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Looking inside a vintage Soviet TTL logic integrated circuit
This blog post examines a 1980s chip used in a Soyuz space clock. The microscope photo below shows the tiny silicon die inside the package, ...
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Initial Impressions of WSL 2
Soon the Windows May 2020 Update (20H1) will be released upon the world. This update will contain some nice UI improvements, but most relevant to me it allows Web Developers on Windows to upgrade to WSL 2. This is a significant milestone in the #davegoeswindows saga and it’s worth posting about what it means going…
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How I got the French Tech Visa to start my company in France
Three years ago, things were different. I didn’t know any French, I didn’t have a business, and I didn’t have a job.
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The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
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The End of the American Internet
For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and atti
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Why Can't I Reproduce Their Results?
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
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Why does musl make my Rust code so slow?
Software engineer specializing in query engines and distributed systems
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Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
I was reviewing some stats for Mailintel and was curious about what email service top apps use; being particularly interested in transactional email services. Is there a way I can go through my mai...
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How to Be Helpful Online
Helping people online is difficult. We expect technical questions and discussions, but everyone involved are just people, so it doesn’t always go smoothly.
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The core memory inside a Saturn V rocket's computer
The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) had a key role in the Apollo Moon mission, guiding and controlling the Saturn V rocket. Like most...
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Reflections on Software Performance
At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on…
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Regexes vs. Combinatorial Parsing (2019)
Recently, I’ve been working on a music app that needs to get a musical sequence (like a melody) from the server to the client. To do this, we use a format called ABC. (You can read about how ABC music notation works here .) We chose ABC because it’s more readable than MIDI, it’s pretty concise, and it’s a standard, so…
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Guitar Chord Voicings with Prolog
Prolog is a language that excels at defining and exploring relationships. Let’s take advantage of that and use Prolog to explore a few of the myriad of relationships that exist between chords and the guitar’s fretboard.
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A look at Chang’e 5 telemetry
Chang’e 5 is a Chinese lunar sample return mission. It was launched a few days ago on 2020-11-23 from Wenchang and is estimated to perform lunar orbit injection on Saturday. Since then, a number of Amateurs such as USA Satcom , Paul Marsh M0EYT , Scott Tilley VE7TIL , Fer IW1DTU and others have been receiving the…
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CERN at Home: Building a Particle Detector
What do you do when you’re stuck at home with a 16-year-old son during a pandemic lockdown? Well, the first answer is that you build a gaming PC. That was a good project with a lot of incentives to complete, but that also meant it was soon over. So, what next? I spotted a post about an outreach project from CERN to…
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Notes on Paxos
These are my notes after learning the Paxos algorithm. The primary goal here is to sharpen my own understanding of the algorithm, but maybe someone will find this explanation of Paxos useful! This post assumes fluency with mathematical notation.
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Tesla's market cap now accounts for roughly 1/3rd of the global automaker market
I wasn’t really paying attention, so maybe I’m the only one that hadn’t noticed, but Tesla’s market cap as of December 9th 2020 is a touch over 616 billion US dollars. That makes it kind of a big deal. In fact, it accounts for a full third of the global automaker market cap:
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Scammers registering date-based domain names
Yesterday, January 2nd, my wife received a billing alert from her phone provider. Luckily, she's not with EE - because it's a pretty convincing text. That domain name is specifically designed to include the day's date. If you're stood up on a crowded train, with your phone screen cracked, would you notice that a . is…
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Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
Since the Raspberry Pi 4 came out last year, we now have an excellent candidate to base the mini server on. The faster processor and option for up to 8GB of RAM opens up more possibilities for what you can do with it, including now being more than capable as a general Linux desktop system, so with all that in mind…
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Five lines I put in a blank .vimrc
TL;DR To make a default Vim installation more useful, type the following 5 lines into its .vimrc file:
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We are building a CLI first PaaS without a web frontend
At the start of this hectic year I have joined Micro, an open source microservices platform. The company was born out of a Go framework. We took the concepts...
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Thoughts on Voice Interfaces
I’ve been working on the Consumer Voice Products team in Mozilla for about a year now. My primary project has been Firefox Voice , but our mandate is larger.
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