Jacob Lodwick
“Doing stuff since 1981.”
2026
Mar 25
Closed an 8-year-old bug in pyenv‑virtualenv: with auto-activation enabled, the prompt hook re-ran the full activate machinery before every shell prompt, adding 200ms of latency every time you pressed Enter. Caching the active version and skipping the redundant calls (#523) reduced it to 2ms, 100× faster. Reported in April 2018; shipped in v1.3.0.
Mar 13
Landed four performance PRs in pyenv (#3410, #3411, #3419, #3423) that strip subprocess forks out of rehash, version listing, and shell command lookup. The largest adds a fast path to pyenv versions, replacing per-symlink realpath resolution with a single readlink call and cutting measured shell startup from 176.8ms to 123.1ms median (30% faster) on a 12-virtualenv setup. Shipped across v2.6.24–v2.6.27.
Mar 9
Found and patched CVE-2026-28693 (NVD), a CVSS 8.1 (High) integer overflow in ImageMagick's DIB coder through which a crafted Windows bitmap can trigger an out-of-bounds read or write. Both release lines were affected; patched in 7.1.2-16 and 6.9.13-41 (#8573). Downstream, Red Hat rated it Important and Debian patched three releases (DSA‑6169‑1). Follow-up overflow checks landed in the sixel (#8587), SGI (#8588), PS3 (#8590), and JXL (#8591) write paths.
Feb 9
Contested every line item of a $9,625 personal-injury claim in Mathis Court with Judge Mathis (All Stitched Up): urgent care, missed modeling bookings, prospective plastic surgery. The speculative items didn't survive cross-examination; final judgment entered at $1,000, ruled nominal, 89.6% under claim. From the bench: “I'm not convinced that he caused all the damage.”
2025
Oct 4
Oct 4
Oct 4
Oct 2
Oct 2
Oct 1
2024
Jun 27
Talked with Marc Randolph, founding CEO of Netflix, live on X. Covered: scaling CollegeHumor from a freshman dorm, how Vimeo emerged, selling Connected Ventures to IAC, Barry Diller, the ultimatum that got me fired, and whether an independent video platform can find space against Netflix and YouTube.
2009
Mar 16
Invested in MakerBot Industries, which launches today. “A printer prints things, a maker makes things. MakerBot makes robots that make things”: feed it a 3D model and the extruder, a precision glue gun on a three-axis platform, builds the object in plastic. The first model, the Cupcake, sells as a $750 kit, a commercialization of the open-source RepRap project that stays open source. Small enough to print the icing on a cupcake, hence the name; the frosting extruder is not a joke.
1995
July
Made a home page at the Marin County Fair: San Marin High School students are running a Make Your Own Home Page booth in the Multimedia Funhouse, digitizing camera included, pages linked from the fair index through the end of July. Mine says: 13 years old, 8th grade, Maryland, Pentium 75, AOL. Hosted on MIDAS, the Marin Information and Data Access System.
1981
