An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape
Several news outlets
reported
the discovery of a 1970s Fourth Edition Research Unix magnetic tape
at the University of Utah in July 2025 and its successful restoration.
This is a significant find, because up to now only
the Fourth Edition’s manual was thought to have survived.
Over the past few days I incorporated the tape’s source code into the
Unix History Repository
hosted on GitHub (see it here)
and studied the code’s composition.
Continue reading "An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape"Last modified: Tuesday, December 23, 2025 8:18 pm
How I fixed git-grep macOS UTF-8 support
As a speaker of Greek, I’ve been fixing issues in the handling
of non-ASCII characters for over 40 years, using techniques ranging from
simple lookup tables to dynamic patching of in-memory images.
Here’s how I debugged and fixed the handling of UTF-8 characters
in the git grep command, which was broken for almost a decade.
Continue reading "How I fixed git-grep macOS UTF-8 support"Last modified: Sunday, October 9, 2022 7:19 pm
Rather than alchemy, methodical troubleshooting
I recently encountered a pesky problem while trying to
build a React Native project under Apple’s Xcode.
The build would fail with an error reporting:
EMFILE: too many open files, watch.
Frustratingly, all available advice on the web pointed to
different (often inexplicable) directions, none of which worked.
After tormenting myself with these, I decided to troubleshoot
the problem methodically, which allowed me to pinpoint it and
solve it with an uncommon and noteworthy application of the
git bisect command.
Here’s the story.
Continue reading "Rather than alchemy, methodical troubleshooting"Last modified: Saturday, November 27, 2021 8:21 pm
