Aaron Patterson

  1. Apple Photos App Corrupts Images

    The Apple Photos app sometimes corrupts images when importing from my camera. I just wanted to make a blog post about it in case anyone else runs into the problem. I’ve seen other references to this online, but most of the people gave up trying to fix it, and none of them went as far as I did to debug…

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  2. File preallocation on macOS in Ruby

    I haven’t blogged in a while, so I figured I should do that. Jet lag has blessed me with some free time this morning, so I figured I would make some content in order to feed the AI bots. I’ve been messing around with pre-allocating files on the file system on macOS. This is useful in cases where you…

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  3. Monkey Patch Detection in Ruby

    My last post detailed one way that CRuby will eliminate some intermediate array allocations when using methods like Array#hash and Array#max. Part of the technique hinges on detecting when someone monkey patches array. Today, I thought we’d dive a little bit in to how CRuby detects and de-optimizes itself…

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  4. Eliminating Intermediate Array Allocations

    Recently I gave a talk at RailsWorld (hopefully they’ll post the video soon), and part of my presentation was about eliminating allocations in tokenizers. I presented a simple function for measuring allocations: def allocations x = GC.stat(:total_allocated_objects) yield GC.stat(:total_allocated_objects…

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  5. Using Serial Ports with Ruby

    Lets mess around with serial ports today! I love doing hardware hacking, and dealing with serial ports is a common thing you have to do when working with embedded systems. Of course I want to do everything with Ruby, and I had found Ruby serial port libraries to be either lacking, or too complex, so…

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  6. Fast Tokenizers with StringScanner

    Lately I’ve been messing around with writing a GraphQL parser called TinyGQL. I wanted to see how fast I could make a GraphQL parser without writing any C extensions. I think I did pretty well, but I’ve learned some tricks for speeding up parsers and I want to share them. Today we’re going to specifically…

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  7. Bitmap Matrix and Undirected Graphs in Ruby

    I’ve been working my way through Engineering a Compiler. I really enjoy the book, but one part has you build an interference graph for doing register allocation via graph coloring. An interference graph is an undirected graph, and one way you can represent an undirected graph is with a bitmap matrix…

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  8. Vim, tmux, and Fish

    I do most of my text editing with MacVim, but when I pair with people I like to use tmate. tmate is just an easy way to connect tmux sessions with a remote person. But this means that I go from coding in a GUI to coding in a terminal. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but I had made a Fish alias that…

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  9. In Memory of a Giant

    The Ruby community has lost a giant. As a programmer, I always feel as if I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. Chris Seaton was one of those giants. I’ve been working at the same company as Chris for the past 2 years. However, I first met him through the open source world many years ago. He was working…

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  10. Cross Platform Machine Code

    I hate writing if statements. I’ve been working on a couple different assemblers for Ruby. Fisk is a pure Ruby x86 assembler. You can use it to generate bytes that can be executed on x86 machines. AArch64 is a pure Ruby ARM64 assembler. You can use it to generate bytes that can be executed on ARM64 machines…

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  11. Homebrew, Rosetta, and Ruby

    Hi everyone! I finally upgraded to an M1. It’s really really great, but the main problem is that some projects I work on like TenderJIT and YJIT only really work on x86_64 and these new M1 machines use ARM chips. Fortunately we can run x86_64 software via Rosetta, so we can still do development work…

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  12. Publishing Gems With Your YubiKey

    The recent compromise of ua-parser-js has put the security and trust of published packages at the top of my mind lately. In order to mitigate the risk of any Ruby Gems I manage from being hijacked, I enabled 2FA on my RubyGems.org account. This means that whenever I publish a Ruby Gem, I have to enter…

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  13. Debugging an Assertion Error in Ruby

    I hope nobody runs in to a problem where they need the information in this post, but in case you do, I hope this post is helpful. (I’m talking to you, future Aaron! lol) I committed a patch to Ruby that caused the tests to start failing. This was the patch: commit 1be84e53d76cff30ae371f0b397336dee934499d…

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  14. Counting Write Barrier Unprotected Objects

    This is just a quick post mostly as a note to myself (because I forget the jq commands). Ruby objects that are not protected with a write barrier must be examined on every minor GC. That means that any objects in your system that live for a long time and don’t have write barrier protection will cause…

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  15. Guide to String Encoding in Ruby

    Encoding issues don’t seem to happen frequently, but that is a blessing and a curse. It’s great not to fix them very frequently, but when you do need to fix them, lack of experience can leave you feeling lost. This post is meant to be a sort of guide about what to do when you encounter different types…

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