JSON is important, damn near everything that we do as programmers or operators involves JSON at some point. JSON decoding is expensive, if your product talks JSON then performance of marshalling data in and out of JSON is important. This is a talk about designing an efficient replacement for encoding/json.Decoder .
I believe Python's ExitStack feature does not get the recognition it deserves. I think part of the reason for this is that its documentation is somewhere deep down in the (already obscure) contextlib module because formally ExitStack is just one of many available context managers for Python's with statement . But…
I love text layout, and have been working with it in one form or other for over 35 years. Yet, knowledge about it is quite arcane. I don’t believe there is a single place where it’s all properly written down. I have some explanation for that: while basic text layout is very important for UI, games, and other contexts…
Dissecting an SSL certificate
Brinch Hansen was one of the pioneers of concurrent programming and operating systems (kernels). In the 1960s, Brinch Hansen worked at the Danish computer company Regnecentralen, first in the compiler group headed by Peter Naur and Jørn Jensen, and, later, as the chief architect of the RC 4000 minicomputer and its…
One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is really dig into assembly and get into the weeds of how programs actually run. A rework of the asm macro has recently landed in nightly rust so it seemed like a good time.
When I argue that we should bring rents down by building more housing, one kind of response I've gotten is: Why are you trying to move more people into cities? There's lots of housing available in the US, it's just not in the currently trendy cities. Instead of moving people we should be moving jobs. Why couldn't…
You’ve heard of stuff like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make an account on one, and it only works there. You can’t send a DM to your friend on Twitter from Facebook Messenger. You can’t browse your friend’s Instagram feed from Twitter. Each one is closed off
There have been many metallurgists over the decades who have developed steels used in knives. Who has made the greatest contribution?
Ever wondered what that tree is you passed during your lockdown exercise walk? There's a website that tells you the answer.
Sneak peek at future of SaaS investing — Tiny Capital and Buffer
Of all the technologies against infectious disease, which mattered most? A data-driven approach
Lots of people focus on living an objectively longer life by eating well and exercising.
Update 2022: Web MiniDisc Pro can access NetMD devices through the browser and can also download protected files! If you have music on a collection of MiniDisc media and want to finally copy the data off onto modern media (or the cloud!), here are simple instructions for some different solutions:
I signed up for the excellent fastai MOOC recently, and one of the project ideas I had was the idea of adding bokehs to selfies using Deep learning. Most phones have a not so great selfie (front-side) camera and therefore this idea has some merits.
Leo Ostera — making computers do things
I switched away from Google Analytics to Plausible for a better user experience, privacy and performance
Your code might be perfect and never fail, but unfortunately the outside world is less reliable. Sometimes, other people's programs crash or freeze. Networks go down; printers catch on fire . Your code needs to be prepared for this: every time you read from the network, attempt to acquire an inter-process lock, or…
Date: 2020-01-27 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00012-clang-compiler-hacking.md
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
Memory leaks are like parasites of an application, they creep up into your systems unnoticed and don't cause any harm initially, but once leaks are strong
Recently on Twitter there was a maintainer of a Python project who had a couple of bugs filed against their project due to builds failing (this particular project doesn't provide wheels, only sdists). Eventually it came out that the project was using a pyproject.toml file because that's
Ever tried to send a push notification to your phone? How hard can it be? I was surprised when I tried to push a simple push notification without involving a third party. It's not just hard they have made it near impossible to send a simple push notification without subscribing to their service. Moreover it doesn't…
