Viewing profile — chadaustin

God, that's the worst. Minecraft is also what led us to accidentally bind my child's account to the administrator account on my TV PC, and because he's a minor we can't actually un…

I write Rust for embedded systems and both effects and linear types would be meaningful improvements. Effects especially: if you have multiple cores in a coherent memory domain AND…

https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-f... > Apple M1 has an undocumented extension that, when enabled, ensures instructions like ADDS, SUBS and CMP compute PF…

Every time this conversation comes up, I'm reminded of my team at Dropbox, where it was a rite of passage for new engineers to introduce a segfault in our Go server by not synchron…

Windows 95 allowed programs to disable system interrupts. No protection on cli instruction. Careful with those rose-colored glasses.

WER existed on XP but the APIs needed to customize dumps didn’t. And IMVU’s crash reporting code dated back to 2005. > So I think that the claim that Direct3D captures exceptions i…

Hello, author here (16 years ago). I don't think that component existed then. In hindsight, we would have either used WER or initiated crash dumps from outside of the process via a…

It did, especially as the drives got older and shrieky. Plus the floppy and optical drives spinning up. But... funny story, when I moved to Silicon Valley, SSDs didn’t exist yet, b…

Looks like ‘97. Unfortunately I can’t find the receipts! If I had to guess, I think I’d say somewhere around $2000 in all. That computer lasted me a LONG time. When it was done bei…

I did a bunch of media and software development back then so RAM helped a lot. Why 640? Not sure. My particular board could have gone up to 768. I did some googling and found some …

You are straight up wrong. The first computer I ever built was a Pentium 2, RivaTNT, and it had 640 MB RAM. I can’t find the purchase receipts or specific board brand but it had fo…

Last Christmas, we got a tree from a local farm in the mountains. We had the tree trimmed and decorated before we discovered a sleeping (hibernating?) bat on the inside. We got it …

I'm sorry, I had a whole section on amortized allocation in a draft version of the post but I deleted it, thinking it was tangential. You're not the first person to ask: https://ww…

You can still put atomics outside the mutex in Rust.

Exactly correct. Loading solarized in 256-color emacs shows just how poorly the (carefully-selected) Solarized colors map onto the xterm-256color palette.

You're right: I should have included COLORTERM in this history, and a couple of the other fits and starts, like the `RGB` terminfo capability. The issue I had with COLORTERM is tha…

Where does this “can’t see more than 60 fps” rumor come from? It’s trivially refutable by placing a 60 Hz strobe (e.g. old fluorescent light or even some aftermarket headlights) at…

I appreciate your reply! My approach has been to send a header with the number of fds and bytes the next packet will contain, and the number of payload bytes is naturally never 0 i…

How does SOCK_SEQPACKET simplify fd-passing? Writing a streaming IPC crate as we speak and wondering if there are land mines beyond https://gist.github.com/kentonv/bc7592af98c68ba2…

I wanted to make a permanent wake-from-sleep capacitive touch button for a PC that doesn't always have a keyboard attached. I tried to use the Tomu for that. Unfortunately, I never…

I was also surprised by how suboptimal avr-gcc's generated code is. On the other hand, the AVR experience is reminiscent of early DOS, terrible C compilers and all, so it remains n…

EdenFS builds (and probably runs?) from GitHub, but we have done no work to make it usable and hook it up to an existing checkout. It may not be much effort, and we're hoping to de…

I was voted shyest kid in my high school class. My brain would go white during any attempt at public speaking, and I was super awkward around any new people. Much of it came from b…