Operating systems, build systems, and programming languages. Mostly Unix, Bazel, and Rust. Author of Blog System/5. Creator of EndBASIC, and more.

Redmond, WA
Joined May 2008
Oh no! I have created a frankenmonster of Cargo and autotools and other weird oddities like mtree. 🫠 Why? You'll soon see once I have time to iron out a first last issues... // TODO: Insert "I'm not proud of it. I'm a bit." meme.
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Look! Just loads of modern device/fs drivers for old NT versions. Oh, they are vibe-coded of course. "What if they don't work perfectly?!?" But does it matter? You'll have retro-fun anyway. github.com/ages2001?tab=repo…
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Some neat & useful(!) swag I brought back from BazelCon 😎 I have something even cooler to show but that'll have to wait until I write an article about it. h/t @engflow
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Writing articles in Markdown comes with friction. One thing that has always irritated me is inserting cross-links to other articles. I don't know elisp and would have never automated this... but AI does so... why not ask it? 5 minutes, and done. "SPC #" for my own blog helpers!
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I've been very quiet around here for unclear reasons, but with BazelCon 2026 behind our backs... I need to write a couple of articles so let's pick this up again!
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I wrote this reply to the "I changed my license to EUPL" article, which argues for the use of copyleft licenses as a potential protection against slop. Maybe the change does work after all?
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"The toner is out!" ... already? Can't be, but whatever. /me goes to reorder. Oh. "Last ordered 2 years ago". WTF? Where did the time go??? 😭😭😭
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This is the sort of thing AI excels at. I had been wanting to do this code cleanup for a while but it was just extremely boring for me to do, so I never did. Now... I wrote the prompt in a couple of minutes and had Codex run thorough it while I cooked dinner.
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Silly or smart? I wrote a startup rc.d script to automatically mount my encrypted ZFS pool by fetching the key from a remote server. What I want to protect against is the "drives stolen from home" case. If that happened, I could quickly remove the key.
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Scaffolding for the server UI: check. Next up: creating the management webapp for users and keys.
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I picked up this idea I left behind months ago and I think I now have almost all pieces in place. What are you looking at, you ask? A remote escrow service for disk encryption keys where the server with auto-lock a key if it isn't kept alive every N minutes.
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I've had this idea to solve a temperature issue with a countertop over by using some fans and designing an enclosure... and I'm now two failed designs in and reading about airflow...
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There is a lot you can learn from old technology to keep things lean and simple in this day and age. Autoconf's AC_SUBST is one of those, and you can apply that idea to... Bazel no less! (Yes... some articles don't seem to work at all...)
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Casualties from upgrading to a monitor with a built in Thunderbolt dock and speakers.
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New little goodie for EndBASIC. I think I've accumulated enough features to call 0.14 done. (There is one extra thing I'd like to do but it's proving to be really difficult.)
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Six years since Google Play Music was sunset. Six years since I took all data out and never bothered to look at it because the export was designed to be unusable. But I just threw GPT 5.4 at the problem and... and... this task I had been procrastinating on is done. In minutes.
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The EndBASIC welcome banner has not changed in... years, but I think it's time to spice it up a little to show, from the get go, that graphics are a thing. Open to better ideas for what the little image could be.
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I've been dreaming of adding sound to EndBASIC for literally years now because I feared the difficulty and... Yikes, it was rather trivial to get it to work across the SDL and web backends. Now to clean things up and I think the next release will be feature-complete.
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