Yesterday, Booking.com hosted the Open Compute Meetup in Amsterdam. My talk is on Slideshare and a recording is on Youtube.

• Slideshare: A journey to OCP
• Youtube: A journey to OCP

A cleaned up and more coherent transcript of the talk is here:

Booking.com started out as a small online travel agency in Amsterdam, but is now financially about 15% of Google. We have about 200 offices in 70 countries, support 46 languages and reach about any touristically interesting spot on this planet.

Today I was looking for a way to subscribe to file changes in a directory in MacOS, in order to trigger automatically running commands whenever files change. Turns out Homebrew has “fswatch”, which tells you when things change, but little else.

Turns out Homebrew has “watchman”, which does all this, and on multiple trees, finds changes across restarts and automatically manages a set of commands for different file endings.

There is a very useful and interesting article by Chris Down: “In defence of swap: common misconceptions ”.

Chris explains what Swap is, and how it provides a backing store of anonymous pages as opposed to the actual code files, which provide backing store for file based pages. I have no problem with the information and background knowledge he provides. This is correct and useful stuff, and I even learned a thing about what cgroups can do for me.

What does your Mac do on Startup? Knockknock knows .

It’s not properly updated for current versions of MacOS, but it is still useful. “git clone https://github.com/synack/knockknock" and “/usr/bin/python knockknock.py” is sufficient to test.

TOTAL ITEMS FOUND: 44

That’s quite a bit. Apparently, I am starting

• Google Music Manager,
• AirServer,
• Karabiner,
• Alfred 3,
• a Chrome app_mode_loader,
• the Android File Transfer Agent,
• Dropbox, Divvy,
• Expandrive,
• Chrome itself,
• Soundflower,
• an AX88179 USB GBit Ethernet adapter driver,
• Steam Drivers,
• /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/org.chromium.chromoting.me2me.sh,
• the Steam ipcserver,
• the Expandrive Helper,
• the Skype Helper,
• the OnePasswordNativeMessageHost,
• Expandrive exfs,
• iStatMenus and
• the iStatMenus Agents and Helpers,
• Steamclean,
• the GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent,
• Tunnelblick LaunchAtLogin.sh,
• and finally an ethcheck Firmware checker.

So much Crap being loaded.

Melvin Conway is a compiler developer and systems designer, who is well known for the eponymous Conway’s Law . Various phrasings exist of that, and one popular is

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

The original paper and an introductory paragraph can be found on his website . It’s worth reading, because there are more useful insights to be found in the original writeup.

Frank O’Brien explains an outstanding piece of engineering: The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was the computer that controlled the thrusters and navigation on the Apollo Command Module, and a second instance, on the Lunar Module. It’s a 32kg box with core memory and core rope ROM, a 16 bit discrete CPU (15 data bits and parity) running at 1 MHz effective, and some very special hardware behind its I/O ports.

Introduction to GPUs (PDF)

So you already know how your CPU works, basically, and want to understand what your GPU does differently. Ofer Rosenberg has you covered: Introduction to GPUs does what it says on the tin.

The NVIDIA take on this can be found in An Introduction to Modern GPU Architecture by Ashu Rege, but because this is from 2008, it’s showing it’s age. The first 15 slides or so focus more on the gaming aspect and less on the technology, but are full of matching screenshots.

Frank Swain takes us on a tour of the myths, stories and historic reports of the undead corpse throughout the history of humanity. Referencing sources and quoting people, he shows us the various aspects of the mindless physical body shuffling around after the soul departed, and how that as a theme has been following us around throughout our history.

The first chapter deals with the “original” haitian zombies, later chapters take us to victorian experimentation with corpses of the executed, soviet experiments and many other encounters between humans and the living undead.

Max Brooks, author of World War Z, delivers a straight on, zero tongue in cheek, nitty-gritty survival guide for the coming Zombie Apocalypse. The book delivers exactly what is promised in the table of contents: The Solanum Virus and how it works and does not work, Weapons and Combat Techniques that work, defending your home, public spaces or other places, how to organise a breakout or run, useful equipment to have or to loot, and then fighting back and finally containing the outbreak.

»I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.«

This is how »All Systems Red« begins.

The protagonist in this book is a robot mercenary android, or Murderbot, as it refers to itself. In a universe of corporations and contracts, Expeditions and Exploration teams are taking these company supplied machines with the for their own safety, and for compliance reasons.