Ever since I upgraded to Windows 10 it’s felt like my battery life is worse. My suspicion was various scanning tasks that were springing to life more frequently, but it was just a hunch. So, …| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
I’ve recently told a few people that I write, that I have a blog, and then I try to describe what I write about. I’m kinda proud of some of the stuff that I’ve covered here on randomascii over the … Continue reading →| Random ASCII – tech blog of Bruce Dawson
The Guardian is one of my favorite news sources. I’m a subscriber (support news organizations!) and I read it daily. But it is not immune to errors, as this headline shows: 68 °F above average is a lot. For a … Continue reading →| Random ASCII – tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. However: They didn’t document this (!) … Continue reading →| Random ASCII – tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Last month I wrote about an odd crash that was hitting a few Chrome users. Something was corrupting the XMM7 register and that was causing Chrome to crash. We fixed a couple of bugs in Chrome and w…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Forecast for randomascii: programming, tech topics, with a chance of unicycling| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) th…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
A few years ago I did a lot of thinking and writing about floating-point math. It was good fun, and I learned a lot in the process, but sometimes I go a long time without actually using that hard-e…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
I’ve been a big fan of symbol servers for years. They are a part of the Microsoft/Windows ecosystem that is far better than anything I have seen for other operating systems. With Microsoft’s and Ch…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, wr…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Over two years ago I installed Acronis True Image for Crucial in order to migrate my data to a new SSD I had just purchased. It worked. I then left True Image installed “just in case”, and what har…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
(or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively)Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
I used to really enjoy the other microblogging site but it became too much of a democracy-destroying disinformation hell site so I haven’t been there in a long time.I’ve moved to bsky – I’m Follow …| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason.My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for b…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Floating-point math has an answer for everything, but sometimes that’s not what you want. Sometimes instead of getting an answer to the question sqrt(-1.0) (it’s NaN) it’s better to know that your …| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Riddle me this Batman: how much precision are these calculations evaluated at? If you answered ‘double’ and ‘float’ then you score one point for youthful idealism, but zero points for correctness. …| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
After a recent post on float precision there was some debate about round-tripping of floats. My claim was that if you print a float with printf(“%1.8e”, f); and then scan it back in then you are gu…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
How much precision does a float have? It depends on the float, and it depends on what you mean by precision. Typical reasonable answers range from 6-9 decimal digits, but it turns out that you can …| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
I promised in my last post to show an example of the importance of knowing how much precision a float has at a particular value. Here goes. As a general rule this type of data should never be store…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
This is a special bonus extra post in my floating-point series, ranting about an issue that has been a problem for years. Some debuggers don’t display floats with enough precision.| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Type Punning is Not a Joke I left the last post with a promise to share an interesting property of the IEEE float format. There are several equivalent ways of stating this property, and here are tw…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Years ago I wrote an article about how to do epsilon floating-point comparisons by using integer comparisons. That article has been quite popular (it is frequently cited, and the code samples have …| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
This post is a more carefully thought out and peer reviewed version of a floating-point comparison article I wrote many years ago. This one gives solid advice and some surprising observations about…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Last year I pointed out that float variables can be converted to text and then back to the same binary value using printf(“%1.8e”). You can also use %.9g for more compact results. I als…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
Posts about Floating Point written by brucedawson| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
TL;DR – upgrade your tools, including Visual Studio, windbg, and Windows Performance Toolkit, if you want to handle Chromium’s symbol files.Details:Death, taxes, and browser engines relentlessly gr…| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson
“Hey, you. Yes you, that function over there. When you’re cleaning up please remember to restore all of my registers. Yes, that one too – what do you think this is, Linux?”That’s the problem I was …| Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson