Jonathan Corbet wrote : fork() is a relatively expensive system call; it must copy the entire process state (including memory) for the child process. Many optimizations have been made over the years, but a fork is still a fundamentally costly operation. To make things worse, a fork() call is often immediately followed by an exec() , which will discard all of that memory that was so carefully…
I was inspired this week by the three-column layout of Sylvia ’s website enough that I took a stab at one myself. My site is for the most part a centered single column layout. (Despite the grid layout being substantially more complex than that.) I struggle with how to make use of the extra horizontal space in wide layout modes. So, this was a nice experiment.
Memorial Day in the US was Monday this week. We spent a liesurely day around the house. I hacked a bunch on this website, played some music, and drew some dragons with Erin. I recently tested for Shodan at my Iaidō dōjō and passed. I got my certificate this weekend. Zeal is an open source offline documentation viewer. I have used Dash for years on macOS, and recently had need of a similar tool for…
This rendition of Song of Storms from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time by Jon Batiste and Josh Harmon started out as a little teaser on social media. I think they gave into pressure and released a full version. It’s delightful. Jon has a history of video game covers. On his first album, Hollywood Africans, he did a cover of Green Hill Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega Genesis. It’s…
John Dickerson has been on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert many times, and published a short piece to mark the end of the show. He wrote: Colbert does what all performers do– thinks about what connects his work to the humans receiving it. But he goes further. He agonizes about what connects us as humans, what lifts us up, where the lines are between sentimentality and pathos, humor and…
Look up: Milky Way photographer of the year 2026 . These are stunning . Tess and I made these Salmon Gyro bowls for dinner on Tuesday and they were a smash hit. We all loved them. Jamelle Bouie recommended them in one of his recent email newsletters. Cool Sword Day happens on May 21 of every year. Why weekends are under threat . Via Tess . ‘You do not need fancy equipment, you do not need a…
Albert Burneko wrote : Nothing on earth could get me to outsource any part of the work of writing to an AI chatbot. That is not due to any great store of integrity or principle on my part, nor is it due to some great romantic love of writing, a craft that, as any editor of mine will have sussed out long ago, I clearly fucking despise. The reason is much dumber: Using an AI chatbot for assistance…
I’ve been practicing iaidō for a little over two years, going to classes more or less once a week during that time. This past weekend, I had my first rank test for at my dōjō . I tested for shodan , and I passed! Shodan means “entry” or “beginner”. In many ranked schools in Japan, the first rank is called “shodan” because the first character 初 in the word…
A handy reference for how ISO standard paper sizes work. Via @boredzo . I am absolutely delighted with the parallax starfield effect on the homepage of the Sonnenborgh Observatory . I even made my own . Just the kind of subtle scroll effect I can get behind. It only works on desktop though. taken. A website that illustrates just how much information a website can glean just by you visiting their…
I took a trip with my parent, my sister and her husband, and Tess to the Netherlands in May 2026. Here’s a quick summary of what we got up to. # Saturday, May 2 We left SFO mid-afternoon Saturday. I went to iaidō class in Berkeley in the morning – my last one for a couple weekends – then we had a quick turnaround at home before heading to the airport. It was a long, but mostly…
This one frilly tulip was really goin’ for it above the rest. The extreme light contrast between the flowers in the foreground and the dense foliage in the background meant the backdrop was completely blacked out. It almost looks Photoshopped to remove the background, but this is what I saw through my camera.
Keukenhof is most famous for its tulips. Here are some pretty pink ones.
Inside the Willem-Alexander pavilion at Keukenhof they had many many planters of begonias. Most of the begonias I’ve seen are a deep red color, but these were many different colors. At the gardens I played with different angles for my photos, trying to find unconventional views of the flowers. This one is top-down. I think it makes a good phone wallpaper. :)
Just some of the many beds of flowers at Keukenhof .
The gardeners at Keukenhof do an excellent job of finding interesting combinations of flowers.
I enjoyed the “high & low” arrangement of this a several other beds. It adds a fun bit of dimentionality. The puff balls are purple alium.
There are more varieties of tulips than I realized. I love these frilly ones.
Anil Dash writing about Flickr and its significance for the web: many large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes […] In contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful…
NetHack reached version 5.0 this week. Version 5.0 comes immediately after the 3.6 series; there was no 4.0 series. A list of over 3100 fixes and changes can be found in the game’s sources in the file doc/fixes5-0-0.txt. Yowza. This is a big release! Additionally, one of the improvements they call out in their release notes: Has its source code compliant with the C99 standard. Having read a…
The <a download> attribute lets you hint to the user agent that a link should be downloaded, and furthermore what filename it should use when saving the linked content to disk. Hank Green did some incredible work collating and sorting all the publicly available photos from the Artemis Ⅱ mission and built a website to browse through them in chronological order . Here he is talking about it on…
Tess was in China this week, so I had a lot of time to myself. I saw a few friends, cooked myself dinner, and went to iaido class twice. Last Friday, I got a haircut . I’m pretty pleased with it. Metric released a new album this week: Romanticize the Dive . I’m a huge fan (of Metric, and the new album). Victim of Luck and Antigravity are my favorites, though Time is a Bomb is getting…
This was a week with no Artemis news, which is decidedly less fun than weeks with Artemis news. Did you know that NASA publishes a tremendous amount of source code on Github? That includes cFS which serves as a foundation for many software packages installed on spacecraft and satellites. Tess and I made this Orzo with Roasted Vegetables recipe for dinner with Erin one evening. We used kabocha…
I got a hair cut this week! After almost a year since my last cut, I went with a shorter ‘do. Swish factor = maximum. I love it. 🥰
Nick Heer wrote : It blows my mind that their view two hours prior had the Earth at great distance . Every flight I take will feel weak and silly after watching this. Almost every flight I take, I get this feeling the night before that I’ll be going to bed in some far off place in 24 hours. NASA has put a few hundred photos on Flickr with some awesome views — and I must emphasize how the word…
Chris wrote : I wrote SkiFree in C on my home computer, entirely for my own education and entertainment. One day while I was playing with it at work, the program manager for Windows Entertainment Pack happened to look over my shoulder and immediately decided he had to have this game. I called it WinSki, but the Microsoft marketroids hated that and decided, for inscrutible marketroidal reasons, to…
Shady Characters’ 2025 wrote about the PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING emoji in their 2025 Advent Calendar series: Connare connected some dots. He was a fan of lively, exuberant ska music, whose devotees often sported sharp suits, pencil ties and pork-pie hats, and Connare decided that “jump” would be best exemplified by a pogoing figure wearing those same clothes. He modelled his design on the…
Japanese class picked up again on Wednesday night, after spring break last week. We worked on expressing reasons for things with 〜から and offering help with 〜ましょうか. So, now I can say things like: 今日、外に行きませんでした。雨でしたから。 I didn’t go outside today because it was rainy. And also things like: 暑いですね。窓を開けましょうか。 It’s hot, isn’t it? Shall I open a window? Big stuff. Lately I’ve been…
NASA published a playlist on Spotify of the wakeup songs they played for the Artemis Ⅱ astronauts during their mission. CBS wrote about the wakeup playlist too.
Artemis Ⅱ made their flyby of the moon today. Tess and I watched a bunch of it in the morning, and left the streams running all afternoon. My feeling today is pretty well summed up by Tess and this kid and Rocky and the crew themselves : Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!
I took this photo of the aqueduct in Segovia, Spain in 2015. It’s truly massive, an incredible feat of engineering especially when you consider the technology of the day. Segovia was a day trip at the very end of my time in Spain that year. A friend recommended it to me because of the cochinillo asado and this aqueduct. This has been a post about the Roman Empire . Oops.
Delphi Tools : A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools. No logins, no registration, no data collection. I can’t believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web. Need a tool to generate color palettes, or barcodes, or maybe a typography scale? Or maybe you need a unit converter, graphing calculator, or quick base64 encoder? Or hell, maybe you need to translate English to…
The weather in SF has been exceptional the last few weeks, so Tess and I took a bike ride up to Cole Valley. It was a short trip: we got lunch at Say Cheese , checked out the neighborhood, and then headed home. I used to live in Cole Valley. I hadn’t been up there in a little while. Still just as charming as I remember.
The Oberlin Luddites, a student organization at my alma mater, wrote an opinion piece last September in the Oberlin Review last September, asking the president of the school to opt out of the use of AI in school work. We are drafting this letter to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old; this is a machine that we know well. With it, we ditch the crutches of spell-check and generative AI,…
Someone taped over the street sign at Cesar Chavez and Folsom in San Francisco, relabeling the street Huerta Way, in honor of Dolores Huerta. In March of this year, Cesar Chavez was credibly accused of abusing young girls for years.
NASA’s Artemis Ⅱ mission launches today, assuming everything goes to plan. They are planning to take a crew of four astronauts around the moon and back again. It’s extremely exciting to see humans going to the moon again! Update 2026-04-02: The rocket lifted out and reached orbit with no major hiccups. Always a relief. The astronauts are making a few orbits of Earth to test their…
Today is TDOV . If you know a trans person, give them a hug today. It’s rough out there. 🏳️⚧️❤️
I was on my own this week. Tess was in Geneva , and EJ was on spring break. I made quesadillas and chana masala for myself. I started a new sourdough starter. I planted some plants in our backyard garden. I watched Kagemusha and Apollo 13 . And I finished Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary on April 1. We had an event at Apple Park where Sir Paul McCartney…
Alex Harri has been working on an ASCII image renderer and wrote about how it works. There are some really interesting problems to solve in developing one of these. I’ve been fascinated by these since I discovered I could make mplayer play a movie to my terminal with aalib and the (extremely grown-up, not at all named by teenage boys) libcaca .
Les Orchard wrote on his blog: Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Now…
Neil Brown wrote on his blog: I’ve been reasonably pleased with hugo, and it does the job, but I find it complex. In short, if an update broke my site, I am not 100% convinced that I would be able to fix it. This is basically exactly how I feel about Hugo. It’s excellent in many ways, but borders on over-engineered in others. While it works quite well for this modestly sized website, it’s…
A fun house set DJ’d by a puppet. Via Kottke . Stardust by Maze 28. Via @quephird .
A view of the field from our seats Tess and I took our friend Divya to the Bay FC home opener this weekend. They played the Denver Summit, one of the two expansion teams in the NWSL this year. Bay FC won 2-1! We took the train down and back, the weather was beautiful, and we had a delightful time. Divya, Tess, and Me
mpd is a headless audio player – a music player daemon, if you will. rmpc is a client for mpd written in Rust. It recently came back to my attention during an aimless YouTube session when I came across Bread on Penguins video about rmpc . Terminal apps have come a long way, which is a funny thing to say in 2026. This one is pretty intriguing, with its vaguely vim -like controls and mouse…
Today I got around to updating my VPS (the one serving this website) from FreeBSD 14.3 to 15.0. Unlike past major version upgrades, this one was surprisingly difficult, involving a reboot into into single user mode and a fraught hour this morning. # Upgrading Normally when I upgrade this machine to a new major version of FreeBSD, it’s a straight-forward process, as outlined by the FreeBSD…
A brilliant pink cherry tree I found in the parking lot of Page Springs Cellars . We stopped here on the way home from Flagstaff.
This metal floral sculpture I found in Sedona, AZ reminded me of the Black Lotus card from Magic: The Gathering.
Sir Ian McKellan was on Colbert this week. His soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More (a role he debuted in the 60s; it had never been peformed publicly) is incredible and highly relevant to today, despite being 400 years old. Skip ahead to 20:15 or so to see just the soliloquy. Bye Canada, I’m Going Back Where I Came From about the difficult state many immigrants to Canada find…
I’m turning thirty eight today! Last year was an interesting year, numerically. 38 is not quite so interesting, but does have a few cool space tidbits: Neil Armstrong was 38 when he walked on the moon. (Buzz Aldrin was 39.) Jack Swigert was also 38 when he timed the 14 second burn that brought Apollo 13 back into position for reentry to Earth. Tess took me out to dinner last weekend. We went…