darkness

I’m logging in the morning rather than the night since I’ve forgotten to do it the past few days.

Reverse engineered a simple program the other day. They appeared to have left debugging symbols in and didn’t optimize the program, so this was real easy. I used gdb to print out the value of some symbols and do some disassembly, but I preferred the output of objdump -d since it printed the opcodes with the instructions. It took me a few to discover this, but with ELF binaries on Linux/x86, you can subtract 0×08000000 from an address and gets its offset within the file, it seems. Spiffy, that.

Played with IntelliJ IDEA. It’s a cool editor/IDE, works in Linux, is probably Pure Java, and is fast. Interface was decent, though it started doing some weird stuff a time or two WRT those windows that pop out from the sides. It a preset key map for Emacs-like keys, and a lot of good indentation options. However, it does not do tab width independent indenting! (I suspect that “tab width independent” should be hyphenated.) So I will stick with Emacs.

Tried out Xrefactory for Emacs as well. Pretty spiffy, worked reasonably well, but it wanted to put its menu in the global map, which meant it was in every buffer. I’m posting my Xrefactory menu patch as well as updating my .emacs. Note that the patch only applies to FSF Emacs, if the code I commented out from it is to be believed. (Apparently XEmacs builds menus in a different way? Unsurprising, perhaps.)

Haven’t done much coding. Feeling a bit under the weather. Did go investigating uninterruptable power supplies (UPS’s) for work. Found a few good places. APC’s web site has some calculators. You can use the one where you type in Watts (or VA, a.k.a. volt amperes) and how long you want it to last and it’ll make suggestions. Alternatively you can just go to a product line page and it should have a combo box at the top where you enter in how many Watts (or VA) you need to support and it’ll show you all the UPS’s that will handle that load with their expected battery operating time. Best has become Powerware apparently. If you go to their products section they have a single phase UPS selector that is even nicer than APC’s. Moreover I hear tell these UPS’s are probably better and have more features (like actual power cleaning kind of stuff?) than the APC UPS’s of comparable price. Indeed they recommended a PW9120 with some extra battery packs. I recommended this to my boss. If you’re looking for some information on VAC, Watts, and UPS’s in general, you can try a UPS article on extremetech.com.

Hopefully going to do some coding today since a meeting I had at work was canceled (and I was barely informed of this cancellation in time to not waste part of my day trying to make it).

I’ve become interested in another random web log. It makes me nostalgic, and worries me some too. It’s always interesting to get insight into how other people live. (If you’re wondering, here’s the last web log I was interested in.)