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Upgrading eureso, try 3
So for reasons that I don't understand, I can no longer build a FreeBSD 12 or 11 kernel on eureso, a FreeBSD-10 copy of eureka. So I took the different approach of building the system on dereel, with intent to install on eureso today. But that didn't work either! The first issue, of course, was that the objects were on dereel, and I needed them on eureka. OK, move them across and symlink /eureka/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12 to /usr/obj. === root@eureso (/dev/pts/1) /usr/src 31 -> make installworld make[1]: "/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/Makefile.inc1" line 97: A build is required first. You may have the wrong MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX set.
Cross-building FreeBSD-12 on dereel
As planned yesterday, started building a current FreeBSD-12 system on dereel, which is already running an older version. What I forgot was that dereel has 4 CPUs, but I did a single-threaded build because that's what I would have done for eureso, a virtual machine, so as not to overload the host eureka. It took all day for buildworld and buildkernel: -------------------------------------------------------------- >>> Kernel build for GENERIC completed on Fri Nov 27 18:11:03 AEDT 2020 -------------------------------------------------------------- 20015.05 real 16524.06 user 1195.53 sys ... Fri 27 Nov 2020 18:11:03 AEDT OK, dereel's not the fastest machine I have, but that's over 5½ hours.
Greg's monitors
Once again somebody wanted to see how my now monitors are arranged on my desk top. The obvious projection is cylindrical, since that's the way I view the monitors, but previous attempts have been less than successful: Apart from the ever-present Moiré, which no software seems to be able to remove, there's a question of distance from the monitors and their relative height. OK, dammit, take a single photo with an extreme wide-angle lens. Rectilinear or fisheye? Conventional wisdom is that fisheyes distort and rectilinears don't: That is in fact the same photo, taken with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED ...
Upgrading eureso, 2nd try
Why couldn't I build bmake on eureso yesterday? Could it be that FreeBSD 12 has changed too far from release 10? OK, how about an intermediate step of release 11? cc -O2 -pipe -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/lib/libnv -MD -MF.depend.dnvlist.o -MTdnvlist.o -std=gnu99 -Qunused-arguments -I/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/tmp/legacy/usr/include -c /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/sys/contrib/libnv/dnvlist.c -o dnvlist.o /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/sys/contrib/libnv/dnvlist.c:50:10: fatal error: 'sys/dnv.h' file not found #include <sys/dnv.h> ^ 1 error generated. *** Error code 1 Stop. bmake[3]: stopped in /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/lib/libnv What's that? I don't want to know. Quarter of a century later, and I'm still running into this kind of problem. This should Just Work.
eureso and other frustrations
Finally got round to building a new world on eureso, the virtual copy of eureka. It didn't get far: sh /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/tools/install.sh -s -o root -g wheel -m 555 make make.amd64/bmake install: make.amd64/bmake: No such file or directory *** Error code 71 Stop. make[2]: stopped in /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/usr.bin/bmake What's that? Do I have Yet Another Corrupt Source Tree? Established that there was no /usr/obj hierarchy. What is this crap? Is the system too old to build the current FreeBSD-12 system? How do I work around it?
Upgrading eureka: yet another tack
Upgrading eureka seems to be a never-ending task. It's been well over 7 months since I came up with the bright idea of running two computers again, and gradually updating the second (dereel) as I go along. Clearly this isn't working either. Why not? One obvious reason is that the configuration has proved much more complicated than I expected. Where do I put my files? I ended up with a maze of little twisty symlinks, all different. And of course modern programs like firefox and (especially) Google Chrome have issues with networks. Chrome won't work at all on a remote display.
The Devourers
I was reading yet another lament at the death of a much-loved publication because advertising doesn?t work any more and they couldn?t execute the pivot to subscription (fewer and fewer can). Ads no longer work because of the Google/Facebook duopoly; suddenly I was thinking ?This reminds me of something.? After wandering the dusty back corridors of memory I came up with names that will be familiar to a few oldsters: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. No, really. Our Heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, heroes both, appeared in stories written by Fritz Leiber between 1939 and 1988 (!)
Video: AMA @ C++ Russia
Back in early July, I did a wide-ranging “ask me anything” Q&A session at C++ Russia. The video is now available — I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again to C++ Russia for inviting me to their great online event!
The Attack Surface Lectures: Little Revolutions
The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in my novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers. This program is “Little Revolutions,” hosted by Skylight Books in Los Angeles, with guest-hosts Tochi Onyebuchi and Bethany C. Morrow.... more
The Attack Surface Lectures: Cyberpunk and Post Cyberpunk
The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in Cory Doctorow’s novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers. This program is “Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk,” hosted by Anderson’s Books in Napierville, IL, with guest-hosts Bruce Sterling and Christopher... more
How the Seahawks are using a data lake to improve their game
Growing up in the Netherlands, American football was largely a foreign concept to me. My version of football was The Beautiful Game, or as most Americans know it, soccer. Football, futbol, soccer, or whatever else you call it, will always be something I?m deeply passionate about, especially my hometown team, Ajax. When I joined Amazon and Seattle became my new home, I began to see how my colleagues shared this same level of passion for American football ? and particularly the fervent fans known as ?The 12s? of the local team, the Seattle Seahawks. As I started to better understand this version of football, it was easy for me to get excited about the game as well as what was happening behind the scenes.
Understanding Climate Change Using High Performance Computing and Machine Learning
D Watson-Parris and NASA Worldview As the COVID pandemic continues to sequester many of us to our homes, our everyday behaviors have come mostly to a collective halt. The immediate effects are obvious, as cities, roads, and public spaces have emptied. Reports of nature intermingling with spaces once claimed by humans have amazed audiences worldwide. Coyotes casually strolling by the Golden Gate Bridge and through the streets of San Francisco, the canals of Venice running clear and teeming with fish, and the [Himalayas visible from India(https://www.insider.com/himalayas-seen-from-india-pollution-drop-coronavirus-lockdown-2020-4) for the first time in three decades are just a few of the examples made famous by popular culture.
New kitchen scales
Yvonne has been looking for new kitchen scales for some time. There are plenty on eBay, and they all seem to work well, but they're so tiny. This was significantly larger, and much more expensive?$80 compared to the $12 or so that I paid for the eBay offerings. But it had been halved in price, and in addition they were offering 20% shop-wide, so she ?only? paid $32 for it. From Soehnle, a well-known German company, with the rather silly name ?Page Comfort 400?, and no indication of the resolution (which proved to be the expected 1 g). Came with a single sheet of ?instructions?
NiZn battery behaviour
Taking my ring flash photos yesterday ended up with what I expected: the batteries went flat. Well, as usual, one battery went flat. These were Nickel-Zinc batteries, and I've already noted that in almost every case, only one went flat. While the other three had dropped to about 1.55 V, this one was round 0.6 V. Throw it away? That's what I've done in the past. But this time I measured the voltage some hours later, and it was back to about 1.2 V. So I charged it, and it reached the same level of charge as the others. Has it survived the ill-treatment?
Bloody Android phone!
Yvonne went shopping today, and called me several times. I've more or less learnt to live with pain smart phones: pull gingerly out of my shirt pocket, being very careful not to touch the screen, then smash swipe upwards. Works if you're careful. One time, though, I did it wrong and touched the screen. A completely different display appeared. OK, I've analyzed this one in the past: wait a few seconds for this glacially slow phone to produce a DISMISSACCEPT display, then accept. And yes, it did that. Press ACCEPT. Display goes away, phone continues ringing. And that was all until Yvonne got bored and hung up.
The Attack Surface Lectures: Intersectionality: Race, Surveillance, and Tech and Its History
The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in my?s novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers. This program is “??Intersectionality: Race, Surveillance, and Tech and Its History,” hosted by The Booksmith in San Francisco, with guest-hosts... more
Who coded the Internet?
Somehow I have had this knowledge in the back of my head for decades: when IPv4 was finalized, DARPA gave contracts to BBN and University of California, Berkeley to implement it?on Unix. The university created a Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) to do the work. And the first functional version of the IP stack was in 4.1cBSD, though it was really released in 4.2BSD. Kirk McKusick put me right on one detail: it was 4.1aBSD, not 4.1cBSD. But in the course of my reviews I read the Internet protocol suite page on Wikipedia, and it barely mentions Berkeley. The only reference is: The spread of TCP/IP was fueled further in June 1989, when the University of California, Berkeley agreed to place the TCP/IP code developed for BSD UNIX ...
The Attack Surface Lectures: Cross-Media Sci-Fi
The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in my?s novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers. This program is “Cross-Media Sci Fi” hosted by the Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA, with guest-hosts John Rogers and Amber... more
Time for a new firefox
Still more problems with my ancient firefox today. OK, bite the bullet, run it from dereel. Apart from mail interface problems (also on dereel), things now seem to work. I had to change my dobrowser script to put the web pages somewhere neutral (/eureka/var/tmp), and I needed to copy the ~/.mailcap to dereel. Somehow the biggest issue of running like this is the maze of twisty little symlinks, all different.
Fraudulent web sites?
It looks like we're going to have to feed Leonid 4Cyte for the rest of his life to treat his arthritis. It's expensive stuff?our vet charges $74 for 100 g. Melissa Wisbey gave Yvonne a cheaper source, PetCircle, offering it for only $62.95, post free. OK, we can do that. Signed up, added to my ?cart? and went to checkout: Oh, signup didn't include an address, so I had to give at least the post code: Grr.
SBS programme access: solved
A couple of days ago I grumbled that I could no longer download videos from SBS. That's a challenge for some; Callum Gibson tells me that he can download them with , exactly the same tool that I use. Do I have an old version installed? No, for once it was newer than his, probably because it's necessary. OK, I can try upgrading, and of course there's a new version, but it didn't make any difference OK, an example.
Attack Surface Lectures master post
The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in my’s novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers. 1. Politics and Protest with Ron Deibert (Citizen Lab) and Eva Galperin (EFF) Strand Bookstore, October 13, 2020 Original Youtube... more
The Attack Surface Lectures: Politics and Protest
The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in my’s novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers. This program is “Politics and Protest,” hosted by The Strand in NYC, with guest-hosts Eva Galperin and Ron Deibert. It... more
Thu, Nov 19 NYCDEVOPS meetup: John Allspaw on "Learning From Incidents"
Don't forget! November's nycdevops meetup speaker is John Allspaw, who will give a talk titled "Findings From the Field: 2 Years of Learning From Incidents". The talk starts at 5pm sharp! (NY is in US/Eastern) Please RSVP! See you there! https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/273826675/ (This is a virtual meetup. Everyone in the world is invited!)
The Attack Surface Lectures: Politics and Protest (fixed)
The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in my’s novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers. This program is “Politics and Protest,” hosted by The Strand in NYC, with guest-hosts Eva Galperin and Ron Deibert. It... more
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 23)
Here’s part twenty-three of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here). This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to... more
technology, opinion
Andy Oram, my old editor at O'Reilly, has published the first of a series of articles From Unix to Linux: Key Trends in the Evolution of Operating Systems. This is the series that I was reviewing last week, and which gave me cause to think. I told Andy about this in my review, of course, but it's clear that he sees things differently. He took some of the suggestions on board, but I'm left wondering whether the difference is simply our viewpoint. For my viewpoint, it looks a little uneven. Why highlight BIND? The issue of upper and lower case? The one-letter options that we know and love?
Printer pain
Yvonne wanted to print the recipe for the Rouladen so that she could mark it up in the kitchen. It wasn't easy; in fact, I nearly gave up: First, her firefox didn't want to know about the printer. Why not? No idea. So I had to print to a file and then copy the file to the printer. But that didn't work as expected. I got three pages, the first only with headings, the second showing only the photo, and the third also almost empty.
Trip report: Autumn ISO C++ standards meeting (virtual)
On Monday, the ISO C++ committee completed its final full-committee (plenary) meeting of 2020 and adopted the first changes to the C++23 working draft, including a few new features. This was a first in several ways: It was our first-ever virtual plenary, held online via Zoom. It was also our first-ever plenary meeting that wasn?t … Continue reading Trip report: Autumn ISO C++ standards meeting (virtual) →
Evolution of TV viewing
Andy Farkas has a new DVD collection: ?Get Smart?. He paid money for it; I downloaded my copies legally for free. That led to a discussion on IRC, which was interesting. But first, a digression. It's been over 50 years since we first had a TV in the house. Times have clearly changed. Thinking back, 30 July 1964 Home TV (parents) 1 June 1972 TV in my home 10 December 1975 Colour TV ...
?Coronavirus? ?spikes?
I've heard from several sources recently that ?Coronavirus? numbers are ?spiking?. What does that mean? First, Coronavirus, one of the main causes of the common cold. Do people really keep statistics on the kind of virus that people have? It seems highly unlikely. Clearly they're talking about one specific coronavirus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Given that name, or even the abbreviation SARS-CoV-2, you could almost forgive the inaccuracy. But in fact they're not talking about the virus at all, but COVID-19. Why do they have to be so inaccurate? In Germany they tend to refer to it simply as ?Corona?, which I thought was a crown or a beer or something.
More insights into BSD vs. Linux?
While looking for reasons for Linux overtaking BSD, came across this page. There's a lot in there, and I haven't read it yet, but it quotes a number of people who were active early on. I should read it.
Why did BSD fail?
I'm currently reviewing a yet-unpublished paper about (effectively) how Linux ?took over? from Unix (and thus also BSD). And clearly Linux is now an order of magnitude more important than BSD. Why did BSD fail? Why, did BSD fail? No, it's still going strong, just not as strong as Linux. But why did that happen? I still don't really understand. A couple of suggestions that have done the round: The AT&T lawsuit scared people off The AT&T lawsuit was over by 1994, long before Linux became usable.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 22)
Here’s part twenty-two of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here). This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to... more
Facebook Market
In the last few days my fear of Facebook has been ramping and in my mind the case for breaking it up got stronger. What happened was, I sold the old family minivan on Facebook Marketplace and it?s a juggernaut. We bought a reasonably-well-equipped Honda Odyssey in 2007, a few months after our second child was born. Minivans, they really do the trick when you?ve got multiple kids. It?s carried little-league teams and birthday parties and construction materials and everything the family needs at the cabin for a week. It?s taken the two-day drive over the mountains and across the Prairies to Saskatchewan, twice.
Web site maintenance
I've always shied away from content management systems, but it's clear that they address a real issue: how to ensure that everything is consistent. With 2400 odd text pages, I'm not always winning. Spent some time today writing up my Weißkrautsalat; the recipe in my recipe index was just a copy of a broken German recipe. After some time I had the recipe pretty much ready, and just needed to link to the old version. Damn! I've been there before! I just forgot to change the link in my recipe index. It was a certain satisfaction to discover that the recipes (in each case modified from the original) were as good as identical.
Woolworths checkout
Part of my shopping was at Woolworths, where I've had fun with their checkout machines in the past. To their credit, they've fixed one of the issues I had: how do you pay? Now they say it clearly: But to get there I first had to scan in the items. Six bottles of cherry juice. Please bag this item? Or Skip Bagging? Until I told it, it wouldn't proceed. Dammit, I have my own bags. Skip. But I had to scan Every Individual Bottle.
Computers in the days of Facebook
It's relatively clear that Yvonne won't be riding for a while, so now seems like a good time to send off her riding vest for service. More contact via Facebook, this time with Michelle in Gisborne. A PDF document arrived by Facebook. How do you print it? Why would you want to print it when you can send it to a device (clearly not a printer)? I couldn't find any way to send it to a printer. Yvonne asked Michelle. ?Just download it?. I couldn't see a way to download it either. In the end I went searching for it with Google, found the PDF, displayed it with xpdf and printed it.
Yvonne's accident, two days later
Yvonne is still not feeling any better after her fall on Sunday. OK, time to get a doctor to take a look at it. Oh. 20th-century US American tones when trying to call Health First. I'm not sure what the difference is between them and a normal ?engaged? tone, but I think it means something like ?this line inaccessible? or ?this line not in service?. Was it Health First or the phone system? Tried calling my other phone line. Same thing. So: MyNetFone? Tried calling Health First from my mobile phone. Same ancient tones. Tried calling my mobile phone from my VoIP phone.
Grüezi Schwiiz! Bonjour la Suisse! Buongiorno Svizzera! An AWS Region comes to Switzerland
Today I?m happy to announce our plans to open a new AWS Region in Switzerland in the second half of 2022. When the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region is launched, developers, start-ups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations will be able to run their applications and serve end users across the region from data centers located in Switzerland.
Raspberry Pi 400 vs ZX Spectrum
The release of the Raspberry Pi 400 personal computer reminded me of a wildly popular home computer that was launched in a similar computer-in-a-keyboard format almost 40 years ago: the Sinclair Research ZX Spectrum . I decided to compare the two, following the steps of an earlier comparison I performed between the 2015 Rapsberry Pi Zero and the 1957 Elliott 405.
What makes Unix unique?
I'm currently reviewing a paper for publication. Amongst other things it talks about what made Unix different from other systems. I'm not happy with the paper as it stands, but it's a cause for me to step back and think, especially as the author doesn't seem open to my argumentation. Unix was a multi-user system Yes, but it wasn't alone in that. By 1970 most systems were multi-user. Arguably Unix was one of the smaller multi-user systems, but my first experience with computers at all was multi-user FOCAL on a PDP-8, an even smaller system.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 21)
Here’s part twenty-one of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here). This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to... more
Long Links
This is the fifth ?Long Links? episode, a monthly curation of good long-form essays from around the Internet that nobody who (unlike me) has an actual job has time to read all of. A glance through this might turn up one or two pieces that would reward even a busy person?s time. [Geeks only.] Microservices ? architecture nihilism in minimalism?s clothes, by Vasco Figueira, comes with a provocative title and really a whole lot of different angles on the problem. I certainly don?t agree with all of his conclusions, but some of the angles are new to me and I suspect would be to others as well.
Autumn Yellow
This is my least favorite of the seasons, because I can?t help thinking of the looming cold and dark. This weekend???when the timeshift robs us of an hour of late light???feels particularly onerous. But you have to admire those trees. I?m still shooting with the the Fujifilm X-T30. My honeymoon with this eighteen-month-old camera is somewhat over. I miss the mammoth electronic viewfinder of the flagship X-T models and the minimal grace of the X-E models. For pictures like the ones in this fragment, I think of the mighty GFX100 and big poster-sized prints.
Cropping multiple images uniformly
Cropping yesterday's images was not easy. The photos were only approximately in the same place, something like this: What I wanted was 600x450 pixel crops of the bottom right-hand corner of the gate: There were 26 images. How should I do it? GIMP can do that. But it's such a pain to use. If you invoke it with 26 file names, you get 26 windows (and then some).