Pathfinder-1 flew quite close to my house today!

This morning, I was driving home (from a doctor's appointment, ugh), and while stopped at a traffic light I was distracted by the biggest blimp I'd ever seen.

It turns out this was Pathfinder-1, the LTA Research experimental vehicle.

Technically, the airship carries helium in a rigid internal frame rather than relying on the soft envelope design of traditional blimps; the design aims to improve resilience and control while lowering the carbon footprint compared to jets, as reported by Design News.

I guess I'm not supposed to call it a blimp.

Reading my way to Bordeaux: Allan Massie

I visited Bordeaux, France, recently. This is a very old city and has a quite complex history. About all I can personally attest to from my experience is that, nowadays, Bordeaux seems to be a lovely place:

• There are many interesting places to see and visit
• There is quite good public transit to get around
• All the local people I met were extremely friendly
• The food is great (try the Caneles)
• There's a lot going on: throughout the city I saw construction cranes and crews at work and lots of activity everywhere

As I often do, when looking forward to visiting a place, I sought out some books to read ahead of time. For this approach to work, of course, it is necessary not just to pick some books, but to actually read them!

Based on that criteria, I feel that Allan Massie's books were a resounding success. Massie wrote a four-book series of novels set in and around Bordeaux:

1. Death in Bordeaux
2. Dark Summer in Bordeaux
3. Cold Winter in Bordeaux
4. End Games in Bordeaux

The books are often referred to as the "Superintendent Lannes Mysteries", a very fair phrase, as they follow our hero Superintendent Lannes of the Bordeaux Judicial Police as he wrestles with a series of brutal crimes.

But the books could be just as easily categorized as historical fiction, since:

• They're set during World War II
• They're arranged chronologically
• They follow an entire collection of characters, not just Lannes
• The historical events and major themes of the World War II experience play an extremely large role in the books.

The last point is particularly important, I think. The books cover a period of time during which Bordeaux, and France as a whole, underwent many social changes. In the first book Bordeaux is a thriving city in the French Republic, but during the series of books France is: attacked by Germany; divided into various zones; occupied by German troops; administered by Petain's Vichy government; home to a Resistance movement; delivered from occupation by Allied troups; and re-formed under the De Gaulle administration. In addition to Petain and De Gaulle, Mitterand and other famous historical figures feature prominently throughout the books.

Massie also explores many important social themes. The experiences of Jews in Bordeaux is examined in many ways. There is also a lot of discussion of homosexuality and how it surfaced during the wartime years. Another major theme is the way that people in Bordeaux experienced contemporary events such as Fascism in Spain and Communism in Russia. Different characters react to these pressures in different ways: some join groups such as the Resistance, or the Vichy government, the French Foreign Legion, etc.; some become collaborators; some escape France for Africa or England; some become smugglers and black-market operators; many simply just try to survive.

And, of course, there are mysteries to solve! Superintendent Lannes and his team must find and interview witnesses, collect evidence, develop theories, and attempt to ensure justice is upheld. As much as they can.

Massie's plotting is tremendous, and his characters are vivid and believable. The action is nearly non-stop. Many of the events are tragic, but Massie does well to remind us that life during wartime in an occupied country is, still, life. So there are the occasional lighter events, even a touch of humor at times. And, of course, this is Bordeaux, France, so there's wonderful food and even greater wine ("Bring us a bottle of St. Emilion, please"), and lots of vivid depictions of buildings, plazas, streets, and other bits of the Bordeaux landscape.

Massie is not without flaws. For one thing, at least in the printings I read, he sorely needed a good editor, or at least a reliable proof-reader; there are far too many typos and missing or duplicate words and inaccurate punctuation dotting the pages of all four volumes. But that's a quibble, and was rarely more than a momentary distraction.

Significantlly more distracting, unfortunately, is that Massie's dialogue, though nicely colloquial, is English colloquial. "Jolly good, old chap" says one French policeman to another, a line that Just Seems Wrong.

A thousand pages is quite a bit to read, and it took me a significant amount of time to make it through all four books. I read the first two before I took my trip, was reading the third book while in Bordeaux, and didn't even start the fourth until I got back home.

But I don't regret any of that time, not even a moment. When I think back about Bordeaux in years to come, I'll certainly remember what a lovely trip I had, but I'll also always see Bordeaux at least partly through the eyes of Superintendent Lannes of the Bordeaux Judicial Police.

The eagle visited the bay

I happened to see a notice that the USCG Eagle was visiting the bay: Media Advisory: U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle ride-in opportunity into San Francisco Bay, Friday, July 25.

Of course, with my puny blog, I'm not a qualified media representative. Still! It would have been so cool!

Seeing that article instantly took me back to 2008, when the Festival of Sail occurred. That was a long time ago, I didn't even have my blog back then!

The Festival of Sail had a Parade of Tall Ships, which assembled just outside the Golden Gate and sailed through the gate in a grand procession. You can read a little bit about it here.

The Festival’s opening Parade of Sail, at noon on July 23, is a unique opportunity for Bay Area residents to view the stately procession of the visiting Tall Ships as they enter the Golden Gate, led proudly by the sleek, elegant United States Coast Guard Cutter Eagle. The historic fleet will be met and escorted by dozens of local sailing vessels as it proceeds past Marina Green, Fort Mason, Aquatic Park, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building. At the Bay Bridge, the Tall Ships will tack around to be welcomed at their individually assigned berths along the San Francisco waterfront.

I certainly wouldn't call the Eagle sleek, nor elegant, but it was definitely impressive.

A colleague of mine had a 36 foot Hunter, and loved to sail, and in those days I would often act as crewmember (more fondly known as "meat on the high rail"), assisting with the boat, trimming the sails, helping with tacking, raising and lowering the spinnaer, taking turns at the wheel, keeping my friend company, and generally enjoying a day on the bay.

We arranged to be out on the water during the parade, and it was certainly something! Unfortunately it seems like it mostly pre-dated the Internet, and it's hard to find much information online about it anymore, though I did locate this fun short video. In the video you can get a great feel for what it was like to be out on the water, and there are a few beautiful shots of the Eagle. As I recall, the wind was high and the conditions were challenging, and we were almost too busy with our own sailing to be able to admire the big boys. Watch the video all the way through for some stunning footage of the Eagle coming under the Bay Bridge near the end of the parade.

2008 was a bit of a peak time for sailing in the Bay Area. All of the marinas were full, there were sailing clubs everywhere, there were major regattas every weekend, oh what a time it was.

If the timing for this year's visit by the Eagle had been just a little different, I would have tried to get my dad out to see the Eagle, somehow. I often spoke about the Eagle with my dad, who of course was a 30-year veteran of the United States Coast Guard Reserve, retiring as a full Captain. My dad never had a chance to ride the Eagle himself, but we made several other lovely trips on the bay, including one on the Jeremiah O'Brien during Fleet Week, and another for a special Navy League event.

If you ever get a chance to see the Eagle, by all means do so; it's very interesting!

Apple's memory safety work

I was fascinated by this survey article from Apple describing their work on memory safety: Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices.

I spent pretty much my entire 45-year software engineering career working in systems programming areas where memory safety is a constant challenge. We have many many tools (lint, valgrind, Rust, etc) for finding such problems, yet still they seem ever-present.

So it's wonderful to see Apple taking a new approach to the problem, working across multiple layers. Programming languages, operating systems, function libraries, and custom hardware all have a role to play in their work.

This is an approach that is currently possible for Apple, because they deliver integrated systems where such complete stack control is possible. You wouldn't, for example, be able to do this on your Windows PC or on your Linux workstation because in those environments you tend to get the operating system, programming language, and hardware from three different vendors.

So good on Apple for realizing they had an opportunity to do something new and powerful, and for seizing that opportunity and delivering on it.

They're calling it the Turkish Immortal

Have a look at this recent chess game. Just play through the moves.

It's from a recent chess tournament in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. This is one of the qualifying tournaments for next year's World Championship, and there are some very fine players competing.

Chess is very popular around the world these days, and many new young stars from unfamiliar regions are making the modern game quite exciting to watch.

In this game, the white pieces are played by Aditya Mittal, who will have his 19th birthday this Friday, while the black pieces are played by Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş , currently the youngest grandmaster in the world, having just turned 14 in June.

Pointer Provenance in C and C++

I happened to stumble across some interesting work from some people who are trying to take some of the Rust ideas about tracking memory lifetimes down into C and C++:

• A Provenance-aware Memory Object Model for C

  In a committee discussion from 2004 concerning DR260, WG14 confirmed the concept of provenance of pointers, introduced as means to track and distinguish pointer values that represent storage instances with same address but non-overlapping lifetimes. Implementations started to use that concept, in optimisations relying on provenance-based alias analysis, without it ever being clearly or formally defined, and without it being integrated consistently with the rest of the C standard.

• P2434R4: Nondeterministic pointer provenance

  The main alternative that was considered and rejected is the PVI model, which avoids the notion of storage exposure but imposes further restrictions on integer conversions. These restrictions provide further opportunities for optimization but also complicate the execution model in subtle ways that make it difficult for the programmer to determine whether a manipulation preserves the validity of a pointer (yet to be reconstructed). They also interact badly with serialization of pointers where operations on the converted pointer value are entirely invisible; additional annotations might be required to support this use case.

• What on Earth Does Pointer Provenance Have to do With RCU?

  The results of operations on invalid pointers are not guaranteed, which provides additional opportunities for optimization. This example perhaps seems a bit silly, but modern compilers can use pointer provenance and invalidity to carry out serious points-to and aliasing analysis.

Not very easy reading. And a bunch of it is nearly 20 years old!

Change comes very slowly to the world of system programming in C. But at least C is still, slowly, evolving.

A strange cell phone day.

Mid-morning yesterday (8/30/2025), my wife's phone just stopped connecting to the cellular network (Verizon, in our case).

The phone said SOS at the top instead of its normal display of a signal strength bar graph.

We tried powering the phone down and back up, several times. Didn't fix the problem.

Everything else about the phone seemed to be fine. It was able to get on WiFi with no problems. Its GPS seemed to be working fine, etc. But she couldn't make or receive a call, couldn't get on the internet without wifi, couldn't send or receive text messages. All those Verizon things were just not working.

My phone is on the same plan as hers, and my number is only one digit removed from hers. My phone was just fine.

We happened to be out on the road at the time, and so we went to the local Apple Store and a friendly tech ran a diagnostics program on the phone and it all came back green.

He said there was some chatter among the other staff in the store that there might be a widespread Verizon problem, and maybe we could go over to the Verizon store a little ways down the road.

We called Verizon and the AI that answered told us that there were no outages in our area, and then told us it would be 37 minutes before a human would talk to us, and then said "System Error" and hung up.

I looked on DownDetector and it had a chart saying that there might be a Verizon problem. But there were only 21,000 reports across the entire country, didn't seem likely. I looked on Reddit and some people in Florida were complaining about some problem that might have been similar. Or maybe not. The Verizon status pages continued to report no problems anywhere.

We went on with our day.

Her phone stayed on SOS; my phone remained fine. It was a pleasant summer day and we didn't do much more about it.

Late in the afternoon, after we got home, my wife decided to plug her phone into the charger, as the phone was down to 35% charge.

The instant she plugged it in, it instantly went online and has been fine ever since.

I don't have a good mental model for why that worked.

My best theory is that there is some software in the phone that says: when you are plugged in, check for updates. And something about that update check managed to get the phone back online in a way that simply rebooting it didn't.

Everything is so complicated and mysterious these days; my ability to diagnose even simple problems seems faulty.

But the phone is working again.