Posts by Chewi 233 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Feb 2013
During an interview, I was shown some code (Ruby with SQL IIRC) and asked to explain what it did. Me, being a little forthright, commented "This code is terrible! Who wrote it?"
"Err, I did," said the senior engineer. Huh. You don't say.
They made heavy use of the open source Asterisk PBX, so I also told them the story about how I once got shitfaced with its author after the LinuxWorld Expo. Naturally, I got the job. :D
I have had PiStorm32-Lite since December, but I'm yet to actually try it. WHAT!? How could I resist!? Well, I'm a notorious tinkerer and perfectionist, and I've got too sidetracked trying to prepare my own unique Gentoo-based setup. Also I have young kids. I am getting closer though.
Although a lot of the interest is in the bare-metal Emu68 now, I'm actually more curious about Musashi. I owe my software engineering career to the Amiga, but I've been a penguin-head for far longer, and I would love to mix the two in weird and wonderful ways.
The first idea I've been working towards is using Sunshine to stream video from the Pi wirelessly, so that you can use the Amiga from anywhere simply by providing it with power. I have had Sunshine running on the Pi already, but it's currently far too slow. Convincing it to use hardware encoding is the first step.
I will try Emu68 too though. Running the two from the SD card is currently considered to be a boss level procedure. I think I can some up with something easier. In fact, I have already prototyped a tri-boot solution where the Amiga can boot directly from the SD card without a Pi at all.
I was a student at Durham Uni in 2001, living in halls at one of the colleges. My friend lived upstairs in a block that cornered onto mine. We wanted to share files and play games, but this was in the days before wireless was common, and only the newer halls had been wired up to the network. What to do? Naturally, we decided to have him swing a long ethernet cable out of his window for me to catch. We wanted to be discreet about it to avoid getting into trouble, but that didn't quite go to plan. Aiming and catching the cable was a bit harder than we anticipated. Our rooms looked down over the big common room window, and within a couple of minutes, we had attracted a crowd of onlookers who were enthusiastically cheering us on. "Oooooooh.... awwwww!" After several attempts, we finally managed it and got a big "Hurrah!" Fortunately, no one batted an eyelid after that.
Beer icon because we probably had a few after that!
No need. There is standards-based technology that is already dealing with this problem and it's completely transparent to both caller and recipient. Look up STIR/SHAKEN. It's all based around cryptography with regular EC keys and X.509 certificates. The US have made it mandatory for all telcos to use it, but I don't believe many, if any, are actively blocking based on the results yet. Instead, they are using it to feed a reputation database for now. I think some teething issues need to be resolved before it could be used to block, such as the inconsistent formatting of numbers (e.g. include country code or not). It seems the reputation database alone has made it easier to spot who the real abusers are though, so it's still being effective.
Some of you may recall the early Ryzen CPUs had an issue where they would just randomly freeze up after hours or days under Linux. It only seemed to happen when the system was very idle. I said half-jokingly that this wasn't seen on Windows because it never gets that idle. I then heard through the grapevine that people inside AMD thought that may indeed be the case.
I'm no expert, but I now reckon this kernel bug was causing it to happen more often than it otherwise would have. Maybe it's just as well. If it hadn't happened so frequently, AMD may have taken much longer to fix it.
My wife and daughter are both long time OpenSUSE Leap users. Me? I'm a Gentoo developer, but when it comes to your nearest and dearest, you want something that just works. There's the odd issue now and then, usually due to newer hardware, but for the most part, it's a breeze. It was the first distro I tried things like EFI and Secure Boot on. I love how they continue to maintain a rich feature set while keeping it polished. Long may it continue.
My 2008 Ford C-Max seems to follow the Mayan calendar. It doesn't let you manually set any date after 2012, as it just wraps back round to 2000. Ford evidently didn't think this car would last longer than 5 years! You can work around it by setting the time and date to just before midnight on December 31st and letting it naturally roll over a few times, but you have to be really careful not to touch the year. Bloody annoying.
The LG OLED55CX5LB I bought at the start of the year doesn't do anything like this, despite being connected to the Internet. I did opt out of a few things though. If I hadn't, it might have been worse. I definitely don't use the voice recognition feature, that just creeps me out, plus my employer insists on turning such things off. I do at least want mine connected to the LAN because I send it commands using a Python library.
I have a classic 160GB iPod with a spinning drive. It's old but I was using it in the car back when I did regular commutes. I had a dashboard magnet, designed for holding a phone, and it would have been perfect for holding the iPod. I knew it probably wasn't going to like it, but I couldn't resist the temptation to try. Sure enough, it made a horrible noise, and the screen glitched out. For a few moments, I thought it was totally buggered, but it eventually sprang back to life with seemingly no permanent damage.
It natively supports MacOS and Reddit tells me the Steam version works fine on the M1.
I play it on Linux and it runs great there too. I have had the odd issue over the years but I think they were entirely driver-related, and not the game's fault.
I've been playing this on and off over the years, not sticking to it because I found it so brutal. I think I had it on Hard to start with, then lowered it to Medium, but still struggled. It was only a few weeks ago that I realised what I'd been doing wrong all this time. Having left it for so long, I'd forgotten exactly what I was supposed to be doing so I watched a video on YouTube to recap. I watched in amazement as this player strutted around the ship without a care in the world, and no alien in sight. Surely they were playing it on easy? Apparently not. Just to check, I watched another video and saw much the same thing. I then tried this for myself, not slowly inching around the place, but casually walking about, just doing what I needed to do. I made it to the next save point without incident on the first attempt, despite having failed dozens of times before. Honestly, I was gobsmacked. It turns out that the alien takes time to home in on you. Stay in one room too long and it'll certainly find you. Keep moving and you'll probably be fine. I haven't had time to go back to it yet, but when I do, I'll probably crank it up to Hard again.
Their higher end stuff is no better. I'm no security researcher but even I figured out how to get root access through their telnet interface on the SRX5308 a few years back. It was enough to allow me to flash OpenWRT onto it, despite not being supported by the distro at all, though I never did get the weird network hardware working properly. I was going to report the issue but I realised they'd already fixed it in a subsequent firmware update, probably only by accident though, as they'd changed much of the software stack.
Former Gentoo Java lead here. I totally feel his pain as I burned out some years ago. It's even worse when you're trying to allow users to build the stuff from source. I'm familiar with many languages, including those that are known to be particularly troublesome for distros (like Rust and Ruby) but trust me, Java is the worst of all worlds.
One reason for this is its approach to optional dependencies. Take log4j 2, for instance. When I last looked, it had about two mandatory dependencies but tens of optional ones, most of which hardly anyone would care about. That's fine if you're grabbing the precompiled jars with Maven or Gradle or whatever. Grab just the ones you need. Or hey, just grab them all, it's only a few more KB to download. If you need to build from source though, as Fedora policy dictates, you're screwed. Although it's possible, no one uses a preprocessor with Java so all those dependencies that are optional at runtime suddenly become mandatory at build time. And guess what, those dependencies have more dependencies and so on and so on, and before you know it, you've had to package and build half the Internet. Maintaining a single distro package, particularly in Gentoo, carries significant overhead that just doesn't scale in the context of the Java ecosystem.
Gentoo is not as strict about building from source as Fedora is so I considered just using precompiled jars where possible. You then have to ask what the point of packaging Java stuff is at all though. There are some small benefits but I didn't feel it was worth my time so I moved onto other things. I'm now the Gentoo Games lead. That's much more fun!
Dear IONOS,
As a very long-standing customer of yours, I was dismayed to learn that you have reportedly voted "no" in the forthcoming vote to oust the current Nominet execute board, despite years of despicable behaviour. If you have, in fact, not voted "no" then please declare your support for the campaign publicly immediately. I will otherwise be taking my business elsewhere at the earliest opportunity.
Regards,
James
P.S. I will be publicly posting this message to the recent article on this matter at The Register. You're lucky I don't use Twitter.
I did wonder why 4 somewhat unrelated people among my contacts suddenly appeared on Signal within 24 hours. When one of them mentioned Elon Musk, it suddenly made sense. They are comprised of 2 physicists and 2 business leaders!
To put that in perspective, that's about the same number of new users I'd seen in the previous year. I've been using it for a while. It could be better in places but it's certainly not bad and it's long been my default SMS app.
Sorry for posting again but I had another thought. The willingness of the Linux community to fix any issues could extend to them actually working with the code or even creating native ports in the first place. I know I'd certainly be up for the former and probably the latter if I had more time. Game studios generally aren't prepared to trust their crown jewels to third parties like that though. One fantastic recent exception is the original Unreal Tournament (99). Epic, of all studios, trusted their old code to a small group of community developers and https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches is the wonderful result. Granted, it's an ancient game now but it still has a great following.
When looking for new games to play, I certainly favour ones with native Linux ports over those that don't. Proton does work remarkably well these days but I'm always left feeling like a second-class citizen. What's even more frustrating is when games initially have Linux ports and then drop them later on, leaving them bereft of bug fixes and updates. One such game I've started playing with my daughter recently is Dungeon Defenders. Based on the Unreal Engine, it must have been one of the best-looking games on Linux at the time of its release. As is so often the case, Ryan "icculus" Gordon did the port, but seemingly on a one-off or time-limited basis. It was eventually left to rot with a heap of known bugs. Most of these bugs weren't even Linux-specific. It then lost multiplayer compatibility with Windows, a key feature in this game, and eventually multiplayer stopped working entirely when GameSpy was shut down. We were forced to give up and switch to the Windows version under Proton. Yeah, it's fine, but it still feels shitty and it's no thanks to Chromatic Games.
You don't hear it so often now but the other thing that annoys me is the assumption by some that Linux somehow cannot handle these AAA games. When Valve ported their games to Linux, they found they ran slightly faster than they did under Windows. I recently finished Shadow the Tomb Raider. I gather it looks every bit as stunning on Linux as it does on Windows. Kudos to Feral Interactive for their hard work on this and other games. There's even a somewhat unsubstantiated story that Doom 2016 was successfully ported to Linux during its development but that never saw the light of day.
Java Edition is quite demanding but the alternative Bedrock Edition (generally the only option on consoles and tablets) is a bit speedier. Only Java Edition is officially supported on Linux and MacOS but the mcpelauncher project hacked Bedrock Edition into working. The difference is certainly noticeable. Although Bedrock Edition on the Xbox 360 is presumably built for PowerPC, I think mcpelauncher needs the Android version, so it wouldn't help in this case.
I can't top that but I can tell you that a few months ago, I ran Windows for Workgroups 3.11 under DOSBox on a 33MHz Amiga 1200 running Gentoo Linux. It took about half an hour just to start and moving the mouse was like shifting a boulder but it really did work. Unfortunately hardly anything on Linux besides the text framebuffer supports the Amiga's weird graphics hardware so I had to run it under Xvnc and view the results remotely but it was still running on the miggy all the same!
I can totally echo that. As a Gentoo developer, I get new pull requests on GitHub almost daily. I can barely find enough time to make my own changes these days, never mind review other people's. I do try though. I just wish they'd go that extra few miles and actually become bona fide Gentoo developers, then they can take responsibility for their own changes instead of getting stuck behind the bottleneck that is me.
Indeed, I would be rather disappointed if anyone I worked with failed to spot that. Things do get a bit hazy with the larger powers of 2 though. Not so long ago, a colleague pointed out something interesting about the strange figure of 16777216 we were getting. "That's 2 to the 24." We all looked at him with eyebrows raised. "What, doesn't everyone know that?"
Got to echo the above. We got sick to the back teeth of going through gunked up inkjet after gunked up inkjet. The HP lasted much longer than most but eventually suffered the same fate. We were maybe only printing once a month, if that, which is just not enough for any inkjet, it seems. We switched to a HP Color LaserJet MFP M180n and have never looked back. It's the smallest and cheapest colour laser with a scanner you will find, or at least it was a while back. It hasn't failed to print once. The proprietary scanner plugin even works perfectly under Linux on ARM. Sure, photos don't look that amazing, even on glossy paper, but we can live with that. I'll pop to Tesco and print photos there if I have to.
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