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  • POSIX File Handling and Undefined Behaviour

    POSIX File Handling and Undefined Behaviour

    Whilst porting code between Linux and macOS I have come across two issues which make assumptions about how something works but in reality different implementations of libc handle them differently. In this post I’ll talk about recent issues I faced with fopen() and fclose() in codebases. Read more

  • Nested Variadic Functions in C

    Nested Variadic Functions in C

    You may be familiar with variadic functions in C, these are basically functions that allow a variable number of parameters, they are normally written like this: Obviously you can do more with them and they are very useful, but if you want to have one function calling another things can get complicated. This post explores… Read more

  • Rendering Emoji in Linux Terminals

    Rendering Emoji in Linux Terminals

    Following on from my post about getting TUIs in CentOS 7 to use Unicode I thought I should write a short piece on how to actually get those characters to render in Linux terminals. Read more

  • Unicode 7 in CentOS 7 TUI Code

    Unicode 7 in CentOS 7 TUI Code

    I’m in the middle of developing a project in C which uses NCurses and Unicode 7+ characters. This has been working out great in macOS and Fedora 31 where I have been doing most of my testing. But in CentOS I have been having big problems getting the characters to render. This post goes into… Read more

  • Fixing an OpenSSL issue with Curl and Autotools

    Fixing an OpenSSL issue with Curl and Autotools

    One project I created at MariaDB is libMariaS3 [source, documentation]. It is a lightweight simple LGPL licensed API to access Amazon S3 and compatible object storage implementations. We created it so that GPL v2.0 licensed projects could use S3 without the license incompatibility of Amazon’s Apache 2.0 licensed SDK. MariaDB itself uses this for the… Read more

  • Episode 2: Introduction to Open Source and Licensing

    Open Source Software is key to many of innovations in technology over the last few decades. It is also a fundamental requirement to build communities around software development. In this episode I give a brief introduction and an overview of Open Source and the licenses behind it. Please excuse the hay fever induced muffle of… Read more