I’m pleased to share the ‘ SpecPool : Storage-Layer Speculation for Parallel Smart Contract Execution’ paper which I’ve co-written. It introduces a mechanism for parallel speculative smart contract execution at the mempool stage. With improvements of consensus protocols and increased computation demands on blockchains, the transaction execution time becomes blockchain’s bottleneck. SpecPool…
This entry includes maths formulæ which may be rendered incorrectly by your feed reader. You may prefer reading it on the web . This article continues the series about approximating circles using Bézier curves. Preceding parts analysed linear and quadratic curves. This entry examines cubic Bézier curves. It presents a construction of a spline which approximates a circle and derives practical…
This entry includes maths formulæ which may be rendered incorrectly by your feed reader. You may prefer reading it on the web . Fig. 1 An outline of a degree symbol from DejaVu Sans font. The previous article in the series explored drawing circles with linear Bézier curves. This article continues by showing how to use quadratic curves. Table of Contents Drawing a circle Choosing the parameters and…
This entry includes maths formulæ which may be rendered incorrectly by your feed reader. You may prefer reading it on the web . Fig. 1 First: Star Castle video game draws circles as regular polygons. Second: Dishonored draws a round finial with straight edges (screenshot thanks to Raphael Colantonio ). (Click to open the image). Some systems do not provide a circle primitive; in those cases,…
Recent carykh’s Adobe Animate’s circles aren’t real circles video demonstrates how Adobe Animate approximates circles with Bézier curves. At the end of the video Cary demonstrated what happens to the shape if control points are pushed to extreme, but using imprecise mouse manipulation, the effect wasn’t quite precise. The effect can be achieved with SVG 1 quite easily and so I present it below:…
Introduced last century, favicons help users identify tabs in a crowded browser. Originally limited to the ICO format, they can now leverage Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). This vector format not only scales perfectly to different sizes but also unlocks dynamic features which this article explores, namely: colour scheme preference detection , language preference detection and animations . Adapting…
When Linux desktop adoption is discussed, some point out the lack of graphical user interfaces (GUI) and the necessity of using command-line interface (CLI) tools or editing text files as a reason more people don’t use Linux-based systems. Such characterisation misses how much Linux has changed. The notion that the terminal is a major barrier is outdated and ignores the fact that most users never…
Bambu Lab, a company once celebrated for its high-quality and user-friendly 3D printers, has recently hit a trifecta of questionable behaviour: enshittification of their products, threatening legal action to silence critics and violation of free software licences. Fortunately, several organisations have stepped in to fight for customer rights and free software. Among those, Software Freedom…
It is unclear why Americans write dates in month-day-year format. What is clear is that it makes little sense and differs from the way most of the world writes dates resulting in confusion. While human puzzlement is well-documented (something I’ve written about as well), equally critical is how screen readers and machine translation behave. When handling dates in a free-form text, software relies…
In case you’ve missed it, issue #8 of the Paged Out! magazine is out. Marking that occasion, I thought I’d share my ntp-over-http Rust implementation which was featured there. Did you ever need to synchronise a machine’s time without access to NTP (maybe because of a blocked port)? That’s exactly what the tool can help with. $ cargo install ntp-over-http … $ ntp-over-http ntp-over-http:…