RANDOM BITS

A random site by a random clueless human

Random bits of programming, math, and thoughts By a clueless human

Blogs

Random long thoughts I had over the years...

Topics range from programming, math, to my views of school


Misconfigured hostname

February 25, 2021

Reminiscing another problem I encounter during my internship at IBM, I encountered an issue with some internal tools during a server migration.

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ct - Bad Phone Number

February 14, 2021

During my internship at IBM a while back, I recall encountering an error on some HP UNIX machine when I was trying to checkout a file using the CLI tool cleartool for the version control system Clearcase.

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My 2021 Reading List

January 29, 2021

Having no good topic to write for this month’s blog post, I decided to write about the books I plan on reading for the year and why I chose to read them. I never was an avid reader. The books I read in Highschool for fun were typically old computer books I could find in the library or get as gifts. Although there were better books to read from, I learned a lot from them. I started to read and explore books of varying genres during my internship, which led me to read on a somewhat regular schedule. Visit the...

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Debugging expr with ldd

December 31, 2020

TOC 1. expr failing to perform simple multiplication 2. Investigating expr 3. Looking at the libraries used by expr

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Dangers of Improper Macro Naming

November 1, 2020

TOC 1. A random promotion 2. Expected unqualified-id before string constant Error 2.1. Verifying the Error is not Environment Related 3. The Dangers of MACROS

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A look at Double Pointers

October 25, 2020

I was randomly browsing r/CarletonU community on Reddit since it’s one of the schools I may attend next Fall. A particular post interested me due to the title: For anyone in Computer Science. As a recent graduate in Computer Science (undergrad), this post caught my attention. This blog post is inspired by my response on reddit about double pointers.

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Another Look at scanf - scanset

October 15, 2020

It came to my attention from an embedded course on udemy the existence of scanset in scanf

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Another Look at CONST in C

October 4, 2020

Recently, I’ve been learning embedded programming from udemy and there was a section dedicated const. The section was interesting because despite programming in C a lot during my duration of my undergrad, I have never taken a look at const in much detail. I am sure there is more to const than what the course provides but I still learned a lot from this section itself.

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A look at Input Buffer and scanf

September 25, 2020

Today I learned something new that should have been obvious but it was something I never took time to think about. In Linux, we have three standard streams: stdin, stdout, and stderr. If you are familiar with programming in C, you should know that stdin is the input channel that handles data from an input device such as your keyboard. scanf is a function that scans input according to format (definition from SCANF(3) - Linux Programmer's Manual). But how does scanf actually scan the input?

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Random thought about Tee

September 22, 2020

In the latter half of June (when I flee from my parent’s home to Mississauga for 2 months so that I can study and read all I want without being bothered), I decided to read Intermediate Perl: Beyond The Basics of Learning Perl. For those of you who are not familiar with the book, it’s the sequel to the “Llama book” (Learning Perl), a classic book on Perl.

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