Author Archives: bitjunkie

About bitjunkie

Teacher, Lecturer, and BITJUNKIE ...

The Brilliant Concept of Standard Streams in Unix (1)

Posted on March 22, 2018

1. The basic idea of standard streams In the 1980s, almost every book or class on computer science here in Germany started with an explanation of the EVA-Prinzip, where E stood for Eingabe (Input), V for Verarbeitung (Processing), and A … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , ,

How to use ancient Morse code to solve a modern problem

Posted on October 3, 2017

If you own a Raspberry Pi mini computer the following problem may sound familiar to you: You just connected your Rasperry Pi to a network with automatic DHCP. Now you need to find out what IP address has been assigned … Continue reading →

Posted in c, Information Theory, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , ,

Let’s make the stack explode in Java!

Posted on February 28, 2017

In one of my lectures about memory management in Java, I was looking for a quick and simple way to demonstrate the influence of local variables on the stack memory usage. So what came to my mind was this: Local … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Programming Essentials | Tagged , , , , ,

A simple way to obfuscate string literals

Posted on December 25, 2016

By Andre M. Maier While I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room last week, it occurred to me that I could send out a geeky holiday greeting to my younger programming students. Naturally, as a teacher, I wanted to … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Theory, Java, Programming Essentials | Tagged , , , , ,

Why Linux DOES NOT Suck

Posted on October 5, 2015

By Andre M. Maier On October 5, 1991, Linus Torvalds officially published the first version of his homemade Linux kernel. Today, 24 years later, a large number of IT professionals agree that best of Linux is yet to come. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Non-technical | Tagged , , , ,

Let’s make the heap explode!

Posted on December 5, 2014

This blog entry is dedicated to those who teach computer science at high schools and vocational schools. In one of my Java programming classes, only few of the students showed up. It didn’t seem to make sense to continue with … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Linux, Programming Essentials, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , ,

Floating Point Representation

Posted on November 1, 2014

Back in the days when I was in middle school, I started to develop a strong preference for “nice” and “short” numbers, such as 0.1. One likely reason was that any math problem in school was designed to yield a … Continue reading →

Posted in Bit-Twiddling, Math, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , ,