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kabuki ([personal profile] kabuki) wrote2009-10-26 09:03 pm

A whole new perspective on Math

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Just a little thing I came across while doing my homework – hexspeak.
 
And suddenly I have a relation to the whole converting from one base to another. Maybe it’s my sense of humor, but to use 0BADF00D to clear locked index.dat files shows that Microsoft’s programmer are still human.
I need silly stuff like this magic numbers to find a grip on mathematics. They make my inner child happy.

… and just because I have to practice the hardcoding of tables, here are some more examples

Code Description
0xCAFED00D ‘cafe dude’ is used by Sun JAVA as a magic number for their pack200 compression
0xDEADBABE ‘dead babe’ is used by IBM Jikes RVM as a sanity check of the stack of the primary thread
0xCAFEBABE ‘cafe babe’ is used in Java to identify Java bytecode class files
my personal favorite: 0xDEADDEAD ‘dead dead’ is the bug check (STOP) code displayed when invoking a Blue Screen of Death either by telling the kernel via the attached debugger, or by using a special keystroke combination

And no … I will not waste a single thought on the fact that stuff like this puts a wide grin on my face.

Originally published at SMOKINGBUNNY. Please leave any comments there.