Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert
Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist.
Latest Posts
Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. This is a condensed and updated version of my earlier post On the pan-genome. Towards a multi-stranded genome Given that the completion of the human genome project was...
Over the holiday, I ran into this job advertisement from The Economist: The Economist is looking for a new Science and Technology correspondent. Knowledge of the field, an ability to write informatively, succinctly and wittily, and an...
By bert hubert bert@hubertnet.nl / @bert_hu_bert / https://galmon.eu/ Late July 2019, Galileo, “the European GPS” suffered from a week long outage. I’m a proud European, and I think we should have our own well-functioning navigation...
Hi everyone, As noted previously I’ve gone all in on GNSS monitoring. GNSS is the generic term for GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou satellites. Eventually a big blog post will come out, but meanwhile you can see the results on galmon.eu....
I’ve recently been spending quite some time on the EU’s Galileo Navigation Satellite System. In this post you’ll find some rough notes on things I’ve found out, both about how to receive data & how to understand the Galileo ephemeris...
In this post I want to shine a light on an important development within the world of DNA which shows how much DNA and the world of computing are now intertwined. It turns out we share important problems, like in this case: file formats....
I’ve been using gnuplot since.. like forever. It is one of my best friends in plotting data and discovering what is going on. But for all its greatness, you do tend to run into a wall - once you step outside the things gnuplot is good...
In previous articles, I’ve waxed rhapsodic about how great C++ is. I also noted there however that every language, C++ included, has its dark sides. Some languages have an unavoidable pervasive dark side, like being slow or hard to...
This is a more personal post than I usually write, and it was prompted by several people asking what I had been up to lately. It turns out that it is somewhat of a story. It is a long story too. Since the beginning of 2018 day to day...
Yesterday, NASA landed its InSight mission on Mars, and it all worked! The landing happened between 8 and 9PM local time, but I wanted to share the excitement with my kids’ classmates from school (aged between around 9 and 10), so I...
John Ousterhout, of TCL fame, has written a book that is as small (literally) as it is important. Weighing in at 178 none too big pages, it takes us on an inspired trip through what John has learned over the decades. There is no shortage...
Linus Torvalds has long been one of my heroes. The invention of Linux & the subsequent development of Git were technical and organizational miracles. You could fill a book simply by quoting examples of Linus dissecting technical problems...
In part 5 we discussed smart pointers, placement new and the powerful move constructor. As you may have gathered by now, parts 1 through 5 were a pitch to sell modern C++ to existing C specialists. To do so, I tried to show the best and...
I recently wrote a series of posts called ‘Modern C++ for C Programmers’. I mentioned in the introduction: “I hope to convince C programmers to give ‘2017 era C++’ (which is entirely unlike 2003 C++) another good look. (…) My goal is...
2018 is an exciting time to be a programmer, with so many good “full service” programming languages to choose from: C, C++ 2017, Go, Python, Rust and who knows Swift too. Programming languages are complicated beasts - even the simplest...