Luckily the .exe’s MZ header is pretty small. But in this case it was necessary: when DOS loads a .com binary, it can’t know how much memory it will need, so DOS just gives it all free memory. But then the program can’t launch another, because all memory is in use. So that’s why I had to add the MZ header which allows specifying the memory needs.

It’s how non-Latin Unicode domain names are encoded, in this case one made out of Japanese characters. I suppose it depends on the browser whether or not it shows them.

2-Factor authentication

Click Continue when your authenticator app shows a code with two leading zeroes.

We don’t even have that rule with CVS. Sometimes you have a merge conflict after cvs up, well then you fix it. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Two of my favourite tools!

That’s handled by virtue of GetWittyReplyEx being #defined to GetWittyReplyExA and GetWittyReplyExW right? Just be aware that nMaxReplyMessage needs to be specified in bytes (excluding the null terminator!) but the returned length is in characters.

Note that while Visual C++'s msvcrt doesn’t implement this POSIX function officially, there’s a nonstandard _ofcyfpos_s() and it will in fact warn you that any use of the official ofcyfpos() is unsafe. The semantics are slightly different (it’ll return 1 on success instead of the length of the reply) so you can’t just #define the problem away.

Don’t forget to set the cbSize of the GETWITTYREPLYEXINFO structure before passing it to GetWittyReplyEx() or you’ll get funny things happening to your stack!

I like Void, it feels a little more like a BSD. But I’ve only really used it for experimentation, no idea what it’s like as a daily driver.

You could also try an actual BSD. OpenBSD has a very clear style and direction which I like but be careful when partitioning, they have their own ‘disklabel’ system. Updates are really streamlined with syspatch and sysupgrade.

NetBSD had a nice TUI installer. It may appear a bit less focussed on its aims but has a lot going for it: many supporter platforms, a friendly community, etc.

There’s also FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, possibly more but I don’t have much experience with those.