The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
The Nintendo GameBoy is an exceptionally well-documented system, perfect for anybody who’d like to take a crack at emulation. Publicly-maintained resources like the Pan Docs make it both approachable and convenient to get an overview of the GameBoy’s address space layout, to understand the mechanics of hardware…
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
Apache Kafka has been the most popular open source event streaming system for many years and it continues to grow in popularity. Within the wider ecosystem there are other open source and source available competitors to Kafka such as Apache Pulsar, NATS Streaming, Redis Streams, RabbitMQ and more re
I used to run FreeBSD on older laptops – some more then a decade old – like my favorite ThinkPad W520 daily driver or ThinkPad X220 mobile companion. Today I will share with you my expe…
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were d
This blog post presents several techniques to make the binaries resulting from C or C++ compilation smaller with GCC (or Clang). Please note...
The Prime Video team published this story: Scaling up the audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%, and the internet piled…
This post is best described as a technology demonstration; it melds together web servers, plugins, WebAssembly, Go, Rust and ABIs. Here's what it shows:
Building evolvable software systems is a strategy, not a religion. And revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.
UPDATE: this post unexpectedly ended up on Hacker News and I received a lot of comments. The two most important points being made are (1) that Secure Boot on the RPi as …
Whenever you enter a URL into a system, it must be parsed and validated. It is a surprisingly challenging task: it may require hundreds of nanoseconds and possibly over a thousand cycles to parse a typical URL. We can use URL parsing as a reasonable benchmark of a system performance. Of course, no single measure ……
Apple has just released the first of its new Rapid Security Responses (RSRs) for macOS 13.3.1 Ventura. This is indicated as macOS Rapid Security Response 13.3.1 (a), and is just just over 300 MB to…
First: performance is tricky and bechmarking even more so. I will talk some numbers in this post but of course they are what I have measured for my specific tests on my machine. Your numbers for your test cases will be different. Over the last six months or so, curl has undergone a number of … Continue reading curl 8…
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
I like Sun Ray laptops. They make surprisingly useful thin clients. Here, going from right to left, I'm playing Quake on my Solaris UltraBoo...
There are many legitimate arguments to be had about performance, but there are also plain old excuses. It's time to end the excuses.
The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM file transfers over SSH using Qodem
F38 just released and seeing a bunch of people complain that TF2 dies on AMD or other platforms when lavapipe is installed. Who's at fault? ...
I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short): This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it. First I tried some low-spec cards like the Zotac…
Published: 18-09-2014 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
So for the past year and a half or so I've been using the fantastic Windows btrfs driver for easily sharing files between my Windows and Linux dualboot. The driver works great and basically fully supports everything that both operating systems could ever want (and let me tell you transparent compression and copy on…
When the JPEG folks were working on image compression, they didn't create a better or faster LZ. Instead they developed new approaches. I se...
The Pico Cray is a cluster of 8 Picos and a controller Pico. All Picos are connected in parallel by an I2C bus. The controller is designated by one GPIO being held low, the processor Pico’s addresses are allocated automatically. The Controller Pico has a 320x240px display connected by SPI and a couple of buttons. ……
Over the past years, the adoption of RocksDB increased dramatically. It became a standard for embeddable key-value stores.
Daniel P. Gross is a computer software and hardware professional based in Toronto.
