niedziela, 23 października 2016

The problem with Timezones by Computerphile

Have you ever had to work with timezones?
Have you experienced UTC to other timezone conversion maybe for storing data in database?
You probably used some library for that.
Can you imagine how hard it would be to implement such library by yourself?

Computerphile channel on Youtube has great entertaining video about that.




It is just crazy how different countries dealt with time over centuries.

The Computerphile channel has about 700 thousand subscriptions and they publish "videos about computers and computer stuff".

niedziela, 16 października 2016

Defeating SSL by Moxie Marlinspike

"If you just look at the shape of this code, you know, there's a bug in here somewhere" - Moxie Marlinspike.



I will remember that sentence forever after watching DEFCON 17 presentation about "More Tricks For Defeating SSL"

This presentation will show you what SSL strip is and how you can notice it. Also how browsers can be fooled by exploiting a bug in SSL implementation.


czwartek, 18 sierpnia 2016

JackTech - The Game Boy, a hardware autopsy

Remember this big white brick - the first original Game Boy?
Ever wondered what's inside and how the games were made back in the early 90s?

Check out this great presentation by Youtube user JackTech:



https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC008MpfclY6ap-QGzoTMNKg

poniedziałek, 15 sierpnia 2016

Fabien Sanglard - PRINCE OF PERSIA CODE REVIEW

Meet Fabien Sanglard - French/Canadian programmer who did great code reviews and brought us some insight about how some of the famous games were made.
One of them is original Prince of Persia:

http://fabiensanglard.net/prince_of_persia/index.php

Check it out and dig into engineering treasures  from the 80s



piątek, 12 sierpnia 2016

OpenC1 from Jeff Harris

Jeff Harris is without a doubt an awesome programmer.
What blew my mind back in the day was my discovery of his OpenC1 - an open source port for good old Carmageddon game from 1997.
He found a way to read all original Carmageddon files (how to deal with textures, sprites, animations, 3d models etc) and wrote his own engine using C# and XNA.

On his website you can read more details about OpenC1 development and other interesting things (for example episode with Square Enix, a company that currently had the rights to Carmageddon trademark)

http://1amstudios.com/projects/openc1/

When I have some time, I'm trying to dig into his code and implement raytracing engine for OpenC1. But saddly I'm very busy these days.



Source code on Github:
https://github.com/jeff-1amstudios/OpenC1

poniedziałek, 8 sierpnia 2016

Fail0verflow - PS3 epic fail

Guys from Fail0verflow group show us how PS3 fails at security.
Well... I wouldn't be able to hack PS3 myself in 100 years but the thing with random number generator is hilarious.

Very informative, very clever, respect to those guys!
Their website:
fail0verflow




From Youtube channel CCCen:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG4QMB95FR6Df6XdQwn8gSg

niedziela, 7 sierpnia 2016

George Dyson - The birth of the computer

GREAT presentation by George Dyson from 2003.
He told us the story about first computer getting built.
It could be said that this was the start of our "programmers universe"

This TED presentation is pure gold.

Warning: hilarious logs / notes / comments from the first computer engineers



Link to TED Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug

niedziela, 31 lipca 2016

Craft by lft

What can you get from 8 bit, 20 MHz AVR microcontroller and 9V battery?
Linus Akesson will show you:

  • NES-like Audio & video generated inside single CPU
  • Fractals (animated Julia set)
  • Fire effect
  • Tunnel effect
  • 3d projection
  • ... and more


Visit author's home page to get more info about this awesome project.


sobota, 30 lipca 2016

Creating NES emulator in realtime - by Joel Yliluoma (Bisqwit)

Creating a NES emulator in C++11


Let me introduce to you Joel Yliluoma also known to the Internet as Bisqwit.

Joel showed how to write a NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulator in realtime on Youtube.

From his channel:
Part 1:


Part 2:



As far as I know, Joel writes his own tools for presentation. It is something like Tool Assisted Speedrun (TAS) not for beating games, but for writing software.

That makes it even more awesome!