Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer Original Site: The Elements of Computing Systems This course is run by some guys from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its about building a computer from nand gates in a hardware simulator, building an assembler, programming language and a kernel from first principles. So far its been very interesting and informative - I've made it through to the third project in about 2 days or so of work. I posted this in their forums as a suggestions, but the only...

Update 2019: Coursera killed every course permalink. ??? I was working through lecture 59 of the UW hardware software interface course and got interested in the origin of the fork-exec model for process management. In case you didn't know, fork is a way of creating a process in Unix-like systems. I have known this for a long time. I never really thought about how it works, though. It turns out, what it does is create a 'copy' (optimized to copy-on-write later on) of the existing program and returns the new process...

For the first time in probably 10 years, I've got a handle on my email. I unsubscribed from every list I could find, created a set of auto filters that apply a label and skip inbox based on some lists that I still want to be subscribed to, but that I don't look at every day. I feel much less stressed about my communications. It had grown and grown over the years organically (both from managing 30+ people) and having interests in a ton of different topics. One thing I won't ever do again: subscribe to any mailing...

I was recently reading an article on "The Path to Rust," which is a topic I've been interested for some time, based on the promises of the language. Namely a language with explicit memory management without a garbage collector that claims to be thread and memory safe. Hardcore enough to have an inline assembly (gcc syntax, which is gross) and with a focus on performance. I really like C and C++ and have spent a fair amount of time actually learning x86-64 assembly. This is from a guy who spent most of...

I recently went through Open Security Training's Intro to x86 assembly programming. Here is a quick review. Reference: Open Security Training Website and Youtube Playlist In general, I thought this was a worthwhile course to go through, despite having a pretty firm grasp on the material. I watched it at 2x speed and did do most of the suggested exercises. Its free and posted under Creative Commons, which is extremely generous. However, because it was a live class, there was definitely a fair amount of 'dead air'...