kaashif's blog: Computers, with some mathematics on the side

I saw a talk at CppCon 2024 delivered by a friend of mine on request latency outliers, find it on YouTube here.

I was looking at a proposal for adding value-semantic dynamically-allocated types to C++.

I went to a talk recently about C++ coroutines, and I don't think it was very good.

I recently read Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I was running something in WSL, as you do, then I thought about it for a second.

Why is the following change to a Rust struct backwards incompatible?

I just noticed that we're now past the 10th anniversary of my first blog post, which I made on 2013-08-11!

(or: How I learnt to stop worrying and love opportunity cost) I'm a fan of the board game Sidereal Confluence.

alloca is a function provided by several C libraries (e.g. glibc) that lets you allocate a block of memory that will be freed when the calling function exits.

386BSD 1.0 was released in 1994 on a CD in an issue of Dr Dobb's Journal.

Java is a language missing a lot of features.

A few weeks ago, I was reading a Hacker News post about a clipboard manager.

A few weeks ago, I played the board game "The Search for Planet X".

Mockito is a pretty popular Java mocking library.

This is a post from the perspective of a new Java programmer, so it is 100% likely that the concerns here are well-known and already addressed.

People write code that relies on all sorts of implicit or obfuscated knowledge.

While in Venice, I picked up a book, If Venice Dies by Salvatore Settis.

There are many mistakes we made when halfheartedly trying to get funding for our startup.

I recently read a couple of blog posts about deserving success, and I found them very interesting, mostly because of what they tell me about the people writing them.

No-one reads this blog, so this is a safe place to make a public announcement I don't really want anyone to see.

A while ago, I soldered together a Z80 homebrew computer and ran some programs on it, then wrote a blog post about it.

The conventional wisdom is that if you're starting a business you should do something you're good at or know something about.

Since C++17, us C++ programmers have rejoiced in the fact that when we return something from a function, the standard now guarantees that the value won't be copied.

There are a lot of ways to represent numerical values on a computer, you've got the various fixed-size integer types and floating point types, but you also have arbitrary precision arithmetic, where the size of the number is limited only by the memory of…

I was recently trying to get to grips with the GAP programming language.

For my Master's degree, I (helped greatly by my supervisor) implemented some algorithms and even invented some new algorithms to decompose representations of finite groups.

I'm somehow one of the maintainers of rss2email, a popular Python program for reading RSS feeds and sending feed updates to your email address.

Anyone who has played Halo and fired the Gauss cannon on the Warthog has experienced a strong desire to do it in real life.

I was decommissioning a few of my older computers and servers, stripping them down for parts.

I have a Sun Ultra 45, the last and most powerful Sun SPARC workstation.

Like everyone, I have a ton of old routers lying around.

I've always wanted to design and build my own homebrew computer.

Until recently, my transcript search web app was running (at https://transcripts.kaashif.co.uk, check it out) in a tmux session, with a PostgreSQL server running on the same machine in the usual way, as a daemon.

Since I have access to a machine that has the PA-RISC architecture, I thought I'd compile some test programs and see what sort of assembly code produced.

A while ago, I got my hands on a beast of a machine, a 7U HP L3000 (rp5470) PA-RISC server.

Remember my transcript search engine, https://transcripts.kaashif.co.uk?

Everyone's studied x86 assembly (just objdump any program on your PC...) and maybe even some ARM or MIPS in a class somewhere, but there are a few features that exist in some CPUs that don't exist at all in any of these designs.

It's a little known fact that there is actually no way in C or C++ to do an unaligned access without invoking undefined behaviour.

A few weeks ago, I got my hands on a Sun T2000 server.

This server (the very one you are reading this post on), at the time of writing this post, runs OpenBSD 6.1-stable.

I recently got an old Sun Ultra 5 working.

Migrating mail servers is a tricky business, especially when one server doesn't have IMAP set up.

There I was, a loyal user of http://mail.zoho.com, when I decided to download all of my emails.

Before I get my Sun Ultra 5 working and can write something about that, I thought I'd go through all the hardware I'm using right now and the OSes I'm running on them.

You may have heard of the Star Trek script search tool at http://scriptsearch.dxdy.name.

So I was setting up a laptop I had just picked up, when it came to deciding what OS to install on it.

Today, I decided to install Gentoo on a spare machine I had lying around, since I was bored.

There are hundreds of blog posts about backing up your PGP keys around on the internet.

I wanted to make a list of the websites of the people on the website http://nixers.net, and I decided to solve it not by asking people to tell me what their sites were called, but by scraping the forum.

Some people reading this might be thinking: "hey, it's really easy to do this, why is he writing an article on this?".