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 notion of resource limits (on memory, CPU, etc) has never been very well-defined, and the use of container-based deployment makes the situation worse. This article describes why, and what can be done about it.
Containers have become increasingly important for Linux developers and administrators. A number of frameworks like LXC, Docker, and Podman are now available to automate the management of containers. However, all these frameworks rely on...
I see too many C (and C++) programs misbehave at runtime, for reasons that could easily have been detected using checks built into all modern compilers. This article describes some common C programming errors, and shows how they would...
The UK Government's response to the covid-19 is to 'test, test, test'. This article demonstrates in pictorial terms why this strategy will catastrophically overestimate the number of people actually infected, leading to widespread...
New auto-compilation features in Java 11 give Java the potential to behave more like a traditional scripting language, such as Perl or Python. But how useful are these features in practice?
Running a shell script from a Java program using Runtime.exec() appears simple. In practice, there are many pitfalls. This article describes how to avoid at least some of them.
Creating stop-motion animated movies using a DSLR camera and some basic Linux tools. It won't rival Pixar, but it's something to do with your kids on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Although Java dominates the webservices world, there are gains to be made by considering the use of lower-level lanaguages like C, particularly in a containerized, microservice architecture. This article describes one way to implement a...
The Hamming bound is an important metric in the evaluation of information coding schemes. It sets an upper limit on the number of distinct codewords that an error-correcting block code can provide, for a given block length. The Hamming...
This article describes how to do arithmetic in a small finite (prime) field. Being able to do this is essential for the implementation of cryptography, among other things. The arithmetic isn't particularly difficult -- particularly if we...
An explanation from first principles of the concepts of probability applied to two random discrete variables.
The official Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen is a useful and well-designed piece of equipment but, if you're using it in a custom (hardware and/or software) build, you'll notice a lack of any relevant technical information. This article...
It's surprisingly difficult to detect switch actuations in a robust way, dealing with contact bounce and other quirks. This article describes one approach to the problem in C.
Using a single MOSFET transistor for power switching in microcontroller applications is simple and low-cost, but it often doesn't work as well as expected. Either the switched device doesn't run at full capacity, or the MOSFET gets hot....
Using the official Raspian repository to assist the construction of a custom Linux for embedded applications is quick and convenient, compared to building everything from source. However, this approach has certain hazards.