OTC CatchUp #172 Summary

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OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!.
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OTC CatchUp #172

Date: 24-02-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 14 mins

Topics Discussed

Siddharth Bhatia showcased a bunch of applications!
- He got Beta access to Project IDX, a web-based IDE by Google, like GitHub Codespaces and Gitpod. It is based on NixOS and has built-in iOS and Android emulators.
- He showcased Warp, a modern terminal that was previously only available in MacOS, but is now available for Linux as well.
- He also showcased Everything, a faster, better and more lightweight search solution for Windows, similar to ANGRYsearch for Linux.
We talked about Google Stadia’s issues that led to its shutdown.
Rishit Dagli told us about K3s, a lightweight K8s distribution built for IoT and Edge Computing and about MicroK8s, a fully compliant K8s distribution with a smaller CPU and memory footprint than most others.
- Introduction to MicroK8s
Akhil Sahu shared Open Props by Adam Argyle, which makes it easy and flexible to design components.
Harsh Kapadia talked about the different package managers available on Fedora-based distributions like CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux, etc.
- DNF is the most modern package manager in the Fedora ecosystem and is pretty similar to APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) that is the package manager for Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu. It stands for Dandified Yum and is a rewrite of the Yum package manager.
- Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is an older package manager that was a rewrite of YUP (Yellowdog UPdater), the package manager for Yellow Dog Linux.
- Both DNF and Yum work with RPM, the RedHat Package Manager.
- More details
  - APT vs. DNF vs. YUM: Linux Package Managers Compared
  - What is the difference between yum, apt-get, rpm, ./configure && make install?
Mohit Gangwani talked about an issue that he was facing with Webpack not rendering certain Tailwind CSS classes in the production build, but was working fine in the development version, while building a web site for his friend.
Harsh Kapadia shared
Ishan Sharma shared Reducing Instagram’s basic video compute time by 94 percent
- Streaming Vs. Progressive Download Vs. Adaptive Streaming
Anas Khan shared a project HackerRank + VS Code, which lets you solve HackerRank challenges in VS Code and Ishan Sharma informed Anas that they hired the developer to work for them at HackerRank.
- The project is impressive, because the author spent hours reverse engineering HackerRank’s API calls and CSRF security measures, as is apparent from the project’s README file.
  - Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack
We talked about the differences between X11, Xorg and Wayland.
We talked about what Direct Memory Access (DMA) is and how it can be used to cheat in video games.
Verilog
- Pranav Dani shared that he has been using Verilog to build Code Fetchers.
  - He also shared ASIC World
- Jay Kaku shared his solutions for HDLBits, a collection of small circuit design exercises for practicing digital hardware design using Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL).
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)
- Harsh Kapadia shared a simple CPU vs FPGA animation
- Jay Kaku shared Introduction to FPGA
We looked up some binary data structures like the Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and Interrupt Vector Table (IVT or IDT) from volume two of the AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual.
- IDT, LDT, TSS and GDT
- Along similar lines, Hardik Raheja told us about the issues he faced with DSDT and SSDT while installing Hackintosh.
We talked about prefetching (Locality of reference - spatial and temporal) and speculative execution in CPUs.

Projects Discussed

Siddharth Bhatia showcased his project Anonymize_Excel, a Python script that anonymizes an Excel file and synthesizes new data in its place.
- It uses uses Microsoft Presidio together with Faker for anonymization purposes.
Ishan Sharma showcased a browser extension that he built at HackerRank which auto-fills job applications based on data stored on HackerRank and the answers that a user fills in applications.
- He showed us how his design was inspired by the Arc browser and the CSS behind it.

Attendees

Meet Screenshot

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