Polymath Engineer Weekly #85
Polymath Engineer Weekly #85
Health Monitoring, LUTs, Faster Cars, Text Editors, Ring Buffers, Reverse Engineering, Athletic Performance
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Comic of the week
Links of the week
How I keep myself Alive using Golang
If something happens which causes my blood glucose to trend downwards, I wanted to be notified so that I can take an action before any more major issue appears. However, if things do take a turn for the worst or I’m unable to self-resolve, I wanted to feel good about the fact that someone else would get notified if I am unable to help myself and hopefully prevent it from escalating from a P3 to a P0 incident.
How video games use LUTs and how you can too
We’ll embark on a small journey, which will take us from simple things like turning grayscale footage into color, to creating limitless variations of blood-lusting zombies, with many interactive WebGL examples along the way, that you can try out with your own videos or webcam. Though this article uses WebGL, the techniques shown apply to any other graphics programming context, be it DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan, game engines like Unity, or plain scientific data visualization.
This is the Porsche that was faster than F1, and smashed a 35-year-old Nurburgring lap record… I’ve spoken about it before, but this time I got an interview with the Technical Project Lead - to understand exactly HOW Porsche did it.
And it’s crazy stuff, it’s almost the real-life version of my “F1 with no rules” video from a few weeks ago. They took their already, extremely fast LMP1 car, and made it over 12 seconds faster at Spa -- that’s 11%, a huge amount in motorsport.
Nerdy internals of an Apple text editor
So to make typing snappier, I’ve built an algorithm that looks at the next character being typed as well as what characters are around it. The gist of the logic is that if you’re typing a special Markdown symbol, or the location of the edit is surrounded by one, then you should update the whole paragraph, otherwise you can simply rely on the typing attributes. It’s a simple algorithm that does marvels for the speed of the editor in the majority of typing situations.
The design and implementation of a lock-free ring-buffer with contiguous reservations
This is the story of how Andrea Lattuada (PhD student at ETH Zurich) and James Munns (from Ferrous Systems) designed and implemented (two versions!) of an high-perf lock-free ring-buffer for cross-thread communication. If any of those words look scary to you, don't fret, we'll explain everything from the basics.
Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions From Compiled Binaries
A few years ago I released protodump, a CLI for extracting full source protobuf definitions from compiled binaries (regardless of the target architecture). This can come in handy if you’re trying to reverse engineer an API used by a closed source binary, for instance. In this post I’ll explain how it works
Book of the Week
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.