Blog
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For the past year and a half, I’ve disconnected myself from all my social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Those platforms still presumably store my data (e.g. posts, images, chat logs) but I no longer log into the system, neither consuming or contributing any content. This disconnect was motivated by several reasons. First, I had…
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Although Jess and I legally married six months ago (February) in King County Court, a municipal court in Seattle, we threw our wedding ceremony just three weeks ago. The Saturday ceremony was held in Malibu at Great Spirits Ranch, a ranch that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Ojai mountains. Most importantly, this venue was dog…
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Every Wednesday morning, I attend therapy. Not the physical kind, where one goes to rehabilitate some injury afflicted by blunt trauma. Rather, I sit in a cushy sofa chair that’s positioned six or so feet away from Roy, my psychotherapist, and I voice not only what I’ve been thinking—the primary focus of cognitive behavioral therapy—since the past…
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He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it – George Orwell Are you a masculine man? How does one even define masculinity? By the American, western definition, a masculine man is someone who carries a heavy beard on his chiseled chin, speaks in a deep Clint-Eastwood voice, commands respect from those around…
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My wife (Jess) and I were both dead tired from yesterday—friends had come over to our house and cooked a Vietnamese meal the night before and we fell asleep around just before midnight, a little over two hours past our bedtime—and we had decided to spend the Friday night staying in doors, eating leftover, vegan…
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As a software programmer, I always had a vague understanding of how an operating system fetches data from memory. At an abstract level, I understood that a processor requests data from the memory controller, sending a message (with the memory address encoded) across the bus. But I learned recently that in addition to the system’s…
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http://blog.itsmemattchung.com/2017/02/28/csapp-defusing-the-bomb-phase-1/ I password protected the original post (email me for the password if you are interested in reading it). When I posted the original link on reddit/r/compsci, multiple commenters suggested that I delete the article to avoid students from cheating (which was not my intention). I then sent an e-mail to the professors (at CMU) and they kindly replied, asking me…
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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As a programmer, I’ve written a line or two of code that includes the modulus operator (i.e. “return x % 2“). But, never have I paused to think: “How does the underlying system carry out this operation?” In this post, I limit “underneath the hood” to the lowest level (human readable) programming language: assembly. So, I’ll take…
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A wide grin formed on my face, after successfully completing an exercise (from Computer Systems a Programmer’s perspective) that required me to write C code, based off a sequence of a six assembly instructions: void decode1(long *xp, long *yp, long *zp) { /* xp stored in %rdi, yp in %rsi, zp in %rdx) decode1: movq (%rdi),…