Viewing profile — billpg

I've just purchased a dot-dev domain from Namecheap who I've used before and been very happy with. I set my domain up to use "www" as a CNAME to a static-file web service and the a…

I once developed for PC-GEOS, which wanted all memory in exactly 8K sized blocks. I wrote a set of C macros that presented an array-of-arrays as a single collection by using mod/di…

shrug I've reviewed what I originally wrote and I prefer the text I published. Sure, I could review it all myself (indeed I used to) but that takes time and it was becoming a barri…

I kinda wish they had. 64k windows with no overlap would make segment registers a slightly inconvenient 32-bit address register. I get why hey didn't. Someone might want to run two…

Hi. I wrote it, and I'm a human. (Or at least I think I am.) I did use an AI for spell-checking, punctuation, generally making it flow, but its all my text. You think a machine is …

1992-author (me) is wondering if he'll ever get a girlfriend. (And I completely agree.)

Why would you ever want a single 64k object? That's like an entire machine's worth of memory!

Indeed, I say as much at the end. But what should Intel have done? They needed a CPU that can run 8080 code but with more memory. Also it's the year ~1980 and we're limited to the …

Thanks, and that POSIX link is exactly the one I expected someone to bring up. The key point is that POSIX does not actually define a real, physical epoch, and it explicitly avoids…

I forget where I encountered it, but I've seen similar encodings that eliminated the possibility of many possible encodings for the same number by making the length part of the val…

Do any formats using ZIP as the underlying format use ZIP comments for metadata? Unless there's a lot of compressors leaving "Zip file generated by MySuperZipper™" then I imagine a…

True, but I wanted this to be something anyone could do with equipment they might already have lying around and also get a feel for what gravity is actually doing. Switching on a m…

I had a similar reaction when learning 8086 assembly and finding the correct way to do `if x==y` was a CMP instruction which performed a subtraction and set only the flags. (The bo…

It's a cookbook!