ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

October, 2013

Visualizing a block allocator

GHC’s block allocator is a pretty nifty piece of low-level infrastructure. It offers a much more flexible way of managing a heap, rather than trying to jam it all in one contiguous block of memory, and is probably something that should be of general interest to anyone who is implementing low-level code like a runtime. […]

  • October 30, 2013

Xmonad and media keys on Saucy

Ubuntu continues on its rampage of breaking perfectly good software, and on my most recent upgrade to Saucy Salamander, I discovered to my dismay that my media keys (e.g. volume keys, fn (function) keys, suspend button, etc) had stopped working. Of course, it worked fine if I logged into my user using Unity, but who […]

  • October 27, 2013