Sunday, April 4, 2010

Perl and The Time It Owes Me

These days I'm working on a my final Verilog project, where I create a simulator for a basic Verilog syntax (netlist only) in Verilog.

The first stage in creating such simulator is parsing the input .v file into two data structures that contain the netlist and the list of cells in the file. This code was given to us by the instructor, and it's written in Perl.

To gather more knowledge about our design, I've decided to create a Python Verilog simulator, similar in concepts to the one we're going to create and verify that it's behaving like the well-known software simulator that we're working with.

After fixing some small bugs, I've noticed that my code generates some events in one time-unit less than the real simulator. After checking my code again and verifying that no bugs lie there I checked the tables that were created by the Perl script that my instructor wrote, and there it was: one line of a bad parsed data.

The parser takes a line that looks like "bla bla bla 1.974 bla bla bla", parses it using a Regular Expression and converts the number to a floating point number (which is always in the format d.ddd) to integer by multiplying it by 1000 and then formatting it using sprintf() (casting to int using the int() function yields the same results).

Looks fine, ain't it? That's what I thought too, but it seems that there's a floating point error that causes a lot of trouble for specific numbers, like 1.007. Then after conversion you get 1006 and some temporary madness.

If you don't believe me, check the following code:

$num = 1.007;
print "Floating number: $num\n";

$newNum = $num * 1000;
print "Possibly integer: $newNum\n";

print sprintf("Real integer: %d\n", $newNum);

Say it's a bug, say it's a feature, I don't care.

This was tested under Perl 5.10.0 under Linux and Windows.

Update: to clear this out, the problem lies in rounding of floating point numbers, and probably exists in every implementation that uses the IEEE representation format. The solution as I see it right now is to use string formatting "%.0f" to convert the floating point variable to string with rounding and not truncation (that's what casting to integer does) and then convert it from string to integer.

Thanks goes to lorg and Michael for clarifying the real facts.

Update 2: it seems that this "feature" doesn't apply to C, because these numbers can be represented in the regular IEEE standards. Now it's a bit weird to me that Perl and Python act exactly the same (any suggestions?).

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Google Chrome Update Errors

Two weeks ago I've had a problem updating my Chrome. The error message I got when viewing the "about" window was "Update server not available (error: 3)":


The problem is caused by improper registration of Google Updater as a COM component in the registry (don't ask me how or why it happens, but it already happened to me two times in the last two weeks).

After searching the net a bit, I've seen some people who complained about the same error, but it took me some time to find a real solution:
Go to your Google Updater directory (in Windows 7 it's %userprofile%\Local\Google\Update) and run 'GoogleUpdate.exe /regserver' (make sure you elevated your privileges to Administrator before that) and voila! No more errors! (You don't even need to restart your Chrome).

On a side note: I'm really busy these days, with the University and all, but I got at least one cool project I'm going to release soon (just need to polish some corners here and there). So beware :)

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Creating HTML Signatures in Gmail with Google Chrome

In the last couple of months I've been a heavy user of Google Chrome. I got really addicted to its amazing speed, comparing to IE and Firefox.

Yes, Google Chrome is still under development - there's no fancy interface to extensions yet, Greasemonkey needs a command line switch to be activated and so on. But the speed just makes it worth.

Anyhow, in my Firefox days I used the Black Canvas extension to add HTML signatures to my outgoing Gmail messages. Nothing too fancy -- just a grey text and a link to my blog.
Google Chrome, however, doesn't support such extensions, so I searched for an alternative and found this tool.

This little application creates an inline Javascript that should be dragged to your bookmarks bar, and with a click of a mouse it adds the signature you created into the message. Sounds good, nay?

Well, besides that this generated scripts downloads an external script (http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.pack.js) which only god knows what's there, another problem popped up.

When I first used this tool I clicked on the link and nothing happend. No Javascript errors. Nothing. Then I remembered that I'm using the Gmail's lab tasks feature. Closing that window made the script work.

Why not create a smaller, working version, I thought. And I did. There it goes:
javascript:void ((function(){document.getElementById("canvas_frame").contentDocument.getElementsByTagName("iframe")[0].contentDocument.body.innerHTML += "your HTML signature";})())

Where your HTML signature can be a hand-made HTML/CSS code or an auto generated by a WYSIWYG editor like in the tool's page.

So all you need to do is create a new bookmark to this Javascript, and click on it whenever you'd like to add your signature to the mail you're currently sending.

Yeah, it's a hack, so use it on your own risk, blah blah blah.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

The End of Annoying OTP's

If you're a student in CS at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, you're familiar with OTP's (one time password) used to connect to the university servers from remote, submitting exercises, receiving grades and so on.

There are currently two ways to generate OTP's:
  • If you have a java-enabled phone (Nokia only) you can download an application called HOTP which will allow you to generate an OTP with each button click.
  • If you don't have a Nokia phone (like I do) you have to enter a website, fill your unix username and password and answer a CAPTCHA. Then SMS is sent to your cellphone, including 5 OTP's.
Needless to say, the latter option is really annoying, especially when you need to use the OTP 4-5 times in a row while submitting an exercise (connect to an FTP server, use SSH, enter the submission system and so on).

So I decided to create my own OTP client which will be able to generate OTP's locally. The main target was to create a program that will copy the next OTP to the clipboard, which will allow easy transportation of the 5-digit password.

I simulated a download of the HOTP program, and decompiled it (Jad rules). The code was scrambled, but I figured out by using the koders search engine that Java's bouncycastle package is used there. This package gives a lot of encryption services, and here they use the Rijndael (original AES) and the HMAC SHA-1 encryption in order to generate the OTP.

I won't go into further details. If you're really interested in how it works, you can go over the script's source - it's not that complicated.

Some installation details:
  • Very important note: if you're currently using the HOTP application, installing this script (requesting a new HOTP application download) will make your cellphone HOTP application broken. This is caused because the key counter is randomally selected each time an application is generated for download.
    If anyone of you sees this as an important issue, leave me a reply here or send me an email.
  • You'll need ActiveState Python (version 2.4 and up).
  • If you're using other operating system than Windows, you can still use the script, but the clipboard option will not work (only printing to stdout).
  • After installing python and downloading the script, run it without parameters and installation will begin.
  • For further options, use the --help or -h switch.
You can download NOTP from here.

Have a great semester :)

Monday, September 22, 2008

Job Proposals Everywhere

While working I was checking some HTTP headers of random sites, and I stumbled upon these headers:

Server: nginx
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:17:12 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
Vary: Cookie
X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
X-Pingback: http://developerinsight.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding

So who wants a job? :)

Thursday, August 7, 2008

New Facebook Worm?

I got this mail from Facebook today, notifying about a new private message:


*** sent you a message.

Subject: Hi my friend.


"This is you on hidden cam. lol:

http://myvideo.d9.pl/"


The site is currently giving a page in polish, but no malware or exploit whatsoever. It probably went down.

The message did not appear in my Facebook's private messages list nor in the notifications, which means that Facebook somehow deleted it from their database.

Beware.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Job Market

There was one, today at the university.

And I stumbled upon this advertisement:


And then I began to ponder... :)