Posts by Ozzard

Forks are helpful when upstream is slow or non-responsive

I've got a couple of forks of Puppet modules at the moment, typically where I'm running a more modern Puppet or stdlib than upstream uses and I've needed to make a few changes. Sometimes upstream is slow - or, in some cases, non-responsive. Sometimes the fork lasts a few days or weeks; one is several years old. I'm using one Terraform provider from a fork at the moment, because the maintainer wants to get a few more changes in before releasing a new version but there are showstopper bugs in the provider vs the latest version of what it's managing. So it goes. Once the fixes are incorporated and released upstream, I'll take great pleasure in changing my manifests to get the modules from the "right" place again, deleting my forks, and going back to letting other people do the thinking for me :-).

Used sensibly, forks are helpful for showing ancestry of code and providing a locus of administrative control. Like anythng else, they can be abused.

It's all about selling advertising

"Someone at the Reg hates Firefox? And that deserves screen space because...why, exactly?"

Because every page impression is the chance* of ad revenue for The Register, and extremism attracts eyeballs.

* Reading this on Firefox with NoScript and an ad blocker, so I'm neither contributing ad revenue nor stats to anything other than a log reader.

Re: You /what/ Liam?

I used to teach ParcPlace Smalltalk. 3 day course. First hour and a half: concepts and syntax. Rest of course: class library.

Re: "...let me count the ways..."

Let's just say these boards aren't going out into the field yet, where we expect them to survive a decade or more with no visits and total data traffic of under a megabyte a month. Six months or a year from now, once the firmware starts to settle down? Sure. They're good enough for what we need, and have an excellent ecosystem around them. That ecosystem is the difference for us.

Always check for odd habits

Also always, always, always check for cleaners with odd habits. We had a Sun workstation at a hospital in the early '90s, on a 4-way multiplug, which was plugged into the right-hand socket of the double 13A socket near the door. Note "right-hand". This is about to become important. The left-hand socket was empty, so as to leave a socket free for the cleaner.

This worked well for a year or so. Then the machine started becoming unreliable - it'd reboot between about 5.30pm and 6.30pm many weekday evenings. Aha! Must be a new cleaner or a dodgy vacuum cleaner! So we put some tape over the plug with a nice neat "Please do not unplug" notice. The following evening... reboot. The morning after that... check the socket. The tape had been peeled back, the plug presumably removed, then at some later time the plug had been put back in and the tape replaced. The empty, inviting left-hand socket next door was unused.

This was... mysterious. Time for some overtime! Hover outside the office after hours and see what happens.

The hover revealed the cleaner coming down the corridor, cleaning each room. When they got to ours, they peeled the tape back and... were just about to pull the plug on the workstation when our spy intervened. It turned out that when the new cleaner had received their training, they'd been shown how to use a vacuum cleaner (new technology for them) and the person showing them had plugged it into the right-hand socket of a double. Therefore the cleaner had assumed that they had to do it exactly the same way, and had been unplugging anything on the right-hand side of a double in order to plug in the vacuum.

Our spy promptly shut down the workstation, moved the multiplug to use the left-hand socket, and restarted the workstation. And we never had a problem again.

I've spent quite a long time trying to port a moderately complex WinForms app so that it will run under WINE. I have access to the source, and it's .Net (presently Core 3.1) and, as far as we can, adheres religiously to the published APIs with no weirdness.

It doesn't port cleanly, because one third-party library (DevExpress XtraRichEdit - I ain't writing my own word processor!) does something deep in its innards that causes WINE to display cross-hatched scrollbars.

WINE might change that, but it's going to have to do so app by app, and it'll be hard to shift the line-of-business apps because at the moment the DevExpress and Infragistics of this world couldn't care less.

Re: Change the way it's done

* You can turn off querying from organisations that break the rules.

* You can bring down the portcullis completely if you want.

* You can put a human between the request and the response, running the query past the Caldicott guardian in healthcare for example.

I was the architect of one such system.

I'd love a foldable phone... sort of

As I get older and my eyesight gets worse, screen real-estate becomes more and more valuable. I'd love a device that I can fold to put in a pocket, then get out and open to tablet size so that I stand a chance of reading it. Doesn't need 400ppi, just needs lots of degrees across my field of vision with my varifocals!

Believe me (I'm in that market) it isn't, because you can't get the parts. We're being quoted 1 October for 500 Pi 4B, 2022Q3 for the components for 500 of the custom boards we have for the same application. We're re-tooling from custom to Pi.

Possible? Clearly yes, for small enough and/or critical enough projects. One ex-colleague of mine wrote his own BCPL compiler for PDP-11, which he bootstrapped from his own PDP-11 assembler, which he originally hand-assembled. Then he wrote his own OS using that compiler. I didn't check what he used for storage and access to the PDP-11 while doing this, but it wouldn't surprise me if he went from scratch there as well.

Practical? That's a cost-benefit analysis :-).

If true, I'm going to make a small fortune selling tiny USB warts that are class-compliant with USB cameras and microphones, speak all the right protocols, and contain neither a camera nor a microphone.

Control the hardware and you control the system.

Check out Pi-Hole - run on a VM if necessary

Our remaining Windows boxen and VMs are finding they're having a hard time of it reporting telemetry back to the mothership; they suddenly can't resolve any of the DNS names. Might have something to do with me blocking 53 outbound for anything except the household DNS server, which is running Pi-Hole... *innocent whistle*

Ad-free on mobile is another blessed relief.

Threatening with a $5 wrench is effective in the short term but will be reported within minutes to weeks, at which point the team will take countermeasures.

That's not what most people who are interested in hacking the Linux kernel are after. They want to be an advanced, persistent threat.

It touched the IRB - which is an alternate name for an ethics review board

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board is worth the check.

As the article noted:

"The paper describes how the authors submitted what's described as subtly subversive code contributions that would introduce error conditions into the operating system software, and it claims the researchers subsequently contacted Linux maintainers to prevent any bad code ending up in an official release of the kernel.

"It further states that the experiment was vetted by the university's Institutional Review Board (IRB), which determined that the project did not constitute human research and thus granted an ethical review waiver."