This article has been on my to-write list for a while now. In my opinion, fork is one of the most questionable design choices of Unix. I don’t understand the circumstances that led to its creation, and I grieve over the legacy rationale that keeps it alive to this day.Let’s set the scene. It’s 1971 ...

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For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve dis...

For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve dis...

As you all know, the simulation of universe 2813/9301 is now coming to a close. This simulation is notable for being the first simulated universe suitable for hosting intelligent life, but yesterday the simulation reached a state where we believe no additional intelligences will emerge. It seems the...

As you all know, the simulation of universe 2813/9301 is now coming to a close. This simulation is notable for being the first simulated universe suitable for hosting intelligent life, but yesterday the simulation reached a state where we believe no additional intelligences will emerge. It seems the...

I just finished replacing the micro-USB daughterboard on my Samsung Galaxy S5, which involved taking the phone most of the way apart, doing the replacement, and putting it back together. This inspired me to write about my approach to maintaining my cell phone. I’ve had this phone for a while and I h...

I just finished replacing the micro-USB daughterboard on my Samsung Galaxy S5, which involved taking the phone most of the way apart, doing the replacement, and putting it back together. This inspired me to write about my approach to maintaining my cell phone. I’ve had this phone for a while and I h...

There are many kinds of “portability” in software. Portability refers to the relative ease of “porting” a piece of software to another system. That platform might be another operating system, another CPU architecture, another web browser, another filesystem… and so on. More portable software uses th...

There are many kinds of “portability” in software. Portability refers to the relative ease of “porting” a piece of software to another system. That platform might be another operating system, another CPU architecture, another web browser, another filesystem… and so on. More portable software uses th...

There’s something I need to make clear about Nvidia. Sway 1.0, which is the release after next, is not going to support the Nvidia proprietary driver, EGLStreams, or any other proprietary graphics APIs. The only supported driver for Nvidia cards will be the open source nouveau driver. I will explain...

There’s something I need to make clear about Nvidia. Sway 1.0, which is the release after next, is not going to support the Nvidia proprietary driver, EGLStreams, or any other proprietary graphics APIs. The only supported driver for Nvidia cards will be the open source nouveau driver. I will explain...

Today I’ve released sway 0.15-rc1, the first release candidate for the final 0.x release of sway. That’s right - after sway 0.15 will be sway 1.0. After today, no new features are being added to sway until we complete the migration to our new plumbing library, wlroots. This has been a long time comi...

Today I’ve released sway 0.15-rc1, the first release candidate for the final 0.x release of sway. That’s right - after sway 0.15 will be sway 1.0. After today, no new features are being added to sway until we complete the migration to our new plumbing library, wlroots. This has been a long time comi...

Hacker News is a popular “hacker” news board. One thing I love about HN is that the moderation generally does an excellent job. The site is free of spam and the conversations are usually respectful and meaningful (if pessimistic at times). However, there is always room for improvement, and moderatio...

Hacker News is a popular “hacker” news board. One thing I love about HN is that the moderation generally does an excellent job. The site is free of spam and the conversations are usually respectful and meaningful (if pessimistic at times). However, there is always room for improvement, and moderatio...

Complexity is quickly becoming an epidemic. In this developer’s opinion, complexity is the ultimate enemy - the final boss - of good software design. Complicated software generally has complicated bugs. Simple software generally has simple bugs. It’s as easy as that. It’s for this reason that I stro...

Complexity is quickly becoming an epidemic. In this developer’s opinion, complexity is the ultimate enemy - the final boss - of good software design. Complicated software generally has complicated bugs. Simple software generally has simple bugs. It’s as easy as that.It’s for this reason that I stron...

The other day, I saw Learn regex the easy way. This is a great resource, but I felt the need to pen a post explaining that regexes are usually not the right approach. Let’s do a little exercise. I googled “URL regex” and here’s the first Stack Overflow result: https?:\/\/(www\.)?[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%._\+~#...

The other day, I saw Learn regex the easy way. This is a great resource, but I felt the need to pen a post explaining that regexes are usually not the right approach.Let’s do a little exercise. I googled “URL regex” and here’s the first Stack Overflow result:https?:\/\/(www\.)?[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%._\+~#=]...

Is it already time to write another one of these? Phew, time flies. Sway marches ever forward. Sway 0.14.0 was recently released, adding much asked-after support for tray icons and fixing some long-standing bugs. As usual, we already have some exciting features slated for 0.15.0 as well, notably som...

Is it already time to write another one of these? Phew, time flies. Sway marches ever forward. Sway 0.14.0 was recently released, adding much asked-after support for tray icons and fixing some long-standing bugs. As usual, we already have some exciting features slated for 0.15.0 as well, notably som...

Let’s open with some quotes from the Wikipedia article on link rot: In 2014, bookmarking site Pinboard’s owner Maciej Cegłowski reported a “pretty steady rate” of 5% link rot per year… approximately 50% of the URLs in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the original information… (analysis ...

Let’s open with some quotes from the Wikipedia article on link rot:In 2014, bookmarking site Pinboard’s owner Maciej Cegłowski reported a “pretty steady rate” of 5% link rot per year… approximately 50% of the URLs in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the original information… (analysis o...

Wayland is the new hotness on the Linux graphics stack. There are plenty of introductions to Wayland that give you the high level details on how the stack is laid out how applications talk directly to the kernel with EGL and so on, but that doesn’t give you much practical knowledge. I’d like to inst...

Wayland is the new hotness on the Linux graphics stack. There are plenty of introductions to Wayland that give you the high level details on how the stack is laid out how applications talk directly to the kernel with EGL and so on, but that doesn’t give you much practical knowledge. I’d like to inst...

I should start this post off by clarifying that what I have to show you today is not, in fact, generics. However, it’s useful in some situations to solve the same problems that generics might. This is a pattern I’ve started using to reduce the number of void* pointers floating around in my code: mul...

I should start this post off by clarifying that what I have to show you today is not, in fact, generics. However, it’s useful in some situations to solve the same problems that generics might. This is a pattern I’ve started using to reduce the number of void* pointers floating around in my code: mul...

I’ve been putting this post off for a while. Do you remember the CloudFlare security problem that happened a few months ago? This is the one that disclosed huge amounts of sensitive information for huge numbers websites. When this happened, your accounts on thousands of websites were potentially com...