Andy Howlett and Mark Williamson in our group have been developing fantastic software. It can read the whole scientific literature and analyse it in minute detail. One of the things we are starting with is chemistry. ChemVisitor (part of AMI2) can read chemical structure diagrams and chemical names and work out what…
At CMU yesterday, I heard a story about how Yahoo Trip Planner has pretty much zero adoption. It has never taken off, though it remains online even today. Yahoo keeps it around because it's...
Can I drop a pacemaker 0day at DefCon that is capable of killing people? Computers now run our cars. It's now possible for a hacker to i...
Early results from my scan: there's about 3000 systems vulnerable just on port 80, just on the root "/" URL, without Host field. That doesn'...
With a bit of care and a cooperative compiler, we can zero a buffer — but that's not what we need. What we need to do is zero every location where sensitive data might be stored. Remember, the whole reason we had sensitive information in memory in the first place was so that we could use it; and that usage almost…
When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…
Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL: “The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of…
For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …
This entry is cross-posted on the datadog blog . If you want to learn more about Datadog or how we deal with the mountain of data we receive, check it out!
Let's transform an old airport site into a Traditional City.
You really can sell SaaS/software to large enterprises, despite your perceived inability to do so. Read on for how.
AWS is one of the most popular cloud computing platforms. It provides everything from object storage ( S3 ), elastically provisioned servers ( EC2 ), databases as a service ( RDS ), payment processing ( DevPay ), virtualized networking ( VPC and AWS Direct Connect ), content delivery networks ( CDN ), monitoring (…
I had summarized/discussed a couple papers ( Haystack , Memcache caching ) about Facebook's architecture before. Facebook uses simple arch...
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
When it gets too cold, you can always put on more layers of clothing. But when it gets too hot, after a while you can't take off any more. -- RMS This is GNU Em...
The workaday world of a modern programmer abounds with Unix tools, stitched together in myriad ways. While good tools integrate seamlessly with your own environment, bad ones will constantly frustrate your efforts. Good tools have a seemingly limitless application, constrained only by your own imagination. Bad tools…
At Dropbox, security is our highest priority. Find out how Dropbox secures your files and data, and why millions of people trust us with what matters most.
This tale begins and ends with a fellow named Bob Colesberry, who taught me as much as he could about filmmaking in the three or four years I was privileged to work with him. To those who knew Bob, it will provoke warm memories to say that he was not a language guy; he understood image, and story, and the delicate way…
We’re launching a crowdfunding campaign around our Novena open hardware computing platform. Originally, this started as a hobby project to build a computer just for me and xobs – something that we would use every day, easy to extend and to mod, our very own Swiss Army knife. I’ve posted here a couple of times about…
Update 2014/04/28: In case you missed the link, the web site for my book is gameprogrammingpatterns.com .
I have three big announcements to make today. The first is the official announcement of our next project. We’ve been quietly talking about it over the past few months, but today we want to tell you a bit more about it and finally reveal its name:
In order to give some structure to my ongoing investigation of git’s data structures, protocols and implementation I decided to re-implement git clone without using any of git’s plumbing commands or any of the existing git libraries. Along the way I tried to keep some implementation notes that should help to…
