, 3 min read
1. Problem statement. You have an encrypted disk and want to decrypt the disk during boot while not sitting in front of your computer. Solution is sketched and indicated in dm-crypt/Specialties. Below is a little bit more explanation. For the following you must be root. 2. Required software…
, 4 min read
Google announced that starting with Chrome version 68 they will gradually mark HTTP-connections as "not secure". "Let's Encrypt" is a free service for web-masters to obtain certificates in an easy manner. Work on "Let's Encrypt" started in 2014. Setting up "Let's…
, 2 min read
I stumbled upon Hiawatha web-server when I read about a web-server for a houseboat by Ronald Scheckelhoff, WB8LZR. I had used Apache, thttpd, Lighttp, NGINX, and others before. Now I use Hiawatha web-server. Hiawatha has three objectives, which are nicely met: Security: Hiawatha resisted…
, 5 min read
Very interesting article. Some remarkable excerpts: To isolate performance issues to the JavaScript VM, the authors rebuilt the client side of WebRsync using the Chrome native client support and C++. It’s much faster. Replacing MD5 with SipHash reduces computation complexity by almost 5x. As a…
, 1 min read
One lesser known Unix command is comm. This command is far less known than diff. comm needs two already sorted files FILE1 and FILE2. With the options -1 suppress column 1 (lines unique to FILE1) -2 suppress column 2 (lines unique to FILE2) -3 suppress column 3 (lines that appear in both…
, 1 min read
I wondered why Unix sort behaved strangely. printf "A0 1\nA 1\n" | sort delivered A0 1 A 1 Of course, I expected A to come before A0. This was strange, as printf "A1 1\nA 1\n" | sort produced A 1 A1 1 just as expected. Also, printf "A0\nA\n" | sort orders A…
, 4 min read
In the post Rewriting Perl to plain C the runtime of the serial runs were reported. As expected the C program was a lot faster than the Perl script. Now running programs in parallel showed two unexpected behaviours: (1) more parallelizations can degrade runtime, and (2) running unoptimized programs…
, 7 min read
Perl script was running too slow. Rewriting it in C made it 20 times faster. 1. Problem statement. Analyze call-tree dependency in COBOL programs. There are 77 million lines of COBOL code in ca. 30,000 files. These 30,000 COBOL programs could potentially include 74,000 COPY-books comprising 10…
, 6 min read
Many scripting languages, like Awk, Perl, Python, Lua, and so on, have hash-tables already built-in. I needed hashing functionality similar to Perl's hash-variables. In particular I needed lookup, insert, and iterating over all entries. I wrote on hashing in Hashing Just Random Numbers and Hash…
, 1 min read
On 23-Oct-2017 Filippo Mantovani held a talk in Darmstadt on "Mobile technology for production-ready high-performance computing systems: The path of the Mont-Blanc project". Unfortunately I was unable to attend, but Mr. Mantovani sent me his Darmstadt Seminar slides. As his slides and…
, 2 min read
1. Prerequisites Assume one owns $n>0$ different products, $n\in\mathbb{N}$, usually $n\approx 100$. Each product has a cost $c_i>0$, $c_i\in\mathbb{R}$, associated with this ownership, $i=1,\ldots, n$. Let $N=\left\{1,\ldots,n\right\}$, and $\mathbb{P}(N)$ be the powerset of $N$, i.e., the…
, 1 min read
This blog was viewed more than 60.000 times since its inception and had more than 45.000 visitors. I wrote about the development of this blog as follows: 2014/05/07: 5,000 Views 2014/09/10: 10,000 Views 2014/12/27: 15,000 Views 2015/04/23: 20,000 Views 2016/01/24: 30,000 Views 2016/11/12: 40,000…
, 1 min read
An article by Krister Walfridsson on C pointers are not hardware pointers demonstrated that even adjacent integer variables having the same hardware address may compare unequal regarding C pointers. See the following C program: #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { …
, 2 min read
When analyzing longer text, especially if this text was written by oneself, it helps to read the text in a different way, here using a concordance. Assume your text is provided as PDF. Convert PDF to text using pdftotext, which is part of package poppler. Replace line breaks in text file with…
, 1 min read
The discussion forum for Hugo contains a description: Hugo development - how to contribute code. Also see Contributing to Hugo. 1. Preparation First set GOPATH as export GOPATH=$HOME/tmp/H then cd $GOPATH Fetch source with go get time go get -u -v github.com/spf13/hugo takes around 1-2 minutes…
, 1 min read
HP (Hewlett Packard) manufacturer of printers of various sorts (laser, ink) unfortunately again decided to annoy its loyal customers. Repeatedly HP updated firmware in printers so that they do not work with alternate ink, see for example Disabling 3rd-party ink ensures “best printing…
, 2 min read
In German known as Fünf-Punkte-Satz. This theorem is astounding. It says: If two meromorphic functions share five values ignoring multiplicity, then both functions are equal. Two functions, $f(z)$ and $g(z)$, are said to share the value $a$ if $f(z) - a = 0$ and $g(z) - a = 0$ have the same…
, 1 min read
Recently I had trouble opening PDF documents embedded in Microsoft Word. I speculated about the following reasons for this problem: Adobe Acrobat not installed, I use MuPDF Embedded document simply not "really" embedded but just an icon There is an easy solution. Microsoft Word 2007…
, 1 min read
This blog was viewed more than 50.000 times and had more than 37.000 visitors. I wrote about the development of this blog as follows: 2014/05/07: 5.000 Views 2014/09/10: 10.000 Views 2014/12/27: 15.000 Views 2015/04/23: 20.000 Views 2016/01/24: 30.000 Views 2016/11/12: 40.000 Views The averages…
, 2 min read
As noted in Youtube 500 Internal Server Error today I again noted an "500 Internal Server Error". Normally you would not expect these kind of errors from Google. It says: Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you…