bkil vs. programming

I had this post in draft for a long time now, however it is evergreen. Just consider the recent exploits  focused on RAM leakage. Although, do note that ECC by itself can't give 100% protection against row hammer, so it is only loosely related. An excellent empirical work has been published in 2009 regarding DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large Scale Field Study . " About a third of machines and over 8% of DIMMs in our fleet saw at least one correctable error per year. " - analysis by  James Hamilton " Besides error rates much higher than expected - which is plenty bad - the study found that error rates were motherboard, not DIMM type or vendor, dependent. This means that some popular mobos have poor EMI hygiene. " - analysis by ZDnet Note that such an event plainly translates to faults on non-ECC machines. So despite the fact that human error is much more probable, it is not unlikely at all that you encounter bit errors in everyday life. Consider the foll...

I've recently learned that the Google platform enables you to connect various services via server side ECMAScript . I've encountered a nice example which sends out a notification for each e-mail that your filters tag as urgent. I've altered a lot of its functionalities, and now it supports the following: Concatenates the subject and the body Jams the first 60 characters in the title, the next 63 characters in the location Preprocess automated mails to only keep the most important fields (RegExp does wonders) Extract and aggregate various daily indices of interest (UrlFetchApp is also nice) As an exception to my usual philosophy, I will have to give second thought if I should be sharing these enhancements or not this time.

The host of bkil.hu has decided to switch servers and inform me only afterwards with an e-mail that got into the spam folder for most people. You get what you pay for. That means my secondary private mail addresses gave bounce messages for about 60 hours, sorry about that. I only check them when I have time. By the way, I found out all about this issue when running ping. It's a great habit of mine to do that daily. Actually, I have a trivial script running in the background to endlessly send a ping packet to bkil.hu once in a few minutes to keep my wireless links active for dumb access points. Too bad I rarely check its output in detail. That just gave me an idea! ;-)