Welcome!

Around two years ago I attended the 2016 LLVM Developer’s Meeting and led a “Birds of a Feather” (BoF) discussion on the topic of shipping software as LLVM IR. The objective was to bring out all the parties who are clearly doing so already or interested in doing so and to try to find ways to work together.

I’ll hopefully write more about this in the future, but for now here’s a short post about this event as well as a link to the slides used for the discussion.

Posted on the ALLVM github organization, the allvm-meta repository is now available— and because naming is hard it ended up being the repository with perhaps the least “meta” content.

Even so I’m excited to make this public and will give a brief overview below.

Multi-booting is a widely-used practice that enables a user to select the OS best suited for their current task. For example, I dual-boot Windows and Linux on my laptop which allows me to get the best of both worlds on the same machine.

I’ve encountered a minor pain point in this setup however, largely due to the way I tend to use my machine: once I boot a particular OS I continue to use that same OS repeatedly and expect reboots/shutdown/startup to continue to use the last OS I booted. This is especially true of reboots, for example after installing system updates.

Traditionally I addressed this by setting the default boot to my most-frequently-used OS, but really that is just optimizing for the common case and not solving the issue. Additionally, I’ve recently started using Windows more and am annoyed having to remind my machine what OS I’m using.

So, today I sat down and put together a simple little utility to fix this properly once and for all.

I’m excited to announce the publication of the journal version of “Understanding Integer Overflow in C/C++”, appearing in TOSEM Volume 25 Issue 1. This is an updated and expanded version of our ICSE12 paper of the same name. The longer journal format enabled a more thorough treatment of the subject, and we did our best to take advantage of that opportunity.

Thanks to my co-authors for all their efforts, and especially for seeing this work through to the end. It’s been a long run and you guys are great.

The freenode IRC network has for a long time supported connecting and automatic identification using SASL.

Recently, the freenode network deprecated the commonly used SASL mechanism DH-BLOWFISH due to security concerns, causing my IRC client (irssi) to no longer be able to authenticate.

Unfortunately, while scripts and guides describing using irssi with DH-BLOWFISH are plentiful, it seems the steps required to use the new preferred ECDSA-NIST256P-CHALLENGE method are not yet documented.

Read on for a step-by-step walk-through of configuring irssi to use SASL with freenode in 2015.