Thoughts on timestamps of computer files

Computer files can have a number of different kinds of timestamps. Some of them are stored in the file's external metadata, alongside the file's name -- I'll call these external timestamps. Others are stored inside the file itself -- I'll call these internal timestamps. I use the term "timestamp" loosely. When something called a "timestamp" …

Combined US States covid19-projections.com chart

The covid19-projections.com site doesn't put multiple US States in the same chart, so I did. Many disclaimers apply. These are only projections; they change every day; there are large error margins that are not shown; there are many other projection sites whose projections are quite different. This is not adjusted for population, though it probably …

Win32 I/O character encoding supplement 1 – A Cygwin issue

A while back, I wrote a series of posts about using Unicode in Windows console mode programs: Part 1Part 2Part 3 In Part 2, I said that programmers should probably not be changing the console code page to UTF-8 (65001). And that if they must, they should change it back when they're done. But now …

The recent discovery of an ancient bilaterian fossil

In March 2020, researchers in Australia announced the discovery of a 555 million-year-old fossil of a bilaterian animal, which they named Ikaria wariootia. The way that journalists presented this discovery made it clear that it is significant for… something. But it seemed to be difficult for them to pin down precisely what is significant about …

The World Chess Championship is kinda not so great

As I write this, the chess Candidates Tournament is still expected to be held as scheduled, starting March 17, 2020, in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The tournament is between eight of the top chess players who aren't currently the World Champion. The winner of the tournament will earn the right to play a match against the current …

PKZIP Implode bug #3

I've already written about two PKZIP bugs related to the "Implode" compression method. Now I've come across another one, so I guess I'll investigate it as well. Here are the first two: Bug #1 (MML)Bug #2 (v1.01 literal tree issue) There's an old collection of files called the Pier 1 Shareware CDROM (#1). On it …

Notes on WinHelp format, part 3

This post is part of a series about WinHelp file format. Please read the other parts first: Part 1Part 2 With what we learned previously, we can decompress the TOPIC blocks, locate the TOPICLINKs, and stitch each TOPICLINK's fragments together to make each TOPICLINK a contiguous blob of bytes: A defragmented TOPICLINK is composed of …