We live in an incredible time where virtual reality is on the horizon. I’ve had some mind-expanding conversations with several folks about it, and over the course of a few months have compiled a few little thoughts and opinions on VR and the role it potentially has in our lives.

Earlier today I did a code review and saw my coworker using Array.new to create an empty array. This gives the same return value as the literal constructor []. But are they the same internally?

I’ve been maintaining several blogs for about 10 years, and I’ve come up with a few practices that I use to guide how I keep these going.

Many of us sling code, do product reviews, spend hours in a chair with nothing but gdb and silence. And though we talk shop with coworkers about minor features in the x86 architecture, a dark, ugly secret lurks.

In the space of 20 minutes, I’ve closed out two personal projects, that combined represent hundreds of hours of effort. And it feels wonderful.

On the slim chance that there’s another OpenBSD user who also wants to sync files to their BlackBerry Playbook, read on!

This is one of the protocols that I’m kind of surprised isn’t in more use, by virtue of its simplicity in implementation. RFC 865 is a layer 7 debugging RFC where a socket listens for a TCP or UDP connection, and then sends a short, arbitrary message.

The first IETF standard was an informational affair, a housekeeping standardization-process snapshot that summed up the current ‘best practice’ RFCs that’s led up to it.

This is the first article I’ve typed completely using Dvorak, a keyboard layout that is designed for more ergonomic typing, completing a far greater amount of words on the home row than QWERTY.

Oh, the times they are a-changing. I was reviewing some code done by a coworker and saw they had .1 seconds for a timeout on one of their checks. I suggested a 1 second timeout, and to satisfy my curiosity ran a test that delivered an unrealistically extreme workload, saturating the CPUs, while still trying to get a socket timeout. And wouldn’t you know it, the timeout of .1 seconds was never reached.

I had the privilege of joining the Chef Food Fight show today to discuss Chef Metal.

edited: I’ve since removed it. It’s unnecessary page bloat that doesn’t give any real benefit to myself or my friends - probably why it never succeeded in the first place ;-)

Have you ever felt that there was a point where your codebase escaped from you? Where obvious bugs go unseen for long periods of time, and files lurk in the source tree, unauditable and ready to devour flesh?