2011
'Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe Meets the Koch Brothers
If you haven't seen it, my name appeared a few weeks ago in a headline next to Koch Industries
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,307 posts.
2012
2013
Mainframes as a lifestyle choice
I started working at IBM last year on mainframe compilers with the goal of making mainframes feel a little more modern. Hence, a lot of my time is spent in z/OS . The interface I use to z/OS is Unix System Services (USS, a.k.a. the command line), but if I were up for bucking the whole moderm thing, I could break out…
2014
What is Symbolic Computation?
I've been reading a lot of Lisp books lately, some more advanced than others. All of the introductory books I've seen cover the idea of symbolic computation, but most of them breeze past it with just a few pages about "symbols" and "quoting". For many programmers coming from non-Lisp languages these are new, foreign…
2015
Become a 10x Programmer by Managing Your Time Better
Become aware of bad habits that make you less productive and learn how to break them with proper time management skills.
2016
Composability: From Callbacks to Categories in ES6
Exploring Functional Programming ideas like Monads and Kleisli Category in JavaScript. Starting from an alternative solution to Promises.
2017
Cheap BlueTooth Buttons and Linux
Selfie sticks - like most modern inventions - are utter tosh. But they've rapidly brought down the price of Bluetooth buttons. So who am I to complain? Let's take the venerable AB Shutter 3 - You can find it on Amazon for around £2 including postage - or around $2 on AliExpress. Frankly, that's stupidly cheap. OK…
2018
Node.js debugging with Chrome DevTools in parallel with browser JS
Node.js debugging with Chrome DevTools in parallel with browser JavaScript
2019
Perlin noise
I used Perlin noise for the fog effect and title screen in Under Construction. I tweeted about my efforts to speed it up, and several people replied either confused about how Perlin noise works or not clear on what it actually is. I admit I only (somewhat) understand Perlin noise in the first place because I’ve…
2020
Diving into Other People's Code
This post will walk you through an exercise in diving into someone else's code. The goal will be to make an arbitrary change to the code of the Spyder Python IDE , a project I have never touched before in my life, and learn just enough about it to accomplish what I want without getting bogged down. You will learn how…
2021
Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011)
This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer…
2022
PlayStation Vita Exploit Reverse Engineering Challenge
We released HENkaku a week ago and were blown away by the reception. There has been over 25k unique installs and every day new homebrew are being announced. This is all thanks to those who contributed to the SDK project back when Rejuvenate was announced. Without a working toolchain for developers and a couple of…
2023
Full-Stack Redux Tutorial
Tero Parviainen
2024
The Bear Essentials: Developing a Commodore 64 Game, Part 1 (2015)
Part One: Initialising and moving a sprite I find it absolutely incredible that the Commodore 64 development scene is alive and well. Thanks to companies like Psytronik there is still a healthy st…
2025
Developers don't build cheaper housing because we make it illegal (2014)
One of the protests against allowing more housing construction is that supply and demand has failed – that developers only want to build luxury units or that the global elite will invariably buy al…
2026
London vs San Francisco – back and forth
This site is mainly a storage cupboard for things I've tinkered with along the way, such as:
2027
2028
2029
2030
2031
How to run C programs on the BeagleBone's PRU microcontroller
This article describes how to write C programs for the BeagleBone's microcontrollers. The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card...
2032
The Busy Beaver Game
This month, a bunch of ‘logic hackers’ have been seeking to determine the precise boundary between the knowable and the unknowable. The challenge has been around for a long time. But on…
2033
Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
Writing Hello World on a homebrew CPU
2034
Fewer Than 1000 Brits Googled “What Is the EU?” After Referendum
I’ve never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating. The media, pundits, and academics have desperately tried to paint the Brexit voters as ignorant, backwoods troglodytes who only voted to leave the EU because they don’t like brown people.
2035
Small, Freestanding Windows Executables
Recently I’ve been experimenting with freestanding C programs on Windows. Freestanding refers to programs that don’t link, either statically or dynamically, against a standard library (i.e. libc). This is typical for operating systems and similar, bare metal situations . Normally a C compiler can make assumptions…
2036
Zero-allocation Trie Traversal
As part of a demonstration in an upcoming article , I wrote a simple trie implementation. A trie is a search tree where the keys are a sequence of symbols (i.e. strings). Strings with a common prefix share an initial path down the trie, and the keys themselves are stored implicitly by the structure of the trie. It’s…
2037
2038
How becoming a pilot made me a better programmer
Two years ago I trained for my private pilot license over the course of nine months. Besides be...
2039
Computing primes with CSS
I’ve been working on a redesign of this site, so doing more CSS, finally internalizing Sass, etc. During my reading, the nth-child pseudo-class caught my eye.
2040
Where are you in your company's layoff list?
Where are you in your company's layoff list? Every company has one, even if it's just a vague idea in the mind of the CEO. By looking a...