Why manual memory management can be worse for performance than garbage collection – I spent over a decade coding in C and C++, and these are true words. Instead of GC pause you’ll have ‘deallocation hiccups’ whenever a big object destructor or scope change occurs, and reference counting is an intrusive performance hog that leads to horrific constructs like loops that repeatedly Release() a COM object until the reference count is zero. This allocation meditation from someone switching to C from Python is worth a read too, it captures the near-obsession with malloc that C programmers have to develop.
Proper handling of SIGINT/SIGQUIT – Have you ever wondered what’s going on when you press Control-C in the terminal? This article is a great case study on how a seemingly simple requirement spirals into tough-to-get-right complexity when you have to integrate it into a wider system.
Use multiple CPU cores with your Linux commands – How to use GNU Parallel to speed up your grep, awk, and sed-ing.
Thieves pose as truckers to steal huge cargo loads – The interesting part is that criminals are doing intensive web research to build themselves convincing false identities from publicly-available information. Open data has its downsides.
Accidental aRt – When R attacks!
Pete Warden's blog 