End of Summer Link Clearance
August was pretty hot here in northeast Indiana. Not unbearably hot as it usually happens, and weirdly cool for August, but hot enough to complain about it. But towards the end of August, I noticed that some leaves of the black walnut tree in the backyard was turning yellow. It had even started to shed some of those yellow leaves.
And then September rolled by. Temperatures suddenly dipped to single digit lows – before you freak out, this is in degree Celsius. It is still pretty cold for September. It reminds that winter is just around the corner. Looks like my tomato plants and pepper plants are going to die before giving me a good round of produce.
Speaking of winter: this is a collection of useful/interesting articles, books, papers, stories and the such from around the Internet, meant for mindless consumption whenever my copious free time permits. Which would be whenever I wake up from my winter hibernation, which I’m going to start pretty soon now.
(Normally pinboard is the place where all my links go to die. I think this will be place to make sure that they’re indeed dead.)
Systems/Security
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. A free, online Operating Systems textbook written by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea
- Arpaci-Dusseau. Excellent, will read it all.
An Overview of Kernel Lock Improvements - (pdf) slides of LinuxCon 2014 presentation.
LWN: MCS locks and qspinlocks and the paper, A simple correctness proof of the MCS contention-free lock (pdf). An approach to reduce cache contention with spinlocks.
A Study of Linux File System Evolution (USENIX FAST 2013 paper, pdf).
What’s the matter with PGP? - Matthew D. Green argues that it’s time for PGP to die. PGP keys are unwieldy, the (key server and public keys) infrastructure is questionable, key management is poor, web of trust is weak, there’s no support for forward secrecy, and mail client support is terrible.
Laurence Tratt’s Blog. Programming languages, compilers, systems. The fun stuff.
The Back-to-Basics Readings of 2012. Systems-y papers collection in Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels’ blog.
PL/Compiler
Coq: The world’s best macro assembler? (PPDP 2013 paper, pdf).
Programming With Effects. Haskell stuff by Graham Hutton, January 2014 vintage.
Lenses from the ground up. Haskell stuff.
Build Your Own Lisp. Ebook on creating a Lisp using C.
Software Architecture
Functional Architecture - Phil Trelford’s presentation suggests that “domains, such as modeling, DSLs, concurrency, for which functional programming is well-suited, and areas for which an OO or a mixed approach has better results.”
Design
Confused About REM and EM? (To be clear: I’m still confused.)
Unclassified
How to stay in love with programming, Camille Fournier’s presentation.
Exploring the Bionic Pancreas with Dr. Steven Jon Russell, in Scott Hanselman’s podcast.
The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit. For thirty years, a man lived all by himself in Maine woods. All those years, he slept in a tent:
Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.”
On the roofs - Hong Kong - Russian “roofers” climb up Hong Kong skyscrapers.
Openism, IPism, Fundamentalism, and Pragmatism - Moshe Vardi’s piece in Communications of the ACM, in which he calls open access advocates “IP Communists”. What.