Booting to Rust
A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,129 posts.
A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…
How to create perfect secret messages that can be decoded using just your eyes.
LightTable, the famous innovative IDE (slash reactive work surface, as described by the author) recently got some pretty amazing additions: user defined plugins and user defined custom expressions.…
Google is going down the drain. That isn't to say they aren't fantastically successful. They are. I still use their products, mostly becau...
< Random thoughts of John Murray
In this article I want to explore what happens when a statically linked program gets executed on Linux. By statically linked I mean a program that does not require any shared objects to run, even the ubiquitous libc . In reality, most programs one encounters on Linux aren't statically linked, and do require one or…
I spend a lot of time working with monitoring solutions, and like to measure and track things. The information we collect from our apps tells us a lot about what’s going on. Who’s using it. How frequently they access it. Where they are from. How much time they spend accessing the app etc. And then…
As I was exiting Oxford Railway Station, I glanced at this screen showing the bus departure times. Notice anything odd about it? sigh Yet again someone has shoehorned Microsoft Windows into a product it is completely unsuitable for. Why does a screen which displays a fairly basic set of information need to be running…
This summer I had the opportunity to attend NodeConf and it was a fantastic experience. I really appreciated how every session was a hands-on coding session: I felt like I walked away knowing how to put a bunch of advice directly into practice.
I’ve been using tmux as my main terminal multiplexer for about 3 years now and have refined my configuration over time to fit my daily workflow. Which is usually a mix of writing code, chef recipes, remote login into different servers and various shell tasks. This is a flexible setup that doesn’t concentrate too much…
Microsoft has announced that CAs in its root program may not issue certs signed using the SHA-1 algorithm, starting just over two years from now, and that Windows will start refusing to recognise such certs starting just over 3 years from now.
I find Flash games on Facebook great fun. Not playing them, of course, that’s boring. As you may remember from my previous post, “ winning at Puzzle Adventures ”, I like to take a look into their guts and figure out how they work, and whether or not I can get insane scores with no effort.
This is a brilliant campaign, for technical and artistic reasons. What is the brand that it conveys? Heirloom quality .
Two days ago, Ashe Dryden published an article I’ve been desperately wishing someone would write for months: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community . It’s a detailed, well-researched take-down of the seemingly quite popular myth that open-source contributions are a useful way to screen candidates for…
If you had asked me whether or not it was possible to get a 2x speedup for my LazySorted project by adding a single line of code, I would have told you "No way, substantial speedups can really only come from algorithm changes." But surprisingly, I was able to do so by adding a single line using the __builtin_prefetch…
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.
Do-it-yourself EEG, EKG, and EMG Source: https://sites.google.com/site/chipstein/home This site features things related to my interests...
Deep learning has become something of a buzzword in recent years with the explosion of 'big data', 'data science', and their derivatives mentioned in the media. Justifiably, deep learning approaches have recently blown other state-of-the-art machine learning methods out of the water for standardized problems such as…
What is the most commonly used bytecode language in the world? Java (JVM Bytecode)? .NET (CLI)? Flash (AVM1/AVM2)? Nope. There’s a few that you use every day, simply by turning on your computer, or tablet, or even phone. You don’t even have to start an application or visit a webpage.
Disclaimer: This post is critical of open source software in the context of unpaid labor and the hiring requirements we've set up around it. It is not a criticism of open source software itself or the people who participate in it, both of which I and anyone who uses software benefits from. This is work that I - and…