Made of Bugs

I’m at Dragon*Con this weekend, my second time here now. I decided that if I was going to Dragon*Con again, I needed to do something in terms of costuming, and I wanted it to be something unique — I wasn’t going to come anywhere near as epic as some of the costumes people pull off, [...]

I haven’t been feeling very motivated to blog lately — I’ve missed the last two weeks of Iron Blogger, and I’m not totally enthusiastic about any of the items on my “to blog” list. But, I do enjoy blogging when I actually get into posts, and I’d like to keep updating this blog. So, in [...]

One of the major reasons I can’t stand webapps is because I’m a serious emacs junkie, and I can’t edit text in anything that doesn’t have decent emacs keybindings. Fortunately, on Linux, at least, GTK provides basic emacs keybindings if you add gtk-key-theme-name = “Emacs” to your .gtkrc-2.0. However, some webapps think that they deserve [...]

With the announcement this week that Quora had taken $11 million in VC at an $86 million valuation, there’s been an awful lot of attention on Quora. I’ve had an account there and wanted to write up some of my initial thoughts. If you haven’t heard about Quora, it’s yet another question/answer site on the [...]

About two months ago, Linux saw CVE-2010-0307, which was a trival denial-of-service attack that could crash essentially any 64-bit Linux machine with 32-bit compatibility enabled. LWN has an excellent writeup of the bug, which turns out to be a subtle error related to the details of the execve system call and with 32-bit compatibility mode. [...]

So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more. Like so many good ideas, it all started with a fundamentally simple [...]

In my previous blog post, I discussed how git is distinctive among version control system in the way in which it makes the backend model that is being used to store data the most important element of the tool, and that experts use it by having the complete model in their head, and thinking in [...]

(This is part three of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read part 1 or part 2 if you’re new here) For my final entry on termios, I will be looking at job control in the shell (i.e. backgrounding and foreground jobs) and the very closely related topic of signal generation [...]

(This is part two of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read part 1 if you’re new here) In this entry, we’ll look at the interfaces that are used to control the behavior of the “termios” box sitting between the master and slave pty. The behaviors I described last time are [...]

If you’re a regular user of the terminal on a UNIX system, there are probably a large number of behaviors you take mostly for granted without really thinking about them. If you press ^C or ^Z it kills or stops the foreground program — unless it’s something like emacs or vim, in which case it [...]