Initially I wanted to write articles on those two topics separately (mocking time and testing event loops), but during the process I realized that the things I want to talk about are too interrelated: when I need to mock time, it's usually to test some event loop with it, and when I test event loops, typically mocked…
I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago.
One of the first Japanese commercial features to directly address the fear of nuclear holocaust and the implications of the atom bomb, Record of a Living Being, which is better known as I Live in F…
In this post, we implement a garbage collector that frees memory no longer used by the executables our compiler creates.
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
The narrative can change, but we must overcome the disinformation and fear that has overtaken the United States.
Last week, I revisited Andrew Kensler's business card raytracer to make it run as fast as possible [1] . It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot in the process. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to revisit Andrew's follow up, the postcard sized pathtracer [2] . I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of that code…
What happens when we get or set an attribute of a Python object? This question is not as simple as it may seem at first. It is true that any...
Pathfinding is one of these topics that usualy baffles game developers. The A* algorithm in particular is poorly understood, and the general belief seems to be that it’s arcane magic.
Recently I was digging deeper into Raft , an important algorithm in the field of distributed systems. Raft is a consensus algorithm , meaning that it is designed to facilitate a set of computers agreeing on a state of the world (more on exactly how the state of the world is represented later), even when communications…
As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.
Better hiring leads to better work environments, less turnover, and more innovation and productivity. When you understand the limitations and pitfalls of the job interview, you improve your chances of hiring the best possible person for your needs.
The conventional wisdom for app subscriptions is to price affordably, like $1.99/month, and hopefully attract lots of subscribers at a low price. Then by having low pricing, fewer will reject the idea of subscriptions, and you’ll make up the difference with volume. But this is the wrong
Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…
In 2001, Microsoft's former CEO— Steve Ballmer— was quoted by the online tech news publication, The Register, saying: Linux is a
If you’re lurking on HackerNews, or are interesting in entrepreneurship, you might occasionally bump into something like this Starbucks coffee is $2.45 + taxes. $100/mo is less than a cup of coffee a day. And it’s very tempting — and somehow logical — to consider how much money we might spend without thinking too much…
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been …
"Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is: Who will have to deal with it—the user, the application developer, or the platform developer?" Larry Tesler's original law regarding complexity in software applications, and links to articles and pap
Organizations in the throes of cleaning up after a ransomware outbreak typically will change passwords for all user accounts that have access to any email systems, servers and desktop workstations within their network. But all too often, ransomware victims fail to grasp that the crooks behind these attacks can and…
Noting Google's continued support for Microformats as a metadata format.
The Intel 8086 processor was introduced in 1978, setting the course of modern computing. While the x86 processor family has supported 64-b...
I've long said, as a fan of the console and text mode, that the command line is ...
Taking a second look at the newly introduced mask registers, this time with the benefit of a SKX die shot from Fritzchens Fritz.
I have finished my cruise now, which was mostly holiday, but also some work. I did some training for my mates (mainly in C coding) and we di...
You’ve likely heard everyone at the office or online proclaim that “K8s has eaten everyone’s lunch!” or that “everything should be in a docker container!”. While there are advantages to the above methodologies; it’s very easy to have cargo-culted their adoption; especially for Kubernetes (K8s). I find the biggest…
This is Part 3 in a series of posts describing the Raft distributed consensus algorithm and its complete implementation in Go. Here is a list of posts in the series:
