Big Stomper is out to get you. Better watch what you say, or you’ll get stomped.

Of course, they won’t admit to stomping you. They’ll even deny it. Make it look like an accident or natural causes, an unfortunate rockslide. But you’ll be stomped just the same. All for speaking out about their misdeeds.

Not everyone believes Big Stomper is even responsible, but I hang out on the Stomp Watch forum, where we catalog and discuss the evil things Big Stomper is up to. So we know that when something bad happens, Big Stomper is to blame. Sometimes we debate if the stomping is carried out in house, or contracted out, but we are all agreed that the murky lack of evidence is a clear sign that professionals are involved. These are not amateur stompers.

Because I know what Big Stomper is capable of, it would be irresponsible not to warn you what happens to anyone who reveals their secrets. Everyone at Stomp Watch would love to discuss your revelations, but you need to know that you will definitely get stomped. Big Stomper does this to dissuade future leakers.

Some people (there’s always that “someone” on the internet, right?) will tell that it’s safe to come forward, these are just rumors and wild speculation. Well, they’re not the ones risking their lives, are they? Anyone inside Big Stomper who feels obligated to disclose the truth should come check out Stomp Watch first to know the risks.

Memory leaks have plagued C programs for as long as the language has existed. Many solutions have been proposed, even going so far as to suggest we should rewrite C programs in other languages. But there’s a better way.

Presented here is a simple solution that will eliminate the memory leaks from every C program. Link this into your program, and memory leaks are a thing of the past.

#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <stdio.h>

struct leaksaver {
        struct leaksaver *next;
        void *pointer;
} *bigbucket;

void *
malloc(size_t len)
{
        static void *(*nextmalloc)(size_t);
        nextmalloc = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "malloc");
        void *ptr = nextmalloc(len);
        if (ptr) {
                struct leaksaver *saver = nextmalloc(sizeof(*saver));
                saver->pointer = ptr;
                saver->next = bigbucket;
                bigbucket = saver;
        }
        return ptr;
}

It is now entirely optional to call free. If you don’t call free, memory usage will increase over time, but technically, it’s not a leak. As an optimization, you may choose to call free to reduce memory, but again, strictly optional.

Problem sovled!

Here at Enterprising Enterprise, we love technology, but we’re also pushing it hard, constantly trying to expand the frontier of what’s possible. Along the way, we frequently find we’ve outgrown an earlier technology choice, and it’s time for us to migrate to something new. There’s a cost to doing this, but it’s the only way to keep moving forward.

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My Windows desktop has a Threadripper CPU with a few cores. Maybe I could I get a bit more utilization out of it with virtualization. Or maybe, given the frequency with which attacks target Windows, I could use virtualization to increase security. Let’s see how that goes.

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Some people write blog posts. Some people read blog posts. Sometimes readers find that the writers do not explain everything they expected to be explained. I typically prefer to write about things other than my own writing, but occasionally there are exceptions.

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I’ve been paying a bit more attention than usual to web interfaces, and there’s a few examples which really get to me. GitHub is one that’s annoyed me for a while, but I didn’t quite know what was wrong until I looked at some screenshots to see what was frustrating me.

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But what about screen readers, you ask. Somebody did a web thing you don’t like. Doesn’t this break screen readers?

It seems the easy way to find out would be to test. But that requires caring about screen reader usability enough to actually have one on hand to test. Much easier to wag fingers. Screen readers are the starving children of web accessibility arguments. Why don’t you care about the starving children?

It’s borrowing somebody else’s concerns to score internet points. Oh, hi, I just wanted to try this on and post a few comments, you can have it back now. Thanks. I wouldn’t want to have to think about this all the time.

Configuring an HP laptop, came across this gem.

I like that I get a choice, but is it really necessary to tack on a $2 fee? If I have to choose one or the other, maybe just include it in the listed price? I thought airlines were bad...

Possibly related to this great option:

It’s a tough choice, but somebody has to make it. And pay $22 for the privilege.

Got a new spam today, subject “hard facts”, which was actually kind of interesting. There was a link, which obviously not clicking, but the body was a reply to an email I had allegedly sent. Here’s what I said:

Be careful with shitcoins. They tend to market themselves based on the latest trendy arguments against btc.

First it was the confirmation time then mining algorithm then inflation schedule
and recently, unfairly distributed, incomplete shitcoins are hyped on the grounds
of smart contracts, usually asking you to buy in their "crowdsale" or "IPO".

That’s so on target I thought maybe it really was an email I’d sent. Is it still spam if I agree with it?

Long story short, printing on a chromebook is still fucked, and now the incompetent dickheads who write drivers for HP have made things worse. With time and effort, however, one can still repair the damage. Writing this up in case somebody finds it useful, and because I have little doubt I’ll be referring to it again in the near future.

First, the problem: printing from a chromebook to a local network printer no longer works. There is an extension that used to make this possible. If one reads the reviews, one will quickly notice the many, many one star reviews saying that it doesn’t work. In particular, it used to work, but after the March 20 update it completely unhelpfully and uselessly does nothing but say “Printing unsuccessful”. That was more than a month ago. The rockstar talent at HP is apparently on tour and too busy to fix this.

Here’s the insane workaround. First we need the old version of the extension. Obviously Google will never let us have it, but there’s an archive site. Here’s the previous print extension. Download that. Rename the file to zip. Create a new folder and extract the contents of the zip file. Rename the _metadata folder to not_metadata. Open the chrome extensions panel. Delete the old HP Print extension. Flip into developer mode. Add an unpacked extension. Add back the printer IP address and rejoice.

For bonus fun, talk your mom through this procedure over the phone.