month or so. Notably: Book Recommendations: random non-fiction books I liked and would recommend for anyone interested in computer science Blog: My long form content that I have been maintaining from my former blogsite. Hopefully I resolved all the issues when it comes with migration including photos and internal links Archives for µBlog as it was getting a bit too overwhelming to display all the micrblogs in one giant page UI Changes: With the help of AI (I...Singularity Rootkit
February 19, 2026
An interesting yet scary piece of software I read about on the weekly Linux news is Singularity, an open-source rootkit, which can hide itself from being detected, at least does a decent job at it. It hides its existence by removing itself from the list of active kernel modules, and also attempts to hide attacker-controlled processes, network communication, and related files. As it has kernel-level access, it can hook and intercept syscalls that could reveal files that singularity wishes to hide from. Not totally related but this reminds me of a shared library exploit whereby the shared library intercepts the...Digital Signatures on PDF
January 17, 2026
Recently, I came across my electronic copy of my degree and transcript from several years ago and remembered that it was digitally signed. I previously wrote about how to manually verify an email signature 2 years ago and that got me thinking: how can I verify the signature of my degree and transcript to ensure that it has indeed come from my University and that it has not been tampered with? Note: When referring to digital signatures on PDFs, I am not referring to e-signature i.e. the graphical signature that contains a name for instance For this post, I won’t...2025 - The End of Two OS
January 9, 2026
December 31st marked the end of HP-UX. Apparently released in 1982, it was mainly used in the enterprise world from what I know. I do not have much fond memories of this platform due to my work compiling (building) security fixes (PSIRT - Product Security Incident Response) when I was at IBM many years ago, though no fault to HPUX itself. At IBM Db2, we called HPUX builds hpipf32 and hpipf64 as evident if you were to look at the link to any HPUX Db2 security patch: fixids=special_38387_DB2-hpipf64-universal_fixpack-9.7.0.11-FP011. Though for some reason, I recalled calling it ia32 and ia64 as...New Year, New Desktop
January 8, 2026
A new year, a new computer, and a new experience, building my first desktop. It’s only been a year since I got a Framework laptop which is already sufficent for my current needs so there wasn’t any good reason to get a new computer. While most think GPUs are only good for gaming and more recently for running your own local LLM, it can be used for more interesting things, compute such as numerical analysis and simulations. Not that I’m sufficiently motivated to do so myself. Perhaps I’ll write my final undergraduate Math paper on numerical analysis and simulations, but...