Project Log
The Smart Home That Learns
Home automation that infers the routine instead of waiting to be programmed.
exploring
Lead story
Predicting the Unseen
How a battery tells you it is about to fail, and what it costs to listen.
Project Log
Rewriting Memory Management in xv6
Taking apart the page allocator in MIT's teaching kernel to find out what it was hiding.
archived
Project Log
Writing a Shell That Handles Signals
bird_shell: pipes, redirection, job control, and the part of POSIX nobody warns you about.
archived
Essay
From Challenges to Victory
Four years in a university robotics club, and the motor driver that kept burning out.
Essay
Long Walks as Debugging
The best tool I have for a hard problem is leaving the room it is in.
List
Chess Openings I Keep Returning To
Not the strongest ones. The ones that suit how I actually think at eleven at night.
- The London System
- The Caro-Kann
- The King's Indian Defence
Recipe
Kanda Poha for a Slow Morning
The Pune breakfast, done properly, which mostly means not drowning the poha.
- 2
- 10 min
- 12 min
List
Why Test Cricket Is the Correct Format
Five days, four innings, and the only sport that lets a draw be the best possible result.
- A draw can be an achievement
- The conditions are a participant
- It punishes a single lapse across five days
Review
Blade Runner 2049
The rare sequel that earns its length by using it for something.
Review
The Dark Side of the Moon
Forty-three minutes with no slack in them, and the rare record where the production is part of the writing rather than a coat of paint over it.
Review
The Pragmatic Programmer
Still the best single book on the craft, provided you read the reasoning and not the rules.
Essay
In Defence of the Hypothetical
Why the question nobody will ever face is often the only one worth asking.
Essay
What Comes Next
Intentions written down with dates attached, which is the only thing separating them from wishes.
Also in this edition
Project LogProjects
Benchmarking GPU Generations
Running the same kernels across architectures to see which generational claims survive contact with a workload.
archived
Project LogProjects
A Cache Simulator Worth Arguing With
Measuring what associativity and replacement policy actually buy you, on real traces.
archived
The record
Timeline
Milestones in order, from a university robotics bench to a battery pack that had to be told what it was about to do.
Everything
Archive
Every article filed, browsable by section, by kind, or by tag.
Correspondence
Contact
Letters to the editor, and everywhere else this paper's writer can be found.