Stuff I read last week

About: A collection of links and short commentary, published weekly. In theory the inclusion criteria are for it to be something I read last week (duh) and was either particularly interesting or something I might want to refer to later. Subscribe with RSS or see my main blog for long-form writing.

2017-04-17

Writing a Time Series Database from Scratch Or at least writing a storage engine. On solving the problem of wanting column-order for reading, row-order for writing. (Collect data in memory until you have enough to efficiently write an immutable column-order block of data to disk. Use a write-ahead log for reliability).
Misbehaviors in TCP SACK Generation 30 operating system versions, 7 different ways of getting SACK generation wrong.
I want to refer to this one roughly once a year, and it always takes me half an hour to find it. (Though usually I stumble onto other interesting papers during that search, so it's not too bad).
The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts The story of recovering pre-v5 Unix source code, and making it runnable. Nice list of software restoration lessons in the end, especially "any restoration will affect the purity of the original artifact". I got very confused today by somebody having taken this patched Unix v1 source, and representing it as the original.
Incompatible Timesharing System This repository contains source code, tools, and scripts to build an ITS system from scratch.
Amazing ITS restoration project. A lot of of other cool stuff under /PDP-10/ in general.
The 640k Barrier Turns out I never bothered finding out what the difference between EMS and XMS was, despite spending inordinate amounts of time on tweaking DOS memory settings. An inexcusable lack of curiosity, and it's amazing that there was never an issue of MikroBitti that explained this. But at least now I know.

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