RSS Parrot

Build dependable bare-metal ARM firmware with UNIX tools

https://begriffs.com/posts/2023-10-10-bare-metal-firmware.html

Published: October 10, 2023 00:00

Download the eBook ($12) For software developers, the world of hardware and firmware can be an exciting change. Firmware catapults your logic into the physical world. Rather than moving text between forms and a database, you can move motors. Rather than…

Pleasant debugging with GDB and DDD

https://begriffs.com/posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html

Published: July 17, 2022 00:00

GDB is an old and ubiquitous debugger for Linux and BSD systems that has extensive language, processor, and binary format support. Its interface is a little cryptic, but learning GDB pays off. This article is a set of miscellaneous configuration and…

Practical parsing with Flex and Bison

https://begriffs.com/posts/2021-11-28-practical-parsing.html

Published: November 28, 2021 00:00

Although parsing is often described from the perspective of writing a compiler, there are many common smaller tasks where it’s useful. Reading file formats, talking over the network, creating shells, and analyzing source code are all easier using a robust…

Dynamic linking best practices

https://begriffs.com/posts/2021-07-04-shared-libraries.html

Published: July 4, 2021 00:00

In this article we’ll learn how to build shared libraries and install them properly on several platforms. For guidance, we’ll examine the goals and history of dynamic linking on UNIX-based operating systems. Content for the article comes from researching…

Tips for stable and portable software

https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-08-31-portable-stable-software.html

Published: August 31, 2020 00:00

After several years’ involvement with quickly evolving programming languages, I’ve come to appreciate stability. I’d like to make my programs easy to build on a wide variety of systems with minimal adjustment. I’d like them to keep working long into the…

Create impeccable MIME email from markdown

https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-07-16-generating-mime-email.html

Published: July 16, 2020 00:00

The goal I want to create emails that look their best in all mail clients, whether graphical or text based. Ideally I’d write a message in a simple format like Markdown, and generate the final email from the input file. Additionally, I’d like to be able to…

Logging TLS session keys in LibreSSL

https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-05-25-libressl-keylogging.html

Published: May 25, 2020 00:00

LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that improves code quality and security. It was originally developed for OpenBSD, but has since been ported to several platforms (Linux, *BSD, HP-UX, Solaris, macOS, AIX, Windows) and is now the default TLS provider for some…

Concurrent programming, with examples

https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-03-23-concurrent-programming.html

Published: March 23, 2020 00:00

Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems…

History and effective use of Vim

https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-07-19-history-use-vim.html

Published: July 19, 2019 00:00

This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more…

Unicode programming, with examples

https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html

Published: May 23, 2019 00:00

Most programming languages evolved awkwardly during the transition from ASCII to 16-bit UCS-2 to full Unicode. They contain internationalization features that often aren’t portable or don’t suffice. Unicode is more than a numbering scheme for the…