Category Archives: Java

Leveling up snapd integration tests

Over the last several months there has been noticeable and growing pain associated with the evolving integration tests around snapd, and given the project goal of being a cross-distribution platform, we are very keen on solving this problem appropriately so … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Assembly, C/C++, Cloud, Design, Go, Hardware, Haskell, Java, Lua, Project, Python, Ruby, Snippet, Test | Leave a comment

Reference strepr implementation

In an effort to polish the recently released draft of the strepr v1 specification, I’ve spent the last couple of days in a Go reference implementation. The implemented algorithm is relatively simple, efficient, and consumes a conservative amount of memory. … Continue reading

Posted in Design, Erlang, Go, Java, Lua, MongoDB, Perl, Project, Python, Ruby, Security, Snippet | 2 Comments

IEEE-754 brain teaser

Here is a small programming brain teaser for the weekend: Assume uf is an unsigned integer with 64 bits that holds the IEEE-754 representation for a binary floating point number of that size. The questions are:

Posted in C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Math, Perl, Puzzle, Python, Ruby, Snippet | 7 Comments

strepr v1 (draft2)

Note: This is a candidate version of the specification. This note will be removed once v1 is closed, and any changes will be described at the end. Please get in touch if you’re implementing it. Contents Introduction Supported values Representation … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Cloud, Design, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Math, MongoDB, Python, Ruby, Security | 14 Comments

Gopher-powered backups

10gen, the company behind the MongoDB database, recently announced the availability of the MongoDB Backup Service. This is not a traditional backup service, though. Rather than simply sending scheduled snapshots of the data over to a remote system, the backup … Continue reading

Posted in Go, Java, MongoDB, Project | 3 Comments

Synchronicity: threads vs. events

There are a number of common misconceptions in software development surrounding the idea of concurrency. This has been coming for decades, and some of the issues have just been reinforced one more time in an otherwise interesting post in LinkedIn’s … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Go, Java, Python | Leave a comment

Efficient algorithm for expanding circular buffers

Circular buffers are based on an algorithm well known by any developer who’s got past the “Hello world!” days. They offer a number of key characteristics with wide applicability such as constant and efficient memory use, efficient FIFO semantics, etc. … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Snippet | 4 Comments

Introducing The Hacking Sandbox

When I started programming in Python long ago, one of the features which really hooked me up was the quality interactive interpreter offered with the language implementation. It was (and still is) a fantastic way to experiment with syntax, semantics, … Continue reading

Posted in C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Perl, Ruby | 10 Comments

The forgotten art of error checking

I was just rambling randomly yesterday, in the usual microblogging platforms, about how result checking seems to be ignored or done badly. The precise wording was: It’s really amazing how little attention error handling receives in most software development. Even … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Go, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Snippet, Test | 10 Comments

Breaking into an Android password manager – Theory

For some time now I’ve been wanting to research more deeply about the internals of Android. Until now, though, this was just a sentiment. Then, a couple of weeks ago I’ve finally managed to replace my iPhone for an Android … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Java, Mobile, Puzzle, Security | 5 Comments