Hacktoberfest

I finished Hacktoberfest Last night !!!! Hacktoberfest is a month long hackathon thing run by DigitalOcean and github, in exchange for some open source Pull Requests DO will send you stickers and a tshirt. I tried to do this last year, but found it is really hard to do small commits against projects, I ended only managed 1 commit, but DO still sent me a sticker.

This year I was determined to manage the 4 commits required to get a tshirt, silly me I thought that working on an open source github hosted project for $work would make that easy. Instead I really struggled to manage the four PR's, I only got two via the work project, small commits are hard things to find.

For the other two pull requests I looked at open source software.

gpredict is a cross platform open source satellite tracker, I have used to for following amateur satellites. gpredict has always been super buggy for me, the current packaged build for FreeBSD dumped core when I tried to open the 'sat info screen'. Firing up gpredict with debug symbols and within in gdb made it really easy to find the use after free that was the culprit.

There were a pile of issues like this, I ran the build through llvm's scanbuild tool and it showed up a bunch of potential bugs. They too went into the PR for gpredict.

Last night an email came from DO stating there was still time to get the necessary PR's in. Dern, I had only manage three of the four pull requests so far.

Kaitai Struct is an awesome project for generating code from binary formats, it is a compiler, a visualizer and a declarative language. There is a set of example formats of images, games, media, compression and network packets. I noticed that UDP was missing from the network set and shamelessly added it .

Reading: Little Brother, Autumn 2600