The git bisect command helps you identify the first commit in a range that broke something. You give it a good commit and a bad one, and it will do a binary search between the two to find the first … Read more
Three years ago I found a 32 GB memory leak caused by CcmExec.exe failing to close process handles. That bug is fixed, but ever since then I have had the handles column in Windows Task Manager enabled, just in case … Read more
Written by David Anderson on June 20, 2021 If you’ve never read the classic Reflections on Trusting Trust, and you like the idea of being unsettled about the foundations of computing, go have a read. It’s amazing. It details the strange … Read more
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was the Xbox … Read more
For sqlite-utils issue 250 I needed to locate some test CSV files that start with a UTF-8 BOM. Here’s how I did that using ripgrep: $ rg –multiline –encoding none ‘^(?-u:xEFxBBxBF)’ –glob ‘*.csv’ . The –multiline option means the search … Read more
Microsoft Bob was a graphical shell that installed on top of Windows to make it more user friendly and appealing to home users. Bob replaced the standard Program Manager / Explorer shell with a virtual home consisting of a number … Read more
The results of this experiment are not exactly close to my target as you can see, but I thought it was worth a blog post anyway. There was this rough idea I’ve been thinking about in Conway’s Game of Life … Read more