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Keeping Ruby alive: Replace pry-nav with pry-moves
Looks like the wonderful pry-nav gem has fallen into disrepair. No one can push to rubygems, the creator is MIA. A common story these days, right? So I went looking for forks. Of course, lots of people have “forked” it on Guthub, but I want one that, you know, has had improvements and modernizations made […]
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Why Reinventing the Wheel is Good, Actually
In the world scientific community, our rate of yearly innovation seems to be slowing. Let’s look at a chart of the important technological innovations per year divided by world population: How do we interpret this data? What could it mean? Does this indicate that we’re lazy and stopped innovating? Or we’ve disincentivized innovation? Or have […]
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Is Ruby Dead? Only if you want to use it like it’s 2013.
Show of hands – who’s still using Ruby in 2021? *raises hand* Although, it’s debatable that any of us are using Ruby in 2021. We’re certainly not using the Ruby that people were using from 2010-2016, the Ruby golden era. It kinda feels like Ruby is a failing empire in it’s last days. Nothing really […]
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Why Linux isn’t Popular on the Desktop
Linux is almost 100% of the market share on servers, and almost 100% of mobile devices (besides Apple). So why is it stuck at 10% on desktop? (Or 20% if you count ChromeOS, or 1% if you only count people’s “work PCs”, such as in corporate offices and work-from-home setups). It’s because Linux has conflicting […]
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Use Linux, It’s Good For You
A running theme in the Calvin & Hobbes comic is his Dad dragging him along on a family outing, or giving him chores, or some other drudgery, and saying it “builds character” [Building character | The Calvin and Hobbes Wiki | Fandom]. In many of the comics, the Dad has hopelessly bungled the endeavor, and […]
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The Linux Init Process is There to Hide The Ugly Truth
When the Linux kernel boots, it needs to be told what to run next. That program, the “init process”, a.k.a. “PID 1”, is the first process that will run, and is responsible for readying the system for all of the other processes that will be run. Normally this is System V Init or System D, […]
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3D Printing Old PC Parts
I’ve been restoring an old computer, using as many new parts as possible (dual SATA and PATA SSDs, rather than the PATA Hard Disk Drive that was in there, modern SATA DVD-RW drive, a modern power supply rather than the non-standard-sized one that came standard). One problem I’ve run into is brittle plastic. A little-known […]
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Helpful GDB Commands
Mostly for my personal reference: target remote tcp::1234 – Connect to remote host layout asm – Switch to asm layout (horribly broken and often breaks your whole terminal, but whatever…) python [gdb.execute(‘YOUR_COMMAND’) for x in range(N)] – Repeat command N times br *0x7c00 – Set breakpoint info registers (or i r) – Show registers
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Mounting /proc, /sys, and /dev in an Init Process
When the Linux kernel finishes booting, it needs to know what to run next. What process will be the “manager” of all of the other “userland” processes? This process, called the “init process” or “PID 1” is commonly part of a larger “init system”. There are several. Mostly only SysV Init and systemd are worth […]
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How Microsoft (and Linux) Won the Desktop
I’ve been skimming through the 1993 book Windows Internals by Matt Pietrek. At that time, Microsoft Windows (and a copy of Microsoft MS-DOS to bootstrap it) was already the go-to Operating System for businesses. But there were attempts to dethrone it, such as IBM’s PS/2 and of course the Apple Macintosh. What made Windows able […]
