Tag Archives: Tech

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Paul Graham. He’s the guy who got me interested in Lisp and, by extension, Emacs. There’s a bit of irony there considering that Graham is a Vim user and his … Continue reading →

Boeing was a great company. For many years it defined the aviation industry by designing and building the best aircraft possible. The company thrived in large part because its culture was informed by an engineering ethos. Even their top executives … Continue reading →

Irreal readers know that I’m a big fan of RSS and use it as my primary means of discovering interesting content. Happily, despite the efforts of the content aggregators in their never ending crusade to wall in and control all … Continue reading →

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 →