Writing
eBPF Is Coming for Windows
With the help of the IETF and Microsoft, eBPF will soon offer cross-platform compatibility for in-kernel programs, for both Linux and Windows.
(The New Stack), 2024-10-11 .
What GitHub Learned Building Copilot
In an ACM tech talk, a principal researcher for the GitHub R&D arm shares the lessons learned developing a generative AI-enhanced app for coders.
(The New Stack), 2024-10-04 .
With WarpStream, Confluent Got a New Type of Kafka Platform
WarpStream customers ran Kafka at a tenth of the cost of other cloud providers, thanks to using AWS object storage to beat networking costs.
(The New Stack), 2024-10-01 .
Internet Architecture Board ISO Future Networking Tech
IETF group has set out to define a new directional foundation for the continued future of network management.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-29 .
PostgreSQL 17 Gets Incremental Backup, SQL Queries for JSON
EDB's VP of database development, Tom Kincaid, reveals his favorite features of the newly released PostgreSQL 17.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-26 .
Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live
System Initiative brings Digital Twins-styled modeling to platform automation, allowing teams to visually test new configurations on the fly.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-25 .
Free JavaScript from Legal Clutches of Oracle, Devs Petition
Despite its minimal involvement in the language, Oracle still owns the JavaScript trademark. Ryan Dahl and other JS stewards are asking the company to relinquish the name to the public domain.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-17 .
VMware Users Adjust to Broadcom Subscription Licensing
At VMware Explore last month, customers expressed unease at the new subscription model but remained hopeful that they could make it work.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-11 .
Charles Schwab Adopts PostgreSQL (With VMware Tanzu)
One of the benefits of being a Charles Schwab analyst is that you can pull up a new PostgreSQL database at a click of a button.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-04 .
Istio 1.23 Drops the Sidecar for a Simpler Ambient Mesh
This new edition of the Istio service mesh can be run without sidecars, simplifying deployments and, in some cases, even reducing latency.
(The New Stack), 2024-08-24 .
Meta Open Sources DCPerf, a Benchmark for Hyperscale Workloads
With five tests, the social media giant expands beyond standard SPEC benchmarking to more accurately predict workload performance.
(The New Stack), 2024-08-15 .
NIST Releases Encryption to Guard Against Quantum Computing Attacks
Though quantum computing is still in its infancy, NIST urges IT ops teams to move to quantum-resistant encryption algorithms, providing three to get started.
(The New Stack), 2024-08-14 .
Netflix Open Sources Maestro, a Next-Gen Data Workflow Engine
Maestro provides a Workflow as a Service to Netflix's data scientists and information-hungry line-of-business managers.
(The New Stack), 2024-08-02 .
Kafka 3.8 Brings Faster Startups to Java Developers
The newly-released upgrade to the open source data streaming platform also gives admins more control over compression levels.
(The New Stack), 2024-08-02 .
Debian Retools APT for Better Dependency Management
DebConf/24: As dependency trees get more complicated, and provide more opportunity for security holes, a Debian engineer is revising APT to make better decisions about which packages to update.
(The New Stack), 2024-07-30 .
Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today
Once, Azure was a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. These days, the company tests over 1,000 Linux distributions a month just to ensure their customer apps run smoothly on Azure.
(The New Stack), 2024-07-19 .
Valkey Will Not Just Be a Redis Retread
Think again if you assume the Linux Foundation's Valkey project will just be a clone of the Redis database.
(The New Stack), 2024-07-17 .
Showdown at the Lakehouse: Databricks Muscles Up With Tabular
By acquiring Tabular, Databricks can combine Apache Iceberg expertise with its own Delta Lake format, and promises to unify the increasingly fragmented market for data lakehouses.
(The New Stack), 2024-07-11 .
RustLang Semantic Versioning Still Breaks Too Many Apps
In an environment of automated builds, incorrectly versioned packages build can wreak havoc, one Rust dev notes on the Changelog podcast.
(The New Stack), 2024-07-05 .
Canonical Offers LTS Distroless Containerized Apps for K8s
Canonical is expanding its Long Term Support (LTS) program — 12 years of guaranteed security maintenance — beyond Ubuntu releases to open source apps — no distribution needed.
(The New Stack), 2024-06-27 .
What GitHub Pull Requests Reveal about Your Team’s Dev Habits
Does your team suffer from duplicate git Issues? How about competing or over-stuffed pull requests? A group of researchers have discovered all sorts of ways your dev team may be working with less-than
(The New Stack), 2024-06-24 .
Python Mulls a Change in Version Numbering
Despite popular belief, Python does not use the industry standard semantic versioning, and this has led to frustrations around backward compatibility and End-of-Life expectancies.
(The New Stack), 2024-06-18 .
Why Python Is So Slow (And What Is Being Done About It)
PyCon 2024 showcased a number of ways to speed the pokey Python programming language including sub-interpreters, immortal objects, just-in-time compilation and more.
(The New Stack), 2024-06-14 .
PlatformCon: How Spotify Manages Infrastructure with GitOps
Spotify engineer Tim Hansen described how the music service relied on GitOps principles to automate infrastructure provisioning.
(The New Stack), 2024-06-12 .
Snowflake, Databricks and the Fight for Apache Iceberg Tables
The market for data lakes and data lakehouses is clearly being disrupted by open source software, given recent news from Databricks and Snowflake.
(The New Stack), 2024-06-10 .
DuckDB: In-Process Python Analytics for Not-Quite-Big Data
An in-process analytics database, DuckDB can work with surprisingly large data sets without having to maintain a distributed multiserver system. Best of all? You can analyze data directly from your Py
(The New Stack), 2024-05-31 .
PyCon US: Simon Willison on Hacking LLMs for Fun and Profit
Prompt engineering is a big bag of dumb tricks, argued the co-creator of Django. But that is no reason you can not create interesting apps with the technology.
(The New Stack), 2024-05-19 .
Red Hat Podman Lab Gets Developers Started on GenAI
Unlike many tools for building generative AI apps, the Podman AI Lab was built specifically for developers, rather than data scientists.
(The New Stack), 2024-05-15 .
Red Hat Rethinks the Linux Distro for the Container Age
Red Hat wants to bring cloud native-based build and deployment practices to the Linux operating system itself.
(The New Stack), 2024-05-07 .
5 Lessons From LinkedIn’s First Foray Into GenAI Development
LinkedIn has found that prototyping a Generative AI-based feature can be done really quickly. Getting it into production, however, is another matter entirely.
(The New Stack), 2024-05-02 .
OpenTofu Amiable to a Terraform Reconciliation
The OpenTofu community would very much like to return to an unforked open source Terraform, perhaps guided by the Linux Foundation.
(The New Stack), 2024-05-02 .
GQL: A New ISO Standard for Querying Graph Databases
The International Standard for Organization (ISO) has a published an international standard for querying graphs, called the Graph Query Language (ISO/IEC 39075:2024).
(The New Stack), 2024-04-29 .
Guider Daemon Automates Linux Performance Monitoring
Guider, built over a period of nine years, comes with over 150 performance-tracking and visualization command-line tools.
(The New Stack), 2024-04-19 .
Golang 1.22 Redefines the For Loop for Easier Concurrency
Golang 1.22 fixes a quirk in the for loop that has long-thwarted closure users.
(The New Stack), 2024-04-04 .
Hasura Visualizes Data API Integration into a Supergraph
Data integration provider Hasura has added a visual component to its data integration API platform, offering developers a handy visualization of the complex topologies that they wrangle with.
(The New Stack), 2024-04-04 .
Linux xz Backdoor Damage Could Be Greater Than Feared
A mysterious contributor who planted the backdoor helped maintain the widely used xz compression library for the past two years. So what else was hidden in there?
(The New Stack), 2024-03-31 .
https://thenewstack.io/linux-xz-backdoor-damage-could-be-greater-than-feared/
A mysterious contributor who planted the backdoor helped maintain the widely used xz compression library for the past two years. So what else was hidden in there?
(The New Stack), 2024-03-31 .
Chainguard: Outdated Containers Accumulate Vulnerabilities
Hackers keep finding vulnerabilities in software even after the application is no longer supported, Chainguard has found.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-29 .
NVIDIA H200 GPUs Crush MLPerf LLM Inferencing Benchmark
Also, VMware and Red Hat demonstrated with MLPerf some speedy and flexible system configurations for large-scale LLM work.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-29 .
20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry
GnuCOBOL has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-15 .
Meet DBOS: A Database Alternative to Kubernetes
The creator of PostgreSQL has teamed with the creator of Apache Spark to build a cloud OS on top of a distributed database.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-12 .
With YAMLScript, YAML Becomes a Proper Programming Language
A scripting language that brings to YAML all the programming capabilities many assumed it already had.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-11 .
Vendoring: Why You Still Have Overlooked Security Holes
A cautionary FOSDEM talk from the Nix community about all the vulnerable software that may still overlooked on your systems.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-08 .
KubeCon 24: GUAC Reveals Where the Vulnerabilities Hide
Software Bills of Material (SBOMs) are only the first step in understanding security data. GUAC uses a dependency graph to more readily display problematic components.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-07 .
Can the Unix Shell Be Improved? Hell Yes!
A look inside the world of alternative command line environments.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-02 .
Q&A: Cockroach Labs' Spencer Kimball on Distributing SQL
How watching Google evolve distributed transactional databases inspired three engineers to bring these innovations to the enterprise.
(The New Stack), 2024-02-16 .
CNCF-Approved Strimzi Eases Apache Kafka onto K8s Clusters
With a set of operators, Strimzi extends the Kubernetes API in order to provide a native way to interact with Kafka.
(The New Stack), 2024-02-14 .
Google Spends $1 Million to Make Rust, C++ Interoperable
Eager to eliminate memory errors in C++-based Android apps, Google wants to make it easy for devs to write functionality in Rust instead.
(The New Stack), 2024-02-05 .
CNCF CloudEvents: A Message Envelope That Travels Far
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has anointed CloudEvents as a graduated project, but Microsoft and others are already using the technology in large event-driven architectures.
(The New Stack), 2024-01-31 .
The Problem with Slow Rustlang Build Times
Frustrated by the slow build times of their Rust programs, the engineering team at Oxide investigated the entire compile process.
(The New Stack), 2024-01-25 .
BPF Opens Door to Linux Extensible Scheduling (Maybe with Rust!)
In a Christmas hacking project, one Canonical engineer spun up a Linux scheduler that could operate from user-space.
(The New Stack), 2024-01-19 .
The Day Vehicles Started Driving Themselves
Remember, if you will, that not all that long ago the very idea of a self-navigating vehicle
was mostly the stuff of SciFi. It certainly seemed fairly preposterous in 2004, when I had the opportunity to
witness the first-ever autonomous vehicle race, held in the Mojave Desert, by the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency(DARPA). So it was remarkable then that the winning vehicle had managed to travel
was 7.4 miles on its own, just as it is remarkable today how quickly these robot vehicles have evolved
since then. Here is my account of that day.
Click to Read More...
Fri, 19 Mar 2004
Remember, if you will, that not all that long ago the very idea of a self-navigating vehicle
was mostly the stuff of SciFi. It certainly seemed fairly preposterous in 2004, when I had the opportunity to
witness the first-ever autonomous vehicle race, held in the Mojave Desert, by the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency(DARPA). So it was remarkable then that the winning vehicle had managed to travel
was 7.4 miles on its own, just as it is remarkable today how quickly these robot vehicles have evolved
since then. Here is my account of that day.
Click to Read More...
The Long Running Feud Between vi and EMACS users
Like fight-fatigued battalions who come to a temporary truce but refuse to give up the war, vi and
EMACS users keep an uneasy standoff in many Linux communities. When pressed, most people familiar
with both editors will say the difference between the two is primarily one of speed vs. flexibility.
But why has this difference of views remained a divisor of programmer culture for more than four decades now?
Click to Read More...
Tue, 04 Dec 2001
Like fight-fatigued battalions who come to a temporary truce but refuse to give up the war, vi and
EMACS users keep an uneasy standoff in many Linux communities. When pressed, most people familiar
with both editors will say the difference between the two is primarily one of speed vs. flexibility.
But why has this difference of views remained a divisor of programmer culture for more than four decades now?
Click to Read More...
Pie in the Sky: How Crack the Sky Became Famous in Nowhere but Baltimore
Wed, 12 Jul 1995
1975 was the Indian summer of progressive rock. Procol Harum and King Crimson released their respective swan songs. ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis were still popular. Younger art rock upstarts like Kansas, 10CC, Supertramp, and Gentle Giant were weighing in with strong new releases. Crack the Sky, from a small steel town 30 minutes west of Pittsburgh, was then one of most promising of these young upshots. Click to Read More...
Patsy Cline and the Paddle
Fri, 18 Dec 2015
Patsy Cline, in today's parlance, gave zero fucks. I feel a certain kinship to Cline, if only because I attended the same school she did, Gore Elementary, 12 miles west of Winchester, Virginia (though I attended 30 years after she did).
Back up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, Gore is a tiny unincorporated town, mostly a few buildings coalescing around a single road breaking off Route 50.
Many of the refined folk in the nearby metropolis of sorts, Winchester, had looked down on Patsy Cline, as being
from the wrong side of the tracks, even after she became famous. Click to See the Tracks She Was on the Wrong Side Of...
Liquor in the Front, Poker in the Rear
Tue, 20 Nov 2018
Some dirty truths about running a newspaper:I am sorry to hear of the passing of the Village Voice, and for, my own kindred, the Baltimore City Paper, both of which folded last year. But I am pretty cynical about attempts to revive them. Quarter-page ads from the local coffee shops were not what drove those newspapers. My advice for anyone foolhardy to try to start an actual print newspaper or magazine these days? Find a source of dirty money to keep the books healthy.
Click to Read More...
The Path to Totality
Fri, 06 Apr 2018
I would not recommend driving 1,400 miles in approximately 30 hours. But if you must do it, it helps
to have a speedy set of wheels. Our goal was to experience the eclipse in its entirety,
to get under the path of totality as its darkness cut a swath across the United States mid-day August 21, 2017.
Others had made plans,
procured camping spots and sleeping bags for the night before. We had a
Ford Mustang to get us there, and get us back, through a 30 hour day all in order
to experience the 3 minute micro-day of pure planetary discombobulation within.
Click to See...
Friends of John Sargent
Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray remained young while his portrait aged in an attic. John Sargent (1856-1925),
in a way, pulled off the opposite trick, preserving on oiled canvas the full beauty and animism of people
who are now all long deceased. Sargent painted portraits of his friends, often trading a payment for
freedom of artistic direction, which allowed him to more accurately capture their personalities.
Tight with Claude Monet, Sargent often borrowed techniques from impressionism to make his work more dynamic
and subtle. The results remain almost eerily vivacious over a century later.
Click to See
Wed, 26 Aug 2015
Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray remained young while his portrait aged in an attic. John Sargent (1856-1925),
in a way, pulled off the opposite trick, preserving on oiled canvas the full beauty and animism of people
who are now all long deceased. Sargent painted portraits of his friends, often trading a payment for
freedom of artistic direction, which allowed him to more accurately capture their personalities.
Tight with Claude Monet, Sargent often borrowed techniques from impressionism to make his work more dynamic
and subtle. The results remain almost eerily vivacious over a century later.
Click to See
Better Life Through Medicine
1984
As a teenage fuck-up who had recently (and barely) graduated high school, I, of limited opportunities,
joined the U.S. Army in the summer of 1983. I had never been outside the northeast U.S., and after advanced
training, was first assigned to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Cool, I thought, I would be close to my
girlfriend, who lived not too far away in Harrisburg, Pa. But then, in would I would later understand to be in
true U.S. Army fashion, a last minute phone call came in: I would be instead be dispatched to South Korea,
a place that seemed for my lovelorn heart to be on the other side of the planet.
Click to See
Sexism in Silicon Valley
Thu, 27 Feb 2020
Susan Fowler's "Whistleblower" should be required
reading for any Silicon Valley start-up founder, or any company exec for that matter.
The sexism/misogyny Fowler experienced at Uber and elsewhere derailed her career, multiple times.
But it also damaged these organizations as well,
in terms of lost talent and, later on, public goodwill. Click to Read More...
Darwin by the Fire
Wed, 16 Jul 2014
Sometimes a piece of writing so closely describes the truth, that it itself becomes the truth. Charles Darwin's " On the Origin of Species," first published in 1859, made its argument so thoroughly, so absolutely, it literally willed evolution into being in the human consciousness. Click to Read More...
Feature writing about life in Baltimore:
Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Magazine
Bushwick Nation:
(Editor, Web Admin) Pop culture blog about life in Bushwick
Spock Science Monitor:
(Editor, 2006-2008) Burning Man's longest-running (mock) newspaper
