State the Problem Before Describing the Solution This one-page note is as relevant today as when it was first written in January of 1978.

The Internet as a conduit for releasing licensed works to the public is dead.

Linux coredumps bury the arguments and environment variables on the initial process stack. My ptools project walks the auxiliary vector from AT_RANDOM to recover every argument and environment variable intact.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ basilcrow.com/blog/recoverin…

Ever tried to figure out why a Linux process is hung? You probably cobbled together output from GDB, lsof, and /proc, each with its own interface, its own flags, and its own quirks. And if all you have is a core dump? Good luck. Solaris solved this decades ago with its "ptools": pstack, pfiles, ptree, and others. They have one consistent interface for inspecting live processes and core dumps alike. It's one of those things that, once you've used it, is hard to live without. So I've been building ptools for Linux: a collection of Linux process inspection utilities modeled after the Solaris originals. Written in Rust, available on crates.io, fully open source (Apache 2.0), and ready to meet your production debugging needs today: - pstack: Thread stack traces for live processes and core dumps, with optional DWARF source locations - pfiles: Every open file descriptor with paths, offsets, socket details, and flags - ptree: Process trees for the whole system or a single process - penv: The *current* environment of a running process, not just a snapshot from startup. No other Linux CLI tool does this. - pargs, pauxv, pcred, psig, plgrp, plimit, prun, pstop, ptime, pwait, and more Postmortem debugging support is a first-class feature. Most tools work seamlessly with Ubuntu/Debian Apport .crash files or systemd-coredump core dumps on RHEL/Fedora/SUSE, making postmortem debugging feel as natural as inspecting a live process. We've even upstreamed changes to Ubuntu Apport to enable postmortem analysis of open file descriptors. ptools will be shipping in Fedora 44 next month. But why wait? github.com/basil/ptools

ptools v0.2.5 is out! 🚀 github.com/basil/ptools/rele… New: Major pfiles upgrades for socket/file introspection (TCP state, peer process info, IPv6, and more), plus new psig for process signal actions, and updated manual pages. ptools is a collection of Linux utilities written in Rust for inspecting process state, inspired by the original Solaris/illumos tools.

The Python 3 documentation for priority queues has a fun Theory section: docs.python.org/3/library/he… Turns out it was written about 25 years ago by François Pinard mail.python.org/archives/lis… Don’t miss the fun anecdote about tape sorting in the 1960s retrocomputing.stackexchange…

“the indignities of trying to monetize open source infrastructure on a VC timeline”

Sun Microsystems might be dead, but I still treasure its leadership principles.

Don’t allow your sparkling prose – heaven forbid – to be mistaken for AI slop! Follow Robert Bringhurst’s advice about dashes: “The em dash is the nineteenth-century stand­ard, still pre­scribed by many edit­or­ial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the over­sized space between sen­tences, it belongs to the pad­ded and cor­seted aes­thetic of Vic­torian typography. Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens – to set off phrases.”

The inventor of the term “vibe coding” is writing his code by hand because agentic coding tools are “net unhelpful” and his repository is “too far off the data distribution.”

Many companies moving away from open source these days theregister.com/2025/10/09/i…

I just published my Manual of Me: a concise guide for teammates on working with me effectively. Covers why-first mindset (explain reasoning & I’ll move mountains), written/transparent communication (w/ exceptions), asking for help (problem-first), efficient PR reviews, & more. Past/future collaborators, check it out: github.com/basil/basil/blob/…

Navigating the Security/Compatibility Tradeoff with Escape Hatches basilcrow.com/2025/08/30/nav…

So the “let” keyword means the variable is immutable in Swift but mutable in TypeScript. 🤦‍♂️

I want to run a terminal agent in an isolated Docker container on an internal network, connected to a proxy server with access to both internal & external networks—proxying requests only from allowed domains. What do I choose?

Ricers gonna rice