Author Topic: The Night Watch by James Mickens  (Read 10191 times)

Varti

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1266
    • View Profile
The Night Watch by James Mickens
« on: July 08, 2017, 10:03:36 pm »
The Night Watch, a humor column by James Mickens on the horrors of system programming, well worth reading:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/f...enightwatch.pdf

"What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a memory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY. "

Varti
Planet Gemini PDA WiFi/LTE with Mediatek x27
SL-C1000 running Arch Linux ARM May2017, K30225 Wi-Fi CF Card, 64GB SDXC card
and many other Zauruses!

speculatrix

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3706
    • View Profile
Re: The Night Watch by James Mickens
« Reply #1 on: July 18, 2020, 01:11:58 pm »
brilliant!
even more relevant today than when first published.
Gemini 4G/Wi-Fi owner, formerly zaurus C3100 and 860 owner; also owner of an HTC Doubleshot, a Zaurus-like phone.