2026-11-01 03:00:00
On November 16th, 2004 — π years after arriving in Oxford — I submitted my doctoral thesis. My mind wasn't really on my thesis though; I was thinking about an issue I had noticed in recent Intel CPUs: The "Hyper-Threading" (simultaneous multithreading) feature they introduced in 2002 could leak information between execution threads via the cache state.
2026-09-25 07:00:00
I'm excited to announce — oh don't worry, I'm not doing that again — a new feature for the FreeBSD/EC2 platform: Desktop AMIs.
2026-08-27 22:00:00
I'm excited to announce Route 53 Files, a new file system that seamlessly connects any AWS compute resource with Amazon's highest-availability database.
2026-04-11 13:31:00
I created my first AWS account at 10:31 PM on April 10th, 2006. I had seen the announcement of Amazon S3 and had been thinking vaguely about the problem of secure backups — even though I didn't start Tarsnap until several months later — and the idea of an online storage service appealed to me. The fact that it was a web service made it even more appealing; I had been building web services since 1998, when I decided that coordinating a world-record-setting computation of Pi over HTTP would be easier than doing it over email.
2026-02-20 02:30:00
In 2021 I started publishing FreeBSD AMI IDs in the SSM Parameter Store; this made it much easier for scripts to launch EC2 instances without needing to have hard-coded AMI IDs. (Indeed, I use this extensively in my regression testing, to launch e.g. the most recent 14.4-STABLE image.) While this is useful for scripts, it's not so useful for humans.
2026-01-21 02:30:00
I've been maintaining FreeBSD in the EC2 cloud since 2012, and from October 2013 onwards FreeBSD AMIs had code to automatically download and install security and critical errata updates when they first boot. Importantly, this took place before sshd started running, to ensure instances could be launched safely even if there were OpenSSH vulnerabilities in the release, and the system rebooted after installing updates to ensure that it would be running an updated kernel.
