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Microsoft confirms Exchange Year 2022 problem
[German]Exchange servers (on-premises) have had woldwide a Year 2022 problem since January 1 (00:00 UTC), because mails are no longer transported due to a “date error”. Meanwhile…
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How SQLite scales read concurrency
Understanding how the write-ahead log turns your scaling up to 11.
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Paxos
Use two consensus building phases to reach safe consensus even when nodes disconnect
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PostgreSQL 14 Internals book – Part II
I’m pleased to announce that Part II of the “ PostgreSQL 14 Internals ” book is available now. This part explores the purpose and design of the buffer cache and explains the need for write-ahead logging. Please download the book freely in PDF. There are three more parts to come, so stay tuned! Thanks to Matthew Daniel…
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The Merge
Learn about The Merge, when Ethereum Mainnet moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in September 2022, cutting its energy use by about 99.95%.
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Hot-code reloading on macOS/arm64 with Zig
Jakub Konka's weblog about programming, game theory, maths, and more.
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Dear Linux, Privileged Ports Must Die
Privileged ports were a security feature in the days of dumb terminals, in the age of the World Wide Web, they are a security vulnerability.
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Fedora 36: A brave new (DRM/KMS only) world
The upcoming Fedora release includes a change proposed by Peter Robinson and yours truly, that disables all the Frame Buffer Device (fbdev) drivers in the Linux kernel package. This means that star…
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Year 2038 problem is still alive and well
Largely because of a single code snippet used by many.
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Hardening macOS
Quick and easy guide for securing macOS systems, for both laymen and security enthusiasts. Last updated for Golden Gate.
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Redox OS 0.7.0
The Redox official website
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What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
(“This Week in Glean'' is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release ...
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LatencyFleX: A new approach to game latency reduction
This post describes the inner workings of LatencyFleX, which is a set of libraries that achieves latency reduction for video games, made as a vendor-agnostic alternative to Nvidia Reflex. A technology called Nvidia Reflex was released in 2020. It drastically improved system latency, by adjusting the pacing of the…
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Gzip exceptions, but only on hot or rainy days
A debugging story about a mysterious C# gzip decompression exception and what actually caused it, with investigation steps and lessons learned.
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Founding Uber SRE
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…
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How the clipboard works
Reading how copy-paste works from the Wayland specification is non-trivial unless you understand a lot of how desktop computing works and Wayland internal. It took me quite a while to figure it all out, though once you get there, it seems quite obvious.
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Your computer is a distributed system
Many have observed that today's computers are distributed systems implementing the abstraction of the shared-memory multiprocessor. The wording in the title is from the 2009 paper " Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? ". Some points from that and other sources:
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Raid-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS Goes Live
The Foundation sponsored feature reflows existing data to rewrite it onto a new arrangement of disks thereby freeing space at the end of the logical RAID-Z group The FreeBSD Foundation funded the project to ensure the completion and release of an easy-to-use and practical application. The project came in under budget…
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Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so
Unix counts time as seconds since the epoch. Seems straight forward. What could possibly go wrong?
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tolower() in bulk at speed
DNS servers often have to convert DNS names to their canonical lower case form. BIND has to do so a bit more than most because it tries to preserve the case of DNS names rather than canonicalizing them.
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Writing systemd units that stop gracefully before shutdown
systemd Shutdown Units
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We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
Since the foundation of the first public cloud companies in the early 2000s, they have radically transformed the landscape of the internet…
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Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
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The FreeBSD/Firecracker Platform
I started working on this on June 20th mainly out of curiosity: I had heard that Firecracker had PVH boot support (which was in fact mistaken!) and I knew that FreeBSD could boot in PVH mode from Xen, so I wondered just how hard it would be to get FreeBSD up and running. Not impossible, as it turned out, but a bit…
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WebVM: WASM virtual machine in browser with networking via Tailscale
WebVM, our virtual Linux environment running fully client-side in the browser, now supports networking via Tailscale.
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Performance Improvements in .NET 7
.NET 7 is fast. Really fast. This post deep-dives into hundreds of performance improvements that contributed to that reality.