Some guy.
Today, a month after launching from Earth, the JWST has safely made its way to its L2 orbit, a million miles away. Everyone can let out a sigh of relief now, as our 10 billion dollar investment is on its way to being paid off. Throughout the journey, the telescope had to unfurl itself, and […]
Just a few hours ago, an Ariane 5 rocket blasting off from a spaceport near Kourou, French Guiana carried the James Webb Space Telescope (or JWST) to the stars. The JWST has been in development for decades, with NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian space agencies all taking part in its development. The idea for […]
I can’t help but admire the little Martian copter that could, Ingenuity. It was originally planned to only fly five times, and as of last week it has made sixteen flights. This isn’t the first time a NASA space robot outlived its expected mission lifetime, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were supposed to only run […]
When writing an operating system, after you get past the tedium of the arbitrary rituals you need to initialize your hardware, you get to the fun part – designing the abstractions that your kernel will use. One of the things we need to think about is processes and threads. In operating systems textbooks, there are […]
In early 2017 I wrote a silly Python script called Wall of Sound that chose desktop wallpaper for you from Flickr which was based on the lyrics of the currently playing song. Why? Well, why not? Music has always inspired visual art[1], and while machines can’t really interpret art, perhaps a few algorithms can help […]
30 years ago today, Linus Torvalds sent out the now-famous email announcing that he was building a free operating system. 30 years later, Linux has taken over the world, from tiny embedded systems to supercomputers and even runs in space, on Mars, and wherever else you can find a computer. I first used Linux in […]
Chicken tikka masala is a spicy, creamy, chicken curry. Popular in Britain (and around the world), I first had it at an Indian take out place in Boston. I’ve since learned how to make my own version, and friends have asked me for a recipe. I’ve never written a recipe before, I usually just write […]
I’m writing several small operating systems for fun (as you do), and to test and debug them I use the QEMU virtual machine. I’m writing this down to collect the bits and pieces of information I need in one place, and so that I can look it up again if I forget, and hopefully will […]
I would like to sing praises to the delightful condiment known as chimichurri, an oil and herb based sauce from South America that accompanies meat-based dishes. I’ve only recently tried it, after getting a recipe from a Gordon Ramsay video. With a pestle and mortar, we crush garlic together with coarse salt and sugar, then […]
Today, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, brought to Mars as a hitchhiker on the Perseverance rover, successfully took flight on the surface of Mars. This is the first time humanity has flown an aircraft on another planet! Since the atmosphere of Mars is less than 1% of that of Earth’s, the little helicopter’s rotors needed to be […]