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When web-based social networks started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social networks. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine…
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot services have become increasingly sophisticated and popular. These systems are now embedded in search engines, software development tools as well as office software. For many people, they have quickly become part of everyday…
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen…
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…
There's a corner of the Internet where people have been reclaiming their digital independence by hosting their own websites and promoting the idea of owning your own content. It's called the IndieWeb. The community has its own website , IRC channels, social media presence, etc. as well
Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs . It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that posted messages to various newsgroups using text…
Today, we will meet a spiky-haired nerd named Corey Dumm, who normally lives within Markdown code fences. We will get to know him a bit, smile with him when his fences hold and weep quietly when misfortune strikes.
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.
Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. In fact, I have been involved in software development for a little longer than 20 years. Although I had my…
Fizz Buzz is a counting game that has become oddly popular in the world of computer programming as a simple test of basic programming skills. The rules of the game are straightforward. Players say the numbers aloud in order beginning with one. Whenever a number is divisible by 3, they say 'Fizz' instead. If it is…
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.
One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. Here's a glimpse of the clarity it provides:
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does…
In this article, we will perform a series of hands-on experiments that demonstrate the various Emacs commands that can be used to sort text in different ways. There is sufficient documentation available for these commands in the Emacs and Elisp manuals. In this article, however, we will take a look at some concrete…
This post illustrates a key lemma that is used in proving the fundamental theorem of Galois theory (FTGT). Note that FTGT is not covered in this post. The focus of this post is on understanding and proving this lemma only. Here is the lemma from the book Galois Theory , 5th ed. by Stewart (2023):
While calculating certain round-trip times, here is a number I came across that is surprisingly memorable: It takes light 0.1337 seconds to travel the length of the Earth's equator via vacuum or air. Let me repeat that. It takes light "zero point leet" seconds to travel once around the equator.
Open a Unix or Linux terminal emulator. If you have Terminal.app on macOS, ensure that the "Use Option as Meta Key" option is enabled in its "Preferences" section. Now type foo bar baz followed by meta + b (i.e. alt + b or option + b on modern keyboards). In a typical desktop environment with a typical and modern…
On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…
I first encountered Jenkins in 2007 while contributing to the Apache Nutch project. It was called Hudson back then. The nightly builds for the project ran on Hudson at that time. I remember sifting through my emails and reviewing build result notifications to keep an eye on the patches that got merged into the trunk…
Is a million times a million a billion or is it a trillion ? For my entire childhood, it was a billion, only for me to grow up and realise, as an adult, that it had better be a trillion!
How many CSS selectors and declarations do we need to produce the Fizz Buzz sequence? Of course we could do this with no CSS at all simply by placing the entire sequence as text in the HTML body. So to make the problem precise as well as to keep it interesting, we require that all text that appears in the Fizz Buzz…
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…
MS-DOS as well as Windows 98 come with a debugger program named DEBUG.EXE that can be used to work with assembly language instructions and machine code. In MS-DOS version 6.22, this program is named DEBUG.EXE and it is typically present at C:\DOS\DEBUG.EXE . On Windows 98, this program is usually present at…
I recently had an engaging conversation with Alex ( @veqq ) from the Lobsters community about computing, mathematics and a range of related topics. Our conversation was later published on the community website as Lobsters Interview with Susam .