2011
Notes on the Ivory Coast
I spent about ten days in the Ivory Coast, mostly in Abidjan, but also Yamoussoukro, Man, and Grand Bassam. (Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on offici…
2012
20 Years of Blogging on my own website
I missed it, but last month I had my 20-year blogging anniversary. Let's recap a bit about how it started and how it went.
2013
Beyond Ctrl-C: The dark corners of Unix signal handling
An introduction to signals: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2023.
2014
In praise of the hundred page idea
I prefer a lightweight nonfiction book to a detailed tome. I’m a dilettante of many interests, so my attention for any given topic is more likely to sustain 100 pages than 600. The sweet spot is longer than a longread internet article, but that doesn’t demand a months-long commitment: a 2-3 hour text.
2015
Upgrading a Toshiba NAS HDD Firmware on Linux
I reversed the firmware updater of my Toshiba HDD to be able to update it on Linux. The following commands should work, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK :
2016
HybridNeRF: Efficient Neural Rendering
Neural radiance fields provide state-of-the-art view synthesis quality but tend to be slow to render. One reason is that they make use of volume rendering, thus requiring many samples (and model queries) per ray at render time. Although this representation is flexible and easy to optimize, most real-world objects can…
2017
VPR: Nordic's First RISC-V Processor
VPR (pronounced “Viper”) is Nordic Semiconductor’s first RISC-V processor, landing in the new nRF54H and nRF54L lines of SoCs after their initial announcements in April and October of 2023 respectively. Readers of this blog are familiar with my long-running obsession interest in RISC-V (see my RISC-V Tips and RISC-V…
2018
Adventures in Probability
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business...
2019
Some OpenBSD features that aren't widely known
In this article, you will learn about some OpenBSD features you may not know about
2020
The Elements of APIs (2021)
Would you like the design a web API that is reliable and pleasant to use? I have some ideas for you.
2021
Flow Field Pathfinding
You may know me for my interactive tutorials. But before that, I was writing visual but non-interactive tutorials. In particular, there wasn’t a lot of information about A* on the web, so I decided to collect all my notes about pathfinding [1] together in one place in the 1990s. But then in the 2010s I started making…
2022
IOCCC Flight Simulator (2010)
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
2023
Stealing everything you've ever typed on your Windows Recall PC is now possible
Recall is a new feature in Windows 11 which takes a screenshot every few seconds, runs local device OCR on it and stores the resulting text in a SQLite database. …
2024
Clojure: Managing throughput with virtual threads
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
2025
Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard
Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.
2026
Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches (1994)
In addition to the basic materials, a number of safety-related items were needed to conduct this experiment. First, a suitable location for the experiment was required, it being expected that the kitchen was not the appropriate place for blow-torching SPTs. The author's driveway was chosen as a suitable site. Second…
2027
On Building Git for Lawyers
Building git for lawyers at Version Story (YC W21) — versionstory.com
2028
A concrete example of what goes wrong with Apple's docs
Projects and thoughts from James Porter
2029
Three questions to turn the table during technical interviews
Questions for when your interviewer says “Do you have any questions for me?”
2030
Building a deep learning rig
Blog post of Samsja
2031
Greenwich: an experiment in collaborative links
Greenwich, an experiment in collaborative curation
2032
Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart
Building software is hard. Oftentimes things that seem like they should be simple end up being way more complicated when you get into the details. ( OK, maybe this isn’t specific to software. )
2033
2034
The Nvidia Way
Tae Kim's terrific new book on the story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang
2035
Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is an LLM that can code well that runs on my Mac
There’s a whole lot of buzz around the new Qwen2.5-Coder Series of open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) LLM releases from Alibaba’s Qwen research team. On first impression it looks like …
2036
Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z
Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3" TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM.
2037
We've been put in the vibe space
Search+recs+open-ended text boxes
2038
Constructing a Four-Point Egg
For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I have been investigating elliptical and ovoid shapes. The Wikipedia article for Moss’s egg has a link to a tutorial on Euclidean Eggs by Freyja Hreinsdóttir which (amongst other things) describes how to construct the “four point egg”. I think it is a nicer shape than Moss’s…
2039
Every webpage deserves to be a place
Posted on Thursday 5 Sep 2024. 1,133 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.
2040
Initial CUDA Performance Lessons
I am somehow very late to learning CUDA. I didn’t even know until recently that CUDA is just C++ with a small amount of extra stuff. If I had known that there is so little friction to learnin…