* * * * *
I guess we'll see how well CBOR works
The Corporate Overlords of The Corporation have spoken, and lo, they said
“Worry not, for you do not have to deal with the stupidity [1]—we shall
deal.” So great, we don't have to drink the REST (REpresentational State
Transfer)/HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol-Secure) über alles Kool-Aid™,
but instead query our Corporate Overlords for the data, who have drunk the
REST/HTTPS über alles Kool-Aid™ (or were forced to by the company we query
for the data—the end effect is the same though).
Sigh.
So for now, we still make our queries via UDP (User Datagram Protocol), only
now in CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation) [2]—the legacy format of
DNS (Domain Name Service) is apparently too arcane to support any more.
I have a Lua module [3] but we also need one in C. There are some existing
ones, but they have their issues (either an alien build system or missing
some critical CBOR (Concise Binary Object Represnetation) feature) so I've
been working on a C library I started a few years ago and never finished.
It's working now, and to test it, I've been using valgrind [4] to ensure
memory safety, in addition to using /dev/urandom to generate random garbage:
-----[ shell ]-----
GenericUnixPrompt% dd if=/dev/urandom count=2 | tee bad-data | valgrind ./testdecoder
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----
dd is one of those relatively arcane Unix programs that I find useful on
occasion (like here to generate some random data). tee I use to record the
data so I can play it back when valgrind finds an issue. This is a reasonable
way to fuzz [5] a program. It did find several issues that could have lead to
a crash, and I don't leak any memory so the code should be good to go.
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2018/05/29.1
[2]
http://cbor.io/
[3]
https://github.com/spc476/CBOR
[4]
http://valgrind.org/
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing
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