Perpendiculous

Any comp-sci grad worth his or her student loan debt can tell you about virtual memory. And many can tell you the intricacies of dealing with unix-style VM. But for the developers working with Mac OS X (and iOS), there’s a deeper layer hidden underneath that is seldom expressed (and often for good reason) – Mach. (more…)

Visualizing the badness of purchasing a new car. (more…)

Mid last month (September, for those keeping score at home), a peculiar email arrived in my inbox.  Therein, I was referred by an Apple employee with an opportunity to potentially work there.  To say the least, my interest was piqued.  After all, after spending the past 2 years up to my elbows in some of their software’s guts, reverse engineering, patching, and exploring, I’d like to think I had some authority on the subject.

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Somewhere out there on the internet, there’s a “showdown” between @synchronized, NSLock, pthread mutexes, and OSSpinLock. It aims to measure their performance relative to each other, but uses sloppy code to perform the measuring. As a result, while the performance ordering is correct (@synchronized is the slowest, OSSpinLock is the fastest), the relative cost is severely misrepresented. Herein I attempt to rectify that benchmark.

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Last year, CollegeAdvantage’s 529 college savings plan offered a referral bonus where those opening new accounts, as well as those referring them, received $25 bonuses.  They’ve recently reinstated that bonus, so I figured I’d post some shameless self-promoting in the hopes of getting y’all some free college savings (for kids, etc), and get some for me as well (for our future children). (more…)