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Large-format camera movements (2020)
For less than a cup of coffee, a downloadable 29-page reference guide to Large Format Camera Movements, keep it on file or conveniently on your phone
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
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This year in LLVM
Towards the end of last year, I switched from working on PHP at JetBrains, to working on LLVM at Red Hat. While it was already under discussion beforehand, this catalyzed the creation of the PHP foundation , which now pays multiple people to work on PHP. Special thanks for this go to Roman Pronskiy, who did most of…
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The recent Bank of Japan meeting and its implications for markets
Listen now | The Bank of Japan sudden change of heart has important global implications
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Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python
A walkthrough of 46 lines of code that render a 3D ASCII donut using signed distance functions.
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People took some potassium and lost some weight
In November 2021, we finished our series A Chemical Hunger, where we argue that the obesity epidemic is the result of environmental contaminants, and that one of those contaminants might be lithium…
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Deep work. Essentialism in asynchronous culture
Deep work Nowadays, we are getting accustomed to working in a continuously interrupting environment. Smartphone notifications, hundreds of e-mails, open spaces, and meetings slicing our workday. We are feeling busy, and overworked, but are we more productive? If I am a salesman or project coordinator that way of…
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There oughta be a Game Boy capture cartridge
I present to you: The GB Interceptor. It is an adapter that goes between an unmodified Game Boy and the cartridge and offers a video stream of the game via USB. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. The video above should give you a good overview of what it does, how it works and what its limitations are…
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Upgrading my old Chumby 8 Linux kernel
As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a good chunk of my spare time over the past 6 months working on a project I’ve been thinking about for over a decade. I bought a Chumby 8 in 2011. It’s an 8″ touchscreen device powered by the Marvell PXA166 processor. It is essentially a souped-up digital picture frame with…
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Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip
“ Secure Element ” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and…
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Boring Python: Code quality
This is the second in a series of posts I intend to write about how to build, deploy, and manage …
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“Laws” of software estimation for complex work (2021)
Wrong estimates aren’t your fault, but they are definitely your problem
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Implementing ‘strlen’ using SVE
In C, the length of a string in marked by a 0 byte at the end of the string. Thus to determine the length of the string, one must scan it, looking for the 0 byte. Recent ARM processors have a powerful instruction set (SVE) that is well suited for such problems. It allows you … Continue reading Implementing ‘strlen’…
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Astronomical Calculations for Hard SF in Common Lisp
Hard SF worldbuilding with the HYG database, Dijkstra's algorithm, and Lisp.
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GCC now includes Modula-2 and Rust. Do they work on OpenBSD?
Two new language frontends have been added to GCC : Modula-2 and Rust . I think this is great news on both accounts: having a Wirth language in GCC fills my childhood heart with joy (though I do wish GNU Pascal can one day be revived and mainlined, as Pascal was the first non- BASIC language I learned). And Rust…
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Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
This paper derives from a short, time-bound, review of the literature, which sought to investigate the question “Did Insurance Fire Brigades let uninsured buildings burn?”. The question is set in the context of property fire insurance in London, from 1680. The situation was possibly comparable with other large British…
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A few new things in Emacs 29
Everybody with an Emacs blogs raves about Emacs 29 these days. Things like Eglot, tree-sitter, SQL support and the like. Well, this is all nice – more than nice, brilliant! – but let’s not forget a few minor advances which are coming with Emacs 29. Let me mention a few things that I especially like.
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Structuring Clojure applications
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development
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Special Relativity and Middle-Earth
This post is an unofficial sequel to one of my first blog posts from 2007, which was entitled “Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider”. One of the oldest and most famous allegories is Plato&…
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How many computers are in your computer? (2021)
Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.
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Ubuntu Snap update spoiled my World Cup Final
Goodbye Ubuntu, Goodbye Snaps I missed two goals in the World Cup Finals because of this. It’s not the first time Snap has been a problem, but it’s most definitely the last straw. What happened? I was happily watching the second half of the Fifa World Cup Final, using “ShowMax” – a South African paid … Continue…
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Why fusion will never happen (2012)
I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. But fusion as a power source is n…
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GNU/Linux shell related internals
What every SRE should know about GNU/Linux shell related internals: file descriptors, pipes, terminals, user sessions, process groups and daemons # Last updated: Oct 2025 Contents File descriptor and open file description Pipes Process groups, jobs and sessions Terminals and pseudoterminals Despite the era of…
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The keyboard controller
One of the more common arguments you hear in contemporary computer security circles is about hardware trust and embedded controllers. Technologies like Intel ME, the ARM Secure Element, TPMs, etc, remind us that the architecture of the modern computer is complex and not entirely under our control. A typical modern…
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Let's Encrypt now supports ACME-CAA: closing the DV loophole
Today, Let's Encrypt announced that they are enabling an extension to DNS CAA records known as ACME-CAA ( RFC 8657 ). This came as a surprise to me, but a very pleasant one, since I wrote the ACME-CAA specification back in 2016 with Let's Encrypt in mind, and it was finally published as RFC 8657 back in 2019. To my…
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Quite OK Image is now my favorite asset format
The Quite OK Image (QOI) format was announced late last year and finalized into a specification a month later. Initially dismissive, a revisit has shifted my opinion to impressed. The format hits a sweet spot in the trade-off space between complexity, speed, and compression ratio. Also considering its alpha channel…
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SQLite internals: How the most-used database works
Explore SQLite Internals: How The World's Most Used Database Works by Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer. Deep dive into database internals, systems engineering, and advanced Python.
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Copilot Internals
Hacky repo to see what the Copilot extension sends to the server
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Get root on macOS 13.0.1 the macOS Dirty Cow bug
Get root on macOS 13.0.1 with CVE-2022-46689 (macOS equivalent of the Dirty Cow bug), using the testcase extracted from Apple’s XNU source.