On blood-lines, forks and survivors

UNIX has a colorful history that goes back many decades and the stories of how certain aspects of the operating system evolved or came to be, usually at the hands of one luminary or the other over a weekend, is now well documented in the lore of this sub-culture.

Aug 17, 2020·1 min read

Debian is 27

Today, Debian celebrates its 27th birthday. It is now one of the oldest and most widespread Linux distributions with many offshoots and derivatives while continuing to deliver rock solid stable releases in its own measured pace.

Mar 9, 2020·4 min read

Building a tiny Linux kernel

Today we will go over the process of building a tiny Linux kernel, and booting into a shell. To start with, fetch the Linux source tree that you'd like to try this out on.

Feb 20, 2020·2 min read

Compiling the Linux Kernel with Clang

I decided to give Clang a spin to compile the kernel, and given that I'm not exactly an early adopter in attempting this, it was pretty smooth and straightforward overall. All it took was make CC=clang HOSTCC=clang -j12.

Sep 27, 2019·6 min read

Linux on the Desktop: a cautionary tale of distributions, GPUs and encrypted filesystems

In the last 24 hours, I have been experimenting with this interestingly named and absolutely gorgeous Linux distribution called Pop!_OS by System76. An Ubuntu derivative, it features an extremely polished user experience and I was taken aback by its aesthetic and charming simplicity, which led me to some comparisons, quite unfairly with Debian.

Mar 17, 2019·7 min read

Connecting to the Minnowboard over Serial

In this post, I will walk you through the process of connecting to a Minnowboard over a serial console connection, so that you can use it without having to hook up a monitor or keyboard. For those of you that may be new to Minnowboards, they are single board computers that fall into the niche segment of SBCs that are based on Intel x86 processors.

Mar 10, 2019·6 min read

On Linux, backups and encrypted filesystems

Today, I want to focus on backups. Specifically, how can I backup my Linux filesystems in a way that I can perform it frequently without hassle, keep it secure with encryption, and make restoration painless.

Oct 26, 2018·3 min read

X.org Security Vulnerability: CVE-2018–14665

X Windows, and the popular fork X.org, is notorious for security issues and vulnerabilities. Most recently, a bug in X.org that has been around for nearly two years and is trivial to exploit has been disclosed.

May 6, 2018·3 min read

Lightweight Docker images with Alpine

One of the challenges in building Docker images is keeping it small and lean. For example, let's take a simple app that prints a simple message to the console, and containerize it in Docker.

Mar 19, 2018·4 min read

Building a service mesh with Istio

If you're looking to build a modern microservices architecture that is highly scalable, observable, secure and resilient, it would make sense to consider some of the service mesh technologies that are rapidly evolving right now. At the time of this writing, Istio is one of the key frameworks that have been gaining a lot of traction, and a key contender in the service mesh race.

Jan 1, 2018·7 min read

AlphaGo: a journey to machine intuition

When IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, I was fifteen years old. I didn't know the significance of the event at the time, nor was I even interested in the epic battle that was to define the technology advancements in AI in that decade.

Dec 24, 2017·7 min read

Dissecting Bitcoin, Part 2 — Challenges

In the previous part, we discussed the core technology behind Bitcoin and the concepts that make it tick. In this post, we will be covering some challenges Bitcoin faces as its adoption grows at a rapid rate.