C Program to Plot the Gamma Function in the Terminal

In this post I want to talk about a C program I wrote just recently that plots a mathematical function - specifically the gamma function. I think it's worth looking at, because this program demonstrates how to handle the various aspects of graphing and plotting using just ASCII characters in the terminal. The program draws …

Reverse-Engineering a Linux Process with strace

The pill you took is part of a trace program. It's designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals so we can pinpoint your location. And just like that, we can trace signals as they bounce around the Matrix, whether it's the Matrix that simulates Earth in 1999 or the Matrix that generates pretty pictures on …

C Program to Generate a Blank MS-DOS Floppy Image in Linux

How do you do, fellow old-timers? Today's post is going to be a bit of a crossover, because I'm going to get into some programming stuff, some Linux stuff, and some DOS stuff all at the same time. I'm going to show you a program that I wrote a while back that uses POSIX API …

Obfuscated Unix Scripting with dc

So I realized that I liked the concept behind Obfuscated Unix Scripting with sed and I thought I'd make a series. There are a number of scripting languages native to Unix, and many of them qualify as being what you would call "obfuscated". One such language is the classic Unix calculator known as dc. This …

10 Assorted Vim Hacks for More Effective Coding

Using Vim was one of the best decisions I ever made as a developer. Once you practice Vim's keystrokes to the point where they become muscle memory, you will be lightning-fast at coding. It's definitely not possible to achieve this same editing speed and agility with a standard IDE. In addition to basic keystrokes for …

Doing Statistics in awk

One exercise that offers a lot of interesting challenges in coding is to use a programming language for an application that it's not intended to be used for. Writing a Fortran compiler in TECO and solving the Towers of Hanoi problem in the troff text formatter are two examples from the legendary Hacker Purity Test. …

Shell Script for Launching a Local Denial-of-Service Attack

Disclaimer: The following article is written for entertainment and educational purposes only. Neither the script shown here nor any of the techniques involved are intended to be used in real life. Launching denial-of-service attacks is illegal and can get you in serious trouble. I do not condone or support any use of such hacking methods …

Obfuscated Unix Scripting with sed

Okay, so I had something else planned for this Friday night, but the project I'm working on that I wanted to share is taking a lot longer than expected, so I'm having to push the publication date back a few days while I get all the code working and create all the visuals in SVG. …

Unix vs. Windows: How to Check and Convert Between the Two File Formats

Different operating systems use different formats for line breaks, and this can cause confusion and difficulty for a lot of newbies. In this article I will explain the difference between the Unix file format used by Linux and MacOS and the DOS format used by Windows, and I will also show you how to check …

Convert a TeX File Directly to PDF Format (Cygwin)

This post is a note to myself, in the fashion of another blogger on here that I follow. I think it's prudent because I just had to jump through a bunch of hoops to solve the titular problem, only to find that there was a much simpler method. Basically, I didn't know how to convert …