Order To Chaos
Final thought after a very long day. I have heard many people chanting the mantra “Order To Chaos” , I wonder if they realize the implict literary meaning of this phrase? Sure, you can bring “order to chaos” by cleaning up your desk, or witness the other meaning any time the traffic lights start blinking [...]
Why Every CS Student Should Freelance
Kalyan’s tweet on freelancing reminded me of some recent conversations that I’ve had with several C/S students who recently completed their thesis. The conversation basically boils down to “Why should I spend time on freelance assignments when I don’t really need the money?“ I can only suggest that C/S students think of freelance assignments as [...]
On Airplanes And Anti Lock Brakes
I was just reading about some of the speculation into why the Air France Airbus crashed. Investigators are beginning to suspect total and complete malfunction of the on board computers that automatically adjust for things like turbulence. Apparently, the pilots may have believed that the craft was flying so slowly that it was about to [...]
Some things just have to be compiled
I have a random problem, in particular random numbers. I am working on a re-write of SRCE to fortify things a bit .. and get rid of a lot of ugly code that was introduced when I wasn’t actively managing patches. Humans are the best source of entropy to get random numbers.. the amount of [...]
Mad scientist meets lvm2
Sometimes we’re fortunate enough to really enjoy what we’re being paid to do. That’s been the case for me this week while working on a replacement for the ‘lvm’ command for control panels and other underprivileged things to use. Most people who write programs that must operate on logical volumes do it in a very [...]
A better approach to distributed IPC
There are two golden rules to follow when packaging your own OS distribution: Don’t mangle upstream code Make it work while observing rule #1 When your making a grid OS, its hard not to break those rules. Lets take for instance a scenario where you have two computers and need to live migrate a virtual [...]
Crazy signal stuff
I recently wrote a program that set up signal handlers as the first order of business. Not just SIGHUP and SIGINT, but also floating point exceptions, segmentation faults, double frees, etc. Then I started logging (after establishing the handlers via sigaction()). In my logging routine, there is a shared static buffer s, which gets allocated [...]
The “Drop a quarter” campaign
We’re currently flooded with various campaigns that promise, at best, speculative results. Here is a campaign that you can join with no fear, I’m starting it. Drop a quarter! Why, oh why would you drop a quarter? The answer is easy, someone will find your quarter and their day will be supercharged. If you like, [...]
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