2011
Practices of Reliable Software Design
It should have good performance and be able to hold many entries. Reads are more common than writes. I know how I would do it already, but I’m curious about your approach.
2012
Reverse engineering and dismantling Kekz headphones
Close to a year ago, I stumbled upon the Kekz Headphones, which seemed like an interesting approach on the whole digital audio device space. They claimed to work without any internet connection and all of the content already on the headphones itself. They are On-Ear Headphones, which work by placing a small chip (I…
2013
Microui+fenster=Small GUI
Sometimes I just want to put pixels on a screen. I don’t want to think about SDL this or OpenGL that—I just want to draw my pixel buffer and be done.
2014
What happened to the US machine tool industry?
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization.
2015
Singapore Airlines Concorde
Sleek, supersonic, and short-lived. Here’s how Singapore Airlines’ Concorde service to London fell victim to politics, nationalistic jealousies, and soaring costs.
2016
The Curious Case of MD5
Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes electronic evidence with MD5, even though MD5 is badly broken. So, why are lawyers using broken, outdated technology? The answer involves the common law system, cultural isolation, and a single man named Don L. Lewis.
2017
Reformatting 100k Files at Google in 2011
Laurent Le Brun's blog
2018
2019
The immediate victims of a con would rather act as if the con never happened
Dorothy Bishop has the story about “a chemistry lab in CNRS-Université Sorbonne Paris Nord”:
2020
Sei pays out $2M bug bounty
In April 2024, I found and reported two critical bugs to Sei Network concerning their layer-1 blockchain. One of these issues impacted the chain’s availability, and the other its integrity. The Sei Foundation awarded me $75,000 and $2,000,000 respectively for these reports.
2021
SSH as a Sudo Replacement
A major caveat in tools like sudo and doas for that matter is that they rely on setuid binaries and privilege escalation in order to run commands as root.
2022
DOS game “F-15 Strike Eagle II” reverse engineering/reconstruction war stories
Misadventures in 16bit reverse engineering, programming WTFs and general rants about the IT industry.
2023
'Visual clutter' alters information flow in the brain
Too much stuff in the periphery of our vision can make it difficult to identify what we’re seeing. Yale researchers now know how that clutter affects the brain.
2024
2025
2026
Deno KV internals: building a database for the modern web
How we built a performant, scalable, ACID-compliant, JavaScript-native database on FoundationDB.
2027
The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
This investigation was surprising to me so I thought it would be interesting to share my findings and I hope you'll like it.
2028
Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
2029
The Nearest Neighbor Attack
In early February 2022, notably just ahead of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Volexity made a discovery that led to one of the most fascinating and complex incident investigations Volexity had ever worked. The investigation began when an alert from a custom detection signature Volexity had deployed at a customer site…
2030
Convolutions, Fast Fourier Transform and polynomials (2022)
You may remember from high school what a polynomial is. If so, you may also remember how to multiply two of them. But what if I told you that the method you were taught is slow as F? In this post we will connect polynomials with the Fourier Transform and convolutions, and show you how to multiply polynomials with…
2031
Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions , going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.
2032
Possibly all the ways to get loop-finding in graphs wrong
In my puzzle collection , there are many games in which you have to connect points together by edges, making a graph, and the puzzle rules say you must avoid making any loop in the graph. Examples are Net , Slant , and some configurations of Bridges (although not the default one). Loopy and Pearl also care about…
2033
Eden Abhez: The strangest hit songwriter
He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer
2034
Generating SVG for the prime knots
How I created a wall poster of knot diagrams.
2035
No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda
When working remotely, asking for help is often just a few keystrokes away. So it's tempting to "quickly" ask someone for support when you get stuck.
2036
Firefox search update
Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla. To continue developing features and products that resonate with our users, we’re adopting a new a
2037
AI is an impediment to learning web development
Some thoughts on AI and LLMs, based on being Head of Engineering for JumboCode , a club of 180 students at Tufts University that builds software for non-profits.
2038
Git Bash is my preferred Windows shell
Ongoing According to Repology , the latest packaged Git for Windows is version . To keep up with releases of Git for Windows, which includes Git Bash and the Mintty terminal emulator , see github.com/git-for-windows/git/releases or groups.google.com/g/git-for-windows .
2039
2040
Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
EDIT: Be warned that this post is angry. If you’re easily offended when someone goes on a rant, then leave now because I’m very unforgiving in several places below. The tone of my writing is unusually harsh, but the people whose work I’m talking about deserve it, and here’s why. Even though I had been working with…