But behind the scenes, there’s a lot more going on. I’ll describe some of what happens, and (much much more importantly!) explain some tools you can use to see what’s going on behind the scenes yourself. We’ll use readelf, strace, ldd, debugfs, /proc, ltrace, dd, and stat. I won’t talk about the Python-specific parts at all – just what happens when you run any dynamically linked executable.
“The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.
Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be.
If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.
But if we avoid hard things, anything mildly challenging will seem insurmountable. We’ll cry into TikTok over an errant period at the end of a text message. We’ll see ourselves as incapable of learning new skills, taking on new careers, and escaping bad situations.
The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.”
I got a pair of AirPod Pro earbuds and set them up for my personal hearing needs. Later that day I went for a walk in my local woods and literally gasped out loud at hearing the birds I'd been missing for some years!
The way you set them up is buried deep in the Settings, so it's not surprising that not many people know about it. Here's where you need to go. You need to have the AirPods connected to your iPhone or iPad.
Settings Accessibility AirPods Audio Accessibility Settings Headphone Accommodations Custom Audio Setup Headphone Audio Customisation
When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability:
Avoid complex flow constructs, such as goto and recursion. All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code. Avoid heap memory allocation. Restrict functions to a single printed page. Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function. Restrict the scope of data to the smallest possible. Check the return value of all non-void functions, or cast to void to indicate the return value is useless. Use the preprocessor sparingly. Limit pointer use to a single dereference, and do not use function pointers. Compile with all possible warnings active; all warnings should then be addressed before release of the software.
Progressively enhance HTML with lightweight JavaScript libraries. No build tools, no compilers, and no hassle.
In the pre-media world, we bumped into fables, or news from across the village, but mostly, our role models and experiences were based on reality.
Now, when it’s not unusual to spend eight hours a day surrounded by media fueled by greatest hits (worst offender, breaking news, richest investor, evillest husband, funniest line of all the movies ever made) we start to imagine that only hyperbole matters.
Greatest hits, by their nature, are unusual. And if the media you’re absorbing is selected from a billion possible clips, don’t be surprised if you start to believe that the unusual is normal.
It’s not.
In the process, they've given us vivid examples of why folding phones could be more than the latest gadget gimmick or another screen to scratch. They could actually be useful. According to these fictional futures, three primary reasons stand out:
You can finally carry a tiny phone again without sacrificing your large screen Screens you’d never comfortably carry (because they’re huge) are finally within reach You could always have the perfect size screen for whatever you need
NASA keeps the original film negatives from the Apollo program sealed in a frozen vault in Houston, TX and rarely grants access to them. As a result, nearly all of the photos we see of those historic missions were made decades ago or are copies of copies. Recently, the film was cleaned and digitally scanned at "an unprecedented resolution".
Using these new high-res scans, image specialist Andy Saunders remastered each of the 35,000 photographs, resulting in this incredible-looking book, Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record. From the book's website:
The photographs from the lunar surface are as close as we can get to standing on the Moon ourselves, and for the first time, we were able to look back at Earth from afar, experiencing the "overview effect" — the cognitive shift that elicits an intense emotional experience upon seeing our home planet from space for the first time. The "Blue Marble" photograph, taken as Apollo 17 set course for the Moon, depicts the whole sunlit Earth, and is the most reproduced photograph of all time. Along with Apollo 8's "Earthrise," which depicts Earth above the lunar horizon, it was a catalyst for the environmental movement that continues today.
Saunders is also selling prints of some of these remastered photos, which look absolutely stunning.
A few years ago I gave a short talk (slides) about myths that discourage people from blogging. I was chatting with a friend about blogging the other day and it made me want to write up that talk as a blog post.
here are the myths:
- myth: you need to be original
- myth: you need to be an expert
- myth: posts need to be 100% correct
- myth: writing boring posts is bad
- myth: you need to explain every concept
- myth: page views matter
- myth: more material is always better
- myth: everyone should blog
It really is one of the best product names in Apple history: Vision is a description of a product, it is an aspiration for a use case, and it is a critique on the sort of society we are building, behind Apple’s leadership more than anyone else.
I am speaking, of course, about Apple’s new mixed reality headset that was announced at yesterday’s WWDC, with a planned ship date of early 2024, and a price of $3,499. I had the good fortune of using an Apple Vision in the context of a controlled demo — which is an important grain of salt, to be sure — and I found the experience extraordinary.
But, I’ve used essentially every major VR headset and AR device since 2013’s Oculus DK1 right up through the latest generations of Quest and Vive headsets. I’ve tried all of the experiences and stabs at making fetch happen when it comes to XR. I’ve been awed and re-awed as developers of the hardware and software of those devices and their marquee apps have continued to chew away at the “conundrum of the killer app” — trying to find something that would get real purchase with the broader public.
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Implement DNS in a weekend
Hello! Our goal here is to implement a toy DNS resolver.
What’s a DNS resolver? It’s a program that knows how to figure out what the IP address for a domain is. Here’s what the command line interface of the resolver we’re going to write looks like:
$ python3 resolve.py example.com 93.184.216.34
The whole thing is about 200 lines of Python, including implementing all of the binary DNS parsing from scratch.
This project is a fun way to learn:
How to parse a binary network protocol like DNS How DNS works under the hood (what’s happening behind the scenes when you make a DNS query?) There are also some bonus exercises if you want to implement a few more of the features a real DNS resolver would have.
Everything is in a Jupyter notebook, which you can download and run. You can download all the code here:
Vint Cerf is the recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor “for cocreating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society’s critical infrastructure.” PETER ADAMS
It was June 1973. For the past three months, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had been working together on a problem Kahn had been pondering for some time: how to connect ground-based military computers seamlessly to communications satellites and mobile radios.
The ARPANET and the way it handled communications was already well established. But extending it to handle multiple networks—whose reliability couldn’t be taken for granted—was a different story.
The two had been exchanging ideas in person and via email and reviewing the work of others who were trying to solve similar issues. But now, Cerf sat alone in the lobby of San Francisco’s Jack Tar Hotel, on a break from a computing conference. And the problem was on his mind.
Summary Passkeys, the popular name for FIDO, are not only easy, they offer better protection against phishing than other forms of multi-factor authentication. This is how they work.
What is a passkey? A passkey is a new way to sign in that works completely without passwords. By using the security capabilities of your devices like Touch ID and Face ID, passkeys are way more secure and are easier to use than both passwords and all current 2-factor authentication methods.
Over the last year, cloud storage services Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive—and probably others—have migrated from custom kernel extensions to Apple’s new-ish File Provider extension. It provides an Apple-approved framework for integrating remote files into macOS and displaying them in the Finder. I touched on this move a year ago in “Cloud Storage Forecast Unsettled, with Possible Storms” (4 February 2022).
Writing Javascript without a build system Hello! I’ve been writing some Javascript this week, and as always when I start a new frontend project, I was faced with the question: should I use a build system?
I want to talk about what’s appealing to me about build systems, why I (usually) still don’t use them, and why I find it frustrating that some frontend Javascript libraries require that you use a build system.
I’m writing this because most of the writing I see about JS assumes that you’re using a build system, and it can be hard to navigate for folks like me who write very simple small Javascript projects that don’t require a build system.
Analyzing the characteristics of real-world applications is difficult. We often make generalizations about applications we see in the wild, both anecdotal and statistical: "Single-Page Applications are slower than multipage" or "apps with low TTI loaded fast". However, the extent to which these generalizations hold for the performance and architectural characteristics we care about varies. I believe one of the primary determinants of this variability are a product's features and design constraints, and classifying applications based on their features & constraints can enable more targeted and impactful solutions to the problems faced by each.
Hello! A few days back we talked about problems with floating point numbers.
This got me thinking – but what about integers? Of course integers have all kinds of problems too – anytime you represent a number in a small fixed amount of space (like 8/16/32/64 bits), you’re going to run into problems.
So I asked on Mastodon again for examples of integer problems and got all kinds of great responses again. Here’s a table of contents.
The Eisenhower matrix is a popular time management tool that can help you prioritize your tasks and make the most of your time.
The matrix, named after former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a tool that helps you evaluate the importance and urgency of your tasks. By categorizing tasks into four quadrants, you can quickly identify which tasks are the most important and should be done first.
The initial segment of what will be the first underwater fiber-optic link to skirt the North Pole, connecting Japan and Europe, will light up in early 2023. This stretch, called Iris, will link Iceland to Ireland. In subsequent years, the Far North Fiber project will lay down a cable through the Northwest Passage, connecting Iceland to Greenland, then Canada, Alaska, and finally Japan. Far North Fiber will help increase the geographic diversity of the world’s fiber-optic network; currently, submarine cables are laid along a few well-trodden routes, leaving the network vulnerable to local hazards, like ship anchors, earthquakes, or fiber-eating sea monsters.
The ANSI escape sequences you're looking for are the Select Graphic Rendition subset. All of these have the form
\033[XXXm where XXX is a series of semicolon-separated parameters.
To say, make text red, bold, and underlined (we'll discuss many other options below) in C you might write:
printf("\033[31;1;4mHello\033[0m");
It is not uncommon to hear about C/C++ programming as a shorthand for “C and C++” programming. This implies that C and C++ are similar, but distinct, programming languages with the obvious interpretation being that C++ is a proper superset of C. However, this does not accurately describe the situation. The C++ programming language is inspired by the C programming language and supports much of the syntax and semantics of C, but is not a superset that is built on top of C. Despite sharing a historical relationship to one another, the languages have evolved independently and are specified in separate language standards. Due to this separation of the two specifications, incompatibilities have crept into the shared space of code that can be compiled by either a C compiler or a C++ compiler.