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SingletonIface's comments

SingletonIface | 8 years ago | on: A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles

> But speaking as a former FreeBSD user, this is pretty easy to figure out after your first time seeing the flood of syntax errors.

I seem to be about the only person that makes use of the following feature, but FreeBSD and GNU make will in addition to looking for a file named Makefile, also look for BSDmakefile or GNUmakefile respectively.

So when I write a makefile with GNU make specific contents, I name it GNUmakefile, and when I write one that is specific to FreeBSD make, I name it BSDmakefile.

The user has to do absolutely nothing different; they simply write

    make
and if their make is GNU make and my makefile is a GNUmakefile then it builds. Likewise with FreeBSD make and a file named BSDmakefile.

The big win is when someone then has the wrong make. Instead of beginning to build and then failing at some point kicking and screaming, they will simply be told

    make: no target to make.

    make: stopped in (path)
by FreeBSD make, or

    make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.
by GNU make.

And at that point they will consult the README I have written for the project in question and they will learn that they need the other make than what they are using if they want to build this software.

SingletonIface | 8 years ago | on: Announcing the Windows Bounty Program

People keep saying that but is it true? There are some problems;

1. The seller would like to keep their identity secret so that they aren't prosecuted or attacked.

2. The buyer would also like to keep their identity secret.

3. The seller wants money. How do they know that the buyer will send them the money if they hand over the exploit before getting paid? Normally you'd report theft to the police but you're not going to go to the police and admit to selling exploits. Also you don't know who the seller is.

4. The seller wants the exploit. If they pay first then how do they know they will get the exploit.

If you contact some agency directly then surely they will not want to pay you out of fear that you will inform either the public or another government or agency about the transaction?

If there was a darknet marketplace for exploits (maybe there already is, maybe there already are several ones?) then that might solve it. There you can have both some degree of anonymity, you can have reputations for sellers and buyers and the DNM can offer escrow of funds.

SingletonIface | 8 years ago | on: MS Paint is here to stay

But then since it was from xp and not win7 and you didn't know that, does that mean that your calc.exe is something you downloaded off some random site on the net trusting that it didn't contain malware?

SingletonIface | 8 years ago | on: Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years

> Taking control of a command and control server, however, had another unexpected outcome: Around 400 victims infected with FruitFly started connecting to it.

"Unexpected"? How? This would have been obvious to Wardle. Maybe the journalist added this to "inject some suspense"? Thanks but no thanks, I won't bother reading the rest of this article.

SingletonIface | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

Web browser: Firefox, Chromium. Comment: It is important that neither Chrome nor Chromium eat too much market share in order for the web to remain healthy.

Email client: ??? Comment: I use mutt but I'm wishing for something better. mutt is too limited

Terminal: Terminology, urxvt

IDE: None; neo-vim is sufficient for programming tasks, don't need most IDE features.

File manager: What ever is the default for the selected DE.

Basic Text Editor: neo-vim

IRC/Messaging Client: irssi and Pidgin

PDF Reader: Evince

Office Suite: LibreOffice

Calendar: Don't know

Video player: VLC

Music player: Tomahawk

Photo Viewer: What ever is default for the selected DE

Screen recording: Open Broadcast Studio

SingletonIface | 8 years ago | on: Pass: A standard Unix password manager

> there's also a facility to scan a QR code, but I don't know how you generate that from your GPG credentials

Search for qr on the python package index using pip. There's a module that you can pipe text to and then it'll render a qr code in your terminal using Unicode glyphs. Worked well last I tried. Don't remember what the module was called but you'll be able to find it I som sure.

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