Photo by egazelle

How to program unreliable chips – It’s been a vitally useful simplification to pretend that computer calculations are 100% reliable, but as our data volumes grow and chips shrink, we’ll need to start planning for errors.

Abigail’s regex to test for prime numbers – A thing of terrifying beauty.

Disguise detection – Using cheap IR detectors to check that the face you’re detecting in visible light isn’t a latex mask.

Mapping “For Whom the Bell Tolls” – A thoughtful look at how locations occur in the novel, with the visualization in its proper place as another tool in the analysis, rather than being seen as the final product. It’s worth following some links too, you’ll find some gems like this analysis of the baggage and future of GIS.

Know thy Java object memory layout – All abstractions leak around the edges, and I love catching glimpses of the machinery that’s whirring away inside black boxes. The complexity of the accumulating layers of software archaeology we’re building on top of is staggering.