bits 0x33 - Calender Week 51, 2023

I’m exhausted.
Mostly I have to get some paperworks done. Collecting x from here, y from there, go back to get z, fill a formular, emails, emails, emails, then send a letter to XXX. But I finally got it done by Friday so I can sit done and do something fun/productive.

Deutsche Bank
If I had the choice I won’t fucking use Deutsche Bank anymore. The Deutsche Bank pretty much summarizes all the bads about Germany, yes I’m talking about bureaucracy and digitalization which doesn’t exists. Plus I had some bad experience with their clerk.

cost vs gain
There was a project that my Prof and I spent some good hours on in the hope that it may become my master thesis. But then the problem haunts:

What’s this good for?

Yeah, as simple as that. We have a hammer (a design that trades off some security to make syscalls faster), but we can never find a nail that justify the cost (and the additional complexity).

In the end this topic is … well, dropped. Actually it’s nevertheless justified as a good amount of work in the scope of a student thesis, but it is not a good feeling when you spend your life on something knowing that this will be thrown away the moment you conclude the project.

I’m starting with something new. On the good side, the new one is equally interesting to me.

There is no limit to the HACKS

HideM: Protecting the Contents of Userspace Memory in the Face of Disclosure Vulnerabilities

Using split TLB to have execute-only memory. That’s really smart and I’m amazed.

UX
people talk about the superiority of UNIX systems. But they talk as if “User Experience” is not a thing.

People design (very good) tools with bad UI/UX, and, if you dare complaining about it it’s your fault because you don’t read the (un)friendly manual and it’s your problem that you can’t live in the commandline 24/7.

I had the need to convert a markdown file to html.

• I first tried my vim plugin, everything looks fine but I simply can’t “export” it to HTML. I read the issues, only to find this “feature”¹ is NOT supported.
• I tried md2html but its syntax support is very limited; tables are broken; footnotes are not there, let alone the math support!
• I tried pandoc and, for fucks sake it’s composed of 225 haskell packages and takes 534.9 MB of disk²! And it didn’t cover my needs either! (a little better than md2html but still..) And it even complains about my markdown syntax because I put some bold text **like this** in the beginning and it mistook that for a bad yaml front matter!
• You know what fucking works? My blog! Yes, I need to create a new (hugo) post, copy paste the markdown, copy paste the images and parse the url, then render the blog and save the HTML from browser. But for something semi-formal that I need to share with people, I had to take the time to strip my blog themes and metadata. I soon gave up.
• Yeah, in the end vs code + a markdown plugin did the job. Two clicks and it’s done.

What gives!

either the kernel or the Firefox is broken
I know element sucks, but when element breaks firefox it’s FF’s fault! This happened to me for more than 10 times. Like, I’m typing in a chat, and it just freezes. I have to pkill firefox and restart and lose all text I typed. There is not even a coredump: I suppose it’s not registered as a “crush”.