m7c1

    A couple of weeks ago, some colleagues of mine and I went to a bar after work.  It was a typical bar atmosphere, perhaps slightly amplified by it being a Friday, with loud music and louder patrons.  Despite some difficulty hearing each other, we got chatting over beers. At some point Adam, someone I’d worked with closely in the preceding weeks, was describing a process by which coding assignments - programs written by students to solve an assigned problem - were automatically checked at NYU.  The process automatically ran the submitted programs, systematically trying malformed inputs and edge cases; things like replacing an expected number with a string, or a divisor with zero. This piqued my interest, and I responded enthusiastically, “Oh, they’re fuzzing ‘em!” He looked at me quizzically, and kindly replied “No… It’s actually the opposite of fuzzing.”  While ‘opposite’ perhaps too strongly implies dichotomy, he was absolutely correct. And I knew that. So what happened?

This is a 'fork bomb':

:(){ :|: & };:

In bash (and probably bash-like shells) this declares a function named :, and defines that function as a call to itself, piped into a call to itself, which is then forked.  The result is endless forking of a non-terminating program that calls itself twice per call.  The last : initiates the bomb.

    I've been occasionally playing with html5 canvas animations, and related things for a while.  Here's the first vaguely playable result!  See if you can stay at the top of the high scores ;)

Also, it turns out that image creation, manipulation, sizing, creating multiple correctly sized and formatted versions of the same image, etc takes up way more time than I (naively) thought.  I have a whole new appreciation for the amount of time, energy and painstaking attention to detail that must have been applied to making the games I've enjoyed over the years!

Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.

    Situation: I'm in the EU, living under its Big State ethos and enduring its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Web presences with an EU market have largely complied in some fashion, but many without have simply denied access to requests appearing to originate in the EU. I wanted to read an article on a site in the second category.You'll need tor and a proxy. I use privoxy.