Index

Rapidly firing myself in the foot with C pointers

Now that I am dedicated to becoming a somewhat decent C programmer, I need to master pointers. Last week, I leveled up in my pointer usage by debugging a particularly nasty segfault. It took the help of gdb (the GNU Project Debugger) for me to notice that my segfault was accompanied by very weird values for some increment counters, while the pointer involved was a char* pointer, not a pointer to an int. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 month ago, on October 25, 2021, at 16:10 | Comments closed

WW challenge 1: learning better C by working on XJot

Since the beginning of this month (October 2021), I become officially jobless, after 6 years at YTEC. That's not so much of a problem for a software developer in 2021—especially one in the Dutch IT industry, where there has been an enormous shortage of skilled developers for years. However… I don't (yet) want a new job as a software developer, because: in the programming food pyramid, I'm a mere scripter. That is, the language in which I'm most proficient are all very high-level languages: Python, PHP, XSLT, Bash, JavaScript, Ruby, C# (in order of decreasing (recency of) experience. I have never mastered a so-called systems language: C, C++, Rust. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 month ago, on October 24, 2021, at 21:10 | 2 comments

MQTT benchmark of HiveMQ, VerneMQ, Mosquitto and FlashMQ

Watch this demoscene style benchmark of HiveMQ, VerneMQ, Mosquitto and FlashMQ: https://youtu.be/vZWLitdCkJQ Read More »
By halfgaar, 3 months ago, on August 23, 2021, at 00:08 | Comments closed

Breaking amplifier fault current with relays and MOSFETs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIfdHpx9V1E Read More »
By halfgaar, 4 months ago, on July 24, 2021, at 12:07 | Comments closed

FlashMQ version 0.8.0

Just released FlashMQ version 0.8.0, a multi-threaded (multi-core) lightweight MQTT server. The latest new feature is a native authentication plugin interface for easy implementation of custom authentication and authorization. Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 months ago, on June 13, 2021, at 13:06 | Comments closed

Gitlab ‘Your password expired. Please access GitLab from a web browser to update your password.’

I just fixed a very obscure error in Gitlab of 'Your password expired. Please access GitLab from a web browser to update your password.' This error would appear during SSH operations, and in various log files in /var/log/gitlab. Also XHR requests to the server got that response. Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 months ago, on June 03, 2021, at 17:06 | Comments closed

Introducing MQTT server FlashMQ version 0.5.0

Introducing my the MQTT server that I've been working on, FlashMQ. I'm starting with test version 0.5.0. It's ready for some testing and benchmarks, and of course development will continue. Read More »
By halfgaar, 9 months ago, on March 20, 2021, at 21:03 | Comments closed

Disable roaming profile for one user on a Samba domain controller

Sometimes you want to mix users with and without a roaming profile. As found here, you can use Samba's pdbedit to set the "Profile Path" to empty: Read More »
By halfgaar, 9 months ago, on March 10, 2021, at 20:03 | Comments closed

Exhaling on YouTube

I've created a YouTube channel separate from my private account and branded it “BigSmoke”. The channel's purpose is to breathe some fresh air into some online discussions that I follow(ed). Actually, the content is the sort of content that I used to want to put more of on BigSmoke, but which I now found to be better suited for long-form discussions than for laying down my views from some ivory tower. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on June 18, 2020, at 08:06 | Comments closed

Icinga 2 dependencies, downtimes and host/service unreachability

There are a few gotchas you have to be aware of when working with Icinga 2 dependencies and downtimes. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on May 05, 2020, at 18:05 | Comments closed