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 system, so I tried to figure out what was going on. Surely someone was monitoring...

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. A few days ago, an unknown GLONASS satellite started transmitting signals on...

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 parameters. Feedback is very welcome on bert@hubertnet.nl or @bert_hu_bert! I’m no...

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. Note: I expect to be posting more DNA material as part of my efforts to write a...

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 at, suddenly large heaps of awk, sort, unique and odd shell scripts are required...

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 multithread, for C++ that dark side is mostly its complexity. In this post I want 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 management of PowerDNS is now truly in the hands of professionals. I’m very proud...

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 needed something that worked remotely. NASA provided a wonderful webcast in English,...

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 of thought on programming. There is also no shortage of people doing...

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 to their components and making it obvious what should happen. However, over the...

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 most immediately useful parts of C++. Note: part 1 is here. As noted earlier, no...

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 that when you go look for a new language to learn (say, Go or Rust), you will...