The Kollected Kode Vicious

336 Pages·2020·2.739 MB·English

by  George Neville-Neil

THE KOLLECTED
KODE VICIOUS
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THE KOLLECTED
KODE VICIOUS
OPINIONATED ADVICE FOR
PROGRAMMERS
George V. Neville-Neil
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ISBN-13: 978-0-13-678824-9
ISBN-10: 0-13-678824-6
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To Kaz, who had to hear these often angry outbursts before they ever
reached the page.
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Contents
Foreword by Donald E. Knuth (DK) ........................... xi
Preface ....................................................xiii
Acknowledgments .........................................xvi
About the Author ......................................... xvii
1 The Kode at Hand .......................................................1
1.1 Resource Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 Big Big Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Coded Arrangements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4 Code Abuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.5 Nesting Tendencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.6 Choking on Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.7 Cursed Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.8 Forced Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.9 A Nice Piece...of Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.10 Something Rotten in... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.11 Logging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.12 Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.13 Copying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
1.14 Top Five Koding Peeves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
1.15 Linguistically Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
1.16 Check in Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2 Koding Konundrums ................................................. 51
2.1 Ode to the Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.2 How Much + in C++? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.3 Something Sleek and Modern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.4 What’s in a Cache Miss? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.5 Code Spelunking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
vii
viii Contents
2.6 Input Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.7 Dickering with Docs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
2.8 What’s in the Foo Field? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
2.9 Testy Tester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2.10 How to Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
2.11 Leave the Test Modes In! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
2.12 Maintenance Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.13 Merge Early . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
2.14 Multicore Manticore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
2.15 This Is Not a Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
2.16 Heisenbugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
2.17 I Don’t Want Your Dirty PDFs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
2.18 Pining for a PIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
2.19 Reboot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
2.20 Code Scanners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
2.21 Debugging Hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
2.22 Sanity vs. Visibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
3 Systems Design ...................................................... 127
3.1 Abstractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
3.2 Driven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
3.3 Driven Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
3.4 Changative Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
3.5 Threading the Needle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
3.6 Threads Still Unsafe? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
3.7 Authentication vs. Encryption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
3.8 Authentication Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
3.9 Authentication by Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
3.10 Cross-Site Scripting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
3.11 Phishing and Infections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
3.12 UI Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Contents ix
3.13 Secure Logging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
3.14 Java . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
3.15 Secure P2P . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
4 Machine to Machine ................................................ 189
4.1 Stepping on Toes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
4.2 Paucity of Ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
4.3 Protocol Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
4.4 Which Came First? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
4.5 Debugging the Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
4.6 Latency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
4.7 Long Distance Runaround . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
4.8 The Network Is the Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
4.9 Failure to Scale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
4.10 Port Squatting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
4.11 Networking in the Raw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
4.12 Pointless PKI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
4.13 Standard on Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
5 Human to Human ................................................... 235
5.1 Of Pride and... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
5.2 What Color Is Your...? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
5.3 Broken Builds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
5.4 What Is Intelligence? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
5.5 Review the Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
5.6 The Naming of Hosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
5.7 Hosting an Interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
5.8 Mythical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
5.9 The Obsolete Koder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
5.10 With Great Power... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
5.11 The Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270