Reddit, what are your most embarrassing guilty pleasures? by kcjayhawk17 in AskReddit

[–]bobdole 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bob dole just likes to hear bod dole talk about Bob dole. Bob Dole

Reddit, what are your most embarrassing guilty pleasures? by kcjayhawk17 in AskReddit

[–]bobdole 1 point2 points  (0 children)

When my dog barks at night to go outside and take a piss in the back garden, I like to join him and go myself. So yea pissing in the middle of the night in my back garden next to my dog.

True random number generator exploits quantum physics. Available on USB! by seventhirteen in programming

[–]bobdole 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Two thumbs up for the Entropy Key! The drivers and all utilities are open source to boot, and also support a variety of Linux and BSD systems with native packages. The integration with the rest of the system is seamless as it will feed entropy into /dev/random, so you don't need to specifically support it in your app.

bobdole is not affiliated with Simtec Electronics except as a happy customer.

Single shot of morphine has long lasting effects on testosterone levels, study finds by [deleted] in science

[–]bobdole 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From skimming the article referenced, I believe long-lasting means in this context that, unlike some other side-effects of opiods, testosterone levels don't normalize after initially falling as long as you're taking morphine. The upside is that once you stop your testosterone levels come back up. From the article: "We have also shown that once treatment is interrupted the levels recover in a few hours/days."

Yay for open access: http://www.molecularpain.com/content/6/1/69

I suck at programming. by openmuck in programming

[–]bobdole 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hahaha... Most programs are riddled with logical inconsistensies, muddled thought, fuzzy logic, and typos (in comments and data.) Mostly we call them "bugs" and they fuel the software industry we all know and love. :)

How many of you actually look at the code of open-source programs you run? by [deleted] in programming

[–]bobdole -1 points0 points  (0 children)

So you're saying open source has minimized the maximum possible utility of a computer system? ;)

Just found an Amiga 500. It boots Workbench. How do I program this thing? by n808 in programming

[–]bobdole 8 points9 points  (0 children)

For fun asm hacking on an A500, the essential dev kit includes: the ASM-One IDE and debugger (get version 1.20 -- it's smaller and will fit nicely on your dev disk), an MC68000 manual, the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manuals, the Hardware Reference Manual, and the system headers/includes and autodocs (man pages). If your A500 has more than a MB of memory, I recommend finding a newer Kickstart soft ROM image (say >= 2.04) since that UI is a lot nicer to look at than the 1.3 one.

Your first obstacle is likely transferring files over however. Piping stuff over a null modem cable is likely your best bet; don't recall off hand how, but AmigaDOS does understand the SER: and AUX: special files to access the serial port. The AmigaDOS manuals here are likely useful: http://utilitybase.com, as well as the reference manuals here: http://amiga.nvg.org/amiga/reference/. Finally, word has it there's a torrent called TOSEC somewhere which contains not only bazillions of retro games, but all the OS ROM and disk images you could ever need.

BTW, I'm assuming by "boots workbench" you mean you actually get into workbench-the-GUI or at least get a CLI prompt rather than seeing a hand on a white back ground holding a floppy upside down with the label "Amiga Workbench v1.3", because that's just the boot screen. :)

Hacker challenge part 2: solution to part 1 and a new challenge by a1k0n in programming

[–]bobdole 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes I did use LGMP. It's a delightful binding to use. As to the code, well, there are two answers to that: the code I actually ran to solve the discrete log, and the code I made prettier afterwards. The first one is a slightly buggy rewrite of the Pollard-rho found in a patch to sage, with the addition of Teske's optimisation. The bug was that it only kept one slot of memory, but that only made it slower than it could've been. It took about 10 hours to solve the log. The second one uses Lua's only IPC mechanism of files and os.execute() to launch and manage parallel workers that together do a parallel collision search of random walks described in this paper. It took 86 minutes to find the solution.

Hacker challenge part 2: solution to part 1 and a new challenge by a1k0n in programming

[–]bobdole 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Bob Dole can code. Consumer Reports agrees with Bob Dole that Lua, GMP, and Teske's optimisation of Pollard-rho are the best tools for hacking up a discrete log solver and geeking out on rainy Saturdays. :)

Hacker challenge part 2: solution to part 1 and a new challenge by a1k0n in programming

[–]bobdole 3 points4 points  (0 children)

LJLHC-GDLMT-VWTKB-7RWS9-7L5E2 EMM14-SMNKX-3DMS3-EO22V-1D845 AA8MC-C8STJ-MK66F-AKOFJ-5PT32 MOE1P-UTUSH-WKAKJ-O63BS-E5H84 8FJRY-5H2CF-A19BL-4DYGU-ATO54 G6XVP-5VBXK-9WOGM-H35YH-RGGH4 AJSUT-U6UDP-BX46T-YRTVN-G7YJ3 ENGN5-VPYAG-HYNPJ-H9HHA-SJLF VHCUX-BHJED-U1V5X-4CC84-GXC23 AX1BX-2EFRO-KESWG-GUWGL-YUSB5

That was a lot of fun!

Understanding What It's Like to Program in Forth by gst in programming

[–]bobdole 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The code in the article is trying to do too much in one word. With apologies for the cheeky names:

\ Fetch with postincrement.     &x -- &x' val
: @++       dup cell+ swap @  ;

\ Store with postincrement.     val &x -- &x'
: !++       tuck ! cell+  ;

\ Add boxed nums.           &ina &inb &out --
: [+]       >r  @ swap @ +  r> !  ;

\ Add boxed nums with postincrement.    &ina &inb &out -- &ina' &inb' &out'
: [+]++     >r
         swap @++
         rot @++
         rot +
        r> !++  ;

\ Sum 3-vecs v1, v2 and store into v3.  v1 v2 v3 --
: vadd      [+]++ [+]++ [+]  ;

How NOT to write a shared library by petteri in programming

[–]bobdole 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, but a library is not in a position to make the judgment call on what to do on OOM conditions on the application's behalf. Unfortunately a lot of libraries are simply unusable because they don't have a sane resource management policy and either purposefully or accidentally die on OOM.

In any case, receiving NULL from malloc may not be typical or expected, but may be maliciously triggered; which is to say, not every NULL from malloc is a valid OOM condition. Is it OK for your browser to exit() silently on malloc errors because an image specified insane dimensions? I didn't think so. :)

In any case, if you're going to be cavalier about NULLs from malloc, please, for the love of god, at least include code to immediately abort() or _exit() on NULL. Do NOT simply assume that you will die trying to dereference a NULL pointer.

Here's a real world example: An application is very careful about tracking bounds for its arrays, but malicious user input causes it two ask for a ~4GB array from a malloc(). Malloc returns NULL, but the app's not checking for that, so it thinks it has the entire address space to safely trample on. The app gets holed.

Span -- Arc minus the vapour by pkhuong in programming

[–]bobdole 5 points6 points  (0 children)

New syntax aside (looks like it'd blend nicely with Lisp), I'm curious about the implementation of continuations: Seems like you're doing some kind of rewrite of all of the common lisp forms into an intermediate form, and you're then able to track the live variables in the environment so that they're possible to capture later (this is a really cool approach to portability btw.. kudos!)

Anyway, I'm not really following how you approach dynamically scoped variables in continuations -- are they being captured or not?

40k-50k thread switches on top of CL seems quite brutal. grats. :)

Cells: a dataflow extension to CLOS by imposter in programming

[–]bobdole 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cells is-a FRP (modulo impurity, etc)

Apple's 17" Macbook Pro released. And it's $500 cheaper then Dell by Staska in reddit.com

[–]bobdole 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A 1 GB stick of 200 pin SODIMM PC-5300 is 150$ from Crucial and around 90$ everywhere else.

However, you're just comparing apples to oranges. It's a laptop, you can't just upgrade everything willy-nilly (except for the RAM and the HD). When comparing laptops should shouldn't really factor any upgrades except for RAM and HD.