iFlame 6S

I was mildly asleep as around 6am in the morning “someone” turned on a very bright light. There was a weird hissing sound. I woke up quite annoyed after around 10 seconds. But what I saw was beyond belief.

There was a roughly 30cm flame burning on my wife’s nightstand. I immediately went over and saw her iPhone on fire. I tried slapping it a few times which made the flames smaller so that I could disconnect the charging cable. I tried picking up the phone, but the case around was melting which burned my fingers. I then knocked it onto the ground (maybe not the smartest move), but I wanted to get the flames away from the lamp shade, plants and wall paper.

It seems the combination of disconnecting the charger and hitting the floor temporarily extinguished the flames. I immediately grabbed the phone at a point that seemed like it was not melted, ran to the kitchen and threw it into the sink. I let the water run over the phone for around a minute. I then filled a bowl with water and put the phone into it to make sure it doesn’t flare up again.

ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَالَمِينَ we got off lightly 😅 … the whole situation could have turned into a huge disaster. ☠

Tony Abbott and Tap Water

What could go wrong if-as a joke-your being asked if you could hack the former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott? Well Alex Hope has documented it. Finding pictures of boarding pass he could log into the booking system of the airline (without additional authentication). Then he found out that the systems leaked sensitive information (passport number, telephone number, airline-internal comments about the passenger). He then went through the whole charade of finding someone in government responsible for concrete data security issues. 😵

There’s even an interesting section on when he finally gets through to Tony Abbot and they talk on a very personal level. Given the reason they were talking in the first place it also revolved about how complicated technology seems to be and how you learn how it works.

This lead Alex to reflect about how he started learning things and how you have to change your thinking when you are “hacking.” He gives a great example which he summarizes with:

In conclusion, to be a hacker u ask for tap water.

😂

We Really Are Engineers 🎉

Hillel Wayne interviewed people who have worked professionally both as a software and a traditional engineer (from a diverse set of engineering disciplines) to determine if “software engineers” are really engineers … and, yes we are.

He also analyzes myths from and about software engineering and tries to find out if there’s actually something that makes software engineering unique among the other engineering disciplines.

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https://youtu.be/3018ABlET1Y

Scaffolding for fetching and parsing emails from IMAP with Python

A friend asked me if I could help him write a Python script for fetching and processing data from emails in his mailbox … Well, the thing with emails is that they’re a pain to work with (in any form). So, I tried to help him out with a little scaffolding (also available as a Gist).

Multi-step Refactoring Pains in C++

Titus Winters talks about maintaining and refactoring large C++ code bases (i.e. code bodies that require multi-step refactoring). He describes how “higher-level” language features effectively make refactoring harder (e.g. functions, classes, templates, concepts).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_yzLe-wnfk

Usefulness of Swap Explained

Chris Down explains how swap’s main role is being the missing backing store for anonymous (i.e. allocated by malloc) pages. While all other kinds of data (e.g. paged-in files) can be reclaimed easily and later reloaded, because their “source of truth” is elsewhere. There’s no such source for anonymous pages hence these pages can “never” be reclaimed unless there’s swap space available (even if those pages aren’t “hot”).

Linux has historically had poor swap (and by extension OOM) handling with few and imprecise means for configuration. Chris describes the behavior of a machine with and without swap in different scenarios of memory contention. He thinks that poor swap performance is caused by having a poor measure of “memory pressure.” He explains how work on cgroups v2 might give the kernel (and thus admins) better measures for memory pressure and knobs for dealing with it.