Here’s the code for a C program I conceived during a rather boring night shift while performing national service some years back. The code was later refined using GNU Bison and GNU Flex for parsing the operand field, yielding the possibility of processing whole expressions involving addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Instead of specifying IEEE […]

Read More → MMIX assembly language floating point number preprocessor – initial C version

Are you missing the down-arrow on the right hand side of the URL address field in Opera? That handy piece of GUI element makes it easy to remove entries from the URL history. According to this forum post, you can enable the down-arrow by visiting opera:config#UserPrefs|ShowDropdownButtonInAddressfield. Simply check the checkbox, hit the Save button, and […]

Read More → Missing the down-arrow on the right hand side of the URL address field in Opera?

I upgraded some of my virtual machines during my summer holiday. They are all running ZFS, but were neglected for so long that they were still updating their source and ports trees using CVSup. I began pondering how to migrate to Subversion with the least fuzz possible. Luckily, I had anticipated the switch to Subversion, […]

Read More → Moving ZFS datasets around eases the transition from CVSup to Subversion

I’ve been experimenting with FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT and an alternative ZFS layout for more than a year. The idea is to have a simple way of switching between boot environments. Thus, you have the opportunity of reverting to a previous boot environment without resorting to snapshots and rollbacks as you would with a sole boot environment. […]

Read More → Alternative ZFS layout

An acquaintant posted on IRC a link to Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog and his post entitled “Why Can’t Programmers.. Program?“. The task should be straightforward: Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print […]

Read More → FizzBuzz

These messages appeared in the kern log file the other day: Jun 21 22:06:06 enterprise kernel: [282015] (ada1:ahcich1:0:0:0): WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 61 18 38 ce 72 40 0b 00 00 00 00 00 Jun 21 22:06:06 enterprise kernel: [282015] (ada1:ahcich1:0:0:0): CAM status: Uncorrectable parity/CRC error Jun 21 22:06:06 enterprise kernel: [282015] (ada1:ahcich1:0:0:0): Retrying command Jun 21 […]

Read More → Are one of the disks beginning to fail?

FreeBSD is approaching 20 years! I guess it all depends on what you regard as FreeBSD’s true birth. The baptism, the first commit to the CVS repository, the first release, or something else? The first commit to the CVS repository was done on “Sat Jun 12 14:49:13 1993 UTC”. That’s 20 years and 6 days […]

Read More → Happy nameday, FreeBSD!