[thechat] Binary Code of Computers

Syed Zeeshan Haider szh at hotpop.com
Wed May 8 02:40:00 CDT 2002


Hi Ron,
Thank you for such a detailed reply.
You are going in that depth which is unfathomable for me. I am using
Cyrix II with Windows 98 SE. The idea of searching for 0's and 1's came
in my mind when I watched an episode of "The X Files" (a TV show) with
Urdu (my language) dubbing. In that episode, a child was used to write
0's and 1's arbitrarily. But on translating them into computer files,
they gave some important data.
Thank you,
Syed Zeeshan Haider.
http://syedzeeshanhaider.faithweb.com/

----- Original Message -----
Subject: RE: [thechat] Binary Code of Computers
Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 08:39:24 -0500
From: "Luther, Ron" <Ron.Luther at hp.com>
To: <thechat at lists.evolt.org>
Reply-To: thechat at lists.evolt.org

Hi Syed,

I'm really not sure where you are going with this, but there are a
couple other things you might want to consider:

(1) You may have to look at your hardware and determine whether your
machine saves information at the byte, gobble, or mouthful level so you
know how big a chunk to consider at a time.

(2) You may have to look at your hardware and your operating file system
to determine whether you are working with 'little-endian' or
'big-endian' data structures.  {The first letter of your name, (a
capital "S"), is a decimal "83" in ASCII.  I *think* this may be stored
as 0101 0011 on a 'big endian' machine and as 0011 0101 on a 'little
endian' machine.}

(3) If you are looking at a raw stream of bits off some kind of stored
media, you're going to need to understand how to differentiate between
'structure' and 'information'.  Is that "1" you just read a piece of the
data file, a file attribute mark, a continuation pointer, a sector
header, or a sector-track jump buffer?

... and of course ... Turning those bits back into information is a
completely different kettle of fish!


Good Luck!

... and since this is pretty far removed from regular web junk ...

<tip type="Oracle date formatting" author="RonL.">

Oracle's "To_Char" function does a nice job of formatting dates as they
are selected from the database.  This can save you a lot of pain [and
quite a few lines of code] trying to convert dates into an odd format
within your application:

e.g.:
"SELECT TO_CHAR(AL1.SHIP_DATE, 'MON-YY') FROM table"

</tip>


RonL.
(Who hasn't looked at things at this level since we used to 'flip bits'
by banging two rocks together ...)    ;-)


-----Original Message-----
From: Syed Zeeshan Haider [mailto:szh at hotpop.com]

You are right. 0's and 1's are always there but our applications are
hiding them from us. This is like blood in a body. Blood is always there
but the body or skin is hiding it. We need a syringe to get the blood.
In the same way I want a software "syringe" which could reveal the 0's
and 1's in the files.







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