Defect attractors

There’s a phrase I’ve used on this blog more than once that I had reason to Google just now and found that (to my surprise) the top hits are mostly my writings. It is “defect attractor”. In this post I’m going to explain why I think this is an important concept that needs to be… Continue reading Defect attractors

Published
Categorized as Software

A touch in the night

Occasionally I have dreams that seem to be trying to assemble into the plot of an SF novel – weird and fractured as dreams are, but with something like a long-form narrative struggling to develop. Occasionally I have nightmares. I don’t know how it goes for anybody else – and one reason I’m posting this… Continue reading A touch in the night

Review: The Fractal Man

The Fractal Man (written by J.Neil Schulman, soon to be available on Amazon) is a very, very funny book – if you share enough subcultural history with the author to get the in-jokes. If you don’t – and in particular if you never met Samuel Edward Konkin – the man known as known as “SEKIII”… Continue reading Review: The Fractal Man

Draining the manual-page swamp

One of my long-term projects is cleaning up the Unix manual-page corpus so it will render nicely in HTML. The world is divided into two kinds of people. One kind hears that, just nods and says “That’s nice,” having no idea what it entails. The other kind sputters coffee onto his or her monitor and… Continue reading Draining the manual-page swamp

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Categorized as General

Embrace the SICK

There’s a very interesting article just out, C Is Not a Low-level Language;. in which David Chisnall punctures the comforting illusion that C is really a “close-to-the-metal” language and relates this illusion to the high costs of Spectre and other processor-level bugs. Those of us who think seriously about language design have long been aware… Continue reading Embrace the SICK