Viewing profile — johnwfinigan

.tar.zst - I have found Zstd to be enormously faster than gzip, bzip2, or xz. Its compression ratio is good and it's available in most Linux distros.

On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion abou…

Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" …

Excluding filenames containing newlines, I wonder how many weird corner cases this would reveal: ls | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 rm I've been annoyed by ls and xargs not playing toget…

Sure. Basically, we go through the first half or so of Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment fairly sequentially. My first take was to group the example code by top…

I am definitely feeling that: I've already had to do some reorganizing as I discover that some of my initial decisions weren't perfect, as to organizing the class repo. By the way,…

I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier. I like to write code in class, an…

I have actually used daytime for a "real" use: as a quick and dirty way of eliminating the possibility of guest clock drift when running benchmark scripts inside of emulated guests…

https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/c/SEI+C... Has a lot of rules of the form "Do Not ..."

Only on topic regarding interesting 1970s OS design, but does anybody have a reference with a similar level of technical detail to this one, but for the ICL (now Fujitsu) VME opera…

The book "Inside the AS/400" has some really cool exposition on the unique aspects of the AS/400. If I remember right, the disks and memory are in a single address space, and of co…

In the last several months, I listened to the Hardcore History podcast about World War I. I am still struggling with the same question as the article poses, but applied to war inst…

"Microsoft Edge is also 64-bit, not just by default, but at all times when running on a 64-bit processor." After 32-bit Windows Server went away as of 2008 R2, I didn't expect MS t…

Running a small datacenter for the last few years, I can totally identify with that quote. On the storage side, I can't help but wonder if it's partially due to incumbent vendors p…

I don't know of any explicit follow up, but there is a ton of interesting info at multicians.org. I think that, for multi-million dollar mainframe timesharing systems, it was easie…

According to [1], the original Multics trap door that Thompson cites as his inspiration was distributed, to an Air force installation no less. Tangentially, I'm more fascinated by …

Yes, that timeline error stuck out to me as well. Recently I found Solaris 2.1 physical media, and the date on it is 12/92. My goal is to get old GCC running on it, but first I hav…

Tim Hunkin's work is unmistakable. After all of these years, The Secret Life of Machines is still some of my favorite television ever. Glad to see he is still at it.