In a keynote at Strange Loop, the author shares their frustration with learning complicated topics and their passion for making them easier. They recount their struggles with understanding DNS and how they eventually figured it out. However, they noticed that their friends were still facing the same difficulties and became determined to simplify complex subjects. […]
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Volatile qualifier is a tool in C/C++ that can be easily misused but can be effective in a specific set of circumstances. This article explains the history of volatile and provides examples of how not to use it, while also highlighting how to use it effectively to create correct systems software. The C program is […]
In a recent cosmology discussion group, a paper by Jean-Luc Lehners and Jerome Quintin titled “A small Universe” was explored. The prevailing assumption in many cosmological models is that the universe is infinite or incredibly vast. However, the authors argue that the universe could actually be relatively small, not much larger than its currently observed […]
TAP, the Test Anything Protocol, is a straightforward way for testing modules to communicate with each other. It separates the reporting of errors from the presentation of the reports, helping to reduce noise and focus on important information. TAP is widely used in the testing community for its ability to streamline the testing process. It […]
We have made several updates and improvements to ActiveSupport in this release. Some of the notable changes include fixing an issue with AS::MessagePack and ENV[“RAILS_MAX_THREADS”], adding a public API for broadcasting logs, fixing Range#overlap? to account for empty ranges in Ruby < 3.3, adding bigdecimal as an Active Support dependency for Ruby 3.4, and adding […]
In this web content, the author shares their experience with a failing drive and the theory of cooling it down to increase reliability. They decided to test the theory on their Powerbook by placing it in the fridge for ten minutes, which successfully allowed the drive to boot. However, when copying large files, the drive […]
Former Samsung employee Patrick Chang testified about the challenges faced by Branch Metrics due to Samsung’s default agreements with Google. Branch Metrics, founded by Alex Austin, struggled to launch an unrestricted version of its app-search software. Chang, who played a leading role in Samsung’s investment in Branch, advocated for a “carve-out” in Samsung’s agreement with […]
OpenPubKey is a new scheme introduced by Docker and BastionZero as a Linux Foundation project. It is similar to Sigstore but eliminates the centralized components of Transparency Log and Certificate Authority. OpenPubKey simplifies the process of signing and verifying artifacts but introduces certain tradeoffs. One tradeoff is that relying directly on OIDC signing keys for […]
In this post, the author explores the implementation of Unix pipes in Linux by optimizing a test program. The goal is to improve the program’s performance, which initially has a throughput of around 3.5GiB/s, and eventually match the speed of a highly optimized FizzBuzz program that pushes output to a pipe at a rate of […]
In 1997, Dr. Jerry Solinas generated the seeds for the NIST elliptic curves used in modern cryptography by hashing English sentences. However, Dr. Solinas passed away in 2023, leaving behind a cryptographic mystery. To crack these hashes and solve the mystery, a group of contributors is offering a bounty of $8,192 to $12,288. If the […]