Search Results: "ed"

In considering storage trends for the consumer side I m looking at the current prices from MSY (where I usually buy computer parts). I know that other stores will have slightly different prices but they should be very similar as they all have low margins and wholesale prices are the main factor. Small Hard Drives Aren t Viable The cheapest hard drive that MSY sells is $68 for 500G of storage. The cheapest SSD is $49 for 120G and the second cheapest is $59 for 240G. SSD is cheaper at the low end and significantly faster. If someone needed about 500G of storage there s a 480G SSD for $97 which costs $29 more than a hard drive. With a modern PC if you have no hard drives you will notice that it s quieter. For anyone who s buying a new PC spending an extra $29 is definitely worthwhile for the performance, low power use, and silence. The cheapest 1TB disk is $69 and the cheapest 1TB SSD is $159. Saving $90 on the cost of a new PC probably isn t worth while. For 2TB of storage the cheapest options are Samsung NVMe for $339, Crucial SSD for $335, or a hard drive for $95. Some people would choose to save $244 by getting a hard drive instead of NVMe, but if you are getting a whole system then allocating $244 to NVMe instead of a faster CPU would probably give more benefits overall. Computer stores typically have small margins and computer parts tend to quickly either become cheaper or be obsoleted by better parts. So stores don t want to stock parts unless they will sell quickly. Disks smaller than 2TB probably aren t going to be profitable for stores for very long. The trend of SSD and NVMe becoming cheaper is going to make 2TB disks non-viable in the near future. NVMe vs SSD M.2 NVMe devices are at comparable prices to SATA SSDs. For some combinations of quality and capacity NVMe is about 50% more expensive and for some it s slightly cheaper (EG Intel 1TB NVMe being cheaper than Samsung EVO 1TB SSD). Last time I checked about half the motherboards on sale had a single M.2 socket so for a new workstation that doesn t need more than 2TB of storage (the largest NVMe that MSY sells) it wouldn t make sense to use anything other than NVMe. The benefit of NVMe is NOT throughput (even though NVMe devices can often sustain over 4GB/s), it s low latency. Workstations can t properly take advantage of this because RAM is so cheap ($198 for 32G of DDR4) that compiles etc mostly come from cache and because most filesystem writes on workstations aren t synchronous. For servers a large portion of writes are synchronous, for example a mail server can t acknowledge receiving mail until it knows that it s really on disk, so there s a lot of small writes that block server processes and the low latency of NVMe really improves performance. If you are doing a big compile on a workstation (the most common workstation task that uses a lot of disk IO) then the writes aren t synchronised to disk and if the system crashes you will just do all the compilation again. While NVMe doesn t give a lot of benefit over SSD for workstation use (I ve uses laptops with SSD and NVMe and not noticed a great difference) of course I still want better performance. ;) Last time I checked I couldn t easily buy a PCIe card that supported 2*NVMe cards, I m sure they are available somewhere but it would take longer to get and probably cost significantly more than twice as much. That means a RAID-1 of NVMe takes 2 PCIe slots if you don t have an M.2 socket on the motherboard. This was OK when I installed 2*NVMe devices on a server that had 18 disks and lots of spare PCIe slots. But for some systems PCIe slots are an issue. My home server has all PCIe slots used by a video card and Ethernet cards and the BIOS probably won t support booting from NVMe. It s a Dell server so I can t just replace the motherboard with one that has more PCIe slots and M.2 on the motherboard. As it s running nicely and doesn t need replacing any time soon I won t be using NVMe for home server stuff. Small Servers Most servers that I am responsible for have less than 2TB of storage. For my clients I now only recommend SSD storage for small servers and am recommending SSD for replacing any failed disks. My home server has 2*500G SSDs in a BTRFS RAID-1 for the root filesystem, and 3*4TB disks in a BTRFS RAID-1 for storing big files. I bought the SSDs when 500G SSDs were about $250 each and bought 2*4TB disks when they were about $350 each. Currently that server has about 3.3TB of space used and I could probably get it down to about 2.5TB if I deleted things I don t really need. If I was getting storage for that server now I d use 2*2TB SSDs and 3*1TB hard drives for the stuff that doesn t fit on SSDs (I have some spare 1TB disks that came with servers). If I didn t have spare hard drives I d get 3*2TB SSDs for that sort of server which would give 3TB of BTRFS RAID-1 storage. Last time I checked Dell servers had a card for supporting M.2 as an optional extra so Dells probably won t boot from NVMe without extra expense. Ars Technica has an informative article about WD selling SMR disks as NAS disks [1]. The Shingled Magnetic Recording technology allows greater storage density on a platter which leads to either larger capacity or cheaper disks but at the cost of lower write performance and apparently extremely bad latency in some situations. NAS disks are supposed to be low latency as the expectation is that they will be used in a RAID array and kicked out of the array if they have problems. There are reports of ZFS kicking SMR disks from RAID sets. I think this will end the use of hard drives for small servers. For a server you don t want to deal with this sort of thing, by definition when a server goes down multiple people will stop work (small server implies no clustering). Spending extra to get SSDs just to avoid the risk of unexpected SMR would be a good plan. Medium Servers The largest SSD and NVMe devices that are readily available are 2TB but 10TB disks are commodity items, there are reports of 20TB hard drives being available but I can t find anyone in Australia selling them. If you need to store dozens or hundreds of terabytes than hard drives have to be part of the mix at this time. There s no technical reason why SSDs larger than 10TB can t be made (the 2.5 SATA form factor has more than 5* the volume of a 2TB M.2 card) and it s likely that someone sells them outside the channels I buy from, but probably at a price higher than what my clients are willing to pay. If you want 100TB of affordable storage then a mid range server like the Dell PowerEdge T640 which can have up to 18*3.5 disks is good. One of my clients has a PowerEdge T630 with 18*3.5 disks in the 8TB-10TB range (we replace failed disks with the largest new commodity disks available, it used to have 6TB disks). ZFS version 0.8 introduced a Special VDEV Class which stores metadata and possibly small data blocks on faster media. So you could have some RAID-Z groups on hard drives for large storage and the metadata on a RAID-1 on NVMe for fast performance. For medium size arrays on hard drives having a find / operation take hours is not uncommon, for large arrays having it take days isn t that uncommon. So far it seems that ZFS is the only filesystem to have taken the obvious step of storing metadata on SSD/NVMe while bulk data is on cheap large disks. One problem with large arrays is that the vibration of disks can affect the performance and reliability of nearby disks. The ZFS server I run with 18 disks was originally setup with disks from smaller servers that never had ZFS checksum errors, but when disks from 2 small servers were put in one medium size server they started getting checksum errors presumably due to vibration. This alone is a sufficient reason for paying a premium for SSD storage. Currently the cost of 2TB of SSD or NVMe is between the prices of 6TB and 8TB hard drives, and the ratio of price/capacity for SSD and NVMe is improving dramatically while the increase in hard drive capacity is slow. 4TB SSDs are available for $895 compared to a 10TB hard drive for $549, so it s 4* more expensive on a price per TB. This is probably good for Windows systems, but for Linux systems where ZFS and special VDEVs is an option it s probably not worth considering. Most Linux user cases where 4TB SSDs would work well would be better served by smaller NVMe and 10TB disks running ZFS. I don t think that 4TB SSDs are at all popular at the moment (MSY doesn t stock them), but prices will come down and they will become common soon enough. Probably by the end of the year SSDs will halve in price and no hard drives less than 4TB will be viable. For rack mounted servers 2.5 disks have been popular for a long time. It s common for vendors to offer 2 versions of a rack mount server for 2.5 and 3.5 disks where the 2.5 version takes twice as many disks. If the issue is total storage in a server 4TB SSDs can give the same capacity as 8TB HDDs. SMR vs Regular Hard Drives Rumour has it that you can buy 20TB SMR disks, I haven t been able to find a reference to anyone who s selling them in Australia (please comment if you know who sells them and especially if you know the price). I expect that the ZFS developers will soon develop a work-around to solve the problems with SMR disks. Then arrays of 20TB SMR disks with NVMe for special VDEVs will be an interesting possibility for storage. I expect that SMR disks will be the majority of the hard drive market by 2023 if hard drives are still on the market. SSDs will be large enough and cheap enough that only SMR disks will offer enough capacity to be worth using. I think that it is a possibility that hard drives won t be manufactured in a few years. The volume of a 3.5 disk is significantly greater than that of 10 M.2 devices so current technology obviously allows 20TB of NVMe or SSD storage in the space of a 3.5 disk. If the price of 16TB NVMe and SSD devices comes down enough (to perhaps 3* the price of a 20TB hard drive) almost no-one would want the hard drive and it wouldn t be viable to manufacture them. It s not impossible that in a few years time 3D XPoint and similar fast NVM technologies occupy the first level of storage (the ZFS special VDEV , OS swap device, log device for database servers, etc) and NVMe occupies the level for bulk storage with no space left in the market for spinning media. Computer Cases For servers I expect that models supporting 3.5 storage devices will disappear. A 1RU server with 8*2.5 storage devices or a 2RU server with 16*2.5 storage devices will probably be of use to more people than a 1RU server with 4*3.5 or a 2RU server with 8*3.5 . My first IBM PC compatible system had a 5.25 hard drive, a 5.25 floppy drive, and a 3.5 floppy drive in 1988. My current PC is almost a similar size and has a DVD drive (that I almost never use) 5 other 5.25 drive bays that have never been used, and 5*3.5 drive bays that I have never used (I have only used 2.5 SSDs). It would make more sense to have PC cases designed around 2.5 and maybe 3.5 drives with no more than one 5.25 drive bay. The Intel NUC SFF PCs are going in the right direction. Many of them only have a single storage device but some of them have 2*M.2 sockets allowing RAID-1 of NVMe and some of them support ECC RAM so they could be used as small servers. A USB DVD drive costs $36, it doesn t make sense to have every PC designed around the size of an internal DVD drive that will probably only be used to install the OS when a $36 USB DVD drive can be used for every PC you own. The only reason I don t have a NUC for my personal workstation is that I get my workstations from e-waste. If I was going to pay for a PC then a NUC is the sort of thing I d pay to have on my desk.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/y8gglf5c

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 148. This version includes the following changes:

[ Daniel Fullmer ]
* Fix a regression in the CBFS comparator due to changes in our_check_output.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add a remark in the deb822 handling re. potential security issue in the
  .changes, .dsc, .buildinfo comparator.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. The problem While testing the cross-compiler, we noticed that the designer library was not being built. The designer library is needed to build designer plugins, which allow loading, dynamically at runtime, .ui interface files that use custom widgets. The error the customer got at runtime is: QFormBuilder was unable to create a custom widget of the class ' '; defaulting to base class 'QWidget'. The library with the custom widget implementation was correctly linked, and indeed the same custom widget was used by the application in other parts of its interface not loaded via .ui files. It turns out that it is not sufficient, and to load custom widgets automatically, QUiLoader wants to read their metadata from plugin libraries containing objects that implement the QDesignerCustomWidgetInterface interface. Sadly, building such a library requires using QT += designer, and the designer library, that was not being built by Qt5's build system. This looks very much like a Qt5 bug. A work around would be to subclass QUiLoader extending createWidget to teach it how to create the custom widgets we need. Unfortunately, the customer has many custom widgets. The investigation To find out why designer was not being built, I added -d to the qmake invocation at the end of qtbase/configure, and trawled through the 3.1G build output. The needle in the haystack seems to be here:

DEBUG 1: /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qttools/src/designer/src/src.pro:18: SUBDIRS := uiplugin uitools lib components designer plugins
DEBUG 1: /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qttools/src/designer/src/src.pro:23: calling qtNomakeTools(lib components designer plugins)

As far as I can understand, qtNomakeTools seems to be intended to disable building those components if QT_BUILD_PARTS doesn't contain tools. For cross-building, QT_BUILD_PARTS is libs examples, so designer does not get built. However, designer contains the library part needed for QDesignerCustomWidgetInterface and that really needs to be built. I assume that part should really be built as part of libs, not tools. The fixes/workarounds I tried removing designer from the qtNomakeTools invocation at qttools/src/designer/src/src.pro:23, to see if qttools/src/designer/src/designer/ would get built. It did get built, but then build failed with designer/src/designer and designer/src/uitools both claiming the designer plugin. I tried editing qttools/src/designer/src/uitools/uitools.pro not to claim the designer plugin when tools is not a build part. I added the tweaks to the Qt5 build system as debian/patches. 2 hours of build time later... make check is broken:

make[6]: Leaving directory '/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qttools/src/designer/src/uitools'
make[5]: *** No rule to make target 'sub-components-check', needed by 'sub-designer-check'.  Stop.

But since make check doesn't do anything in this build, we can simply override dh_auto_test to skip that step. Finally, this patch builds a new executable, of an architecture that makes dh_shlibdeps struggle:

dpkg-shlibdeps: error: cannot find library libQt5DesignerComponentssystem.so.5 needed by debian/qtbase5system-armhf-dev/opt/qt5system-armhf/bin/designer (ELF format: 'elf32-little' abi: '0101002800000000'; RPATH: '')
dpkg-shlibdeps: error: cannot find library libQt5Designersystem.so.5 needed by debian/qtbase5system-armhf-dev/opt/qt5system-armhf/bin/designer (ELF format: 'elf32-little' abi: '0101002800000000'; RPATH: '')

And we can just skip running dh_shlibdeps on the designer executable. The result is in the qt5custom git repository.

I need an alternative to BountySource, who have done an evil thing. Please post recommendations in the comments.

From: Ian Jackson <*****>
To: support@bountysource.com
Subject: Re: Update to our Terms of Service
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:26:46 +0100
Bountysource writes ("Update to our Terms of Service"):
> You are receiving this email because we are updating the Bountysource Terms of
> Service, effective 1st July 2020.
>
> What's changing?
> We have added a Time-Out clause to the Bounties section of the agreement:
>
> 2.13 Bounty Time-Out.
> If no Solution is accepted within two years after a Bounty is posted, then the
> Bounty will be withdrawn and the amount posted for the Bounty will be retained
> by Bountysource. For Bounties posted before June 30, 2018, the Backer may
> redeploy their Bounty to a new Issue by contacting support@bountysource.com
> before July 1, 2020. If the Backer does not redeploy their Bounty by the
> deadline, the Bounty will be withdrawn and the amount posted for the Bounty
> will be retained by Bountysource.
>
> You can read the full Terms of Service here
>
> What do I need to do?
> If you agree to the new terms, you don't have to do anything.
>
> If you have a bounty posted prior to June 30, 2018 that is not currently being
> solved, email us at support@bountysource.com to redeploy your bounty.  Or, if
> you do not agree with the new terms, please discontinue using Bountysource.
I do not agree to this change to the Terms and Conditions.
Accordingly, I will not post any more bounties on BountySource.
I currently have one outstanding bounty of $200 on
   https://www.bountysource.com/issues/86138921-rfe-add-a-frontend-for-the-rust-programming-language
That was posted in December 2019.  It is not clear now whether that
bounty will be claimed within your 2-year timeout period.
Since I have not accepted the T&C change, please can you confirm that
(i) My bounty will not be retained by BountySource even if no solution
    is accepted by December 2021.
(ii) As a backer, you will permit me to vote on acceptance of that
    bounty should a solution be proposed before then.
I suspect that you intend to rely on the term in the previous T&C
giving you unlimited ability to modify the terms and conditions.  Of
course such a term is an unfair contract term, because if it were
effective it would give you the power to do whatever you like.  So it
is not binding on me.
I look forward to hearing from you by the 8th of July.  If I do not
hear from you I will take the matter up with my credit card company.
Thank you for your attention.
Ian.

They will try to say "oh it's all governed by US law" but of course section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act makes the card company jointly liable for Bountysource's breach of contract and a UK court will apply UK consumer protection law even to a contract which says it is to be governed by US law - because you can't contract out of consumer protection. So the card company are on the hook and I can use them as a lever. Update - BountySource have changed their mind

From: Bountysource <support@bountysource.com>
To: *****
Subject: Re: Update to our Terms of Service
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 18:51:11 -0700
Hi Ian
The new terms of service has with withdrawn.

This is not the end of the matter, I'm sure. They will want to get long-unclaimed bounties off their books (and having the cash sat forever at BountySource is not ideal for backers either). Hopefully they can engage in a dialogue and find a way that is fair, and that doesn't incentivise BountySource to sabotage bounty claims(!) I think that means that whatever it is, BountySource mustn't keep the money. There are established ways of dealing with similar problems (eg ancient charitable trusts; unclaimed bank accounts). I remain wary. That BountySource is now owned by cryptocurrency company is not encouraging. That they would even try what they just did is a really bad sign.

Edited 2020-06-17 16:28 for a typo in Bountysource's email address
Update added 2020-06-18 11:40 for BountySource's change of mind.

comments

LWN published today yet another great piece of writing, Loaded terms in free software. I am sorry, the content will not be immediately available to anybody following at home, as LWN is based on a subscription model But a week from now, the article will be open for anybody to read. Or you can ask me (you most likely can find my contact addresses, as they are basically everywhere) for a subscriber link, I will happily provide it. In consonance with the current mood that started with the killing of George Floyd and sparked worldwide revolts against police brutality, racism (mostly related to police and law enforcement forces, but social as well) and the like, the debate that already started some months ago in technical communities has re-sparked: We have many terms that come with long histories attached to them, and we are usually oblivious to their obvious meaning. We? Yes, we, the main users and creators of technology. I never felt using master and slave to refer to different points of a protocol, bus, clock or whatever (do refer to the Wikipedia article for a fuller explanation) had any negative connotations but then again, those terms have never tainted my personal family. That is, I understand I speak from a position of privilege. A similar although less heated issue goes around the blacklist and whitelist terms, or other uses that use white to refer to good, law-abiding citizens, and black to refer to somewhat antisocial uses (i.e. the white hat and black hat hackers). For several years, this debate has been sparking and dying off. Some important changes have been made Particularly, in 2017 the Internet Software Consortium started recommending Primary and Secondary, Python dropped master/slave pairs after a quite thorough and deep review throughout 2018, GitHub changed the default branch from master to main earlier this week. The Internet Engineering Task Force has a draft (that lapsed and thus sadly didn t become an RFC, but still, is archived), Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language that lists suggested alternatives:

There are also many other relationships that can be used as metaphors, Eglash s research calls into question the accuracy of the master-slave metaphor. Fortunately, there are ample alternatives for the master-slave relationship. Several options are suggested here and should be chosen based on the pairing that is most clear in context:

Primary-secondary

Leader-follower

Active-standby

Primary-replica

Writer-reader

Coordinator-worker

Parent-helper

I ll add that I think we Spanish-speakers are not fully aware of the issue s importance, because the most common translation I have seen for master/slave is maestro/esclavo: Maestro is the word for teacher (although we do keep our slaves in place). But think whether it sounds any worse if you refer to device pairs, or members of a database high-availability cluster, or whatever as Amo and Esclavo. It does sound much worse I cannot add much of value to this debate. I am just happy issues like this are being recognized and dealt with. If the topic interests you, do refer to the LWN article! Some excrepts: I consider the following to be the core of Jonathan Corbet s writeup:

Recent events, though, have made it clear even to those of us who were happy to not question this view that the story of slavery and the wider racist systems around it is not yet finished. There are many people who are still living in the middle of it, and it is not a nice place to be. We are not so enlightened as we like to think we are. If there is no other lesson from the events of the last few weeks, we should certainly take to heart the point that we need to be listening to the people who have been saying, for many years, that they are still suffering. If there are people who are telling us that terms like slave or blacklist are a hurtful reminder of the inequities that persist in our society, we need to accept that as the truth and act upon it. Etymological discussions on what, say, master really means may be interesting, but they miss the point and are irrelevant to this discussion.

Part of a comment by user yokem_55:

Often, it seems to me that the replacement words are much more descriptive and precise than the old language. Allowlist is far more obviously a list of explicitly authorized entities than whitelist . Mainline has a more obvious meaning of a core stream of development than master . The benefit of moving past this language is more than just changing cultural norms, it s better, more precise communication across the board.

Another spot-on comment, by user alan:

From my perspective as a Black American male, I think that it s nice to see people willing to see and address racism in various spheres. I am concerned that some of these steps will be more performative than substantial. Terminology changes in software so as to be more welcoming is a nice thing. Ensuring that oppressed minorities have access to the tools and resources to help reduce inequity and ensuring equal protection under the laws is better. We ll get there one day I m sure. The current ask is much simpler, its just to stop randomly killing and terrorizing us. Please and thank you.

So Maybe the protests of this year caught special notoriety because the society is reacting after (or during, for many of us) the lockdown. In any case, I hope for their success in changing the planet s culture of oppression.

Comments Tomas Janousek 2020-06-19 10:04:32 +0200 In the blog post On masters and slaves, whitelists and blacklists you claim that GitHub changed the default branch from master to main earlier this week but I don t think that change is in effect yet. When you create a repo, the default branch is still named master . Gunnar Wolf 2020-06-19 11:52:30 -0500 Umh, seems you are right. Well, what can I say? I m reporting only what I have been able to find / read Now, given that said master branch does not carry any Git-specific meaning and is just a commonly used configuration I hope people start picking it up. No, I have not renamed master branches in any of my repos but intend to do so soonish. Tomas Janousek 2020-06-19 20:01:52 +0200 Yeah, don t worry. I just find it sad that so much inaccurate news is spreading from a single CEO tweet, and I wanted to help stop that. I m sure some change will happen eventually, but until it does, we shouldn t speak about it in the past tense. :-)

Language is a tool of power In school, we read the philologist diary of Victor Klemperer about the changes in the German language during the Third Reich, LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii, a book which makes it clear that the use of language is political, creates realities, and has reverse repercussions on concepts of an entire society. Language was one of the tools that supported Nazism in insiduously pervading all parts of society. Language shapes our concepts of society Around the same time, a friend of mine proposed to read Egalia's daughters by Gerd Brantenberg, a book in which gendered words were reversed: so that human becomes huwim, for example. This book made me take notice of gendered concepts that often go unnoticed. Language shapes the way we think and feel I spent a large part of my adult life in France, which confronted me with the realization that a language provides its speakers with certain concepts. If a concept does not exist in a language, people cannot easily feel or imagine this concept either. Back then (roughly 20 years ago), even though I was aware of gender inequality, I hated using gender neutral language because in German and French it felt unnatural, and, or so I thought, we were all alike. One day, at a party, we played a game that consisted in guessing people's professions by asking them Yes/No questions. Turns out that we were unable to guess that the woman we were talking with was a doctor, because we could simply not imagine this profession for a young woman. In French, docteur is male and almost nobody would use the word doctoresse, ou femme docteur. Unimaginable are also the concepts of words in German that have no equivalent in French or vice versa:

Sehnsucht composed of longing (sich sehnen) and obsession (Sucht). In English, this word is translated as longing. In French it is translated as nostalgie (nostalgia), but nostalgia is directed towards the past, while Sehnsucht in German can be used to designate a longing for people, places, food, even feelings, and can be used in all temporal directions. There are other approximate translations to French, for example aspiration.
Das Unheimliche is a German word and an essay by Sigmund Freud from 1919. The translation of the title had been subject to a lot of debate, before the text was published in French under the name "L'inqui tante tranget ", something that would translate to English as worrisome unfamiliarity. In English, there is a word for unheimlich, which is uncanny, however canny does not transport the German concept of heimlich which is related to home, familiarity, and secrecy.
D paysement. This French word is a negation of feeling home like in one's country (pays): it describes the, generally positively connoted, feelings one experiences when changing habits, or environment.

Or, to make all this a bit less serious, Italian has the word gattara (female) or gattaro (male), which one could translate to English roughly as cat person, most often designating old women who feed stray cats. But really, the way language shapes our concepts and ideas goes much further, as well explained by Lera Boroditsky in a talk in which she explains how language influences concepts of space, time, and blame, among other things. Building new models This quote by Buckminster Fuller is pinned on the wall over my desk:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

A change in language is such a new model: it can make oppression and inequalities visible. Words do not only describe our world, they are a vehicle of ideas, and utopias. Analyzing and criticizing our use of language means paving the way for ideas and concepts of inclusion, equality, and unity. You might be guessing at where am I getting at with this Right: I am in favor of acknowledging past mistakes, and replacing oppressive metaphors in computing. As noted in the IETF draft about Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language, by Niels Ten Oever and Mallory Knodel, the metaphors "master/slave" and "blacklist/whitelist" associate "white with good and black with evil [which] is known as the 'bad is black effect'", all the while being technically inaccurate. I acknowledge that this will take time. There is a lot of work to do.

Review: Network Effect, by Martha Wells

Series:	Murderbot Diaries #5
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	May 2020
ISBN:	1-250-22984-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	351

Network Effect is the first Murderbot novel, although the fifth story of the series. The previous stories, beginning with All Systems Red, were novellas. Under no circumstances should you start reading the series here. Network Effect builds significantly on the story arc that ended with Exit Strategy and resolves some important loose ends from Artificial Condition. It's meant to be read in series order. I believe this is the first time in my life that I've started reading a book on the night of its release. I was looking forward to this novel that much, and it does not disappoint. I'll try not to spoil the previous books too much in this review, but at this point it's a challenge. Just go read them. They're great. The big question I had about the first Murderbot novel was how would it change the plot dynamic of the series. All of the novellas followed roughly the same plot structure: Murderbot would encounter some humans who need help, somewhat grudgingly help them while pursuing its own agenda, snark heavily about human behavior in the process, once again prove its competence, and do a little bit of processing of its feelings and a lot of avoiding them. This formula works great at short length. Would Wells change it at novel length, or if not, would it get tedious or strained? The answer is that Wells added in quite a bit more emotional processing and relationship management to flesh out the core of the book and created a plot with more layers and complexity than the novella plots, and the whole construction works wonderfully. This is exactly the book I was hoping for when I heard there would be a Murderbot novel. If you like the series, you'll like this, and should feel free to read it now without reading the rest of the review.

Overse added, "Just remember you're not alone here." I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that's where 90 plus percent of my problems are.

Many of the loose ends in the novellas were tied up in the final one, Exit Strategy. The biggest one that wasn't, at least in my opinion, was ART, the research transport who helped Murderbot considerably in Artificial Condition and clearly was more than it appeared to be. That is exactly the loose end that Wells resolves here, to great effect. I liked the dynamic between ART and Murderbot before, but it's so much better with an audience to riff off of (and yet better still when there are two audiences, one who already knew Murderbot and one who already knew ART). I like ART almost as much as Murderbot, and that's saying a lot. The emotional loose end of the whole series has been how Murderbot will decide to interact with other humans. I think that's not quite resolved by the end of the novel, but we and Murderbot have both learned considerably more. The novellas, except for the first, are mostly solo missions even when Murderbot is protecting clients. This is something more complicated; the interpersonal dynamics hearken back to the first novella and then go much deeper, particularly in the story-justified flashbacks. Wells uses Murderbot's irritated avoidance to keep some emotional dynamics underplayed and indirect, letting the reader discover them at opportune moments, and this worked beautifully for me. And Murderbot's dynamic with Amena is just wonderful, mostly because of how smart, matter-of-fact, trusting, and perceptive Amena is. That's one place where the novel length helps: Wells has more room to expand the characterization of characters other than Murderbot, something that's usually limited in the novellas to a character or two. And these characters are great. Murderbot is clearly the center of the story, but the other characters aren't just furniture for it to react to. They have their own story arcs, they're thoughtful, they learn, and it's a delight to watch them slot Murderbot into various roles, change their minds, adjust, and occasionally surprise it in quite touching ways, all through Murderbot's eyes.

Thiago had said he felt like he should apologize and talk to me more about it. Ratthi had said, "I think you should let it go for a while, at least until we get ourselves out of this situation. SecUnit is a very private person, it doesn't like to discuss its feelings." This is why Ratthi is my friend.

I have some minor quibbles. The targetSomething naming convention Murderbot comes up with and then is stuck with because it develops too much momentum is entertaining but confusing. A few of the action sequences were just a little on the long side; I find the emotional processing much more interesting. There's also a subplot with a character with memory holes and confusion that I thought dragged on too long, mostly because I found the character intensely irritating for some reason. But these are just quibbles. Network Effect is on par with the best of the novellas that precede it, and that's a high bar indeed. In this series, Wells has merged the long-running science fiction thread of artificial intelligences and the humanity of robots with the sarcastic and introspective first-person narration of urban fantasy, gotten the internal sensation of emotional avoidance note-perfect without making it irritating (that's some deep magic right there), and added in some top-tier negotiation of friendship and relationships without losing the action and excitement of a great action movie. It's a truly impressive feat and the novel is the best installment so far. I will be stunned if Network Effect doesn't make most of the award lists next year. Followed by Fugitive Telemetry, due out in April of 2021. You can believe that I have already preordered it. Rating: 9 out of 10

"master is wrong word!!! Stop to use it in tech world!!!"

Oh, such activity reminds me of .

Just changing the words does not solve the problems in the real-world, IMHO (of course, it's my opinion, may it be different from yours).

Setting up a Sony PS3 Blu-Ray Disc Remote Controller with Kodi TLDR; Since most of the articles on the internet were either obsolete or broken, I ve chosen to write these notes down in the form of a blog post so that it helps me now and in future, and hopefully others too.

Raspberry Pi All this time, I have been using the Raspberry Pi for my HTPC needs. The first RPi I acquired was in 2014 and I have been very very happy with the amount of support in the community and quality of the HTPC offering it has. I also appreciate the RPi s form factor and the power consumption limits. And then, to add more sugar to it, it uses a derivative of Debian, Raspbian, which was very familiar and feel good to me.

Raspberry Pi Issues So primarily, I use my RPi with Kodi. There are a bunch of other (daemon) services but the primary use case is HTPC only. RPi + Kodi has a very very annoying issue wherein it loses its audio pitch during video playback. The loss is so bad that the audio is barely audible. The workaround is to seek the video playback either way and then it comes back to its actual audio level, just to fade again in a while. My suspicion was that it may be a problem with Kodi. Or at least, Kodi would have a workaround in software. But unfortunately, I wasted a lot of time in dealing with my suspicion with no fruitful result. This started becoming a PITA over time. And it seems the issue is with the hardware itself because after I moved my setup to a regular laptop, the audio loss is gone.

Laptop with Kodi Since I had my old Lenovo Yoga 2 13 lying on all the time, it made sense to make some more use of it, using as the HTPC. This machine comes with a Micro-HDMI Out port, so it felt ideal for my High Definition video rendering needs. It comes stock with just Intel HD Video with good driver support in Linux, so it was quite quick and easy getting Kodi charged up and running on it. And as I mentioned above, the sound issues are not seen on this setup. Some added benefits are that I get to run stock Debian on this machine. And I must say a big THANK YOU to the Debian Multimedia Maintainers, who ve done a pretty good job maintaining Kodi under Debian.

HDMI CEC Only after I decommissioned my RPi, I came to notice how convenient the HDMI CEC functionality is. Turns out no standard laptops ship CEC functionality onto them. Even the case of my laptop, which has a Micro HDMI Out port, but still no CEC capabilities. As far as I know, the RPi came with the Pulse-Eight CEC module, so obvious first thought was to opt for a compatible external module of the same; but it comes with a nice price tag, me not willing to spend.

WiFi Remotes Kodi has very well implemented network interface for almost all its features. One could take the Yatse or Music Pump Kodi Remote Android applications that work very very well with Kodi. But wifi can be flaky some times. Especially, my experience with the Realtek network devices hasn t been very good. The driver support in Linux is okay but there are many firmware bugs to deal with. In my case, the machine will lose wifi signal/network every once in a while. And it turns out, for this machine, with this network device type, I m not the only one running into such problems. And to add to that, this is an UltraBook, which means it doesn t have an Ethernet port. So I ve had not much choice other than to live and ~~suffer~~ deal with it. The WiFi chip also provides the Bluetooth module, which so far I had not used much. From my /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-memstick.conf, all relevant BT modules were added to the blacklist, all this time.

rrs@lenovo:~$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-memstick.conf 
blacklist memstick
blacklist rtsx_usb_ms
# And bluetooth too
#blacklist btusb
#blacklist btrtl
#blacklist btbcm
#blacklist btintel
#blacklist bluetooth
21:21

Also to keep in mind is that the driver for my card gives a very misleading kernel message, which is one of the many reasons for this blog post, so that I don t forget it a couple of months later. The missing firmware error message is okay to ignore, as per this upstream comment.

Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver btusb
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo systemd[1]: Mounted /boot/efi.
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: examining hci_ver=06 hci_rev=000b lmp_ver=06 lmp_subver=8723
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rom_version status=0 version=1
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723b_fw.bin
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: bluetooth hci0: firmware: direct-loading firmware rtl_bt/rtl8723b_fw.bin
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723b_config.bin
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: bluetooth hci0: firmware: failed to load rtl_bt/rtl8723b_config.bin (-2)
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: firmware_class: See https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for information about missing firmware
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for rtl_bt/rtl8723b_config.bin failed with error -2
Jun 14 17:17:08 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: cfg_sz -2, total sz 22496

This device s network + bt are on the same chip.

01:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

And then, when the btusb module is initialed (along with the misleading driver message), you ll get the following in your USB device listing

Bus 002 Device 005: ID 0bda:b728 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Bluetooth Radio

Sony PlayStation 3 BD Remote Almost 10 years ago, I bought the PS3 and many of its accessories. The remote has just been rotting in the shelf. It had rusted so bad that it is better described with these pics.

Rusted inside

Rusted inside and cover

Rusted spring

The rust was so much that the battery holding spring gave up. A little bit scrubbing and cleaning has gotten it working. I hope it lasts for some time before I find time to open it up and give it a full clean-up.

Pairing the BD Remote to laptop Honestly, with the condition of the hardware and software on both ends, I did not have much hopes of getting this to work. And in all the years on my computer usage, I hardly recollect much days when I ve made use of BT. Probably, because the full BT stack wasn t that well integrated in Linux, earlier. And I mostly used to disable them in hardware and software to save on battery. All yielded results from the internet talked about tools/scripts that were either not working, pointing to broken links etc. These days, bluez comes with a nice utility, bluetoothctl. It was a nice experience using it. First, start your bluetooth service and ensure that the device talks well with the kernel

rrs@lenovo:~$ systemctl status bluetooth                                                                                                          
  bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service                                                                                                           
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)                                                      
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-06-15 12:54:58 IST; 3s ago                                                                           
       Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)                                                                                                                    
   Main PID: 310197 (bluetoothd)                                                                                                                  
     Status: "Running"                                                                                                                            
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 9424)                                                                                                                      
     Memory: 1.3M                                                                                                                                 
     CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service                                                                                                      
              310197 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                  
Jun 15 12:54:58 lenovo systemd[1]: Starting Bluetooth service...                                                                                  
Jun 15 12:54:58 lenovo bluetoothd[310197]: Bluetooth daemon 5.50                                                                                  
Jun 15 12:54:58 lenovo systemd[1]: Started Bluetooth service.                                                                                     
Jun 15 12:54:58 lenovo bluetoothd[310197]: Starting SDP server                                                                                    
Jun 15 12:54:58 lenovo bluetoothd[310197]: Bluetooth management interface 1.15 initialized                                                        
Jun 15 12:54:58 lenovo bluetoothd[310197]: Sap driver initialization failed.                                                                      
Jun 15 12:54:58 lenovo bluetoothd[310197]: sap-server: Operation not permitted (1)                                                                
12:55

Next, then is to discover and connect to your device

rrs@lenovo:~$ bluetoothctl 
Agent registered
[bluetooth]# devices
Device E6:3A:32:A4:31:8F MI Band 2
Device D4:B8:FF:43:AB:47 MI RC
Device 00:1E:3D:10:29:0F BD Remote Control
[CHG] Device 00:1E:3D:10:29:0F Connected: yes
[BD Remote Control]# info 00:1E:3D:10:29:0F
Device 00:1E:3D:10:29:0F (public)
        Name: BD Remote Control
        Alias: BD Remote Control
        Class: 0x0000250c
        Paired: no
        Trusted: yes
        Blocked: no
        Connected: yes
        LegacyPairing: no
        UUID: Human Interface Device... (00001124-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
        UUID: PnP Information           (00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
        Modalias: usb:v054Cp0306d0100
[bluetooth]#

In case of the Sony BD Remote, there s no need to pair. In fact, trying to pair fails. It prompts for the PIN code, but neither 0000 or 1234 are accepted. So, the working steps so far are to Trust the device and then Connect the device. For the sake of future use, I also populated /etc/bluetooth/input.conf based on suggestions on the internet. Note: The advertised keymappings in this config file do not work. Note: I m only using it for the power saving measures in instructing the BT connection to sleep after 3 minutes.

rrs@priyasi:/tmp$ cat input.conf 
# Configuration file for the input service
# This section contains options which are not specific to any
# particular interface
[General]
# Set idle timeout (in minutes) before the connection will
# be disconnect (defaults to 0 for no timeout)
IdleTimeout=3
# Enable HID protocol handling in userspace input profile
# Defaults to false (HIDP handled in HIDP kernel module)
#UserspaceHID=true
# Limit HID connections to bonded devices
# The HID Profile does not specify that devices must be bonded, however some
# platforms may want to make sure that input connections only come from bonded
# device connections. Several older mice have been known for not supporting
# pairing/encryption.
# Defaults to false to maximize device compatibility.
#ClassicBondedOnly=true
# LE upgrade security
# Enables upgrades of security automatically if required.
# Defaults to true to maximize device compatibility.
#LEAutoSecurity=true
#
#[00:1E:3D:10:29:0F]
[2c:33:7a:8e:d6:30]
[PS3 Remote Map]
# When the 'OverlayBuiltin' option is TRUE (the default), the keymap uses
# the built-in keymap as a starting point.  When FALSE, an empty keymap is
# the starting point.
#OverlayBuiltin = TRUE
#buttoncode = keypress    # Button label = action with default key mappings
#OverlayBuiltin = FALSE
0x16 = KEY_ESC            # EJECT = exit
0x64 = KEY_MINUS          # AUDIO = cycle audio tracks
0x65 = KEY_W              # ANGLE = cycle zoom mode
0x63 = KEY_T              # SUBTITLE = toggle subtitles
0x0f = KEY_DELETE         # CLEAR = delete key
0x28 = KEY_F8             # /TIME = toggle through sleep
0x00 = KEY_1              # NUM-1
0x01 = KEY_2              # NUM-2
0x02 = KEY_3              # NUM-3
0x03 = KEY_4              # NUM-4
0x04 = KEY_5              # NUM-5
0x05 = KEY_6              # NUM-6
0x06 = KEY_7              # NUM-7
0x07 = KEY_8              # NUM-8
0x08 = KEY_9              # NUM-9
0x09 = KEY_0              # NUM-0
0x81 = KEY_F2             # RED = red
0x82 = KEY_F3             # GREEN = green
0x80 = KEY_F4             # BLUE = blue
0x83 = KEY_F5             # YELLOW = yellow
0x70 = KEY_I              # DISPLAY = show information
0x1a = KEY_S              # TOP MENU = show guide
0x40 = KEY_M              # POP UP/MENU = menu
0x0e = KEY_ESC            # RETURN = back/escape/cancel
0x5c = KEY_R              # TRIANGLE/OPTIONS = cycle through recording options
0x5d = KEY_ESC            # CIRCLE/BACK = back/escape/cancel
0x5f = KEY_A              # SQUARE/VIEW = Adjust Playback timestretch
0x5e = KEY_ENTER          # CROSS = select
0x54 = KEY_UP             # UP = Up/Skip forward 10 minutes
0x56 = KEY_DOWN           # DOWN = Down/Skip back 10 minutes
0x57 = KEY_LEFT           # LEFT = Left/Skip back 5 seconds
0x55 = KEY_RIGHT          # RIGHT = Right/Skip forward 30 seconds
0x0b = KEY_ENTER          # ENTER = select
0x5a = KEY_F10            # L1 = volume down
0x58 = KEY_J              # L2 = decrease the play speed
0x51 = KEY_HOME           # L3 = commercial skip previous
0x5b = KEY_F11            # R1 = volume up
0x59 = KEY_U              # R2 = increase the play speed
0x52 = KEY_END            # R3 = commercial skip next
0x43 = KEY_F9             # PS button = mute
0x50 = KEY_M              # SELECT = menu (as per PS convention)
0x53 = KEY_ENTER          # START = select / Enter (matches terminology in mythwelcome)
0x30 = KEY_PAGEUP         # PREV = jump back (default 10 minutes)
0x76 = KEY_J              # INSTANT BACK (newer RCs only) = decrease the play speed
0x75 = KEY_U              # INSTANT FORWARD (newer RCs only) = increase the play speed
0x31 = KEY_PAGEDOWN       # NEXT = jump forward (default 10 minutes)
0x33 = KEY_COMMA          # SCAN BACK =  decrease scan forward speed / play
0x32 = KEY_P              # PLAY = play/pause
0x34 = KEY_DOT            # SCAN FORWARD decrease scan backard speed / increase playback speed; 3x, 5, 10, 20, 30, 60, 120, 180
0x60 = KEY_LEFT           # FRAMEBACK = Left/Skip back 5 seconds/rewind one frame
0x39 = KEY_P              # PAUSE = play/pause
0x38 = KEY_P              # STOP = play/pause
0x61 = KEY_RIGHT          # FRAMEFORWARD = Right/Skip forward 30 seconds/advance one frame
0xff = KEY_MAX
21:48

I have not spent much time finding out why not all the key presses work. Especially, given that most places on the internet mention these mappings. For me, some of the key scan codes aren t even reported. For keys like L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3, Next_Item, Prev_Item, they generate no codes in the kernel. If anyone has suggestions, ideas or fixes, I d appreciate if you can drop a comment or email me privately. But given my limited use to get a simple remote ready, to be usable with Kodi, I was apt with only some of the keys working.

Mapping the keys in Kodi With the limited number of keys detected, mapping those keys to what Kodi could use was the next step. Kodi has a very nice and easy to use module, Keymap Editor. It is very simple to use and map detected keys to functionalities you want. With it, I was able to get a functioning remote to use with my Kodi HTPC setup.

Update: Wed Jun 17 11:38:20 2020 One annoying problem that breaks the overall experience is the following bug on the driver side, that results in connections not being established instantly. Once the device goes into sleep mode, in random attempts, waking up and re-establishing a BT connection can be multi-poll affair. This can last from a couple of seconds to well over minute. Random suggestions on the internet mention disabling the autosuspend functionality for the device in the driver with btusb.enable_autosuspend=n, but that did not help in this case. Given that this device is enumberated over the USB Bus, it probably needs this feature applied to the whole USB tree of the device s chain. Something to investigate over the weekend.

Jun 16 20:41:23 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: ACL packet for unknown connection handle 7
Jun 16 20:41:43 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: ACL packet for unknown connection handle 8
Jun 16 20:41:59 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: ACL packet for unknown connection handle 9
Jun 16 20:42:18 lenovo kernel: input: BD Remote Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-7/1-7:1.0/bluetooth/hci0/hci0:10/0005:054C:030>
Jun 16 20:42:18 lenovo kernel: sony 0005:054C:0306.0006: input,hidraw1: BLUETOOTH HID v1.00 Gamepad [BD Remote Control] on 2c:33:7a:8e:d6:30
Jun 16 20:51:59 lenovo kernel: input: BD Remote Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-7/1-7:1.0/bluetooth/hci0/hci0:11/0005:054C:030>
Jun 16 20:51:59 lenovo kernel: sony 0005:054C:0306.0007: input,hidraw1: BLUETOOTH HID v1.00 Gamepad [BD Remote Control] on 2c:33:7a:8e:d6:30
Jun 16 21:05:55 lenovo rtkit-daemon[1723]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users.
Jun 16 21:05:55 lenovo rtkit-daemon[1723]: Successfully made thread 32747 of process 1646 owned by '1000' RT at priority 5.
Jun 16 21:05:55 lenovo rtkit-daemon[1723]: Supervising 4 threads of 1 processes of 1 users.
Jun 16 21:05:56 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: ACL packet for unknown connection handle 12
Jun 16 21:06:12 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: ACL packet for unknown connection handle 1
Jun 16 21:06:34 lenovo kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: ACL packet for unknown connection handle 2
Jun 16 21:06:59 lenovo kernel: input: BD Remote Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-7/1-7:1.0/bluetooth/hci0/hci0:3/0005:054C:0306>
Jun 16 21:06:59 lenovo kernel: sony 0005:054C:0306.0008: input,hidraw1: BLUETOOTH HID v1.00 Gamepad [BD Remote Control] on 2c:33:7a:8e:d6:30

Others There s a package, kodi-eventclients-ps3, which can be used to talk to the BD Remote. Unfortunately, it isn t up-to-date. When trying to make use of it, I ran into a couple of problems. First, the easy one is:

rrs@lenovo:~/ps3pair$ kodi-ps3remote localhost 9777
usr/share/pixmaps/kodi//bluetooth.png
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/kodi-ps3remote", line 220, in <module>
  File "/usr/bin/kodi-ps3remote", line 208, in main
    xbmc.connect(host, port)
    packet = PacketHELO(self.name, self.icon_type, self.icon_file)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/kodi/xbmcclient.py", line 285, in __init__
    with open(icon_file, 'rb') as f:
11:16         => 1

This one was simple as it was just a broken path. The second issue with the tool is a leftover from python2 to python3 conversion.

rrs@lenovo:/etc/bluetooth$ kodi-ps3remote localhost
/usr/share/pixmaps/kodi//bluetooth.png
Searching for BD Remote Control
(Hold Start + Enter on remote to make it discoverable)
Redmi (E8:5A:8B:73:57:44) in range
Living Room TV (E4:DB:6D:24:23:E9) in range
Could not find BD Remote Control. Trying again...
Searching for BD Remote Control
(Hold Start + Enter on remote to make it discoverable)
Living Room TV (E4:DB:6D:24:23:E9) in range
Redmi (E8:5A:8B:73:57:44) in range
Could not find BD Remote Control. Trying again...
Searching for BD Remote Control
(Hold Start + Enter on remote to make it discoverable)
BD Remote Control (00:1E:3D:10:29:0F) in range
Found BD Remote Control with address 00:1E:3D:10:29:0F
Attempting to pair with remote
Remote Paired.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/kodi-ps3remote", line 221, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/kodi-ps3remote", line 212, in main
    if process_keys(remote, xbmc):
  File "/usr/bin/kodi-ps3remote", line 164, in process_keys
    keycode = data.encode("hex")[10:12]
AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'
11:24         => 1

Fixing that too did not give me the desired result on using the BD Remote in the way I want. So eventually, I gave up and used Kodi s Keymap Editor instead.

Next Next in line, when I can manage to get some free time, is to improve the Kodi Video Scraper to have a fallback mode. Currently, for files where it cannot determine the content, it reject the file resulting in those files not showing up in your collection at all. A better approach would have been to have a fallback mode, that when the scraper cannot determine the content, it should fallback to using the filename scraper

With the current four-month release cycle, the next Rcpp release is due in July following the 1.0.4 release in March. Just prior to the 1.0.4 release I had asked this:

It would be particularly beneficial if those with unsual build dependencies tested it as we would increase overall coverage beyond what I get from testing against 1800+ CRAN packages. BioConductor would also be welcome.

but only on the rcpp-devel list, and only about a good week prior to the release. I remain rather disappointed and disillusioned about what happened after 1.0.4 was released. Two PRs in that release were soon seen to have side effects on more marginal test systems, precisely what added testing could have revealed. An additional issue arose from changes in R s make system, which is harder to anticipate or test. Each and every infelicity was fixed within a day or so, and we always make candidate releases available the current Rcpp as of this writing is 1.0.4.12 meaning twelve microreleases were made since 1.0.4. And those microreleases are always available for normal download and install.packages use via the Rcpp drat repository accessible to all. So it was truly troubling to see some, especially those with experience in setting up or running testing / ci platforms, pretend to be unable to access, install, and provide these for their own tests, or the tests of their users. It just doesn t pass a basic logic test: it takes a single call to install.packages(), or, even more easily, a single assignment of an auxiliary repo. All told this was a rather sad experience. So let s try to not repeat this. If you, or maybe users of a build or ci system you maintain, rely on Rcpp, and especially if you do so on systems outside the standard CRAN grid of three OSs and the triplet of previous, current, next releases of R, then please help by testing. I maitain these release as a volunteer, unpaid at that, and I simply cannot expand to more systesm. We take reverse dependency check seriously (and I just run two taking about a day each) but if you insist on building on stranger hardware or much older releases it will be up to you to ensure Rcpp passes. We prep for CRAN, and try our best to pass at CRAN. For nearly a dozen years. To install the current microrelease from the Rcpp drat repository, just do

install.packages("Rcpp", repos="https://rcppcore.github.io/drat")

That is all there is to it. You could even add the Rcpp drat repository to your repository list. Rcpp has become successful because so many people help with suggestions, documentation, and code. It is used by (as of today) 1958 CRAN packages, 205 BioConductor packages, and downloaded around a million times per month. So if you can, please help now with some more testing. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Hello, Earlier last month, I got selected as a Google Summer of Code student for Debian again! \o/
And as Chandler would say,

Could I be any more happier?

Well, this time, my project is basically to write a linter (an extension to RuboCop). This tool is mostly to help the Debian Ruby team. And that is the best part, I love working in/for/with the Ruby team!
(I ve been an active part of the team for 18 months now :))

More details about the project can be found here, on the wiki.
And also, I have got the best mentors I could ve possibly asked for: Antonio Terceiro and David Rodr guez So, the program began on 1st June and I ve been working since then. I log my daily updates at gsocwithutkarsh2102.tk. Whilst the daily updates are available at the above site^, I ll breakdown the important parts here:

During the first three days, I looked for a potential solution to the usage of git ls-files in the gemspec files. This has been the most problematic thing for us.
- Apart from the option of using Dir or Dir.glob, the best (closest) possible solution (right now) is to use Rake::FileList which tries to respects the .gitignore file.
- I stumbled upon this interesting gem, fast_ignore. It is the exact thing which we want to use but unfortunately, to use it inside other gemspec files, it should be vendored inside bundler s code.
We had our first meeting on the fourth day and we decided to hold meetings every Thursday for the next 12 weeks.
For the next five days, I learned more of Ruby and figured out what to do and how to do it.
If you d like to know what exactly I did in these 5 days, I d suggest you to read the daily logs for those respective days.
During the next to two days, the first part of the project, the GemspecGit Cop, was implemented.
This cop will correctly determine the usage of git in the gemspec files and would tell the developers and the maintainers to replace them with pure Ruby alternatives with giving them a proper reason to do so. Much thanks to Dana for her help she took out time to pair-program with me!
We had our second weekly meeting where I finally told Antonio and David that the first part is already done (\o/) and we discussed some things and even pair-programmed :D
I took the weekend off (and something terrible happened) but anyways, I managed to get together some time and energy to document the source code and raised this PR #2.
And here I am on the 15th day :)

It has been a lot of fun so far! Though I am little worried on how to implement the next part of the project as I am not sure how to check only a particalar directory for some relative require calls.
But I think, that s okay, somehow, something will work out. And I can always ask around others and check other cops to see how it s done! \( )/

Until next time.
:wq for today.

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. These are instructions for building Qt Creator with the custom Qt, so that it can load and use Designer plugins built with it. Sadly, because of the requirement of being able to load Designer plugins, and because of the requirement of being able to compile custom widgets using the custom Qt and use them in the Designer, we need to also rebuild Qt Creator. The resulting packaging is at https://github.com/Truelite/qt5custom. Set up sources Open the source tarball, and add the Qt Creator packaging:

tar axf qt-creator-enterprise-src-4.12.2.tar.xz
cp -a debian-qtcreator qt-creator-enterprise-src-4.12.2/debian
ln -s qt-creator-enterprise-src-4.12.2.tar.xz qt-creator-enterprise-src_4.12.2.orig.tar.xz

If needed, install the Qt license:

cp qt-license.txt ~/.qt-license

Install build dependencies You can use apt build-dep to install dependencies manually:

cd qt-creator-enterprise-src-4.12.2
apt build-dep .

Alternatively, you can create an installable .deb metapackage that depends on the build dependencies:

apt install devscripts
mk-build-deps debian-qtcreator/control
apt -f install qt-creator-enterprise-src-build-deps_4.12.2-1_all.deb

Package build The package is built by debian/rules base on the excellent work done by Debian Qt5 maintainers. After installing the build dependencies, you can build like this:

cd qt-creator-enterprise-src-4.12.2
debuild -us -uc -rfakeroot

In debian/rules you can configure NUMJOBS with the number of available CPUs in the machine, to have parallel builds. debian/rules automatically picks qt5custom as the Qt version to use for the build. NOTE: Qt Creator 4.12.2 will NOT build if qtbase5custom-armhf-dev is installed. One needs to make sure to have qtbase5custom-dev installed, but NOT qtbase5custom-armhf-dev. Despite quite a bit of investigation, I have been unable to understand why, if both are installed, Qt Creator's build chooses the wrong one, and fails the build. Build output Building sources generates 4 packages:

qtcreator-qt5custom: the program
qtcreator-qt5custom-data: program data
qtcreator-qt5custom-doc: documentation
qtcreator-qt5custom-dbgsym: debugging symbols

Using the custom Qt Creator Enterprise The packages are built with qt5custom and install their content in /opt/qt5custom. The packages are coinstallable with the version of Qt Creator packaged in Debian. The custom Qt Creator executable is installed in /opt/qt5custom/bin/qtcreator, which is not in $PATH by default. To run it, you can explitly use /opt/qt5custom/bin/qtcreator. qtcreator ran without an explicit path, runs the standard Debian version. Installing Designer plugins Designer plugings can be compiled with qt5custom and installed in /opt/qt5custom/plugins/designer/. Cross-building with Qt Creator Once the cross-build Qt5 packages are installed, one should see it appear in the Qt Creator kit configuration, where it can be selected and used normally. If one sets device type to "Generic Linux Device", chooses a compiler for "arm 32bit" and sets Qt Version to "qt5custom-armhf", one can smoothly cross-compile and execute and debug the built program directly on the device.

Recently I was part of a call with Daniel and Lars to discuss Zettelkasten, a system for building up a cross-referenced archive of notes to help with research and study that has been getting a lot of discussion recently, the key thing being the building of links between ideas. Tomas Vik provided an overview of the process that we all found very helpful, and the information vs knowledge picture in Eugene Yan s blog on the topic (by @gapingvoid) really helped us crystalize the goals. It s not at all new and as Lars noted has a lot of similarities with a wikis in terms of what it produces but it couples this with an emphasis on the process and constant generation of new entries which Daniel found similar to some of the Getting Things Done recommendations. We all liked the emphasis on constant practice and how that can help build skills around effective note taking, clear writing and building links between ideas. Both Daniel and Lars already have note taking practicies that they find useful, combinations of journalling and building up collections of notes of learnings over time, and felt that there could be value in integrating aspects of Zettelkasten into these practices so we talked quite a bit about how that could be done. There was a consensus that journalling is useful so the main idea we had was to keep maintaining the journal, using that as an inbox and setting aside time to write entries into a Zettelkasten. This is also a useful way to approach recording things when away from a computer, taking notes and then writing them up later. Daniel suggested that one way to migrate existing notes might be to simply start anew, moving things over from old notes as required and then after a suitably long period (for example a year) review anything that was left and migrate anything that was left. We were all concerned about the idea of using any of the non-free solutions for something that is intended to be used long term, especially where the database isn t in an easily understood format. Fortunately there are free software tools like Zettlr which seem to address these concerns well. This was a really useful discussion, it really helps to bounce ideas off each other and this was certainly an interesting topic to learn about with some good ideas which will hopefully be helpful to us.

Eight members of the Debian Perl team met online between May 15 and May 17 2020, in lieu of a planned physical sprint meeting. Work focussed on preparations for bullseye, and continued maintenance of the large number of perl modules maintained by the team. Whilst an online sprint cannot fully replace an in-person sprint in terms of focussing attention, the weekend was still very productive, and progress was made on a range of topics including:

Reducing technical debt by removing unmaintained packages
Beginning packaging and QA for the next major release of perl, 5.32
Deciding on a team policy for hardening flags
Addressing concerns with Alien::*, a set of pacakges designed to download source code
Developing a proposal for debian/NEWS.Developer, to complement debian/NEWS
Developing a plan to enable SSL verification in HTTP::Tiny by default

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists. The participants would like to thank OpusVL for providing the Jitsi instance for the weekend.

This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, and is authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez and Brooke Storm. In the previous post, we shared the context on the recent Kubernetes upgrade that we introduced in the Toolforge service. Today we would like to dive a bit more in the technical details. Custom admission controllers One of the key components of the Toolforge Kubernetes are our custom admission controllers. We use them to validate and enforce that the usage of the service is what we intended for. Basically, we have 2 of them:

Ingress admission controller [source code]
Registry admission controller [source code]

The source code is written in Golang, which is pretty convenient for natively working in a Kubernetes environment. Both code repositories include extensive documentation: how to develop, test, use, and deploy them. We decided to go with custom admission controllers because we couldn t find any native (or built-in) Kubernetes mechanism to accomplish the same sort of checks on user activity. With the Ingress controller, we want to ensure that Ingress objects only handle traffic to our internal domains, which by the time of this writing, are toolforge.org (our new domain) and tools.wmflabs.org (legacy). We safe-list the kube-system namespace and the tool-fourohfour namespace because both need special consideration. More on the Ingress setup later. The registry controller is pretty simple as well. It ensures that only our internal docker registry is used for user-scheduled containers running in Kubernetes. Again, we exclude from the checks containers running in the kube-system namespace (those used by Kubernetes itself). Other than that, the validation itself is pretty easy. For some extra containers we run (like those related to Prometheus metrics) what we do is simply upload those docker images to our internal registry. The controls provided by this admission controller helps us validate that only FLOSS software is run in our environment, which is one of the core rules of Toolforge. RBAC and Pod Security Policy setup I would like to comment next on our RBAC and Pod Security Policy setup. Using the Pod Security Policies (or PSP) we establish a set of constraints on what containers can and can t do in our cluster. We have many PSP configured in our setup:

Privileged policy: used by Kubernetes containers themselves basically a very relaxed set of constraints that are required for the system itself to work.
Default policy: a bit more restricted than the privileged policy, is intended for admins to deploy services, but it isn t currently in use..
Toolforge user policies: this applies to user-scheduled containers, and there are some obvious restrictions here: we only allow unprivileged pods, we control which HostPath is available for pods, use only default Linux capabilities, etc.

Each user can interact with their own namespace (this is how we achieve multi-tenancy in the cluster). Kubernetes knows about each user by means of TLS certs, and for that we have RBAC. Each user has a rolebinding to a shared cluster-role that defines how Toolforge tools can use the Kubernetes API. The following diagram shows the design of our RBAC and PSP in our cluster: RBAC and PSP for Toolforge diagram

RBAC and PSP for Toolforge, original image in wikitech I mentioned that we know about each user by means of TLS certificates. This is true, and in fact, there is a key component in our setup called maintain-kubeusers. This custom piece of Python software is run as a pod inside the cluster and is responsible for reading our external user database (LDAP) and generating the required credentials, namespaces, and other configuration bits for them. With the TLS cert, we basically create a kubeconfig file that is then written into the homes NFS share, so each Toolforge user has it in their shell home directory. Networking and Ingress setup With the basic security controls in place, we can move on to explaining our networking and Ingress setup. Yes, the Ingress word might be a bit overloaded already, but we refer here to Ingress as the path that end-users follow from their web browser in their local machine to a webservice running in the Toolforge cluster. Some additional context here. Toolforge is not only Kubernetes, but we also have a Son of GridEngine deployment, a job scheduler that covers some features not available in Kubernetes. The grid can also run webservices, although we are encouraging users to migrate them to Kubernetes. For compatibility reasons, we needed to adapt our Ingress setup to accommodate the old web grid. Deciding the layout of the network and Ingress was definitely something that took us some time to figure out because there is not a single way to do it right. The following diagram can be used to explain the different steps involved in serving a web service running in the new Toolforge Kubernetes.

Toolforge k8s network topology, original image in Wikitech The end-user HTTP/HTTPs request first hits our front proxy in (1). Running here is NGINX with a custom piece of LUA code that is able to decide whether to contact the web grid or the new Kubernetes cluster. TLS termination happens here as well, for both domains (toolforge.org and tools.wmflabs.org). Note this proxy is reachable from the internet, as it uses a public IPv4 address, a floating IP from CloudVPS, the infrastructure service we provide based on Openstack. Remember that our Kubernetes is directly built in virtual machines a bare-metal type deployment. If the request is directed to a webservice running in Kubernetes, the request now reaches haproxy in (2), which knows the cluster nodes that are available for Ingress. The original 80/TCP packet is now translated to 30000/TCP; this is the TCP port we use internally for the Ingress traffic. This haproxy instance provides load-balancing also for the Kubernetes API as well, using 6443/TCP. It s worth mentioning that unlike the Ingress, the API is only reachable from within the cluster and not from the internet. We have a NGINX-Ingress NodePort service listening in 30000/TCP in every Kubernetes worker node in (3); this helps the request to eventually reach the actual NGINX-Ingress pod in (4), which is listening in 8080/TCP. You can see in the diagram how in the API server (5) we hook the Ingress admission controller (6) to validate Kubernetes Ingress configuration objects before allowing them in for processing by NGINX-Ingress (7). The NGINX-Ingress process knows which tools webservices are online and how to contact them by means of an intermediate Service object in (8). This last Service object means the request finally reaches the actual tool pod in (9). At this point, it is worth noting that our Kubernetes cluster uses internally kube-proxy and Calico, both using Netfilter components to handle traffic. tools-webservice Most user-facing operations are simplified by means of another custom piece of Python code: tools-webservice. This package provides users with the webservice command line utility in our shell bastion hosts. Typical usage is to just run webservice start stop status. This utility creates all the required Kubernetes objects on-demand like Deployment, ReplicaSet, Ingress and Service to ease deploying web apps in Toolforge. Of course, advanced users can interact directly with Kubernetes API and create their custom configuration objects. This utility is just a wrapper, a shortcut. tool-fourohfour and tool-k8s-status The last couple of custom components we would like to mention are the tool-fourohfour and tool-k8s-status web services. These two utilities run inside the cluster as if they were any other user-created tool. The fourohfour tool allows for a controlled handling of HTTP 404 errors, and it works as the default NGINX-Ingress backend. The k8s-status tool shows plenty of information about the cluster itself and each tool running in the cluster, including links to the Server Admin Log, an auto-generated grafana dashboard for metrics, and more. For metrics, we use an external Prometheus server that contacts the Kubernetes cluster to scrape metrics. We created a custom metrics namespace in which we deploy all the different components we use to observe the behavior of the system:

metrics-server: used by some utilities like kubectl top.
kube-state-metrics: provides advanced metrics about the state of the cluster.
cadvisor: to obtain fine-grained metrics about pods, deployments, nodes, etc.

All the Prometheus data we collect is used in several different Grafana dashboards, some of them directed for user information like the ones linked by the k8s-status tool and some others for internal use by us the engineers. These are for internal use but are still public, like the Ingress specific dashboard, or the cluster state dashboard. Working publicly, in a transparent way, is key for the success of CloudVPS in general and Toolforge in particular. Like we commented in the previous post, all the engineering work that was done here was shared by community members. By the community, for the community We think this post sheds some light on how the Toolforge Kubernetes service works, and we hope it could inspire others when trying to build similar services or, even better, help us improve Toolforge itself. Since this was first put into production some months ago we detected already some margin for improvement in a couple of the components. As in many other engineering products, we will follow an iterative approach for evolving the service. Mind that Toolforge is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, but you can think of it as a service by the community for the community. We will keep an eye on it and have a list of feature requests and things to improve in the future. We are looking forward to it! This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, and is authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez and Brooke Storm.

Along with the normal selection of science fiction and fantasy, a few radical publishers have done book giveaways due to the current political crisis in the United States. I've been feeling for a while like I've not done my homework on diverse political theory, so I downloaded those. (That's the easy part; making time to read them is the hard part, and we'll see how that goes.) Yarimar Bonilla & Marisol LeBr n (ed.) Aftershocks of Disaster (non-fiction anthology)
Jordan T. Camp & Christina Heatherton (ed.) Policing the Planet (non-fiction anthology)
Zachary D. Carter The Price of Peace (non-fiction)
Justin Akers Chac n & Mike Davis No One is Illegal (non-fiction)
Grace Chang Disposable Domestics (non-fiction)
Suzanne Collins The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (sff)
Angela Y. Davis Freedom is a Constant Struggle (non-fiction)
Danny Katch Socialism... Seriously (non-fiction)
Naomi Klein The Battle for Paradise (non-fiction)
Naomi Klein No is Not Enough (non-fiction)
Naomi Kritzer Catfishing on CatNet (sff)
Derek K nsken The Quantum Magician (sff)
Rob Larson Bit Tyrants (non-fiction)
Michael L wy Ecosocialism (non-fiction)
Joe Macar , Maya Schenwar, et al. (ed.) Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (non-fiction anthology)
Tochi Onyebuchi Riot Baby (sff)
Sarah Pinsker A Song for a New Day (sff)
Lina Rather Sisters of the Vast Black (sff)
Marta Russell Capitalism and Disbility (non-fiction)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (non-fiction)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.) How We Get Free (non-fiction anthology)
Linda Tirado Hand to Mouth (non-fiction)
Alex S. Vitale The End of Policing (non-fiction)
C.M. Waggoner Unnatural Magic (sff)
Martha Wells Network Effect (sff)
Kai Ashante Wilson Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (sff)

Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness

culture archive.org

2020-06-15

Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years. It ...

091. The Spielberg Face

culture archive.org

2020-06-15

Video Essay Catalog No. 91 by Kevin B. Lee. Featured on the New York Times and other outlets. Originally published December 13, 2011 on Fandor. https://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/staring-in-awe-its-the-spielberg-face/?_r=0

How To Get a Song In The Charts

culture music

2020-06-15

92-year-old man teaches you how to compose reggaeton in just 30 seconds

culture music

2020-06-15

The "millennial whoop" is taking over pop music

culture music on wikipedia

2020-06-15

The Perfect Tribe - Bizzarro Bazar

culture archive.org

2020-06-15

The Korowai cannibals live on top of trees. But is it true?

A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.

culture language archive.org

2020-06-15

A Linguist Explains the Rules of Summoning Benedict Cumberbatch - The Toast

culture language archive.org

2020-06-15

Bandicoot Cabbagepatch, Bandersnatch Cumberbund, and even Wimbledon Tennismatch: there seem to be endless variations on the name of Benedict Cumberbatch. [...] But how is a normal internet citizen supposed to know, when they hear someone say I just can t stop looking at gifs of Bombadil Rivendell that this person isn t talking about some other actor with a name and a voice and cheekbones? Or in other words, what makes for a reasonable variation of the name Bendandsnap Calldispatch?

The next video in our T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys (where we had seen the announcement, shells sessions one, two, and three, as well as byoby sessions one and two) is now up at YouTube. It covers session management for the wonderful byobu tool that is both a text-based window manager and a terminal multiplexer :

The slides are here. This repo at GitHub support the series: use it to open issues for comments, criticism, suggestions, or feedback. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Another maintenance RVowpalWabbit package update brings us to version 0.0.14. This time CRAN asked us to replace the (long obsoleted C-library) function ftime(). Along the way, we also updated links in the DESCRIPTION file to the (spiffy!!) new vowpalwabbit.org website, updated Travis use and fine-tuned some autoconf code in configure.ac. There is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out. It should go to CRAN eventually once we have better mechanisms to support external libraries. CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

So last night I had the idea that it might be fun to write a Brainfuck compiler, to convert BF programs into assembly language, where they'd run nice and quickly. I figured I could allocate a day to do the work, and it would be a pleasant distraction on a Sunday afternoon. As it happened it only took me three hours from start to finish. There are only a few instructions involved in brainfuck:

>
- increment the data pointer (to point to the next cell to the right).
<
- decrement the data pointer (to point to the next cell to the left).
+
- increment (increase by one) the byte at the data pointer.
-
- decrement (decrease by one) the byte at the data pointer.
.
- output the byte at the data pointer.
,
- accept one byte of input, storing its value in the byte at the data pointer.
[
- if the byte at the data pointer is zero, then instead of moving the instruction pointer forward to the next command, jump it forward to the command after the matching ] command.
]
- if the byte at the data pointer is nonzero, then instead of moving the instruction pointer forward to the next command, jump it back to the command after the matching [ command.

The Wikipedia link early shows how you can convert cleanly to a C implementation, so my first version just did that:

Read a BF program.
Convert to a temporary C-source file.
Compile with gcc.
End result you have an executable which you can run.

The second step was just as simple:

Read a BF program.
Convert to a temporary assembly language file.
Compile with nasm, link with ld.
End result you have an executable which you can run.

The following program produces the string "Hello World!" to the console:

++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.

My C-compiler converted that to the program:

extern int putchar(int);
extern char getchar();
char array[30000];
int idx = 0;
int main (int arc, char *argv[])  
  array[idx]++;
  array[idx]++;
  array[idx]++;
  array[idx]++;
  array[idx]++;
  array[idx]++;
  array[idx]++;
  array[idx]++;
  while (array[idx])  
    idx++;
    array[idx]++;
    array[idx]++;
    array[idx]++;
    array[idx]++;
    while (array[idx])  
      idx++;
      array[idx]++;
      array[idx]++;
      idx++;
      array[idx]++;
      array[idx]++;
      array[idx]++;
    ..
    ..

The assembly language version is even longer:


global _start
section .text
_start:
  mov r8, stack
  add byte [r8], 8
label_loop_8:
  cmp byte [r8], 0
  je close_loop_8
  add r8, 1
  add byte [r8], 4
label_loop_14:
  cmp byte [r8], 0
  je close_loop_14
  add r8, 1
  add byte [r8], 2
  add r8, 1
  add byte [r8], 3
  add r8, 1
  add byte [r8], 3
  add r8, 1
  add byte [r8], 1
  sub r8, 4
  sub byte [r8], 1
  jmp label_loop_14
close_loop_14:
  add r8, 1
  add byte [r8], 1
  ..
  mov rax, 60
  mov rdi, 0
  syscall
section .bss
stack: resb 300000

Annoyingly the assembly language version ran slower than the C-version, which I was sneakily compiling with "gcc -O3 .." to ensure it was optimized. The first thing that I did was to convert it to fold adjacent instructions. Instead of generating separate increment instructions for ">>>" I instead started to generate "add xx, 3". That didn't help as much as I'd hoped, but it was still a big win. After that I made a minor tweak to the way that loops are handled to compare at the end of the loop as well as the start, and that shaved off a fraction of a second. As things stand I think I'm "done". It might be nice to convert the generated assembly language to something gcc can handle, to drop the dependency on nasm, but I don't feel a pressing need for that yet. Was a fun learning experience, and I think I'll come back to optimization later.

https://github.com/skx/bfcc

Search Results: "ed"

19 June 2020

Russell Coker: Storage Trends

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 148 released

18 June 2020

Enrico Zini: Missing Qt5 designer library in cross-build development

Ian Jackson: BountySource have turned evil - alternatives ?

Gunnar Wolf: On masters and slaves, whitelists and blacklists...

17 June 2020

Ulrike Uhlig: On Language

Russ Allbery: Review: Network Effect

16 June 2020

Hideki Yamane: excitement kills thinking

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Kodi PS3 BD Remote

Setting up a Sony PS3 Blu-Ray Disc Remote Controller with Kodi TLDR; Since most of the articles on the internet were either obsolete or broken, I ve chosen to write these notes down in the form of a blog post so that it helps me now and in future, and hopefully others too.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.5 in two+ weeks: Please help test

15 June 2020

Utkarsh Gupta: GSoC Phase 1

Enrico Zini: Qt5 custom build of Qt Creator

Mark Brown: Book Club: Zettlekasten

Bits from Debian: Report of the Debian Perl Sprint 2020

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: A better Toolforge: a technical deep dive

Russ Allbery: Radical haul

14 June 2020

Enrico Zini: Culture links

Dirk Eddelbuettel: T^4 #6: Byobu Sessions

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RVowpalWabbit 0.0.14: More Keeping CRAN happy

Steve Kemp: Writing a brainfuck compiler.