The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.
How do you do a binary search for an open-end scale (are PID params open-end?) and three knobs at the same time when they interdepend in their influence? I need to know since i have a PID tuning on my personal projects plate
It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”
So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.
Knew a programmer that was near blind who only used magnifier on maximum zoom with his IDE. One of the best programmers I met, but his screen looked very much like that. Don’t know how he did it.
Well put, however I find code formatting itself has a shape, texture and smell. How the programmer weaves the patterns of formatting tells a lot about his mind and style.
Albino? There was an albino in my IT and the poor dude would literally be like 4 inches from the screen at all times. I guess that must be pretty close to his experience, yeah.
Yeah, I worked with an albino like that who used a handheld magnifying glass. It actually inspired me to write a magnifier application for windows (which didn’t have one at the time, this was in 2006). That then led me to write little windows apps every day for a month, which got a lot of attention.
One of the funnier ones is that the matrix actually did hacking right. It was also so quick you don’t notice it.
When Trinity hacks into the power station, it’s legit. She checks the software version, which shows an out of date version. She then uses a known flaw in that version to reset the password.
It’s the only bit of actual hacking in the movie. They obviously knew that geeks would be checking it frame by frame, so they actually did their homework on it.
Hackers shows “real hacking” in the form of social engineering, dumpster diving for passwords, as well as the bit about the pay phones that, once was true if maybe not by the time the movie came out.
No, I have an outline for a PERFECT realistic hacker movie that would put asses in seats. Basically, make it The Life And Times Of Deviant Ollam.
Imagine a slightly farcical take on a heist movie, like take on Ocean’s Eleven with True Lies’ attitude. It’s kind of a heist movie, except the infiltrating crew has permission to be there from upper management, but no one else in the building knows this, and the stakes of getting caught are they get to tell their client their security is in fact pretty good. So since the stakes are non-existent, you can lean into the lulz a little bit. You have room for eccentric characters, witty dialog, a running gag of how hilariously bad door locks are, and an ending sequence where you’ve got a guy in the security room trying not to laugh as he texts the team leader “Just see what you can get away with.” And then some of the team is deliberately silly, acting like rebellious teenagers on bikes in the parking lot chased by half the security team, wackiness ensues, intercut with the rest of the team breaking into server rooms and just taking over this company.
You can have the gearing up scene explaining what the gadgetry is. “This is an ESP key; it’s a microcontroller with an onboard SD card and Wi-Fi, that we plug into the data wires on one of your badge readers. How do we get it in there? Send two guys wearing high vis vests, one of them carrying a clipboard and watching the other, no one asks a thing. Yeah, there’s a tamper alarm that alerts the security guards if anyone opens the reader…I’ve never seen it hooked up. Now we get a list of every badge used on this reader, and when. See this guy who’s badging in like clockwork every 45 minutes? That’s a guard. And the ESP key isn’t only listening, it can also talk. We can make it send a credential as if the reader did, and unlock this door remotely. Tiffany has two RFID implants, one in each hand. We’ve cloned two different credentials to the chips in her hands, so she can walk up, present her hand to the reader, and it opens, thinking the guard just badged in. She’s carrying a bash bunny; which looks like a USB thumb drive, with a couple switches on the side. It’s actually a little computer that, when plugged into a computer, it can pretend to be a flash drive, a keyboard that can automatically type a whole malicious program really fast, a network device, basically anything we need to compromise a target computer. All Tiffany has to do is walk up to a computer and plug this in. We have it set to put this small text file of an ascii art cow saying “you’ve been pwn’d” on the desktop to prove we’ve infiltrated that machine, but we really could do…anything we want.”
Make me a movie where a guy breaks into a server room in Pepsi pajama bottoms and a t-shirt that says “I’m A Liability” by slipping the latch with a piece of plastic he finds in a nearby trash can.
AKA, make a movie about one of Deviant’s convention presentations. It’ll be endlessly entertaining.
Hacking is really a “montage” type activity, but is treated as something you can show in real time.
Like, imagine the A-Team building some weapon out of spare parts but you had to watch the entire build process including measuring, cutting, screwing up the cut, throwing away the part and trying again…
Or, imagine a martial arts film where the hero trains for the big fight… and you include the entire training regimen, showing them getting up at 6am each day to do sit-ups, then following the entire morning run…
Really a hacking sequence should have those zoomed-in calendars with days flipping by and getting crossed out.
If they really need the hack to be in the critical path of the action, it should only be something like:
Boss: We need to hack the satellite!
Hacker: What model is it?
Boss: It’s a… let me see… KU-STRZ-4 out of Azerbaijan.
Hacker: A 4-series? We’re in luck, NSA’s been sitting on a exploit for that model.
Otherwise it’s as stupid as:
Boss: We need to defeat Scar Killer in the Kumite tomorrow.
Soldier: I did some basic unarmed combat in boot camp, but…
Boss: You have 24 hours, get training!
Next day, the soldier is massively jacked and is throwing flip kicks etc.
I’ve love to watch a realistic hacker movie, because the shit that hackers get into is genuinely bonkers. For example, some white hats got all the way into Apple’s inventory system and IIRC they could’ve disrupted all of Apple’s logistics. Imagine if a black hat got into that. Or the Ukrainian hackers that got into the taxation system of the Russians and were there for a few months. Or the USAians who got into the biggest Belgian telecom and were kicked out years later by a Dutch security company.
Movies or even better TV series showing the time it takes to get into such systems would be amazing. Day 1 phishing, day 40 established beachhead, day 120 gained access to internal system X, day 121 triggered internal alarm and was nearly discovered but was able to cover up traces, etc.
Nobody watches 90 minutes of football matches. Everyone watches the highlights and that’s what movies could be too.
I’m pretty sure they’re talking association football. Gridiron football “matches” (which are called games in the US) are 60 minutes of clock-on time but more than 2 hours if you count all the ad breaks and clock-stopped time. The 90 minute figure only makes sense for association football. And yes, it’s at least a billion people watching them every week.
oh and the ads run into playtime, so once the commercials are done, they give you a 30 second recap of what you missed, then back to commercials because the coach called a time out
I’ve been to an NFL game twice, and it’s so much worse in person. At home at least the ad breaks are a chance to go to the bathroom or get a snack. At the game it’s not worth getting out of your seat and trudging up to the concourse because 2 minutes isn’t long enough for that. So, instead, you sit and wait for the action to resume.
It also makes it more clear that a lot of the long timeouts are purely TV-based.
There are plenty of time-outs that have to do with the state of the game: teams calling time-outs to discuss a plan, a time-out after a point is scored while the sides change, the 2-minute warning, the break after the 1st and 3rd quarters, and so-on. But, you also get explicit TV timeouts that are called by the TV networks when it’s been too long since the last commercial.
In the stadium when that happens the offense might be in a flow, and the defense may be wobbling. But, the TV networks need to show their ads, so the network calls a timeout. Meanwhile, the players just stand around on the field, ready for the next play until the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_timeout#/media/File:NFL_Sideline_Television_Coordinators.jpg lowers his bright orange glove.
Recently switched jobs from maintaining a 15 year old Windows Forms .NET Framework legacy codebase.
At the new job we stick to Clean Architecture, use unit and integration tests, have a code generation tool, actually make nice use of generics and use dependency injection. Also agile processes, automatic build tools, whatever. The difference is night and day and I’m so glad my ex boss fired me because I told him he’s an asshole and his codebase is shit.
My first job out of college I have been able to see a steady improvement in the codebase. A little while ago I had to go back to an old tag and was horrified with what it used to be and impressed how much it improved.
Same feel as “how long is this going to take to pull?” Well I don’t know if part of what you’re asking for exists, how clean it is, and if can join the data you’re talking about, so anywhere from 5 minutes to never?
That’s exactly how you should respond. I’ve been on the requester for some of these and if my team gave me that as a response I’d just say “let me know what you find out or when you know more.”
I actually like this. This would allow reuse of all the infrastructure we have around XML. No more SQL injection and dealing with query parameters? Sign me up!
Better than parameterized queries. Yes, we have stuff like query(“INSERT INTO table(status, name) VALUES ($1, $2);”).bind(ent.status).bind(ent.name).execute…, but that’s kind of awful isn’t it? With XML queries, we could use any of the XML libraries we have to create and manipulate XML queries without risking ‘XML injection’. e.g we could convert ordinary structs/classes into column values automatically without having to use any ORM.
Typescript can add type safety on top of that, of course. And there’s the option to prepare a query once and execute it multiple times.
Honestly, the idea of manipulating XML queries, if you mean anything more fancy than the equivalent of parameter injection, sounds over-complicated, but I’d love to see a more concrete example of what you mean by that.
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