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Microservices and the First Law of Distributed Objects
In P of EAA I said "don't distribute your objects". Does this advice contradict my interest in Microservices?
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Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching
We’ve been lied to. They keep showing us charts where CPU speed goes up and up every year as if Moore’s Law isn’t just a historical observation but some kind of divine right. Without lifting a finger, we software folks watch our programs magically accelerate just by virtue of new hardware.
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Algorithmic complexity attacks and libc qsort()
An algorithmic complexity attack is a denial of service attack that triggers worst case behaviour in code that is otherwise expected to perform well. The canonical example would be the widely published attacks against hash table implementations , where carefully crafted inputs made snappy \(O(1)\) operations…
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The Linux Security Circus: On GUI isolation
There certainly is one thing that most Linux users don't realize about their Linux systems... this is the lack of GUI-level isolation, and ...
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Visualising the Go garbage collector
gcvis is a simple way of visualising the operation of the garbage collector within a Go process. Here is a screenshot of it in operation. The rest of this article explores how gcvis works and how to interpret its results.
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Why threads can't fork
There is an interesting thread on the Go issue tracker about daemonizing processes. Most of the thread is not about daemonizing processes though, but more about why Go has no Fork() function which you can call directly in your code. The first time I read through it I was wondering and saying to myself: “Yeah, why is…
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Terminals Are Weird
Terminals 1 are quite weird. Most modern users assume that they can just have straightfoward keybindings. Right? To bind Ctrl+i to something, they listen for Ctrl+i in their application. If they want to bind Ctrl+Shift+i to something different, they certainly can, they just listen for Ctrl+Shift+i as well. Naturally…
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Bitcoin mining the hard way: the algorithms, protocols, and bytes
This article explains Bitcoin mining in details, right down to the hex data and network traffic. If you've ever wondered what really happe...
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Fun with Shellshock
This is great work. Though I must confess I’m more interested (and far more uneasy) about the other side of the coin — people developing projects like these involving machine learning to find and exploit the vulnerabilities in a fully automated fashion. This is related to, but not quite the same as, attempts at…
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Running ASP.NET vNext on OS X and Linux
So what is ASP.NET vNext ? Microsoft have recently released a preview of the next iteration of their ASP.NET platform. I’m not going to go into …
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Programming Modern Systems Like It Was 1984
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Recovering deleted files using only grep
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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Parallelism in one line
A Better Model for Day to Day Threading Tasks
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How Not to Write a Signal Handler
This website is for sale! 741mhz.com is your first and best source for information about 741mhz. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
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ZFS Gotchas
Things Nobody Told You About ZFS Yes, it's back. You may also notice it is now hosted on my Blogger page - just don't have time to deal w...
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Some small suggestions for the Intel instruction set
Programmers trying to make crypto run fast often say things like "Why can't the CPU designer just add a 128-bit multiplication instruction?" Sometimes these questions turn into academic papers analyzing the cycle counts that would be obtained from various instruction-set extensions. What's missing from most of these…
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Things that make Go fast
Anthony Starks has remixed my original Google Present based slides using his fantastic Deck presentation tool. You can check out his remix over on his blog, mindchunk.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/remixing-with-deck .
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Apache Spark: The Next Big Data Thing?
Apache Spark is generating quite some buzz right now. Databricks, the company founded to support Spark raised $14M from Andreessen Horowitz, Cloudera has decided to fully support Spark, and others chime in that it's the next big thing. So I thought it's high time I took a look to get an understanding what the whole…
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Linux's fsync() woes are getting some attention
In two weeks, I'm headed to LSF/MM and the Linux Collaboration Summit , by invitation of some Linux kernel hackers, to discuss how the Linu...
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Creating a Bare Bones Bootloader
Upon hearing the word 'bootloader', many people cower in fear. It seems like a scary low-level thing that's very easy to mess up. To dispel some of this fear, I'm going to walk through making a super simple bootloader/OS, assuming only a basic level of familiarity with assembly language and how computers work.
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Co-routines as an alternative to state machines (2009)
When you have to traverse some sort of a nested data structure (say, a binary tree), one approach is to create a stack that remembers where in the tree you are. Another, much more elegant approach, is to write the function recursively. A recursive function employs the machine stack used to implicitly implement…
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Counting bytes fast
An apparently trivial and uninteresting task nonetheless received some special optimization care within FSE : counting the bytes (or 2-...
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Interactive Programming in C
I’m a huge fan of interactive programming (see: JavaScript , Java , Lisp , Clojure ). That is, modifying and extending a program while it’s running. For certain kinds of non-batch applications, it takes much of the tedium out of testing and tweaking during development. Until last week I didn’t know how to apply…
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We Need Hardware Traps for Integer Overflow
How many problem domains require wrapping signed integers or non-wrapping unsigned integers? Can the current undefined case be replaced with a trap and everything else be left intact?