Month: January 2015

  • Nibble Sort Programming Contest

    The problem is to sort the 4-bit pieces of a 64-bit word with (unsigned) smaller values towards the small end of the word. The nibble sort of 0xbadbeef is 0xfeedbba000000000. The function you implement will perform this sorting operation on a buffer of 1024 64-bit integers: I’ll give a small prize to the submitter of…

  • Buying Into Open Source Security

    If you were given the opportunity to spend USD 100 million over five years to maximally improve the security of open source software, what would you do? Let’s just assume that the money comes with adequate administrative staff to manage awards and contracts so you can focus on technical issues. A few ideas: Bug bounties,…

  • Testing with Pictures

    Testing code is fun and hard and looking at the problem in different ways is always good. Here’s a picture representing the behavior of a saturating subtraction operation, where the horizontal axes represent the inputs and the output is vertical: And here are some of the functions handed in by my students in the fall:…