Teenage Haskell
I’ve been inspired by the efforts of others (Chris Smith, Manuel Chakravarty) to try teaching children haskell as a first experience of programming. Haskell has a reputation of being a "…
The Hypercard Legacy
Apple’s forgotten software gem was a last breath for democratized computing. Can it be revived?
The Infamous Windows “Hello World” Program
A recent blog post by consultant John Cook reminded everybody about the infamous “Hello World” programs in the early chapters of the first five editions of Programming Windows:
The fundamental problem of programming language package management
Why are there so many goddamn package managers? They sprawl across both operating systems (apt, yum, pacman, Homebrew) as well as for programming languages (Bundler, Cabal, Composer, CPAN, CRAN, CTAN, EasyInstall, Go Get, Maven, npm, NuGet, OPAM, PEAR, pip, RubyGems, etc etc etc). “It is a truth universally…
The Disappearing Universe
Even at the speed of light, you’ll never reach these galaxies.
Say Hello to X64 Assembly Part 3
Stack Some time ago i started to write a series of posts about assembly x64 programming. It is third part and it will be about stack. The...
Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale
While JavaScript employs garbage collection for automatic memory management, it is not a substitute for effective memory management in applications. JavaScript applications suffer from the same memory related problems that native applications do, such as memory leaks and bloat, yet they must also deal with garbage…
GCC 4.9 Release Series – Changes, New Features, and Fixes
The mudflap run time checker has been removed. The mudflap options remain, but do nothing.
Metaprogramming for madmen
This post is part of the series “Debris: Opening the box”. Okay, previous posts from this series aimed to actually convey useful technical information: assuming you actually want to wri…
Heartbleed and Static Analysis
The issue with things like Frama-C is that they are by far the easiest to use if you start out a project using them, and you often don’t know which projects you retroactively wished you had done so until they are big and crufty.
Python, Pitch Shifting, and the Pianoputer
Record a sound, change its pitch 50 times and assign each new sound to a key of your computer keyboard. You get a Pianoputer ! A sound can be encoded …
How Big is Email?
Estimating the size of the world’s communications.
Building a simple VGA-adapter for an 8-bit self made computer
(Update 2014-10-30: Due to some interest in this project, I added schematics for the GALs)
Snowden-haters are on the wrong side of history
In the autumn on 1963, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, worried at Martin Luther King’s growing influence, began tapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms. They hoped to discredit him by gai…
Results of the SQL Performance Quiz
SQL indexing: 60% don’t know how to get it right
Stripe adds multiple account support
Create separate Stripe accounts for each independent business you own.