Tony Finch's blog

https://dotat.at/@/2026-09-16-fibre.html How can something that "just works" be so annoying?

https://dotat.at/@/2026-03-14-eggs.html A few weeks ago I was enjoying a couple of boiled eggs (in the shell, with plenty of salt and pepper, and buttery fingers of toast to dunk into the runny yolk) and pondering how fiddly it is to cut off one end of the

https://dotat.at/@/2026-02-24-nsnotifyd-2-4-released.html The nsnotifyd daemon monitors a set of DNS zones and runs a command when any of them change.

https://dotat.at/@/2026-02-16-async.html I'm writing a simulation, or rather, I'm procrastinating, and this blog post is the result of me going off on a side-track from the main quest.

https://dotat.at/@/2026-01-13-http-ratelimit.html There is an IETF draft that aims to standardize RateLimit header fields for HTTP.

https://dotat.at/@/2026-01-12-hqlr.html A while back I wrote about the linear rate limit algorithms leaky bucket and GCRA.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-12-25-shuffle.html Here's a pearlescent xmas gift for you!

https://dotat.at/@/2025-10-24-tetrapod.html Concrete tetrapods are used to dissipate wave energy in coastal defences.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-09-14-ratelimit.html Last year I wrote a pair of articles about ratelimiting: GCRA: leaky buckets without the buckets exponential rate limiting Recently, Chris "cks" Siebenmann has been working on ratelimiting HTTP bots that are ha…

https://dotat.at/@/2025-09-11-cover-letter.html Although it looks really good, I have not yet tried the Jujutsu (jj) version control system, mainly because it's not yet clearly superior to Magit.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-28-strongly-typed.html What does it mean when someone writes that a programming language is "strongly typed"?

https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-06-p-fast-trie.html Previously, I wrote some sketchy ideas for what I call a p-fast trie, which is basically a wide fan-out variant of an x-fast trie.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-04-p-fast-trie.html Here's a sketch of an idea that might or might not be a good idea.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-07-02-cmp.html Here are a few tangentially-related ideas vaguely near the theme of comparison operators. comparison style Some languages such as BCPL, Icon, Python have chained comparison operators, like if min <= x <= max: ...

https://dotat.at/@/2025-06-28-boulder.html Here's a story from nearly 10 years ago. the bug I think it was my friend Richard Kettlewell who told me about a bug he encountered with Let's Encrypt in its early days in autumn 2015: it was failing to validate…

After I found some issues with my benchmark which invalidated my previous results, I have substantially revised my previous blog entry.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-06-08-floats.html A couple of years ago I wrote about random floating point numbers.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-06-01-bialetti.html In hot weather I like to drink my coffee in an iced latte.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-05-28-types.html TIL (or this week-ish I learned) why big-sigma and big-pi turn up in the notation of dependent type theory.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-05-13-if-is.html About half a year ago I encountered a paper bombastically titled "the ultimate conditional syntax".

https://dotat.at/@/2025-04-30-test.html Recently, Alex Kladov wrote on the TigerBeetle blog about swarm testing data structures.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-03-30-hilite.html I have added syntax highlighting to my blog using tree-sitter.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-03-05-lemire-inline.html Last year I wrote about inlining just the fast path of Lemire's algorithm for nearly-divisionless unbiased bounded random numbers.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-02-13-pcg32-simd.html One of the neat things about the PCG random number generator by Melissa O'Neill is its use of instruction-level parallelism: the PCG state update can run in parallel with its output permutation.

https://dotat.at/@/2024-12-30-ioccc.html The International Obfuscated C Code Contest has a newly revamped web site, and the Judges have announced the 28th contest, to coincide with its 40th anniversary.

https://dotat.at/@/2024-12-05-nsnotifyd-2-3-released.html D'oh, I lost track of a bug report that should have been fixed in nsnotifyd-2.2.