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  • Recent Stories

    • PostgreSQL 17 Gets Incremental Backup, SQL Queries for JSON EDB's VP of database development, Tom Kincaid, reveals his favorite features of the newly released PostgreSQL 17. (The New Stack), 2024-09-26.

    Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live System Initiative brings Digital Twins-styled modeling to platform automation, allowing teams to visually test new configurations on the fly. (The New Stack), 2024-09-25.

    Free JavaScript from Legal Clutches of Oracle, Devs Petition Despite its minimal involvement in the language, Oracle still owns the JavaScript trademark. Ryan Dahl and other JS stewards are asking the company to relinquish the name to the public domain. (The New Stack), 2024-09-17.

    VMware Users Adjust to Broadcom Subscription Licensing At VMware Explore last month, customers expressed unease at the new subscription model but remained hopeful that they could make it work. (The New Stack), 2024-09-11.

    Charles Schwab Adopts PostgreSQL (With VMware Tanzu) One of the benefits of being a Charles Schwab analyst is that you can pull up a new PostgreSQL database at a click of a button. (The New Stack), 2024-09-04.

    Istio 1.23 Drops the Sidecar for a Simpler Ambient Mesh This new edition of the Istio service mesh can be run without sidecars, simplifying deployments and, in some cases, even reducing latency. (The New Stack), 2024-08-24.

    Meta Open Sources DCPerf, a Benchmark for Hyperscale Workloads With five tests, the social media giant expands beyond standard SPEC benchmarking to more accurately predict workload performance. (The New Stack), 2024-08-15.

    NIST Releases Encryption to Guard Against Quantum Computing Attacks Though quantum computing is still in its infancy, NIST urges IT ops teams to move to quantum-resistant encryption algorithms, providing three to get started. (The New Stack), 2024-08-14.

    Kafka 3.8 Brings Faster Startups to Java Developers The newly-released upgrade to the open source data streaming platform also gives admins more control over compression levels. (The New Stack), 2024-08-02.

    Netflix Open Sources Maestro, a Next-Gen Data Workflow Engine Maestro provides a Workflow as a Service to Netflix's data scientists and information-hungry line-of-business managers. (The New Stack), 2024-08-02.

    Debian Retools APT for Better Dependency Management DebConf/24: As dependency trees get more complicated, and provide more opportunity for security holes, a Debian engineer is revising APT to make better decisions about which packages to update. (The New Stack), 2024-07-30.

    Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today Once, Azure was a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. These days, the company tests over 1,000 Linux distributions a month just to ensure their customer apps run smoothly on Azure. (The New Stack), 2024-07-19.

    Valkey Will Not Just Be a Redis Retread Think again if you assume the Linux Foundation's Valkey project will just be a clone of the Redis database. (The New Stack), 2024-07-17.

    Showdown at the Lakehouse: Databricks Muscles Up With Tabular By acquiring Tabular, Databricks can combine Apache Iceberg expertise with its own Delta Lake format, and promises to unify the increasingly fragmented market for data lakehouses. (The New Stack), 2024-07-11.

    RustLang Semantic Versioning Still Breaks Too Many Apps In an environment of automated builds, incorrectly versioned packages build can wreak havoc, one Rust dev notes on the Changelog podcast. (The New Stack), 2024-07-05.

    Canonical Offers LTS Distroless Containerized Apps for K8s Canonical is expanding its Long Term Support (LTS) program — 12 years of guaranteed security maintenance — beyond Ubuntu releases to open source apps — no distribution needed. (The New Stack), 2024-06-27.

    What GitHub Pull Requests Reveal about Your Team’s Dev Habits Does your team suffer from duplicate git Issues? How about competing or over-stuffed pull requests? A group of researchers have discovered all sorts of ways your dev team may be working with less-than (The New Stack), 2024-06-24.

    Python Mulls a Change in Version Numbering Despite popular belief, Python does not use the industry standard semantic versioning, and this has led to frustrations around backward compatibility and End-of-Life expectancies. (The New Stack), 2024-06-18.

    Why Python Is So Slow (And What Is Being Done About It) PyCon 2024 showcased a number of ways to speed the pokey Python programming language including sub-interpreters, immortal objects, just-in-time compilation and more. (The New Stack), 2024-06-14.

    PlatformCon: How Spotify Manages Infrastructure with GitOps Spotify engineer Tim Hansen described how the music service relied on GitOps principles to automate infrastructure provisioning. (The New Stack), 2024-06-12.

    Snowflake, Databricks and the Fight for Apache Iceberg Tables The market for data lakes and data lakehouses is clearly being disrupted by open source software, given recent news from Databricks and Snowflake. (The New Stack), 2024-06-10.

    DuckDB: In-Process Python Analytics for Not-Quite-Big Data An in-process analytics database, DuckDB can work with surprisingly large data sets without having to maintain a distributed multiserver system. Best of all? You can analyze data directly from your Py (The New Stack), 2024-05-31.

    PyCon US: Simon Willison on Hacking LLMs for Fun and Profit Prompt engineering is a big bag of dumb tricks, argued the co-creator of Django. But that is no reason you can not create interesting apps with the technology. (The New Stack), 2024-05-19.

    Red Hat Podman Lab Gets Developers Started on GenAI Unlike many tools for building generative AI apps, the Podman AI Lab was built specifically for developers, rather than data scientists. (The New Stack), 2024-05-15.

    Red Hat Rethinks the Linux Distro for the Container Age Red Hat wants to bring cloud native-based build and deployment practices to the Linux operating system itself. (The New Stack), 2024-05-07.

    OpenTofu Amiable to a Terraform Reconciliation The OpenTofu community would very much like to return to an unforked open source Terraform, perhaps guided by the Linux Foundation. (The New Stack), 2024-05-02.

    5 Lessons From LinkedIn’s First Foray Into GenAI Development LinkedIn has found that prototyping a Generative AI-based feature can be done really quickly. Getting it into production, however, is another matter entirely. (The New Stack), 2024-05-02.

    GQL: A New ISO Standard for Querying Graph Databases The International Standard for Organization (ISO) has a published an international standard for querying graphs, called the Graph Query Language (ISO/IEC 39075:2024). (The New Stack), 2024-04-29.

    Guider Daemon Automates Linux Performance Monitoring Guider, built over a period of nine years, comes with over 150 performance-tracking and visualization command-line tools. (The New Stack), 2024-04-19.

    Hasura Visualizes Data API Integration into a Supergraph Data integration provider Hasura has added a visual component to its data integration API platform, offering developers a handy visualization of the complex topologies that they wrangle with. (The New Stack), 2024-04-04.

    Golang 1.22 Redefines the For Loop for Easier Concurrency Golang 1.22 fixes a quirk in the for loop that has long-thwarted closure users. (The New Stack), 2024-04-04.

    https://thenewstack.io/linux-xz-backdoor-damage-could-be-greater-than-feared/ A mysterious contributor who planted the backdoor helped maintain the widely used xz compression library for the past two years. So what else was hidden in there? (The New Stack), 2024-03-31.

    Linux xz Backdoor Damage Could Be Greater Than Feared A mysterious contributor who planted the backdoor helped maintain the widely used xz compression library for the past two years. So what else was hidden in there? (The New Stack), 2024-03-31.

    NVIDIA H200 GPUs Crush MLPerf LLM Inferencing Benchmark Also, VMware and Red Hat demonstrated with MLPerf some speedy and flexible system configurations for large-scale LLM work. (The New Stack), 2024-03-29.

    Chainguard: Outdated Containers Accumulate Vulnerabilities Hackers keep finding vulnerabilities in software even after the application is no longer supported, Chainguard has found. (The New Stack), 2024-03-29.

    20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry GnuCOBOL has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments. (The New Stack), 2024-03-15.

    Meet DBOS: A Database Alternative to Kubernetes The creator of PostgreSQL has teamed with the creator of Apache Spark to build a cloud OS on top of a distributed database. (The New Stack), 2024-03-12.

    With YAMLScript, YAML Becomes a Proper Programming Language A scripting language that brings to YAML all the programming capabilities many assumed it already had. (The New Stack), 2024-03-11.

    Vendoring: Why You Still Have Overlooked Security Holes A cautionary FOSDEM talk from the Nix community about all the vulnerable software that may still overlooked on your systems. (The New Stack), 2024-03-08.

    KubeCon 24: GUAC Reveals Where the Vulnerabilities Hide Software Bills of Material (SBOMs) are only the first step in understanding security data. GUAC uses a dependency graph to more readily display problematic components. (The New Stack), 2024-03-07.

    Can the Unix Shell Be Improved? Hell Yes! A look inside the world of alternative command line environments. (The New Stack), 2024-03-02.

    Q&A: Cockroach Labs' Spencer Kimball on Distributing SQL How watching Google evolve distributed transactional databases inspired three engineers to bring these innovations to the enterprise. (The New Stack), 2024-02-16.

    CNCF-Approved Strimzi Eases Apache Kafka onto K8s Clusters With a set of operators, Strimzi extends the Kubernetes API in order to provide a native way to interact with Kafka. (The New Stack), 2024-02-14.

    Google Spends $1 Million to Make Rust, C++ Interoperable Eager to eliminate memory errors in C++-based Android apps, Google wants to make it easy for devs to write functionality in Rust instead. (The New Stack), 2024-02-05.

    CNCF CloudEvents: A Message Envelope That Travels Far The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has anointed CloudEvents as a graduated project, but Microsoft and others are already using the technology in large event-driven architectures. (The New Stack), 2024-01-31.

    The Problem with Slow Rustlang Build Times Frustrated by the slow build times of their Rust programs, the engineering team at Oxide investigated the entire compile process. (The New Stack), 2024-01-25.

    BPF Opens Door to Linux Extensible Scheduling (Maybe with Rust!) In a Christmas hacking project, one Canonical engineer spun up a Linux scheduler that could operate from user-space. (The New Stack), 2024-01-19.

  • Older Stories

    • The Day Vehicles Started Driving Themselves

    Fri, 19 Mar 2004

    Behind Remember, if you will, that not all that long ago the very idea of a self-navigating vehicle was mostly the stuff of SciFi. It certainly seemed fairly preposterous in 2004, when I had the opportunity to witness the first-ever autonomous vehicle race, held in the Mojave Desert, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA). So it was remarkable then that the winning vehicle had managed to travel was 7.4 miles on its own, just as it is remarkable today how quickly these robot vehicles have evolved since then. Here is my account of that day. Click to Read More...

    The Long Running Feud Between vi and EMACS users

    Tue, 04 Dec 2001

    EMACS Like fight-fatigued battalions who come to a temporary truce but refuse to give up the war, vi and EMACS users keep an uneasy standoff in many Linux communities. When pressed, most people familiar with both editors will say the difference between the two is primarily one of speed vs. flexibility. But why has this difference of views remained a divisor of programmer culture for more than four decades now? Click to Read More...


    Pie in the Sky: How Crack the Sky Became Famous in Nowhere but Baltimore

    Wed, 12 Jul 1995

    A 1975 was the Indian summer of progressive rock. Procol Harum and King Crimson released their respective swan songs. ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis were still popular. Younger art rock upstarts like Kansas, 10CC, Supertramp, and Gentle Giant were weighing in with strong new releases. Crack the Sky, from a small steel town 30 minutes west of Pittsburgh, was then one of most promising of these young upshots. Click to Read More...

  • Feature writing about life in Baltimore: Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Magazine
  • Bushwick Nation: (Editor, Web Admin) Pop culture blog about life in Bushwick
  • Spock Science Monitor: (Editor, 2006-2008) Burning Man's longest-running (mock) newspaper