Myths about /dev/urandom Note from 2024: This article was published on March 16th, 2014. It is still correct in its discussion of entropy and randomness, but the Linux kernel random number generator has been reworked several times since then and … Read more
As a computer engineer who has spent half a decade working with caches at Intel and Sun, I’ve learnt a thing or two about cache-coherency. This was one of the hardest concepts to learn back in college – but once … Read more
Wed 17 Mar 2021 Floating-point numbers are a great invention in computer science, but they can also be tricky and troublesome to use correctly. I’ve written about them already by publishing Floating-Point Formats Cheatsheet and presentation “Pitfalls of floating-point numbers” … Read more
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. … Read more
What happened to Meta last week — and my response to it — expressed in meme-form: In 2018, the market was panicking about Facebook’s slowing revenue and growing expenses, and was concerned about the negative impact that Stories was having … Read more
Myth or Fact? If 300 people happen to be at your site at the same time, there will be 300 copies of your program running simultaneously, right? And with Perl CGI, that means 300 copies of the Perl interpreter open, … Read more
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Construction is something you probably either love or hate, depending on your commute or profession. Obviously, as a civil engineer, it’s something I think a lot about, and … Read more
According to Wikipedia, .NET will be celebrating it’s 21st birthday this year on February 14, 2022 (author’s note: the date was changed! It’s the 20th birthday of the official release!). It’s been around for so long that I think many … Read more
Draft content for the FreeBSD Myths page FreeBSD is good for servers, not for Desktops FreeBSD has a full-featured sound subsystem, giving low-latency in-kernel mixing allowing multiple applications to play sound (with independent volume settings) with no configuration. The default … Read more
I dread the summer. I truly do. It’s not that I don’t like the weather (who doesn’t like sunshine in the day and breezy decks in the evening?). It’s not the hordes of school kids roaming the streets with abandon. … Read more