Author Archive

A Sampling of the x86 Bootstrap Process

August 20th, 2008
Posted in - blah - | No Comments

Looking forward to a three day weekend, I thought about what I could do to pretty much relax from work. I have always been curious about the bootstrap process on a PC, but I never had the time or skill to understand the assembly language and process involved in writing one. After having exposure to […]

Phone Upgrade Acquired!

August 17th, 2008

The Nokia 3588i, activated on January 24, 2004, was my first mobile phone. At the time, I was working at THQ, Inc. as a game tester with the hope of working for one of their subsidiary game development houses and making it big at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Unfortunately, being a game tester who […]

Questioning the Dependence on Third-Party Service Providers

July 26th, 2008

According to this Amazon.com S3 Team write up on the loss of their S3 service’s availability, “very few requests were completing successfully” during an availability event. The service’s problems seem to have started at 08:40, and the service’s error rates did not fall back to normal, acceptable levels in the United States until 16:02pm. The […]

A Definition of “All Rights Reserved”

June 11th, 2008
Posted in Legal | 4 Comments

Many people place a notice of copyright on artifacts such as web pages and include the text, “All Rights Reserved,” without actually knowing what those rights are. The text of United States Code Title 17 (“Copyrights”), Chapter 1 (“Subject Matter and Scope of Copyright”), Section 106 (“Exclusive rights in copyrighted works”) is presented below: Subject […]

Observer Pattern in C

May 18th, 2008

More interesting software systems are complex, and the implementation of complex software typically requires multiple developers. The introduction of additional developers increases software complexity, which requires the software design to provide for software components that are resilient against change. Functional behaviors or component dependencies, such as the need for one component to recognize that another […]