Books update

Why I write

Zeller’s congruence

I shall toil at a reduced volume

Over the last nine years I have written 300,000 words for this blog on the topics which are important to me. I am not certain that I have much left to say.

I can keep revisiting these topics for years, each time adding a couple more years of wisdom and improvements to my writing skills to present my arguments more effectively. However, I am starting to feel diminishing returns from my writing. It does not seem like my words are connecting with readers anymore. And, though the returns on my work seem to be diminishing, the costs are not. Each new article spurs less discussion than the...

Codegen in Hare v2

I spoke about code generation in Hare back in May when I wrote a tool for generating ioctl numbers. I wrote another code generator over the past few weeks, and it seems like a good time to revisit the topic on my blog to showcase another approach, and the improvements we’ve made for this use-case.

In this case, I wanted to generate code to implement IPC (inter-process communication) interfaces for my operating system. I have designed a DSL for describing these interfaces — you can read the grammar here. This calls for a parser, which is another interesting topic for Hare, but I’ll set that aside for...

The Book Of CP-System, paper version

industry buzzwords

I picked up a thread on lobste.rs about this, thinking it might be a historical note about Microsoft Bob, but of course it wasn't:
https://bob-cd.github.io
Unfortunately there are so many unexplained buzzwords on that site that I haven't the foggiest idea what it's talking about or whether this new "bob" thing is anything worth looking into.
"CI"? "CD"?
Seems to have something to do with "DevOps", whatever that is.
The site quotes Einstein on the front page:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
It seems to me they've gone below that lower limit, and could do with a little more complication in...

In praise of Plan 9

Plan 9 is an operating system designed by Bell Labs. It’s the OS they wrote after Unix, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the most interesting operating system that you’ve never heard of, and, in my opinion, the best operating system design to date. Even if you haven’t heard of Plan 9, the designers of whatever OS you do use have heard of it, and have incorporated some of its ideas into your OS.

Plan 9 is a research operating system, and exists to answer questions about ideas in OS design. As such, the Plan 9 experience is in essence an exploration of the interesting ideas it...

Microsoft GitHub is being sued for stealing your code

Good news, everyone:
Quote:Today, we’ve filed a class-action law­suit in US fed­eral court in San Fran­cisco, CA on behalf of a pro­posed class of pos­si­bly mil­lions of GitHub users. (...) By train­ing their AI sys­tems on pub­lic GitHub repos­i­to­ries (though based on their pub­lic state­ments, pos­si­bly much more) we con­tend that the defen­dants have vio­lated the legal rights of a vast num­ber of cre­ators who posted code or other work under cer­tain open-source licenses on GitHub.
Yeah!

2022-11-02

libgrapheme 2.0.2 released: download