Nathan's Programming Page

Welcome to my little world of programming and hacking. I've been playing around with computers for about eight years now, and been learning a lot about the lowlevel parts of how they operate in the past five years. What I've tried to collect here are various bits and pieces that I hope help others, whether they've been in this field a long time and think they know everything (trust me, they don't) or they are just starting.

Please note: this is not a page with information about cracking security; even though I believe in the free flow of information, I believe that some information can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and I'm not just going to hand it out to everyone who asks. If you are smart enough to know not to ask, then you are smart enough to not need to ask.

Anyway on to the important stuff.

Portability - Portability is something everyone talks about, but no one really understands all that well. I worked for a year on Real-Time Linux across four different architectures, and I still found out I had lot to learn about portability when I started my new job.

• GLUT Example Portability Guidelines - by a man who wrote an entire portable windowing toolkit on top of OpenGL, Mark Kilgard.
• GNU Compiler Portability Guidelines - From the people that have a very portable (if not highly optimizing) C compiler for almost every combination of hardware and software in existence.
• The Fast Light ToolKit homepage a - a very nice portable GUI library.
• The OpenGL Homepage - A graphics library that has stood the test of time, and is portable to boot.
• The GLUT Homepage - And where would OpenGL be if it weren't for GLUT? Probably still only running on IRIX.

There are other toolkits, and I'm sure other guidelines. But these are the ones I've had firsthand experience with and I can personally recommend. I'm still toying with Java, and it's pretty hairy, at least for what I'm trying to use it for (encryption). .NET looks promising; if only it wasn't burdened by Microsoft's unwillingness to compromise and let go of the reigns.

Miscellaneous - Stuff I haven't bothered to sort out yet, mainly because none of it comprises enough sub pieces to justify sorting out.

• Publib - A very nice library for doing lot's of tricky things in C such as string manipulation. Don't reinvent the wheel; use already existing libraries. Also, don't use strtok(3); use strsplit(3pub).
• GGI - The General Graphics Interface. While not as popular (and as widely ported) as OpenGL, it looks very promising, and what little I've played with of it, I like very much. It's also not inherently 3D, but that just makes it all the more simple and easy to program.
• Miscreant Programming Languages - Some interesting case studies in what not to do when you are designing a language. One of the reasons I put this on the page for good programming is that it makes you appreciate why you should be a good programmer, and to be thankful for the tools you have. I'm not trying to be preachy, but there are a lot of people out there who think they are $DEITY's gift to programming/hacking when in fact they couldn't be more wrong. They need to wake up and get a clue. And while they're at it, they need to learn to program nicely.