Blog
Please Stop Form Validation on Key Strokes
03 March 2021
Today I encountered a bug in a web form. A textbox required a numeric value, but when I attempted to enter it, I found that none of my keystrokes resulted in digits appearing in the box. I’ve experienced this bug once every few months for several years at this point. I always knew the reason for it, but today I felt just annoyed enough to fully research the issue and write about it.
Read moreStack Overflow Users Rejoice as Pattern Matching is Added to Python 3.10
09 February 2021
INTERNET – Stack Overflow users today rejoiced at the prospect of Python’s upcoming 3.10 release including the controversial new pattern matching feature described in PEP 634.
Read moreThe Windows 10 Installer Dystopia
08 November 2020
A few days ago I had the displeasure of helping a friend reinstall Windows on their laptop, which had previously contained Ubuntu. The reason for their switch isn’t that important – although I helpfully suggested keeping Linux, it was their machine and their decision. I didn’t expect the process to be particularly difficult. After all, I work on operating systems for a living now, so I didn’t expect any trouble. But to my surprise, I encountered a nearly dystopian situation before I even got to the desktop.
Read moreVisualizing gzip compression with Python!
22 September 2020
Not that long ago, I found myself wanting to understand gzip. I didn’t necessarily want to learn to implement the algorithm, but rather I just wanted to understand how it was performing on a particular file. Even more specifically, I wanted to understand which parts of a file compressed well, and which ones did not.
Read moreImplementing simple cooperative threads in C
24 May 2020
Multitasking, like many services an operating system provides, is something we take for granted so much that it can feel mundane. With our powerful smartphones and computers, the idea of a computer not being able to juggle hundreds of processes feels alien. I think it’s features like this that make computers incredibly useful, but also make them feel so complicated and magical.
Read moreEmbracing modularity with Meson
08 May 2020
Almost seven years ago, I made the first commit to my very first C library. It was a personal C library – so personal that I gave it the name “libstephen”, ensuring that nobody else would ever even consider using it. And to be fair, nobody should have used it! This was a data structures library written by a kid with a few weeks of C experience and a bunch of basic Java coursework under his belt. Without getting into specifics, the code was pretty bad.
Read moreImplementing a virtio-blk driver in my own operating system
22 March 2020
In this blog post, I’m going to describe how I wrote my first block device driver in my operating system, SOS. This OS is my personal project for exploring how to implement an operating system. You can find more inforation about it in my first post about SOS, or check it out on Github.
Read moreBuild your own OS: Pre-emptive Multitasking
08 February 2020
One of my recent long-running projects has been building my own operating system. It’s called SOS, for Stephen’s OS (real creative, I know). And beyond all odds, this project has progressed really well! Recently, SOS got the ability to do pre-emptive multitasking — and it only took me 116 commits and 1.5 years of on-and-off effort to get there! Throughout that time, I haven’t really posted about SOS because it felt too complicated to write about. But I don’t want to let that prevent me from trying, so going forward, I’m going to try to post about different features and achievements with SOS. To start, this post will describe how I got pre-emptive multitasking working.
Read moreNetwork Booting Raspberry Pi 4B with Upstream Kernel
04 December 2019
This is a guide and personal documentation for how I got my Raspberry Pi 4B booted with an upstream Linux kernel. I use this setup for quickly booting custom kernels as I do development. As a result, I had the following goals:
Read moreSite Update
17 February 2019
Today I made a few changes to my site’s design which hopefully makes things a bit more user-friendly for anyone using this site.
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