Compiler backdoors!

If you remember the famous Ken Thompson Turing Award lecture where he demonstrated how easy it is to backdoor a C compiler, we have here the full code and an in depth look at how it works.

Volume 4, Fascicle 7

A new The Art of Computer Programming fascicle has just been released - let us begin to study it.

New features in Perl 5.40

Just in case you missed it, a list of new features in Perl 5.40. Nothing mind blowing but all appreciated.

Seeing Pi in a Pentium chip die

Amazingly, with the right microscope, you can see where Pi is encoded in a Pentium's internal ROM.

Writing a container from scratch

Great little intro to how Unix tools are used to construct containers, from Kevin Boone.

The end of print computer magazines

I'm a big reader of print - I honestly think my ability to keep up with technology changes has gone downhill as books and magazines have stopped covering techology.

Unless you worked at PC World in 2004, what’s most striking about this chart is Computer Shopper’s utter collapse—from something like 350,000 issues sold at the newsstand a month to fewer than 55,000. As the most catalog-like major computer magazine, it was the most vulnerable to being rendered obsolete by the web. Once a 1,000-page (!!!) monthly behemoth, it withered in more dramatic fashion than PC World or PC Magazine. When it didn’t feel like Computer Shopper anymore, readers lost interest.

I read a lot of Computer Shopper back in the day. We should return.

CodeProject woes

While reading an article about IntelliPort, a very neat HyperTerminal replacement, I noticed a link on the top of the page. Long story short, it looks like Code Project is going offline:

Shortly the site will be switched into read-only mode. Our hope with this change is to allow another party to maintain the site as an archive of great code, articles and technical advice. We are working hard to make that happen and while in no way guaranteed, things look very promising so far. However for the foreseeable future, and possibly permanently, new postings will be disabled, for articles, for forums, for QuickAnswers and the other portions of the site.

Hopefully we can come together and save the site. It has been a part of my professional life since I started coding for cash in 2006.