Joshua M. Clulow
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jclulow.bsky.social
Joshua M. Clulow
@jclulow.bsky.social
710 followers 190 following 710 posts
Queer. ADHD. Engineer. UNIX person. Australian. Member of illumos core team. Building a new machine at Oxide Computer Company!
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jclulow.bsky.social
October 25, 2025 at 9:17 PM
jclulow.bsky.social
Microsoft's latest office assistant abomination, Mico, had the best lines in that movie about the plumber family.
October 24, 2025 at 2:46 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
A screenshot of the Oxide manufacturing control software (a terminal user interface, with a lot of dark and light green). The headline is: "DRAM Test: Apparent Success!", with a machine barcode and further message: "Congratulations! This Gimlet probably has functional DIMMs!".
October 22, 2025 at 6:02 PM
jclulow.bsky.social
Good news!
USYNC_PROCESS The mutex can synchronize threads in this process and other processes. The object initialized with this attribute must be allocated in memory shared between processes, either in System V shared memory (see shmop(2)) or in memory mapped to a file (see mmap(2)). If the object is not allocated in such shared memory, it will not be shared between processes. The type argument can be augmented by the bitwise-inclusive-OR of zero or more of the following flags: LOCK_ROBUST The mutex can synchronize threads robustly. At the time of thread or process death, either by calling thr_exit() or exit() or due to process abnormal termination, the lock is unlocked if is held by the thread or process. The next owner of the mutex will acquire it with an error return of EOWNERDEAD. The application must always check the return value from mutex_lock() for a mutex of this type. The new owner of this mutex should then attempt to make the state protected by the mutex consistent, since this state could have been left inconsistent when the last owner died. If the new owner is able to make the state consistent, it should call mutex_consistent() to restore the state of the mutex and then unlock the mutex. All subsequent calls to mutex_lock() will then behave normally. Only the new owner can make the mutex consistent. If for any reason the new owner is not able to make the state consistent, it should not call mutex_consistent() but should simply unlock the mutex. All waiting processes will be awakened and all subsequent calls to mutex_lock() will fail in acquiring the mutex with an error value of ENOTRECOVERABLE. If the thread or process that acquired the lock with EOWNERDEAD terminat…
October 17, 2025 at 6:24 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
October 11, 2025 at 12:50 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
Screenshot of the XFINITY X1 Entertainment Operating System welcome kit, a truly stupid thing.
October 7, 2025 at 1:56 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
October 4, 2025 at 8:46 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
Screenshot of the cover of a paper from Tandem Computers, entitled "Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?". Jim Gray, technical report 85.7, June 1985. PN87614.
September 22, 2025 at 6:55 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
There really should be a better way to put audio here without turning it into a video
September 21, 2025 at 8:15 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
September 21, 2025 at 7:23 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
September 18, 2025 at 4:32 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
The Clock application on the new Pixel 10 is absolutely rubbish. Witness the way it lurches around the display because apparently absolutely nobody at all actually looked at the font with their eyeballs and realised that the numbers are different widths. Just absolutely stellar work.
September 7, 2025 at 8:18 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
Black and white 1980s photograph of a DEC VT-100 with a black wide brim fedora resting on top.
September 6, 2025 at 6:36 PM
jclulow.bsky.social
A screenshot from the movie Stargate (1994) in which Daniel Jackson (played in this film by James Spader, whose hair, though luxurious, is shorter than mine) is correcting the translation of hieroglyphics from the cover stone of a tomb. He is part way through writing the words: Buried For All Time.
August 20, 2025 at 9:21 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
Like Sisyphus, I roll the e-mails up the mailing list, for all time.
It's also easy to see everybody agrees that having more drivers would be good! The thing is, the only way we will get drivers is if you pick a piece of hardware you'd like to use, and _write a driver_. If you have hardware for which a driver is not currently available, the best thing to do is to start working on that driver right now. The kernel is not magic; it's just a big C program. Anybody who can compile random bits of software on a UNIX system can surely learn how to do it, especially with help from other resources in the community. The most important question to ask is: if not you, then who?
August 20, 2025 at 9:17 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
Move over ponycorns, it's time for a new mascot
Text says "D. Tracey" with a silhouette of a familiar yellow-suited detective.
August 6, 2025 at 12:27 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
August 4, 2025 at 3:20 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
NYT Games acknowledges that sex work is work, I guess?!
A screenshot of the "Connections" game on NYT Games, where the group "polite terms for sex" includes the word "commerce".
August 2, 2025 at 8:57 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
It's been
A screenshot of some C source with a definition of the ONEWEEK macro: /* Give some timezone playing room */ #define ONEWEEK (7 * 24 * 60 * 60)
June 10, 2025 at 9:59 PM
jclulow.bsky.social
Sometimes when you open the Kaiser Permanente phone application it does this for ages. What does this even mean? It seems like bullshit to cover for the application being truly atrocious?
Screenshot of Kaiser Permanente android application that says "please wait while we secure your account", with a straight face, as if that means anything at all.
June 1, 2025 at 11:19 PM
jclulow.bsky.social
I didn't realise they sold these by weight
Partial screenshot of an Amazon page where a Cisco Catalyst 1300 switch is priced at $469.27, which Amazon helpfully calculates is $94.23 per kilogram of switch.
May 31, 2025 at 11:42 PM
jclulow.bsky.social
May 21, 2025 at 10:07 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
Some of my favourite parts of the final season of Fringe are the dead pan small talk interactions between Broyles and Windmark. I would probably watch a whole show that was just this.
INTERIOR. FRINGE DIVISION HEADQUARTERS. Windmark offers Broyles a sip from his hip flask. CAPTAIN WINDMARK: Don't be rude, Phillip. Have a drink with me. BROYLES: It's water. It doesn't do anything for me. CAPTAIN WINDMARK: It hydrates you. BROYLES: Yes, I suppose it does. INTERIOR. PAWN SHOP, IN 2036. Windmark is, without any emotion, completing a sequence of lights and tones on a vintage Simon toy. Broyles enters the shop, and approaches Windmark, who eventually looks up, still entering the sequence. Eventually, after probably hundreds of correct tones, he stops and they stare at each other. PHILLIP BROYLES. ... You wanted to see me?
April 29, 2025 at 5:02 AM
jclulow.bsky.social
“It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of [their products] by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words—and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded—their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”
April 26, 2025 at 7:33 PM
jclulow.bsky.social
I think I ADHDed my way through every GH they ever made and then have subsequently taught myself actual guitar, so, be careful lol
April 26, 2025 at 2:06 AM