20 May 2026
architecture
freebsd
tooling
devops
23 September 1999. The Mars Climate Orbiter fires its
main engine to enter orbit, passes behind Mars, and is
never heard from again. The spacecraft cost 193 million
dollars. It was lost to a number with no unit on it.
Lockheed Martin's ground software computed thruster
impulse in pound-force seconds (imperial); NASA JPL's
trajectory software expected newton-seconds (metric).
One pound-force second is 4.45 newton-seconds; the
craft arrived at 57 km instead of 226 km, deep in the
atmosphere. The number was correct; it simply had no
unit attached as it crossed between systems. In
science and engineering, measure in metric; where
systems must meet, make the unit travel with the
number. The same trap hides in GB versus GiB. Tales
from the Bare Metal Episode 04.
19 May 2026
unix
freebsd
tooling
linux
A development server holds a mystery. Someone deployed
something, the logs hold the truth. One types
grep -i timeout /var/log/messages and
three lines admit what happened. The command was
unremarkable. The thing that made it possible has
been answering that question since November 1973.
Doug McIlroy asked Ken Thompson for a tool; Lee
McMahon wanted to analyse the Federalist Papers by
pattern. Thompson disappeared into his office for
about an hour and emerged with grep, named after
ed's g/re/p. The interior uses
Boyer-Moore, Crochemore-Perrin two-way matching, and
Thompson's 1968 NFA construction; mmap
on the input. The shape has stayed identical for
fifty-three years. ack, ag and ripgrep each rewrote
the implementation; none changed the interface.
Technical Beauty Episode 36.
18 May 2026
freebsd
linux
unix
licensing
A production server is slow. The senior engineer wants
to know which syscall is blocking, on which thread,
for how long, without restarting the service. On
FreeBSD one types a dtrace one-liner and
the kernel answers. Linux took the scenic route.
Cantrill, Shapiro and Leventhal designed DTrace at
Sun in 2003; Solaris 10 GA January 2005; John Birrell
ported it to FreeBSD in 7.1-RELEASE on 6 January
2009. Linux could not adopt DTrace because the CDDL
accepts coexistence and the GPL does not. The rebuild
started from a 1992 substrate: BPF by McCanne and
Jacobson. Alexei Starovoitov and Daniel Borkmann
generalised it into eBPF, merged in Linux 3.18 on 7
December 2014; BCC in 2015; Brendan Gregg announced
bpftrace as "DTrace 2.0 for Linux" in October 2018.
The shape was always the same. The journey was a
great deal longer. The Unix Way Episode 17.
17 May 2026
architecture
docker
freebsd
kubernetes
A new service. README, then Dockerfile. Within the
hour, the team is debating the registry, orchestrator,
sidecar and Helm chart. Nobody quite remembers when
this became the second decision. Three currents
converged: isolation (Jails 1999, Linux namespaces
2006–08, Docker 2013), org-shape (Scrum's
sprint-shaped teams meeting Conway's law from 1968),
runtime (Node.js single-threaded since 2009). The
bill: node:22 over 1 GB, dockerd
above 5 GB at 183 containers, network calls a thousand
times a function call. Amazon Prime Video returned to
a monolith at ~90% cost reduction; Segment consolidated
140 services into one; Istio merged its control plane
back into a single binary. The alternatives have been
quietly working: FreeBSD Jails, Capsicum, OpenBSD
pledge and unveil, Go and Rust finding their own
cores. On Second Thought Episode 08.
16 May 2026
security
architecture
freebsd
tooling
Open Windows 11 on a Copilot+ PC. Navigate to Settings,
Privacy & security, Recall & snapshots. The
switch is there. The feature is opt-in today. It was
not opt-in when shipped in May 2024, and the first
version stored its database mostly in cleartext.
Microsoft Recall captures snapshots, indexes them with
a local AI model, offers natural-language search.
Announced May 2024, withdrawn after Alexander
Hagenah's TotalRecall, re-released April 2025 on a VBS
Enclave with AES-256-GCM, TPM-bound keys and Windows
Hello. In March 2026 Hagenah's TotalRecall Reloaded
showed user-level code injecting into
AIXHost.exe reads decrypted snapshots
after Windows Hello unlock. Microsoft VP David Weston:
"does not represent a bypass". The vault door is
titanium. The wall next to it is drywall. Not in the
Brief Episode 03.
