I'm losing faith in America

I recently quit my job at Linode and started looking for something else to do. For the first time in my career, I’m seriously considering opportunities abroad. Sorry for the politically charged post - I promise to get back to tech stuff right away.

On November 8th, I’m going to step into the voting booth and will be presented with the following options:

The next president of the United States will probably be Hillary Clinton. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how ridiculous this is. This is a person who has pulled...

2016-09-26

Videos of the slcon 2016 talks are now available.

Comment on Curve extraction plugin by caiyong

Hello,I meet the same problem.I also want to port it into C++.Your description above is very useful to me. Thank you!

Using the right tool for the job

One of the most important choices you’ll make for the software you write is what you write it in, what frameworks you use, the design methodologies to subscribe to, and so on. This choice doesn’t seem to get the respect it’s due. These are some of the only choices you’ll make that you cannot change. Or, at least, these choices are among the most difficult ones to change.

People often question why TrueCraft is written in C# next to projects like Sway in C, alongside KnightOS in Assembly or sr.ht in Python. It would certainly be easier from the outset if I made every project in a...

What motivates the authors of the software you use?

We face an important choice in our lives as technophiles, hackers, geeks: the choice between proprietary software and free/open source software. What platforms we choose to use are important. We have a choice between Windows, OS X, and Linux (not to mention the several less popular choices). We choose between Android or iOS. We choose hardware that requires nonfree drivers or ones that don’t. We choose to store our data in someone else’s cloud or in our own. How do we make the right choice?

I think it’s important to consider the basic motivations behind the software you choose to use. Why did the author write it? What...

2016-08-24

slcon3 preliminary schedule now published. If you want to attend please register before: 2016-09-01.

[VIDEO] Arch Linux with full disk encryption in (about) 15 minutes

After my blog post emphasizing the importance of taking control of your privacy, I’ve decided to make a few more posts going over detailed instructions on how to actually do so. Today we have a video that goes over the process of installing Arch Linux with full disk encryption.

This is my first go at publishing videos on my blog, so please provide some feedback in the comments of this article. I’d prefer to use my blog instead of YouTube for publishing technical videos, since it’s all open source, ad-free, and DRM-free. Let me know if you’d like to see more content like this on my blog and which...

Teaching Ozlo about Pokémon GO

Pokémon GO is all the rage these days. Ozlo, your friendly AI sidekick, would be remiss if he didn’t help you catch them all!

Thanks to Ozlo’s unique, knowledge-based approach to the world, we were able to teach him about Pokémon in just under a week, including how to find PokéStops and Pokémon Gyms near places you might be going. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of Ozlo’s inner workings, what goes into teaching him a completely new concept, and why his ability to learn quickly matters.

The process involves three high-level steps:

Sway 0.9 & One year of Sway

Today marks one year since the initial commit of Sway. Over the year since, we’ve written 1,823 commits by 54 authors, totalling 16,601 lines of C (and 1,866 lines of header files). This was written over the course of 515 pull requests and 300 issues. Today, most i3 features are supported. In fact, as of last week, all of the features from the i3 configuration I used before I started working on Sway are now supported by Sway. Today, Sway looks like this (click to expand):

For those who are new to the project, Sway is an i3-compatible Wayland compositor. That is, your existing i3 configuration file will work as-is...

Using -Wl,--wrap for mocking in C

One of the comforts I’ve grown used to in higher level languages when testing my code is mocking. The idea is that in order to test some code in isolation, you should “mock” the behavior of things it depends on. Let’s see a (contrived) example:

int read_to_end(FILE *f, char *buf) {
    int r = 0, l;
    while (!feof(f)) {
        l = fread(buf, 1, 256, f);
        r += l;
        buf += l;
    }
...


						
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							Posted at 2016-07-19 00:00:00 | Software | read on