I have a pipe-dream! One idiot's efforts in programming land...

• I want to learn Hack - Facebook's typesafe version of PHP and use it with HHVM to serve up game connections for simple board games.
• I want to learn QML - Qt's cross platform user interface markup language with inline JavaScript (which I will also need to learn) for simple board game clients e.g. Tic-tac-toe and Snakes & Ladders.

Importantly, I have no idea how to do any of this but even if it all crashes and burns I will hopefully have learned along the way - and, just maybe, the journey will be of useful interest to others.

Verify the integrity of a flash/SD card on a Mac using F3 and F3X

TL;DR I just want an App for that but I'm cheap and don't want to pay - go here

Command Line Testing your SD card using F3 on Mac OS X

You love the command line and want to test your SD card? 

The software “F3” (either meaning “Fight Flash Fraud” or “Fight Fake Flash” according to its author Michel Machado) is an open-source implementation of the same algorithm h2testw employs to determine the integrity of a memory card (or any volume you mount on your Mac for that matter).

Vigil++ Because eternal moral vigilance is no laughing matter.

It's Vigil for C++ but with the chance of redemption!

Install Me: Bit Bucket

Bob Nystrom has created the excellent Vigil programming language that auto-deletes any deviant code from the code base! Vigil++ is a denomination that offers redemption! Whilst it does deliver implore and swear macros, it does not adhere to the extreme run time vigilance of Vigil by deleting code but rather throws a moral-exception and a frowny face ಠ_ಠ as appropriate admonishment! But whilst you will be chastened, you will also be given the chance of redemption by being able to recover from the moral-exception.

Why Vigil++?

Site testing with Google Skipfish

skipfish

Skipfish is Google's active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/skipfish

Install:

brew install skipfish 

But...

It looks like the Homebrew package manager port of Skipfish is broken. It doesn't properly changes the path of the signatures directory to point to /usr/local/Cellar/skipfish/2.10b/libexec/signatures.

Fix:

skipfish -z /usr/local/Cellar/skipfish/2.10b/libexec/signatures ...other commands

Setup:

touch dictionaries/empty.wlln -s dictionaries/empty.wl skipfish.wlmkdir ../out

Run:

skipfish -z /usr/local/Cellar/skipfish/2.10b/libexec/signatures -o ../out/ http://example.com

Results:

Then view the result in your browser:

firefox ../out/index.html



Just a friendly advice, Don’t be evil!


Be careful where you use this tool, this is an extremely powerful crawler which can eat up any websites’ bandwidth overnight. 

Migrating to Bitbucket and turning my markdown frown upside down with Dillinger WYSIWYG and Cloudup image drop spot.

Check out my fancy markdown https://bitbucket.org/ifknot/liblog

Why move from GitHub to Bitbucket?

Bitbucket, similar to GitHub, is a web based GIT hosting service for your projects. It offers free private repositories with free private wikis on accounts of up to 5 users(!) and you can switch any repo public and back again anytime. So develop in private and publicise when you're ready. 

GitHub’s  free account doesn’t allow for private repos and their lowest paid option (for organizations) only allows up to 10 private repos. Bitbucket, on the other hand, offers unlimited private repos. 

It's easy to import directly from GitHub with the click of a button - well done Bitbucket.

What to move first?

I moved over liblog the logging software that I first blogged about way back in Jan 2014 but wanted to have a nice front piece for when I chose to make it public. This can be easily achieved using markdown in a README.md file pushed to the repo. 

Markdown frown. 

dillinger.io
Markdown is (quite) easy but slow to hand roll but with the excellent online WYSIWYG markdown editor Dillinger "Type some Markdown on the left... see HTML in the right" I found it pleasurable to work with and get some decent looking results.

Gratis image drop.

A free account on Cloudup gives you space to drop pics/vids/music/docs and have nifty short URLS to them for your markdown/blog/web

Fontastic! Meaningful programming ligatures with FiraCode

Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

Fira Code is an extension of the Fira Mono font containing a set of ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations. It is easy to install in OS X and works with Qt Creator.

I think I like it :)

Qt Creator 4.1.0 released

Qt Creator 4.1.0 Released!

From the Qt Blog via Eike Ziller:

https://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/08/25/qt-creator-4-1-0-released/

 How To Update:

1. Run the Maintenance Tool app (found inside your Qt folder).
2. Follow this (if you need to).
3. ?
4. Profit