• Apple,  Programming,  SQL

    Simple sqlite3 Fuzzer

    One of my favorite ways to find escape defects in code is to employ a generic fuzzer. I typically have 5-10 laptops running fuzzers for various projects at a time. I was recently doing some research on sqlite3 and so started to fuzz the implementation built into macOS. The fuzzer generates random SQL statements and executes them against a SQLite database file. If any errors are encountered, they will be printed to the console: There’s not much logic here. Add more complex tests to improve it. Like SQL grammar to generate valid SQL statements, or a genetic algorithm to evolve SQL statements that are more likely to find bugs. Use…

  • Articles and Books,  WordPress

    20 Rules of Capitalization

    Yesterday, I wrote an article on technical writing. Today, I’m laying out a few basic rules with regards to when to capitalize things. This is pretty straight forward but I find it can help to remember the rules to lay them out in a basic way. These things should have their first character capitalized: The first letter of a sentence. This includes a quoted sentence inside a sentence but not a phrase within a sentence. This also includes the first letter of a terminal command when a sentence starts with a command, although I try to restructure those sentences when they come up as it’s not a hard thing to…

  • Mac OS X,  Unix,  Windows XP

    Subversion Cheat Sheet

    I’ve done a few articles in the past on different tasks in svn and git, but I have a little cheat sheet of sorts I’ve been using for awhile for Subversion on Mac OS X and thought I would share it. Before you get started, check your version. I use 2.0 but I seem to remember all of these are about the same as they were previously: svn --version To get started, Subversion uses a repository to store projects. Each client needs a repository and these should be on direct attached drives. The repository hosts a Berkeley database a folder per project you check out, or import. To create a…