Bookmarks and interesting stuff on the interwebs
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Reverse engineering the ARM1 ⇾
www.righto.com
The ARM1 chip is built from functional blocks, each with a different purpose. Registers store data, the ALU (arithmetic-logic unit) performs simple arithmetic, instruction decoders determine how to handle each instruction, and so forth. Compared to most processors, the layout of the chip is simple, with each functional block clearly visible. (In comparison, the layout of chips such as the 6502 or Z-80 is highly hand-optimized to avoid any wasted space. In these chips, the functional blocks are squished together, making it harder to pick out the pieces.)
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Go Is Unapologetically Flawed, Here’s Why We Use It ⇾
bravenewgeek.comTo put it mildly, Go’s type system is impaired. It does not lend itself to writing quality, maintainable code at a large scale, which seems to be in stark contrast to the language’s ambitions. The type system is noble in theory, but in practice it falls apart rather quickly. Without generics, programmers are forced to either copy and paste code for each type, rely on code generation which is often clumsy and laborious, or subvert the type system altogether through reflection. Passing around interface{} harks back to the Java-pre-generics days of doing the same with Object. The code gets downright dopey if you want to write a reusable library.
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Le challenge du logo ANSSI ⇾
blog.bienaime.info
Le 3 février 2012, l'agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information (ANSSI) a publié son nouveau logo et a eu la bonne idée d'y cacher un challenge de sécurité informatique. Des morceaux de solution furent rapidement trouvés et rendus publics, mais ce challenge a su se faire désirer puisque deux ans plus tard, j'ai finalement été le premier à en voir le bout. Dans cet article, je vous présente ma solution, le raisonnement adopté, les galères rencontrées ainsi qu'un petit bonus, le tout sur un ton assez peu formel.
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Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish ⇾
rob.conery.ioThe problem is that when we start out as software developers we don’t know the “right way” to do things so we are less constrained in what we do. We just march forward and go do things. As we start to learn the “right way” to do things, we are often stifled by that knowledge and the constraints it brings and that causes us to be less productive or to over engineer and design solutions to problems.
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Awk in 20 Minutes ⇾
ferd.caI love the writing style: terse and effective !
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A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You ⇾
search.cpan.orgThere are a number of languages spoken by human beings in this world.
-- Harald Tveit Alvestrand, in RFC 1766, "Tags for the Identification of Languages"
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Programming sucks ⇾
stilldrinking.orgEvery programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It's a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world. This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It's concise. It doesn't do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.
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Deep C (and C++) ⇾
www.slideshare.netProgramming is hard. Programming C and C++ is particularly hard...
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They Write the Right Stuff ⇾
www.fastcompany.comAs the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command ...
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The Builder's High ⇾
randsinrepose.comIs there a Facebook update that compares to building a thing? No, but I’d argue that 82 Facebook updates, 312 tweets, and all those delicious Instagram updates are giving you the same chemical impression that you’ve accomplished something of value. Whether it’s all the consumption or the sense of feeling busy, these micro-highs will never equal the high when you’ve actually built ...
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The spiral of Learning ⇾
sdqali.inAn hour ago, I was staring at a problem on the 4clojure website. Last weekend, I found myself wandering through Zed Shaw’s Learn C the Hard Way. Three days before that, I was taking a stab at figuring what kind of visualizations would make sense if you want to come up with the mother of all comparison’s between two of football’s greatest ever players. Four days before that, I was looking at some classifiers. Five weeks ago, I was totally lost in Learn You Some Erlang, and three weeks before that I was trying to make sense of all the hype around Node.js.
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Build your own FPGA ⇾
blog.notdot.netHow to build FPGA logic blocks using discrete 7400 logic chips
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Russ Olsen - To the Moon! ⇾
www.youtube.comA most inspiring and highly recommended talk by Russ Olsen. Watch it, it's worth it.
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OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t ⇾
spectrum.ieee.org -
It’s Not About the Unit Tests ⇾
pragprog.com -
DIY Cellphone ⇾
web.media.mit.edu
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35 ⇾
files.righto.com -
The tale of a banana and 5 chimpanzees ⇾
security.stackexchange.comIn answer to the question "What technical reasons are there to have low maximum password lengths?", Tom Leek tells us this thought-provoking story:
Take five chimpanzees. Put them in a big cage. Suspend some bananas from the roof of the cage. Provide the chimpanzees with a stepladder. BUT also add a proximity detector to the bananas, so that when a chimp goes near the banana, water hoses are triggered and the whole cage is thoroughly soaked.
Soon, the chimps learn that the bananas and the stepladder are best ignored.
Now, remove one chimp, and replace it with a fresh one. That chimp knows nothing of the hoses. He sees the banana, notices the stepladder, and because he is a smart primate, he envisions himself stepping on the stepladder to reach the bananas. He then deftly grabs the stepladder... and the four other chimps spring on him and beat him squarely. He soon learns to ignore the stepladder.
Then, remove another chimp and replace it with a fresh one. The scenario occurs again; when he grabs the stepladder, he gets mauled by the four other chimps -- yes, including the previous "fresh" chimp. He has integrated the notion of "thou shallt not touch the stepladder".
Iterate. After some operations, you have five chimps who are ready to punch any chimp who would dare touch the stepladder -- and none of them knows why.
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Antibiotic 'apocalypse' warning ⇾
www.bbc.co.ukOn the bright side: IBM vastly improves delivery of nanomeds that kill bacteria where antibiotics fail
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The joys of having a Forever Project ⇾
www.dev.gd -
Your Blog is The Engine of Community ⇾
www.hanselman.com -
On the Origin of Circuits ⇾
www.damninteresting.comFascinating: Genetically evolving circuits on FPGAs
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Go and build amazing applications. Build them with the most boring technology you can find ⇾
zef.meAnd the obligatory Reddit discussion, with a memorable comment:
Monads are important programming tool that enable you to write blog entries about monads
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BBC Micro on an FPGA ⇾
mikestirling.co.uk -
Portal's physics engine rebuilt in 25KB on a graphing calculator ⇾
arstechnica.com -
HN in a nutshell ⇾
www.linkedlistnyc.org -
State of the Lambda: Libraries Edition ⇾
cr.openjdk.java.netI've yet to see how it works in "real world" usage, but I'm liking where this (Java collections with lambda) is heading.
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Why Technical People Should Blog (But Don’t) ⇾
www.rackspace.comSo true ! I've heard these same arguments from at least 3 friends.
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The amount of crap computer (windows) users have to put up with is incredible ⇾
dendory.net -
You promised me Mars colonies. Instead, I got facebook ⇾
images.digital.technologyreview.com
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Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works ⇾
blog.cloudflare.com -
Languages, Verbosity, and Java ⇾
www.informit.comOld article, but was reminded of it by Dri. Thanks !
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Joey Hess minimalism ⇾
joey.hess.usesthis.comA humbling read. Oh, and the obligatory hackers who think this is so "back-wordly".
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The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't ⇾
mina.naguib.ca -
Evolution of lactose tolerance: Why do humans keep drinking milk ? ⇾
www.slate.com -
Every time I have to work with Drupal ⇾
www.reddit.comThis strikes a chord with me:
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RFC 6570 - URI Template ⇾
tools.ietf.orgLooks interesting, but I don't think it could be suitable as a syntax for a web framework routing syntax. See also (in french)
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One sentence per line, please ⇾
rhodesmill.orgBy starting a new line at the end of each sentence, and splitting sentences themselves at natural breaks between clauses, a text file becomes far easier to edit and version control.
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Someone was RESTing too much in the security class... ⇾
blog.ryankearney.com -
Pythonic Java ⇾
gist.github.com -
The World's most influential Languages ⇾
www.andaman.orgReal languages, not programming ones ...