Final Fantasy 7: An oral history
Pretty amazing, particularly for this revelation:
Tetsuya Nomura (Character and battle visual director, Square Japan): OK, so maybe I did kill Aerith. But if I hadn’t stopped you, in the second half of the game, you were planning to kill everyone off but the final three characters the player chooses! Yoshinori Kitase (Director, Square Japan) No way! I wrote that? Where? Tetsuya Nomura (Character and battle visual director, Square Japan) In the scene where they parachute into Midgar. You wanted everyone to die there!
(tags: games history gaming aeris final-fantasy square-enix ff7 stories)
Building the plane on the way up
in 1977, Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) scientists packed a Reed-Solomon encoder in each Voyager, hardware designed to add error-correcting bits to all data beamed back at a rate of efficiency 80 percent higher than an older method also included with Voyager. Where did the hope come in? When the Voyager probes were launched with Reed-Solomon encoders on board, no Reed-Solomon decoders existed on Earth.
(tags: reed-solomon encoding error-correction voyager vger history space nasa probes signalling)
Debugging Java Native Memory Leaks (evanjones.ca)
Using jemalloc to instrument the contents of the native heap and record stack traces of each chunk’s allocators, so that leakers can be quickly identified (GZIPInputStream in this case). See also https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2015/12/11/using-jemalloc-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-a-memory-leak/ .
(tags: debugging memory jvm java leaks memory-leaks leak-checking jemalloc malloc native heap off-heap gzipinputstream)