bitchecker: Binary Irony

Inspired by this article on a website called The Daily TLA, I wrote a fully-fledged bit verifier, which checks not only the ordinal values of all the bits on your hard drive, but also their Quantumness (TM).

At the heart of the Highly Patentable Algorithm are the following functions, which return true if there’s something wrong with either the value or the quantum nature of a given bit, but false if the bit is okay:

// Return true if bit's numericity is wrong (bit is neither zero nor one).
int invalid_numericity(int bit)
{
    return bit != 0 && bit != 1;
}

// Return true if bit's quantum-ness is wrong (i.e., bit is both zero and
// one at the same time).
int invalid_quantumness(int bit)
{
    return bit == 0 && bit == 1;
}

Download and run bitchecker.exe, or have a look at the full C source code. It will check your entire hard drive, displaying the files it’s checking, and showing you any bit errors as it finds them.

Note that I haven’t ported it to Linux, because open source software tends to have fewer problems with Quantum Bit Integrity than proprietary software.

If you have non-technical friends, point them to this handy utility — it will help them identify the worst bit errors on their computers in no time!

19 February 2009 by Ben    4 comments

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