Other People's Technical Stuff

Stuff about Internet standards

ISO 8859-1 Latin 1 and Unicode characters in ampersand entities

How do you portably get chracters like ‘≠’ and ‘™’ into your HTML?

rfc2279 - UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646

How does UTF-8 encode Unicode into characters that a non-Unicode aware 8-bit clean program will still handle? UTF-8 is probably the most popular Unicode encoding format because it doesn't take any extra space to encode straight ASCII text, and can sort of be handled by old programs that don't know about Unicode as long as those programs are 8-bit clean.

Descriptions of Base32, Base64, and Base16 encoding.

These encodings are used for encoding arbitrary data in some form of ASCII. Each encoding has it's own advantages and disadvantages. The lower the base #, the more characters it takes to represent any given piece of data. But, case matters in base64 encoding, and, for things that humans might type in or say to one another, case shouldn't matter.

• Base16 - Encoding as a sequence of hex digits. Easy to do. Not case sensitive. No chance of confusing I, i, or l for 1, nor O and o for 0. But, rather verbose.
• Base32 - Use a 32 character set to encode 5 characters per set. Still not case sensitive. Due to careful choices as to which 32 characters to use, there is no chance of confusing I, or i for 1, nor O or o for 0. But there is a chance of confusing l for 1. The computer should always display in capitals for this reason. More compact than Base16, but also much more complex to encode in than either Base16 or Base64.
• Base64 - Not suitable for data a human may have to read or type in by hand. More compact than Base16 or Base32 though, and simpler than Base32 to encode in, but more complex than Base16.

Description of Base85 encoding

This started as a joke, an April 1st RFC, but some people have actually started using it on purpose. It is very slightly more efficient than Base64. You can encode 48 bytes of data using 64 Base64 characters, or 60 base85 characters. That's a 6% savings. But it is much more complex to encode in.

HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication

A general method for using hashes for authenticating the source and verifying the contents of a message.

Stuff about nitty-gritty programming

IEEE-754 Floating-Point Conversion from Floating-Point to Hexadecima

More than you ever wanted to know about exactly how floating point (most numbers with decimal points in them) numbers are represented.

libevent

libevent is a way to do event driven programming without having to worry about whether the underlying system is using velnerable old poll, kqueue, real-time signals, epoll, or some other mechanism. I need to base StreamModule on this.

RealTime Signals for Highly Concurrent Network I/O

A paper describing how much better things got for Squid when they jiggered it to use real-time signals instead of poll. I would recommend using libevent at this point, but this does make a good case study as well as a good explanation of our real-time signals work.

The C10K problem

It's time for servers on the Internet to handle ten thousand clients simultaneously, don't you think? After all, the Internet is a big place now.

Program Library HOWTO

Stuff about how shared libraries work under Linux. A lot of the information can be applied to any system that uses ELF format libraries and executables. This includes Solaris, newer versions of HPUX, and UnixWare.

C and C++ stuff

C++ Programming Tutorial

A nice tutorial covering the basics of C++.

Strong Pointers and Resource Management in C++

Some very sound advice when it comes to managing resources in C and C++, though some of the advice really only applies to C++, the basic concepts can still be transferred to some degree.

Links people on the #c++ channel on irc.freenode.net think are interesting.

irc.freenode.net is an IRC network for Open Source developers. More information can be found at www.freenode.net

Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

As far as I can tell so far, an excellent book. I'm searching for a good link to the current version of the Loki C++ library described in the book.

Single Unix Specification

The above is a truly excellent manual of C and Unix functions.