Tagged pointers are an interesting technology used to increase performance and reduce memory usage. As of OS X 10.10, NSString got the tagged pointer treatment, and today I'm going to take a look at how it works, a topic suggested by Ken Ferry.
Back in June, I was doing some analysis on a Windows driver and discovered that the INIT section had the read, write, and executable characteristics flags set. Windows executables (drivers included…
A mid-depth cap with classic style for any occasion, this Nike Club Cap comes in smooth cotton twill that's been softly washed for casual, daily comfort. Soft and unstructured, the precurved bill makes for easy styling, and the adjustable back-strap lets you find the right fit. Nike Hat Size 6 1/2 6 5/8 6 3/4 6 7/8 7…
An explanation of Variance, Covariance and Correlation in rigorous yet clear terms providing a more general and intuitive look at these essential concepts.
Introduction A Markov Chain is a set of transitions from one state to the next; Such that the transition from the current state to the next depends only on the current state, the previous and future states do not effect the probability of the transition. A transitions independence from future and past sates is called…
Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?
Greedy algorithms are among the simplest and most intuitive algorithms known to humans. Their name essentially gives their description: do the thing that looks best right now, and repeat until nothing looks good anymore or you’re forced to stop. Some of the best situations in computer science are also when greedy…
The above is the Hello World program for Java, arguably one of the most popular programming languages. Encapsulated in the above three lines are several different concepts ranging from static functions to return types to stdout and to the entirety of object oriented programming in general.
Yesterday, I was looking for some help trying to have a clean way to roll back database transactions at the end of a test in a Python TestC...
a blog post by @azwinkau
I always use the names of economists for my machines' hostnames. keynes, friedman, marx, fisher, ricardo. So every so often the strange economics of open-source software hits me. Today it is almost taken for granted that the source code for most software is freely available. This is a profound and remarkable change…
In my February 23 blog post, I gave a brief overview of how search engines have evolved over the years and how today’s search engines learn from past searches to anticipate which results will be mo…
Lots of exciting new things were announced at the latest Apple WWDC this week, but hidden amongst the big announcements was an extension of something that's been bothering me for a while.
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
This piece is about how to build a modern web application with Common Lisp in the backend, from scratch.
Apparently MTV broadcasts a show called "16 and Pregnant," in which each show tracks a pregnant teen-ager through the final months of pregna...
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
I find that I operate in one of two modes when I’m writing software. I’m either approaching a project as a quick hack or as developing software . As much as anything else, this affects how I approach the project and what kinds of results that I get.
Simulated annealing is a method for finding a good (not necessarily perfect) solution to an optimization problem. If you're in a situation where you want to maximize or minimize something, your problem can likely be tackled with simulated annealing.
I did it. It wasn't easy, but I did it. My C Compiler can compile itself. Even though it still has holes in functionality and obvious bug...
UNIX (well, POSIX) signals are probably one of the worst parts of the UNIX API, and that’s a relatively high bar. A signal can be sent to your program at any point when it’s running, and you have to deal with it somehow. Traditionally, there are three ways …
I've been noticing more and more lately that we have a plethora of libraries and programs written for Go, which don't work on one platform o...
In February I open-sourced a library called Specter , and in my own work it has become by far my m...
