• About
• TIL

Notebooks

Notebooks are more polished and complete write-ups covering topics which have some depth. They are written to aid and structure my own understanding, for future reference, and hopefully to add a slightly different way of thinking about the subject material than is currently available online.

• Memory models and lock-free programming

  Fundamentals for reasoning about and designing lock-free programs, data structures, and algorithms.

Posts

Varying posts on different subjects, of varying quality. Each post is usually something I want to reference or share. Usually there is more to say on the topic, but the post fills a gap in material I've found elsewhere (even if that's just grouping it in one place).

• Orion language and compiler testing

  Trialing my language/compiler in advent of code 2024 (day 1).

• Debian workstation user setup

  In which I setup my workstation's userspace.

• Debian base workstation setup

  In which I setup my workstation from scratch.

• Zip bins

  Abusing zip files to bundle data with binaries.

• Deleting characters in a string - extreme edition

  Using bit manipulation instructions and SIMD to strip characters out of strings.

• Right inverting movemask

  How to turn a bitmask into a SIMD bytemask.

• Encoding binary as hex using SIMD instructions

  An illustration of SIMD beyond simple arithmetic problems.

• Fun with small bitsets

  Compact register calculations in a compiler backend.

• OpenBSD malloc options

  Settings for catching memory bugs in OpenBSD.

• Goto considered useful

  Examples of how working with goto can still be beneficial.

• Blitting pixels in X11

  Graphics with pixel blitting using X11 directly.

• A simple fuzzy matcher

  A primitive but surprisingly effective method of fuzzy matching strings.

• Basic git subtrees

  Because I can never remember the commands.

• User-space distributed tracing with BPF

  User space tracepoints, and a bit of an investigation into how they work.

• A simple intrusive linked list

  Linked lists, generically, in C.

• Anonymous structs for aggregating allocations

  A technique for reducing the number of allocations.

• A quick measurement of the impact of false sharing on simple spinlocks

  Quantifying the impact of contending cache-lines across cores.

• Welcome

  This site began quite a while after some of the initial pieces were written...

• Object Models, Threading Models and Actor Models

  Why Object Oritented Programming is painful, and reasoning a way to message passing (or at least, just passing data).

• Overloaded Labels in Haskell - towards better record fields

  Investigating advances to address an annoyance in Haskell.

• Getting Started With ST - the simple terminal

  Simple Terminal with a couple of tweaks.

• Getting decent font rendering on stock Debian

  Fixing default fonts on Debian.

• The Y combinator - understanding recursion without recursion

  Figuring out the Y combinator for myself.

• Libre-rate your NixOS

  Deblobbing nixos, if you care about such things.

• Booting DragonFly BSD with HAMMER on a GPT drive

  Instructions of bypassing limitations of the old Dragonfly BSD bootloader. No longer needed - booting from GPT is now fully supported.