FFA for DOS!

Reader David Gregory has achieved, via some clever cross-compilation magick, a working FFA port for DOS (mirror).

"Pest" v. 0xFB.

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFC. This is the heaviest revision of the spec to date, approaching a total rewrite. Pedantic details concerning data types and their encodings were added; several algorithms have been reworked and substantially simplified; and a number of ugly gaffes — corrected. There is a pretty-printed mirror of this […]

"Pest" v. 0xFC.

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFD. There are currently two published prototype implementations of Pest: “Blatta” (by thimbronion); and “smalpest” (by jonsykkel). Thank you, prototype implementers! A quite lively Pestnet is now active, and a public log thereof, operated by billymg (WOT) may be seen here. There is a working draft of v. […]

The 2022 Rack.

Thank you, 2021 Rack Service subscribers! I would like to wish all of you a third great year of hygienic Linux on high-quality non-Fritzed iron! The 2022 service agreement remains identical to that of 2020 and 2021. (Deedbot Wallet closed in December of 2020, and there is yet no plug-in replacement for it. Hence, the […]

"Pest" v. 0xFD.

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFE. There is a pretty-printed mirror of this page. There is now a prototype! (Thank you, thimbronion!) 14 Dec 2021: And there is now a second prototype! (Thank you, jonsykkel!) There is a working draft of v. 0xFC. (Note: it may change without warning!) The document (very much […]

"Pest" v. 0xFE.

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFF. Edit: A note for the innocent — this series of articles concerns an algorithm! It is not, at the time of writing, fully implemented anywhere! There is now a prototype! (Thank you, thimbronion!) Or even entirely complete. Edit: There is a working draft of v. 0xFD. (Note: […]

"Pest" v. 0xFF.

What follows is a long-promised detailed specification of a DDOS-proof, CPU-inexpensive, ciphered-authenticated peer-to-peer communication protocol. I would like to thank Thimbronion for implementing a large subset of this spec already despite not having seen it yet! The document (very much a work in progress!) is available as a vtree. You will need: A V-tron. If […]

The 2021 Rack.

Thank you, 2020 Rack Service subscribers! I would like to wish all of you another great year of hygienic Linux on high-quality non-Fritzed iron! The 2021 service agreement is identical to the 2020 one. With the unfortunate exception that Deedbot Wallet is closing down on Dec. 25, 2020, and hence will no longer be accepted […]

"Finite Field Arithmetic." Chapter 21A-Ter: Fix for a False Alarm in Ch.14; "Litmus" Errata.

This article is part of a series of hands-on tutorials introducing FFA, or the Finite Field Arithmetic library. FFA differs from the typical "Open Sores" abomination, in that -- rather than trusting the author blindly with their lives -- prospective users are expected to read and fully understand every single line. In exactly the same […]

"Cryostat" Genesis.

Cryostat is a Fits-in-Head minimal (~700 LOC, including comments) static library for adding safe and reliable persistent storage to Ada data structures. It makes use of memory-mapped disk I/O via the MMap() system call, present in Linux (kernel 2.4 and newer) and all compatible operating systems. This mechanism permits efficient work with persistent data structures […]