A deep dive of how MVCC works in Postgres, from concepts all the way down to the exact source code.
Reverse engineering the microcode in Athlons and Phenoms. Half of this work was done by mutating existing microcode update files, and probing the behavior of various instructions in a minimal operating system. The other half was done by delayering a CPU and using a electron microscope to find and read the microcode ROM.
Then write a proof-of-concept remote triggerable trojan in microcode.
Another trip to crazytown. How Windows Vista would artificially limit network throughput if any sound was playing. (With an effect that would be magnified linearly as more NICs were added to the machine). Brought up in the HN discussion of my PS4 download speed post.
I like the idea of treating programming languages as a creative work to be reviewed critically.
A case study in how not to change defaults when evolving a program from one use case to another. (Any blog platform will inevitably try to transform into a general purpose CMS and call a dystopian hellscape of ecommerce plugins an "ecosystem"). But I can't understand how anyone would think that changing the default RSS feed item count from 10 (which sounds pretty standard) to infinite could be the right thing.
A good discussion on the problems with transparent huge pages. (I turn them off at work for our data analysis machines, due to some absolutely crippling throughput issues they cause. Really need to check whether that server is already running on a 4.6+ kernel, with the supposedly improved THP behavior mentioned in this thread.)