I turn 52 next week, and I have a confession to make: I feel like a complete failure at "adulting". Adulting, loosely defined, is that set of activities and behaviours which we judge to be characteristics of grown-ups. You can stop now and make your own list: what I'm going to suggest, speculatively, is that you…
In this blogpost we'll see how Erlang's Syntax already appeared on TAOCP years before the language was even created.
FBI acknowledged today that there “appears” to be an alternative way into Farook’s iPhone 5c – something that experts have been shouting for weeks now; in fact, we’ve been saying there are several viable methods. Before I get into which method I think is being used here, here are some possibilities of other viable…
This is the third post in the article series about Unix and Linux utilities that you should know about. In this post I will take you through the useful lsof tool. If netcat was called the Swiss Army Knife of Network Connections, then I'd call lsof the Swiss Army Knife of Unix debugging. Lsof follows Unix philosophy...
Dear “Dear GitHub”, Thanks for your recent open letter about GitHub’s shortcomings. As an occasional contributor to Chef, a large open source project itself , I completely empathize with your position. It totally sucks, for example, when an issue is DoSsed with a wall of unhelpful +1’s, especially by people who think…
*maybe The Plot Many of the online music distribution companies: CD Baby, DistroKid, OneRPM, MondoTunes, TuneCore etc., are either rejecting, or at least not entirely happy about accepting, audio content that has been released under a Creative Commons (CC) licence, and are not accepting it into their distribution with…
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
Today’s Washington Post has a story entitled “Johns Hopkins researchers poke a hole in Apple’s encryption”, which describes the results of some research my students and I have bee…
Another notch on the wall as we've reached the esteemed age of 18 years in the cURL project. 9 releases were shipped since our last birthday and we managed to fix no less than a total of 457 bugs in that time. On this single day in history... 20,000 persons will be visiting the web … Continue reading curl is 18 years…
If you are looking to synthesize the sound of a plucked string, there is an amazingly simple algorithm for doing so called the Karplus-Strong Algorithm. Give it a listen: KarplusStrong.wav Here it …
Today I will present how to implement in Python a simple yet effective algorithm for proceduraly generating 2D landscapes. It is called Midpoint Displacement (or Diamond-square algorithm,…
Note: This is a position piece, not a technical article. Hat tip to Jake Skelcy for requesting such a piece. Computers didn’t always have operating …
In Oracle’s early days Kathryn Gould was the founding VP of Marketing, working there from 1982 to 1984. When I heard that Larry Ellison was stepping down as Oracle’s CEO I asked Kathryn to think ab…
For the past few years I’ve followed the evolution of Rust with interest. Rust is a new systems programming language (like C or C++) with greater emphasis on...
PostgreSQL Talk
Podcasting is stuck between the open model of the past and the push for monetization in the future. Might there be a third way that actually benefits publishers?
(The photo above was taken at the Microsoft NYC office of three amazing young ...
Note: Thanks for all the great comments and feedback here and on Hacker News . Please keep them coming. I learned a ton and I am sure others will also.
This site will be the main location for information about the LLVM backend for Scala that is under development by Geoff Reedy.
An Obviously Critical Response to “Economic Inequality” by Paul Graham
I heard a story on the way to work this morning. This story starts out like many stories about software projects start out: with a weird specification.
Update! I tested more hash functions in a follow-up post. See More Hash Function Tests .
As part of an ongoing attempt to learn more about how a real-life Garbage Collector (GC) works (see part 1) and after being inspired by Julia Evans’ excellent post gzip + poetry = awesome I spent a some time writing a tool to enable a live visualisation of the .NET GC in action.
Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world?
