Author Archives: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Converting a binary/blob guid column to text in SQL

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Since we live in an imperfect world where we often have to trade ease-of-use for simplicity and abstractions for performance, while dealing with computer systems and standards you’ll often run into tasks that seem like they should be really obvious and simple only to later discover that in reality they lead down a rabbit hole. Such is the case anytime a developer comes into contact with the individual bits of a binary blob – and that can happen even when you least expect it.

The premise is simple: given a database powered by, for example, the extremely popular MySQL or SQLite RDBMS engines that do not offer “native” representation of UUIDs or GUIDs, database designers and systems programmers have a choice to make: do you store a GUID as a plaintext (VARCHAR or TEXT) and take the performance, memory, and storage hit that comes with it, or do you take off the gloves and dig out the BLOB column type in your DDL?

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Exploring the history and typography of Tahoma and Verdana

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Ask your favorite typophile about the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and you’re sure to regret it… unless you have a latent appreciation for the differences between font faces, the attention given to kerning and hinting, and more. But ask them what’s the difference between Tahoma and Verdana, and you might just be surprised by the ensuing silence. Yet, these are two of the most popular online fonts, and have aged significantly well considering they share corporate roots with Comic Sans and Arial.1 If any fonts ever deserved scrutiny and attention, it’s these two.

Here are two lines of text, one in each of the two fonts in question:

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  1. Just to name two fonts that designers love to hate, though the circle is coming around and you’ll find plenty of Arial defenders too, these days. ↩

What happened to the sandy text editor?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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The sandy text editor is an open source project from the team over at suckless.org, which make painfully minimal1 alternatives for popular tools and applications for unix-ish platforms.

But perhaps the tense being used here is wrong. For quite some time, sandy, suckless’ minimal vi(m) replacement, has been unavailable. The git repository is offline; the root cgit instance returning the following “No repositories found” message:

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  1. Perhaps best described as borderline masochist in their austerity and spartanism ↩

How to import any Linux command into your Windows 10 environment

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
3

At NeoSmart Technologies, we’re huge fans of the new Windows Subsystem for Linux,1 and have spent a lot of time trying to make the transition between the native Win32 subsystem and the Linux/WSL subsystem as seamless as possible.

For those of you that haven’t already seen it, we recommend reading our previous article Meet $, your new best friend for WSL for an introduction to WSL and $, our nifty helper utility that lets you directly run Linux commands in your Windows workflow. In brief, we developed $ (also known – though less affectionately – as RunInBash) to make it possible to run Linux utilities directly from within a Windows workflow, complete with arguments, stdin, stdout, and stderr redirection, and more.

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  1. Yes, we refuse to call it by its ungodly “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows” moniker ↩

These two new iOS 11 features could save your life

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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We may not know for sure what it’s going to look like or what it will cost, but we do know that the new iPhone 8 – Apple’s 10 year iPhone anniversary edition – is on its way and it’ll be running iOS 11. And unlike the iPhone 8, iOS 11 has been available now for some time for beta testing and software development. There are a lot of changes – some good, some bad1 – but there are two new features that are especially important to be aware of given that they could – literally – save your life.

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  1. For example, because Apple couldn’t figure out how to get force touch working nicely on the new iPhone, they’ve chosen to deprecate force touch features across the OS, completely disabling the “force touch swipe from the edge of the screen to switch apps” after having completely rearchitectured the task switcher UX to specifically be built around this feature, rather than officially having a feature available on older gen iPhones but not on the latest and greatest. ↩

The Certificate Authority model does not work for LAN devices

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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HTTPS is the future and the future is (finally) here. Secure HTTP requests that provide end-to-end encryption between the client making the request and the server providing it with the requested content is finally making some headway, with almost a third of the top one million sites on the internet serving content over SSL, as of August 2017:1

But what this chart doesn’t show is an important subsection of HTTP traffic that is unfortunately infamous for a general lack of security: IoT. The “internet of things,” as it is called, is famous for fiascoes that have allowed hackers to break into the privacy of homes, spying on consumers via internet-enabled nanny cams, gaining access to so-called “smart locks” to break into houses, obtaining sensitive information, and exposing private content and data thanks to insecurely designed consumer products and services that live on the local network.

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  1. Source: BuiltWith SSL trends ↩

A high-performance, cross-platform tac rewrite

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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If you haven’t heard of tac, it’s a pretty nifty command-line utility that ships with the GNU utils and it’s used to print a file backwards, line-by-line. It’s especially useful when analyzing things like log files, and judicious use of tac can speed up commands considerably.

Take the example of a 30GiB webserver access log and you want to see the last request to a certain resource or that triggered a particular HTTP status code. You could run the following to get the last such request… which would take quite awhile on anything larger than a few hundred MiB:

> egrep "GET /path/to/resource " access.log | tail -n1

Or you could be smart about it and use tac instead, and not even have time to blink before the result comes back:

> tac access.log | egrep "GET /path/to/resource " | head -n1

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Stuck on .NET 2.0 – 3.5? Copy streams easily with this NuGet extension!

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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If you’re still stuck on .NET 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5 for any reason and don’t have access to the .CopyTo method for System.IO.Stream objects, the Stream.CopyTo extension method, available as a small NuGet package will make manually allocating buffers and other boilerplate associated with copying a buffer from one stream to another a thing of the past.

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Will AMD’s Ryzen finally bring SHA extensions to Intel’s CPUs?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
1

If you have any skin invested in the high-performance computing game, you’ve almost certainly heard of the likes of MMX and SSE, the original “extensions” to the x86 assembly instruction set that provided task-specific performance-optimized instructions that let developers take advantage of specific hardware extensions to quickly perform tasks that previously required extra steps in software to compute. If you haven’t, here’s a quick briefer.

The “basic” instructions supported by PCs are known as the “x86 assembly language” and is the lowest level of code available for writing software that runs on a “regular PC,” originally developed by Intel and adopted by other players in the CPU game (including AMD and the now-defunct Via CPUs). All PCs from the original Intel 8086 way back in 1978 to modern, multi-core behemoths support this language, and code written in or compiled for x86 can (in theory) run on any machine from 1978 onwards.

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