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So it was late at night and I was hacking away at my touch-controls for my UnicornHat. I was trying to set the brightness in nine steps between 0.1 and 0.9. When all of a sudden, this happened: >>> foo=0.1 >>> foo+=0.1 >>> print(foo) 0.2 >>> foo+=0.1 >>> print(foo) 0.30000000000000004 So according to my internal senses this looked not very precise. But according to the almighty Stackoverflow and one of my beloved coworkers who can indeed speak ASM fluently, this is in fact very precise (for a float)....

I just hit a point in an app I am currently developing, where I found myself generating queries from the resultset of another query. Because, what can possibly go wrong, right? $selectors = array(); $query_phase2 = "SHOW KEYS FROM `".$row['table']."` WHERE Key_name = 'PRIMARY'"; $query_phase3 = "select `".$row['field']."` from `".$row['table']."` where "; if($result = $GLOBALS['dbconn']->query($query_phase2)) { while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) { if(array_key_exists($row['Column_name'], $data)) { $qextender = "`".$row['Column_name']."` = '".$data[$row['Column_name']]."'"; array_push($selectors,$qextender); } } $query_phase3 ....

I just stumbled across an enormous outcry about another attack by the “LizardSquad” against DBG’s (former SOE) Games that were allegedly the outcome of a few angry posts on Twitter by DBG’s CEO John Smedley. (Storylink) Along with the usual “fixit fixit fixit” there was also a lot of guesses thrown out about the size of the genitals of a 14-year old fin. What startled me though is the sheer lack of knowledge when it comes to the gamers themselves....

I just viewed a very nice #31c3 talk about a well known issue with certain functions within two very widely used perl-modules (DBI & CGI). When I heard the arguments brought to the presenter from the audience within the Q&A, I thought to myself, well, they’re right. All of these attack vectors are in theory something that could have been prevented by just flatten arguments (as you always should). Then again, this makes for a really, really messy programming style that does not come easy if you were programming any other programming language prior to perl....

I recently commenced the third installation of JAVA on one of my Debian-Boxes and couldn’t remember any of the exact commands, had to google again, ended up with 8 open tabs all saying something different and so wrote this small bash script to set up all necessary alternatives with “update-alternatives” automatically. Please note that there has to be either icedtea or openjdk installed to make all parts of this script work....

I recently got certified with cloudera (CCAH) and found myself the only one in class who really uses Hadoop. I often stumble upon people trying to sell Big Data appliances to brand owners “to store and monitor their social network XXX” where XXX may be replaced by any word that tickles or frightens brand owners. My personal opinion is, if you are a brand owner or not, doesn’t matter, data matters....

Just finished a script, that enables me or anyone else who cares to send tweets directly to a IRC-Channel. The script is powered by the best IRC-Client ever made, perl, and Net::Twitter::Lite. Update [2023-08-18]: Nobody should use twitter or perl or irc any more ;) Update [2013-06-15]: upgrade to Net::Twitter::Lite::WithAPIv1_1 Update [2013-01-12]: second update today added the setting “_count” and some cleanups with vars and setup Update [2013-01-12]: drastically reduced the amout of requests to the API P....

I was just writing a small script for automatizing something via a REST-API and I had to manually add an authorization to all my GET-Requests, which really annoyed me. (it was not Realm-sensitive, so I couldn’t set up auth in the UA itself). So I wrote this small sub I would like to share: #getrequests shorthand sub getReq { my ( $url, $username, $password ) = @_; my $req = HTTP::Request->new( GET => $url ); if ( $username && $password ) { $req->authorization_basic( $username, $password ); } my $res = $ua->request($req); if ( $res->is_success ) { return $res; } else { warn $res->status_line; return undef; } } All you need to call a HTTP-Base-Auth’d site now is:...

Today I do not have very much to do at work. I am not moaning about it, I would just like to point out that my actual team has a very strict “don’t change anything that works before a holiday or the weekend”-policy, this is a very good policy, but it leads to personal downtimes on fridays and the days before holidays for obvious reasons that I like to fill with personal development....

Once upon a time I was asked by one of our javadevelopers if i can send a csv in proper xml to one of his webservices. Of course I can. As usual i decided to use perl and Text::CSV to read in the CSV as well as LWP::UserAgent to send the xml to the (soap-)webservice. After having a second look on the code, where I put in several nodes at the fourth level of the xml-tree, managing all the intents just via print, I found myself doing something like this:...