February was my last month at Twisted Oak Studios. It was a wonderful experience; laid back and interesting, with good people for company. I’ve especially enjoyed writing content for the blog every week. I will continue to write blog posts, but they will appear at strilanc.com. You can be notified about my posts there by [...] I find reading media coverage of quantum computers frustrating. With rare exceptions, the explanations of what a quantum computer is or can do are totally unsatisfying. I remember being really confused about the whole thing. “You say a quantum computer can be in two states at the same time? Sounds cool, but how does that [...] Naming is a strange thing. You take reality, cut a chunk out, assign a sequence of syllables to that chunk, and suddenly you see it everywhere. Having the right chunks named literally changes how you think. In this series of posts, “naming things”, I take some shows-up-everywhere concept from programming (that doesn’t have a name, [...] In this post: efficiently detecting when cycles appear, as edges are added to a graph, by taking advantage of a restriction on the type of graph. Motivation I worry a lot about little details. About ways people using my code might end up shooting themselves in the foot. Case in point: the collapsing futures library [...] In this post: using a trusted third party to make bit commitment perfectly secure. Motivation I wrote my master’s thesis on the subject of secret sharing, where a dealer splits some secret message into shares. Later on, players use some fraction of the shares to recover the secret. One of the tweaks to the problem [...] A few months ago, during the Halifax Game Jam, I realized that for a long time I’d thought angular velocities were more complicated than they actually are. Game Jam In October I attended the 2013 Halifax Game Jam. The theme was “discovery”. Actually, since the group I joined had an Occulus Rift, make that more [...] In this post: dealing with the corner cases inherent in checking if collections are equivalent. Collection Equality One of Objective-C’s features that I really like, but forgot to mention in A Year’s Worth of Opinions about Objective-C, is the built-in support for equating collections by value. When I’m working in C#, and I want to [...] In this post: a subtle way that reactive/event-based code can deadlock, how it affects ReactiveCocoa (obj-c) and Reactive Extensions (.Net), and ways to work around the problem. Realization Today I noticed that ReactiveCocoa, the Objective-C port of .Net’s Rx (Reactive Extensions), implements different semantics for its BehaviorSubject. This would be moderately interesting, except the change [...] In this post: a technique for parallelizing accumulation, when the accumulator only takes on a small number of states. Trigger Today I watched the talk How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! by Guy Steele. (It’s really good. The first third is off topic and still really good.) About an hour into the talk, Steele [...] About one year ago, I was placed on my first Objective-C project: porting RedPhone from Android to iOS. My part of RedPhone (the backend: audio, networking, crypto) has been done for about a month now. We’re waiting for an external security review, but internally no back-end bugs have been stumbled over while work continues on [...]
Leaving
What Quantum Computers Do Faster, with Caveats
Naming Things: Fail-Useful
Detecting Simple Cycles Forming, Faster
Third Party Bit Commitment
Angular Velocity is Simple
Collection Equality is Hard
Deadlocks in Practice: Don’t Hold Locks While Notifying
Brute Force Parallelization
A Year’s Worth of Opinions about Objective-C
Older Posts
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