(( meatspace ))

Advice for Computer Science College Students. A sampling from the self-explanatory (and correct!) section entitled “Learn C before graduating.”:

if you can’t explain why while (*s++ = *t++); copies a string, or if that isn’t the most natural thing in the world to you, well, you’re programming based on superstition, as far as I’m concerned: a medical doctor who doesn’t know basic anatomy…

This is awesome..

Check commenters for other tips as well.

The computer industry, especially the programming profession, has long had (at least internally) a reputation as one of the most creativity-centered disciplines of anything that’s called “engineering” (though what’s called software engineering usually isn’t). This is a very interesting study, though, which FastCompany (something I normally eschew) is reporting — the factors behind creativity and development are a lot closer to what crazy bleeding heart worker advocates claim and a lot further from what hard-nosed management types like to proclaim. See the article here….

While I’m commenting on interesting stuff on Dave Dribin’s blog, let me point out a couple things about his post on SSH proxies.

The problem with this technique is DNS. One, it becomes possible to figure out which sites you’re talking to by snooping your DNS traffic. Two, if you’re tunnelling into a site instead of out, the internal DNS records you need to see to connect to internal sites are not visible to your non-tunneled DNS mechanism.

There are two solutions for this. The one I favored when I was doing this (trying to gain access to intranet HTTP resources) was to simply set up a Squid proxy on an internal host and port forward with ssh bastionhost -L 8080:squidhost:8080. Then point your browser at an HTTP proxy on localhost:8080

The second, more fun way, is to write an HTTP proxy into the ssh client that listens on port 8080 and sets up ad hoc forwards (basically using the same mechanism as the SOCKS proxy, but reading HTTP headers and using the URL or Host: host/port to decide who to connect to). Originally I wrote this as a realtime detection mechanism inside ssh -D, but I think it would be better off as a separate service. Such a patch would never be accepted into openssh mainline, I imagine. (de Raadt turned down my previous patch, though looking back on it, I would too). You can see the patch, and disclaimer, near the bottom of my code page.

Nope, Dave, C++ calls Super() in the following code:

class Super{        public:                Super() { cout << "super" << endl; }};

class Sub : public Super{        public:                Sub() { cout << "sub" << endl; }};

main(){    Sub sub;}