The most stupid C bug ever
I have been programming for a number of years already. I have seen others introduce bugs, and I have also introduced (and solved!) many bugs while coding. Off-by-one, buffer-overflow, treating pointers as pointees, different behaviors or the same function (this is specially true for cross-platform applications), race…
Low-level x86 code compression for 64k intros
This is about the “secret ingredient” in my EXE packer kkrunchy, which was used in our (Farbrausch) 64k intros starting from “fr-030: Candytron”, and also in a lot of other …
jwz: Apple recently broke Ctrl-Y
Ever since MacOS 10.0 was released, text fields have supported Emacs bindings for the single-character Control commands, showing that there were people inside Apple (and, presumably, NeXT) who were right-thinking and sensible. But some time late in the 10.6 release cycle, and continuing into 10.7.1, the binding for…
Smaller than Bloom filters
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
Why linux doesn't have a "wheel" group
The wheel group is, perhaps, not widely used today, or is seen as “archaic” and irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. The wheel group is a group which limits the number o…
Stack Exchange’s Architecture in Bullet Points
I thought as a break form the normal prose some of our readers might enjoy a short overview of the Stack Exchange Network (including Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User) from a technical view:
Azul launches pauseless gc jvm for unmodified linux
Experience Java like never before with Azul Prime. Turbocharge Java performance with a JVM that starts fast and stays fast, with less infrastructure.
FreeBSD 8.2 released
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:
On HTTP Load Testing
A lot of people seem to be talking about and performing load tests on HTTP servers, perhaps because there’s a lot more choice of servers these days.
The next operating system: building an OS for hundreds, thousands of cores
Operating systems for multicore chips will need more information about their own performance — and more resources for addressing whatever problems arise.
The Backblaze Blog
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
He Who Controls the Bootloader
The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…
JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.