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In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.

Last year I wrote a long article about Zip files, covering the history, describing the Deflate compression method in great detail, and showing the implementation of a simple Zip program.

I have been curious about data compression and the Zip file format in particular for a long time.

Many years ago, sometime in the nineties, my family was having dinner at the neighbours', and their son showed me some cool DOS programs on the computer.

Back in 2004, Google ran a recruitment campaign where they posted the following billboard along the main freeway running through Silicon Valley, and later at other locations in the country: For those who managed to find the answer, a second problem awaited

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of those subjects I really wish I'd taken while at university.

Update 2024-03-01: Updated the article to use newer SDK, NDK, etc. and target Android API level 34.

Converting between regular (Hindu-Arabic) and Roman numerals seems to be a common programming exercise.

This is a programming exercise I've wanted to do for a long time: an implementation of arbitrary-precision integer ("bigint") arithmetic in C.

The first time I heard about Don Knuth and his famous books, The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), was during a summer internship more than ten years ago.

Introduction I first started programming in QBasic.

A while back, John Regehr posted the Nibble Sort Programming Contest on his blog.

Introduction I have always been fascinated by computers.

tmux is a terminal multiplexer, much like screen.

I spent a lot of time trying to get my GCC build to work the first time.

Pictures from the unboxing of a Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2:

Below are links to all the Perl One-Liner of the Month episodes from The Linux Gazette.

As I was about to leave for work one morning a few weeks ago, I found that my neighbour's bike had been stolen.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provide automatic validation tools for HTML and CSS.

Clang is a compiler for the C family of programming languages (C, C++, Objective-C, etc.) based on the LLVM compiler infrastructure.

At some point I wanted to learn more about Bash's command history facility.

Pictures from the unboxing of a Soekris net5501-70: Update 2026-08-02: The Soekris ran like clockwork from the spring of 2010 until 23 January 2026, when it gave up the ghost.

A while back, I was doing a presentation about Clang (a C/C++ compiler) at my university.

Gnuplot is a program for plotting functions and data.

This is a list of things in Vim that I have learned but find hard to remember.