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Text of the page (random words):
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 forecast for randomascii programming tech topics with a chance of unicycling skip to content home about older posts reflections on my tech career part 2 posted on november 10 2025 by brucedawson this is second and final part of the story of how my career as a software developer unfolded part 1 is here in this half i work at four different companies in the seattle area make my mark and then retire cavedog humongous entertainment 1997 to 2002 in 1997 my wife and i got annoyed with being so far from family we were in wisconsin they were mostly in british columbia and we wanted to move to the west coast this time i did a proper job search talking to at least four companies in vancouver and greater seattle i mostly interview pretty well and that is an important skill a good job hunt requires a well written resume that reflects some actual achievements the ability to interview well and ideally some contacts this time as with asdg and as with every future job contacts were a critical part of getting the job continue reading posted in bugs chromium floating point investigative reporting linux performance programming quadratic symbols uiforetw unicycling xbox 360 xperf tagged career cavedog google humongous microsoft valve 20 comments reflections on my tech career part 1 posted on october 22 2025 by brucedawson i ve been lucky enough to have had a successful career as a software developer spanning six companies and thirty seven years i ve had the opportunity to work on elastic reality xbox windows steam internet explorer dozens of games and chrome and create a blog whose investigative reporting and etw tutorial articles have been read over five million times i was recently explaining to a friend how i got my start in this industry and i decided that i should write it down if only to clarify in my mind how it all happened i don t necessarily recommend my career path but there may be other people out there for whom it is the right way to go or more likely perhaps there will be a few ideas in here that could inspire somebody s career path or help them avoid mistakes continue reading posted in fractals programming tagged career education interviewing learning 12 comments finding a vs code memory leak posted on october 9 2025 by brucedawson in 2021 i found a huge memory leak in vs code totalling around 64 gb when i first saw it but with no actual limit on how high it could go i found this leak despite two obstacles that should have made the discovery impossible the memory leak didn t show up in task manager there was no process whose memory consumption was increasing i had never used vs code in fact i have still never used it so how did this work how did i find an invisible memory leak in a tool that i have never used continue reading posted in bugs code reliability debugging investigative reporting memory programming rants tagged etw handles leaks vs code windows 17 comments acronis true image costs performance when not used posted on may 26 2025 by brucedawson 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 harm could that possibly cause well funny you should ask i recently noticed that whenever i plugged or unplugged my external monitor explorer exe would consume a lot of cpu time dozens of seconds of it it was enough cpu time to make my computer noticeably sluggish until things calmed down which could take 15 seconds that s odd is how most of my investigative reporting starts so i grabbed an etw trace and drilled in it didn t take long to find the culprit aside i have worked with acronis to help them understand this issue and they have provided a mitigation and have said that they plan to address the problem in the next release of their software see workarounds and fixes for details continue reading posted in investigative reporting performance uiforetw xperf tagged acronis process enumeration shell extensions 17 comments google maps doesn t know how street addresses work posted on april 24 2025 by brucedawson 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 to get bad data into maps i wish they would respond to feedback faster and i wish they would make their estimates for when changes go live more accurate two weeks versus 24 hours i was driving around vernon bc a few weeks ago and i asked google maps for directions to 3207 30th ave it confidently told me where to go but luckily my passenger noticed that it was actually directing me to 3207 34th ave four blocks north well that s odd a few days later my cousin asked me as the ex google still nerd member of the family if i could help with a google maps issue the problem was that the address 138 w 6th ave in vancouver was being mapped at a location 2 4 km that s 1 5 miles or 12 furlongs away from the actual location continue reading posted in bugs rants tagged cartography google google maps maps 14 comments what this blog is about posted on march 25 2025 by brucedawson 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 years but i struggle when trying to summarize it to a non technical audience so here goes i ve got a few human interest stories such as sharing my grief in 2024 sharing my loss of my right ear in 2016 and sharing the fun of commute challenge 2017 2017 video here and commute challenge 2018 2018 video here plus the time i spoke about the commute challenge at ignite seattle i ve also got some quirky posts such as how to make a warm weather snowman how to unicycle faster and the time i unicycled a really long way and i ve got a summary of my entire career part one and part two but what about the investigative reporting the revealing of hidden stability or performance problems usually in windows that i m particularly proud of discovering what about the bug fixes that have happened because of my work how can i share brag about those to my non technical friends i decided to try writing one paragraph summaries of some of the stories that i m most proud of that made an impact and which can just possibly be understood by non experts here goes continue reading posted in fun investigative reporting programming quadratic tagged summary 1 comment find me on bsky posted on january 17 2025 by brucedawson 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 https bsky app profile randomascii bsky social follow me there for ranting on base 2 versus base 10 transportation and housing and tech failures i also seem to post occasional vacation photos and astronomy blurbs and anything else that seems amusing i hope to see some of you there and i hope to see fewer of you on that other place want thoughts on why leaving x twitter is a good idea bill gates has some ideas or you could just look at the number of organizations that are abandoning the site and think about whether they might have a point posted in uncategorized 6 comments life death and retirement posted on october 1 2024 by brucedawson 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 bed and found my wife lying on the bathroom floor in excruciating pain i took her to the hospital she was diagnosed with pancreatitis which is a truly horrible disease her hospital stay was an insane rollercoaster and she ultimately died nine weeks later so yeah it s been a shit year continue reading posted in uncategorized tagged death grief life retirement 73 comments localization failure temperature is hard posted on october 17 2023 by brucedawson 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 tropical country it is not credible for temperatures to be that much warmer than average because the average is too high to give enough headroom so what gives continue reading posted in math metric rants tagged celsius fahrenheit localization 5 comments 32 mib working sets on a 64 gib machine posted on october 1 2023 by brucedawson 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 their implementation doesn t actually save memory the implementation can have a prohibitively high cpu cost this feature works by limiting the working set of a process the amount of memory mapped into the address space of the process to 32 mib before reading any further take a moment to guess what the maximum slowdown might be from this feature that is if a process repeatedly touched more than 32 mib of memory let s say 64 mib of memory then how much longer could these memory operations take compared to if the working set was not limited take a moment and write down your guess the answer is later in this post continue reading posted in computers and internet investigative reporting memory performance programming uiforetw xperf tagged memory priority working set 10 comments older posts search for recent posts reflections on my tech career part 2 reflections on my tech career part 1 finding a vs code memory leak acronis true image costs performance when not used google maps doesn t know how street addresses work categories altdevblogaday bugs chromium code analysis code reliability commuting computers and internet debugging documentation drinks environment floating point fractals fun gaming investigative reporting linux math memory metric performance programming quadratic rants security symbols travel uiforetw uncategorized unicycling visual studio wlpg xbox 360 xperf meta create account log in entries feed comments feed wordpress com random ascii tech blog of bruce dawson blog at wordpress com random ascii tech blog of bruce dawson blog at wordpress com subscribe subscribed random ascii tech blog of bruce dawson join 2 559 other subscribers sign me up already have a wordpress com account log in now privacy random ascii tech blog of bruce dawson subscribe subscribed sign up log in report this content view site in reader manage subscriptions collapse this bar loading comments write a comment email required name required website