Perhaps there was too much fun, and not enough advanced C coding, as one attendee implied. My original intent is to walk through a real implementation in the order I coded it, warts and all, but over 50% got cut for time. After all, it took me 15 minutes in my BoF session just to …
Author Archives: rusty
The LCA Dinner Rule
Dinner was great as only a room full of well-fed FOSS geeks can be, but I felt that that my time on-stage was too long and too chaotic; I apologise. The LCA team have done such a thorough job of recovering from events that it’s a surprise when things don’t magically come together. So I …
Source from “Advanced C Programming for Fun!”
Putting “Advanced” in the title did not have the desired effect of scaring people off. Nonetheless, it went well: maybe because I was on the wired network so noone could access my server to find the bugs :) There wasn’t anywhere obvious to place a link about my talk, so here’s the git repository.
On Conference Harrassment…
The recent attention given to harassment at conferences was sparked by the sexual assault described of Noirin Shirley at ApacheCon; her particular attacker’s actions were deranged and criminal, but it’s clearly a variation on an ongoing theme of harassment. This issue raises two questions for future conferences: how do we prevent an atmosphere which encourages …
The Art of Community (TAoC)
Fuzzy topics annoy me, and hurt my brain as I struggle to quantitify them. People who talk on these topics grate on my nerves; it’s a kind of geek gag reflex. So I really didn’t like Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community. It was like a counseling session where all the faults you half-suspected you …
Hashtables vs Judy Arrays, Round 1
I spent some of Friday and yesterday working on my CCAN hashtable module (renamed to htable); I wrote a set of benchmarks and ran them until my laptop steamed and I had burnished the implementation into a sleek shining bundle of awesome. Then it was time to run the same benchmark on Judy Arrays; code …
A nomenclature anecdote
“…an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully…” — Knuth, Literate Programming The Elements of Style‘s invaluable advice for prose (“Omit needless words”) is mapped into C coding as “Curt names win”: I crave descriptive, short, punchy names. Though perhaps not to the extent of K&R, whose approach might be described …
LWN Supporter Subscription: Take My Money!
I’ve been quietly lobbying Linux Weekly News to offer a $500 – $1000 “Supporter”-level subscription option; LWN has saved my sanity for the last two years as my conference schedule has been severely restricted. But one problem with LWN is that they spend all their time writing and editing quality articles, instead of the boring …
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On C Library Implementation
I recently came across the Judy library which seems like an impressive set of data structures to implement mappings (think variable length arrays or hash indexed by simple key). I also looked through the codec2 sources recently, and I saw some of the same API issues, so I thought I’d crystalize some of them here: …
Being Sampled for The Genographic Project
IBM are involved with the Genographic Project, which is an attempt to “chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species”, by cheekswabbing hundreds of thousands of people around the world. You get swabbed, you get an id to access your history, and they get the consolidated data from the results. My initial …
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