https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/04/14/goodbye-gpl.html I saw this post on Hacker News, and before I could reply, someone flagged it. Oh well. So I’ll post my thoughts on it here… First, it’s unfortunate that this post start out with (well-intentioned but probably compulsive) flame-bait about Richard Stallman, which is likely to derail the discussion. Anyway the author is arguing […]

I always forget the order of arguments to ln -s. It’s a problem. So here’s my handy-dandy way of remembering it, as a blog post:

Once upon a time, I worked at a company that heavily contributed to and used Chisel (a Verilog generator using a Scala DSL). Now, roughly 3 years later, I tried to make a fun little hardware design using Chisel. I remembered that the people who were contributing to Chisel liked to break backward compatibility for […]

I’m mad. I bought an FPGA board, then discovered that one of the primary features I wanted is missing. How? Well, the website of the manufacturer is seemingly (to me) deceptive. Take a look: https://numato.com/product/mimas-a7-mini-fpga-development-board/ Now, looking at that page, does this board support programming via USB only? If you’re looking at it with a […]

I use a beefy build server to do my Linux Kernel compiles. I use github workflows to do the compile in an unattended fashion. I don’t want to SSH into the server to run make menuconfig. What do I do? I use a Macbook as my daily driver. It would be nice if I could […]

I made this little flowchart to collect my thoughts on driver development in the Windows vs Linux ecosystems. Uploading it here so I can refer back to it when the need arises.

Found this excellent blog post: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/82328.html This echoes most of what I’ve been feeling about the state of “Linux Laptops”. They’re mostly a scam. Dell slaps stock Ubuntu, plus some preloaded drivers, onto a laptop and calls it “Linux Edition”. System76 isn’t any better. They also slap a custom Ubuntu derivative distro on there, which […]

Here’s an interesting talk: As you can tell from the title, I disagree. For some reason it blows people’s minds when they realize that most of the code on their PC is running in some embedded chip in a peripheral just moving data around. They think it’s meaningful. It’s not. These peripherals provide a stable […]