Joshua M. Clulow

@jclulow.bsky.social

825 Followers 236 Following

Queer. ADHD. Engineer. UNIX person. Australian. Member of illumos core team. Building a new machine at Oxide Computer Company!

Screenshot of the Wikipedia page for Bell Miner birds. The caption under the photo of two of the birds in the screenshot says "Immature birds".
The Cayman Islands banker from that episode of the Simpsons, lamenting that he "certainly shouldn't have said ... it was illegal".
Locked-in culture is a term coined online to describe doing one thing at a time. When the norm has become to watch a movie while scrolling your phone, locking in refers to a new counter act. "[Locked-in culture is like] going for a 'naked walk', which is a walk without headphones, or getting in the car and trying to find your way without using maps," Mr Stuart said. He said the raw dogging movement was led by a centre-right demographic online, with young white men chasing a traditional hardened version of masculinity.
Screenshot of tweet from Joshua M. Clulow (@jmclulow): The Alice's Restaurant Garbage Pile Principle, as often applies to software engineering: At the bottom of the cliff was another pile of garbage, and we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down. 4:36 AM · Jan 24, 2021
Photograph of an Xbox 360 Chatpad peripheral held in one hand. Behind is an Xbox 360 controller, and on the floor (out of focus) is a copy of You Don't Know Jack for Xbox 360.
A screenshot of an extremely simple Google search for "usb hid usage page 13" in which the "A" "I" confidently reports that page 13 is for "Camera Control Devices". Hastily drawn arrows point out that in the document it refers to, from the USB-IF, the "Usage Pages" table says that Camera Control Devices are page 144 (0x90) and actually "Digitizer" is page 13 (0x0D).
A photograph of the Sydney Monorail crossing Pyrmont Bridge
From "Fit the Ninth", Peter Jones narrating: "Share and Enjoy" is, of course, the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to show a consistent profit in recent years. The motto stands, or stood, in three mile high illuminated letters near the complaints department spaceport on Eadrax: "Share and Enjoy". Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the underground offices of many talented young complaints executives -- now deceased. The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig" and are no longer illuminated except at times of special celebration...
A "USB charger station", with 15 USB A ports on the front. It looks like a photoshopped image.
An animated screen grab from "The Day After Tomorrow" where a professor delivers the line "Save as many as you can" over the phone.
Screenshot of a tweet that says: "He believed strongly that it was important for the author of a system to get details like this right instead of defaulting on that responsibility by making every user make the choice instead... that if the users revolted he'd find a new set of colors, but options wouldn't happen." The tweet also contains a picture of a bathroom in a garish yellow and green as was presumably popular for five minutes in the 1960s.
Eccles: I can see a manhole cover right above us. Neddy Seagoon: Shine the beam of this candle on it. I'll push it off. Eccles! Stand on my shoulders and pull me up! Eccles: Ok... [strained] I'd like to see them do this on television.
A photograph of a Palm IIIe (translucent plastic edition) showing the Graffiti letter form reference. A hand holds a stylus, poised to write something. This was the bee's knees. The cat's meow! Also the one bit monochrome graphics with visible pixels is vastly less gaudy and haphazard than most modern phone user interfaces.
A photograph of the cover art on the box for Bureaucracy, the popular interactive fiction adventure brought to you by Douglas Adams and Infocom.
Why do you want to work for Oxide? I have spent nearly two decades dealing with servers in different personal and professional settings. I have been a customer of Dell and of HP. I have watched for a long time an industry that has seen no lasting, ground-breaking improvement in commodity server technology (especially for scale) since the advent of rack mountable servers with Intel x86 processors. We stand in the long shadow cast by deeply proprietary, but historic and visionary technologies from large companies like DEC, and IBM, and Tandem. Technologies that were defined at least in part by the joint engineering and deployment of hardware and software to provide ground-breaking reliability and features mostly unmatched in more open, commodity systems today. We have an opportunity to build on decades of isolated advancements in commodity software and hardware. To bring together open and commodity components, both new and existing, into one engineered computing system that scales from a single rack up to a warehouse. We can build, as a product and an ecosystem, the kinds of computing platforms that are today bespoke within the walls of the hyperscalers like Google and Facebook and Microsoft. Most importantly, though, we can do it all while building a fantastic team, united in a shared mission, a shared set of values, and a shared trust!
Screenshot of a message from the game "Sunless Skies", that says, ominously: It is not the date that it was.
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!".
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…
Screenshot of the XFINITY X1 Entertainment Operating System welcome kit, a truly stupid thing.
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.
Black and white 1980s photograph of a DEC VT-100 with a black wide brim fedora resting on top.
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.
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?
Text says "D. Tracey" with a silhouette of a familiar yellow-suited detective.
A screenshot of the "Connections" game on NYT Games, where the group "polite terms for sex" includes the word "commerce".
A screenshot of some C source with a definition of the ONEWEEK macro: /* Give some timezone playing room */ #define ONEWEEK (7 * 24 * 60 * 60)
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
A screenshot of a paragraph of a comment on an article, from an exhausted man, which reads: As an aside, we do not capitalise “illumos” – and the reference to “old Solaris” made me think of the story about Cary Grant receiving a telegram (billed, ostensibly, by the word) from a reporter that inquired HOW OLD CARY GRANT?, to which he replied: OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?
Opening paragraph from "Vibe coding" article on Wikipedia.
Note that each generated data file is full of Bs: $ xxd DATA/basic-4294967296/file | head -5 00000000: 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB 00000010: 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB 00000020: 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB 00000030: 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB 00000040: 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 4242 BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
A photograph of a Commodore 64C sitting at the initial boot BASIC language prompt. The system has a 5.25" floppy disk drive, rather than the older, more pedestrian Datasette tape drive.