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Search - "server elf"
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Heck yes!
I implement a stack trace in my embedded systems!
Whenever a device crashes, it makes a stack dump in an unused part of ram.
After it has rebooted and is connected to the server again, it uploads the stack dump.
The server then opens the correct firmware elf file, walks the stack and associates the debug info from the elf.
The result? A beautiful stack trace with file names, function names and line numbers.
No more guessing where random crashes come from.12 -
Out of all the bugs, the most annoying are the ones that come out and make me say "WTF?!?!? WHY THE FUCK HAS IT BEEN WORKING FOR THE LAST 2 YEARS??!!?!!??? THERE"S NO WAY IT COULD HAVE!"
When the bug surfaces, you investigate and see that it indeed IS a bug and there's no way it would ever work w/o a fix. But then SOMEHOW it's been working just fine for years....
It's like server elves went on strike and said "no more, it's enough covering that bug - it's time you fix it, lazy-ass idiot!"11 -
When it comes to the idea of programming and magic, or the comparison between software developers/engineers, computer scientists etc as magicians or wizards, nothing brings the idea much more close to hearth than the C programming language.
A while ago I read the R.A Salvatore books concerning Drizzt, the dark elf. I loved the books, have not continued reading them but I remember them vividly. There was one book in which a human magician came about wielding extremely explosive magic, humans were capable of channeling large amounts of it through explosive and unwieldly ends.
This is the same feeling I get from C
Consider:
int items[] = {1, 2, 3};
printf("Third : %i\n", 3[items]);
and fuck me if shit like the above is not dangerous, it makes sense, arrays have the first items of it server as the pointer address to a first element, doing the above operation returns the third element of the array of 3. But holy shit if I don't think this is dangerous and interesting as fuck
there are many more examples I have that I am finding through me fucking around with: language development (compiler, interpreter), kernel programming as well as net sec. C is the most powerful and devastating thing we have in our hands indeed.7