OTC CatchUp #62 Summary

General introductions.

Himanshu Sharma shared his blogging profiles

Harsh Kapadia told everyone about his upcoming talk on Git Internals at Sudhanshu Yadav's meetup group The Internals.

We talked about PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) and iPXE which is an open-source implementation of PXE.

Vatsal Patel talked about the kind of projects he was working on at AMD as a Field Application Engineer (FAE).

Himanshu Sharma shared a link to a guide on how to enable and disable Google Drive’s auto backup on Android.

A link to the tool Bundlephobia was shared, which lets one understand the performance cost (bundle size, package composition/dependencies and exports analysis) of `npm install`ing a new NPM package.

Himanshu Sharma talked about securing mobile users' sensitive information (like passwords) by encrypting them on device, which allows for offline access as well. He is currently writing an article on it.

Krishna Gadia talked about securing passwords for a client using the AWS Key Management Service, where the client received a password protected Excel sheet via e-mail and the password on WhatsApp.

Krishna Gadia shared a link to Bandit wargame.

Krishna Gadia also shared a link to FURPS.

Shivay Lamba shared his experience at the HackMIT 2019 hackathon.

Krishna Gadia asked about Little Endian and Big Endian and Jai Dewani shared an answer.

Jay Kaku told everyone about the Nand to Tetris Course, shared his experience of the course and also gave us a walkthrough of the course.

Anil Harwani shared an article How a Single Line of Code Made a 24-core Server Slower Than a Laptop.

Anil Harwani asked us to explore the MESI Protocol.

We also talked about Code morphing.

We talked about x86 & ARM instructions.

Anil Harwani asked us to look up Self Modifying Code and Turing completeness.

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)

Anil Harwani also talked about the CPPC, which describes a mechanism for the OS to manage the performance of a logical processor. It exposes a set of registers to describe abstract performance scale, to request performance levels and to measure per-CPU delivered performance.

Omkar Khair shared a website about Quine Programs.

Jay Kaku asked about the approach of taking a security-first approach while building Microprocessors, to which Anil Harwani replied, "The cost of securing something should not be more than the cost of what you’re securing."

Jay Kaku shared a video on How the Apple AirTags were hacked.

Anil Harwani told us about the CPU-Z freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of our systems.

Anil Harwani also told us about the current CTO of Microsoft Azure Mark Russinovich, who even after 26 years still maintains and updates Sysinternals, a set of utilities he created to help manage, troubleshoot and diagnose Windows systems and applications.

Anil Harwani shared with everyone AutoIt, a scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. He added that they used to use it for game & Excel sheet automation.

Anil Harwani shared a video on AMD Ryzen 7 1700 vs Intel i7-7700K in Excel.

Anil Harwani and Omkar Khair discussed how everyone used to use Pidgin and other IRCs where they could form groups of people using different technologies to interact with each other.

Anil Harwani also shared Tridactyl which is a Vim-like interface for Firefox, which allows one to completely operate Firefox with the keyboard.

Anil Harwani shared how streaming services like Netflix check devices they’re being played on and offer videos quality based on that. It also helps in protecting their higher quality video formats.

Anil Harwani shared a video What It Takes to Break a RAM with ESD.

Anil Harwani told everyone how Inline Encryption and Decryption prevents other people from accessing previously stored data on the same storage drive.

Anil Harwani shared a talk on AMD x86 Memory Encryption Technologies.

Anil Harwani told us about Multi-Layer SSDs (SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC and PLC).

We talked about Storage Tapes and Anil Harwani shared a video on the IBM System Storage Tape Library.

Omkar Khair suggested

Shrinath Gupta asked for suggestions on which service to use if he had to store images and possibly videos in the near future.

Harsh Kapadia shared a talk on Concept Visualise - JavaScript Internals

Anil Harwani told about the various Overclocking events he had been to.

Container management

We talked about Monorepos.

Ritvi Mishra shared an invite to the Arm Software Developers Discord server where they have hardware focused discussions and weekly meetups.

Vedant Panchal showcased his Personal Intro Post Designer project.

Anil Harwani showcased a SSD with ~2 TB storage and showed us the storage chips, cache storage chips, capacitors and the controller on the board.

Anil Harwani showcased the first version of AMD Epyc boards, which are processor boards for data centers.

Omkar Khair talked about Dopemin, his e-mail proxy project.