Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Musing on computing, math, electronics, de-Googling and the small web, from an old warhorse of the IT industry.
Latest Posts
The Apache ActiveMQ Artemis message broker holds out the possibility of real shared-nothing replication. The problem, though, lies in coordinating the active and passive brokers in the cluster. This article describes the new...
Sometimes it's helpful to be able to create an executable program that embeds all the data it needs, and provide that data as files. C/C++ do not provide any standard way to do this, but GCC has facilities that the developer can use.
This article describes how to write a trivial program for Linux using no compiler tools at all, but entering machine language directly in hexadecimal. Because we can.
It isn't often that coding theory can be used to evaluate a claim of a UFO encounter. Here is one instance where it can.
In praise of an iconic laptop computer.
Audio CDs were recorded using a 44.1 kHz sample rate that is found almost nowhere else. If we have to resample this audio to suit more modern equipment, how much loss of audio quality will there be?
Collecting sensor data, or low-level system status information, is a job that is often best done in C/C++. Distributing this kind of data to other system components in a way that is platform- and language-independent can be a challenge....
We only see one face of the moon from the Earth, and that isn't a coincidence. The same process that causes this effect also affects other celestial bodies, often in more interesting ways.
The "big switch-off" of analogue radio services in the UK has been deferred repeatedly. One of the reasons for this is that the impact on energy efficiency is hard to assess. This article seeks to explain why.
Does controlling web search rankings amount to censorship? Does it matter if it does?
Building a CP/M implementation of the notorious Wordle game.
Benford's law or the first digit rule states that in many data sets, the first digit of each value tends to be small. This is not at all obvious, but it has significant implications.
How an oddity in the way UTF-8 encoding works can cause all sorts of problems for unwary developers, including security weaknesses.
"Juice-jacking" is the alleged practice of getting unauthorized access to the contents of a cellphone by subverting public USB charging points. It doesn't happen, and probably never has; so why has there been a recent increase in scare...
There's been a recent scare that Unicode reading direction characters could be used to conceal malicious code in open-source projects. This is undoubtedly true, but that fact doesn't make it significantly harder to ensure the security of...