A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer
Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…
Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step
Is your web server using using gzip encoding ? Surprisingly, many are not. I just wrote a little script to fetch the 30 external links off n...
How to Write Fast Code
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
Tokyo Cabinet DB: Beyond Key-Value Store
It took Ruby some time to go from an infant research project by Matz to a language we've all come to know so well. Now, another Japanese developer ( Mikio Hirabayashi ) has all the potential to repeat this cycle with his new database project: Tokyo Cabinet . Developed and sponsored by Mixi Inc . (Japanese Facebook)…
Anatomy of a Program in Memory
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports
Back when I started programming computers came with circuit diagrams and listings of their firmware. The early machines I used like the Sha...
Arbitrary code execution via ldd utility
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
Design Lessons & Advice from Building Large Scale Distributed Systems at Google
Jeff Dean of Google did an excellent keynote talk at LADIS 2009 . Jeff’s talk is up at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/talks/dean-keynote-ladis2009.pdf and my notes follow:
The disappointingly ongoing success of WvDial
In Farmington, CT, in fact, the town my cat was named after. Oh yes. That's how much we love that place. Lukasz, Ashok, and Matt will be...
BSD For Linux Users
Your browser doesn't seem to support CSS , which this page uses for all styling. Don't be surprised if it looks kinda boring.
Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores
Please Note: this was written January 2009 - see the comments for updates and additional information. A lot has changed since I wrote this.
JWZ, on Garbage Collection
In a conversation at work about the architecture of a new product, someone made an assertion along the lines of, ``then we'd need to use a garbage collector, and that would hurt performance.''