25may2014

The TeX Tuneup of 2014

Knuth’s periodic look at bug reports and resulting changes to TeX, Metafont, and Computer Modern. Typical Knuth humor and precision.

Twenty Questions for Don Knuth

Written Q&A with Knuth and a number of legendary figures in Computer Science (Tarjan, Steele, Bentley, etc). Many of the questions are as interesting as the answers.

Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT

They’ve integrated LLVM as the fourth tier of their Javascript JIT compiler. How they handle garbage collection and their notion of hot loop transfers are especially interesting.

Please Put OpenSSL Out of its Misery

Scathing opion in ACM Queue but no real solution offered. Surely rewriting from scratch is not the answer. The LibreSSL project is probably not the answer. Investing some money to get design continuity and support some developers full-time is a better answer.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An exploration of quality. Pirsig pushes into both epistimology and metaphysics while exploring the concept. There is some overlap with Dewey’s "Art as Experience." Highly recommended for anybody trying to design for experience and grappling with both the "romantic" and "rational" aspects of design quality.

Ex Libris Anonymous

I gave these notbooks a try, and they make great gifts for anybody who draws or writes or keeps notes.