About two years ago I wrote a Rust crate to fulfill this promise: If a crash occurs while updating a file, the file either contains the old contents, or the new contents, nothing in between. This crate essentially solves the following problem: when you update a file, generally you open it,...
Many business owners in the software development industry are investing a lot into LLM bots, marketed as “generative AI”. Some of them go as far as forcing software developers to use such tools under the threat of being fired if they don’t comply. After all, why shouldn’t they? This technology has...
In this article I will show you how to start your current operating system inside a virtual machine. That is: launching the operating system (with all your settings, files, and everything), inside a virtual machine, while you’re using it. This article was written for Ubuntu, but it can be easily...
Ever wondered how your computer or your phone displays the current date and time accurately? What keeps all the devices in the world (and in space) in agreement on what time it is? What makes applications that require precise timing possible? In this article, I will explain some of the challenges...
I recently inherited a laptop that was broken by pouring some hot coffee on it. When I dissected it, it was pretty clear that most of it was unrecoverable: the CPU was completely fried, and its thermal paste splashed everywhere on the motherboard. (I wish I took a picture of it that I could...
UPDATE: This article was written in 2016 and refers to a version of Docker Swarm that is now known as “legacy Swarm”. The newer Docker Swarm won’t work in LXC as described in this article. I’ve been using Docker Swarm inside LXC containers for a while now, and I thought that I could share my...
I’ve always dreamed of a encrypted web, where HTTPS is the standard and plain HTTP is no more. A web where eavesdropping or manipulating information is not possible, or at least much harder than today. I remember that I got excited when I first heard of CAcert: “a community-driven Certificate...
Since its initial release in 2008, LXC has become widespread among servers. Today, it is becoming the preferred deployment strategy in many contexts, also thanks to Docker and, more recently, LXD. LXC and Docker are used not only to achieve modular architecture design, but also as a way to run...