Tag Archives: Tech

Diego Crespo over at Deus In Machina has a nice post on the history of C compilers. If you’re a Unix head, you probably know most of it but it was fun to remember the old days of trying to … Continue reading →

Three years ago, I wrote about patent trolls and Cloudflare and compared filing frivolous patent suits against to CloudFlare to messing around with Jim despite the warning from the late Jim Croce. At that time, Cloudflare had already destroyed (literally) … Continue reading →

The title of this post was coined by Arthur C. Clarke to describe the famed Bell Laboratories facility at Murray Hill, New Jersey. If you’re in the software industry and like me, you probably think of Bell Labs as the … Continue reading →

In my A Fatal C Error post I talked about how hard it is to write error-free C code. Any large C program is almost guaranteed to have undetected errors. That’s true of all languages—TeX is famous for being the … Continue reading →

I love the idea of lab notebooks. I was trained in the sciences but that training was in Mathematics so the idea of lab notebooks didn’t play much of a role. In the experimental sciences and most engineering disciplines, they … Continue reading →

As a sort of coda to yesterday’s post on the errors in the C code running the Toyota acceleration system, here’s another example of a spectacular failure in C code that resulted in huge losses for AT&T, caused loss of … Continue reading →

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I spent the majority of my software career writing C code. I love C and don’t have a lot of patience for snark about it from those who have … Continue reading →

I was reading this PBS story on the recent Alaskan Airlines incident in which a door panel blew off in midair and it tickled a distant memory of a post I wrote about Boeing before. A simple search of Irreal … Continue reading →