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Software Engineering
2022
8

An M1 for Curl

A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development. Today it arrived at my home. An 8C CPU/16GB/1TB/8C GPU/1GbE model as per the sticker on the box. The m1 mac mini, still wrapped in plastic. Apple is not … Continue reading An m1 for…

16

SQL + M4 = Composable SQL

I often work with clients who have large “data lakes” or big star schema style enterprise databases with fact and dimension tables as far as the eye can see. Invariably said clients end up with a substantial SQL codebase composed of hundreds of independent queries with lots of overlap between them. I want to be able…

17

Saying “sup” with `net send`

When I was in junior high, my friends and I discovered that a Command Prompt command called net send was enabled on our school network. AIM and similar services were blocked, but if we wanted to send messages to each other we could open up the Command Prompt and type something like: net send lab2126-24 test and get an…

20

Extending Python with Rust

Sometimes a pure Python script can't just deliver the performance we need. When that's the case we have to resort to writing our logic in a "fast" compiled language like C or Rust and expose the function with through a Python module. This way we get the best of both worlds. Today I focus on how to use Rust for writing…

27

Win16 Retro Development

Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development.