In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Using a game use-case to motivate and explain PIDs
Progress report for the Spider-Man decompilation project
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
A compelling idea in the Transient UI package is the ability to craft interfaces where commands specific to a context can be discovered and used. Such contextual interfaces enable a user to...
In 1890 Giuseppe Peano discovered a square-filling curve , and a year later David Hilbert published his variation . In those days people did not waste readers’ attention with dribble – Peano explained it all on 3 pages, and Hilbert on just 2 pages, with a picture!
Developing ideas is the central aspect of many professions, including—but certainly not limited to—academic research and software development. It is my impression that we often consider ideas, or creativity in general, to be some magical binary property: you either have ideas and are a creative mastermind, or not. The…
in which two women are driven into madness by poorly documented cab signaling gear
A series of API flaws in McDelivery India made it possible to order food for a penny, hijack other people’s delivery orders, view user information, and more.
A free survey course on LLMs, taught by practitioners.
Last weekend I wanted to get some inspiration to write some TLA+ spec and I got my hands back on the paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events...
Okay, sorry for the clickbait. NixOS is not reproducible according to the Reproducible Builds definition. I keep reading people making this claim repeatedly on orange-site, even LWN.net made a similar claim when writing about Nix and Guix earlier this week.1 Along with their recently launched wiki. So, what is the…
Print good, not bad!
And a hateful ode to Object-Relational Mappers
Quick, inexpensive, made-to-order treatments
On Software Architecture, Programming Languages,…2024112 points63 commentsSoftware Engineering details
Given that events play such a central role in event-driven architecture, there’s an astonishing lack of agreement on what should be contained in an event. This may be rooted in the fact that, depending on your perspective, events fulfill different purposes.
This is directly inspired by Engineering for Slow Internet. I figured I’d give running with dogshit internet on my desktop and phone a go to see how poorly (or well!) specific applications behave. This is not an in-depth review of the behavior, but just my general impressions running for a few hours on 200kbit…
Good development practices for modern Python
learning a lot about sed, awk and other commands by making a spotify statusbar widget
It takes 67 bytes to make one black pixel. How does it work?
At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter to the goal, or the
PDF slides from a presentation by Paul Gerste at DEF CON 32. It turns out some databases have vulnerabilities in their binary protocols that can be exploited by carefully crafted …
