Recent Blog Posts

In a previous post I discussed linked lists versus arrays, and ran a number of simple benchmarks with both structures to demonstrate that the common advice of “use linked lists for insertion heavy workloads” doesn’t always pan out in practice.

I was recently working on a project which involved performing a number of tasks asynchronously, with the constraint that the tasks could be performed in any order, but they must “commit” in a specific order based on a dependency chain.

Recently, I needed to generate and process multi-billion record synthetic datasets for some data structure benchmarking. Rather than write a bunch of custom code to do this processing, I decided to try using shell scripts and standard system utilities.

I have written in the past about groff, a modern implementation of troff/nroff, an old-school, lightweight LaTex alternative. The underlying typesetting system used is incredibly powerful, but is also ugly and difficult to work with.

Using the command line to interact with a printer is surprisingly straightforward. You configure your printer by IP address, and then use it. Simplicity itself. Surprisingly, I’m even finding it more convenient than fighting with GUI printer setup systems.

I have recently discovered a feature of the apt package manager that smooths over almost all of the annoyances that I’ve had with point-release distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.). apt provides a simple and effective way to install newer packages than are included in the release version that you are running. And it isn’t even hard to get set up.

When talking about data structures, I often like to say that there are two basic ones: arrays and linked lists. These two structures accomplish the same task: storing a sequence of items. But one of them is significantly better in most situations.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I’ve been experimenting with new software in an attempt to remove as many programs written in interpreted languages as possible from my workflow. Probably the biggest example of this was qutebrowser, which is written in Python.

In a previous post I discussed some of the negative experiences that came with daily-driving OpenBSD on a Thinkpad T420s. I am still using that same laptop and OS combination, though, so in spite of these issues the good seems to outweigh the bad.

My primary terminal emulator is kitty, which occasionally gives me problems when connecting to remote machines via ssh, because not every system has terminfo and/or termcap records for it. Further, on OpenBSD the kitty package doesn’t automatically add termcap records for it during installation, so even on an OpenBSD desktop, you will need to take care of this yourself.