buserror

Been using tinc for god knows how long... Perhaps 20 years? It's been fantastic. I really don't know why people are wax-lyrical about wireguard. tinc was doing it 20 years ago. UDP? yeah. encryption, mesh, proxy ARP you name it. I've had countless install and it's been the best VPN.

You even get a 'dot' graph of your current network status if you want to. When 'git' was invented, I put my /etc/tinc/*/ into git with the public keys, and installing a new host to the mesh is one 'git clone' away.

Most underrated open source software ever.

I pasted some headers (some of them very long, in multiple chunks) and asked the bot to write me a summary of what the API does, and what could be used to make it better. Answer were spot on. Free documentation! If you also paste the source, it can give you a documentation for a particular function as well. Same for rather complex Makefiles.

Otherwise I do like others, I use it as a quick stack overflow for uncommon APIs (to me). Or completely random questions, knowing the answer might be dicey.

It has replaced google at about 90%, I only use google to verify, and not all the time.

Unfortunately qemu isn't as 'integrated' as Sheepshaver -- theres the mouse grab problem, also no disk sharing with the host (the read[/write] fat32 disk don't seem to work, at least under 9.2.2)

I had a a project for #marchintosh of making myself a nice powerPC emulation stack to recompile and open source quite a few free/shareware I did back then, but I more or less gave up as I couldn't find something 'comfortable' to work in. I guess I'll have to find, dust up and try to hook that old G4 Mac Mini that I'm sure is in a drawer, somewhere :-)

Possibly my favourite. My dog-eared copy is signed... twice... too. He used to come and read in Windsor, UK on occasion...

I don't want to brag, but I wrote GLterm (for OSX) in 2002 or so, first ever terminal emulator using OpenGL... It was a shareware tho (it was all the rage back then)...

In fact I probably reported and had ATI and nVidia fix bugs that even made it possible to have pixel aligned textures, partial refreshes of GL surfaces etc. It was all basic stuff, but it was always overlooked because "gaming"...

I find it hilarious that the GL UIs are all trendy now, I've done many of them professionally for the last 20+ years. One of first one was Sibelius v2, a desktop software for writing (engraving) musical scores, I converted the windows GD code to a GL backend all the way back then, rendering in textures etc etc.

I know, for quite a while I got quite a bit of income from them, good old day of Mac Sharewares :-)

Oh, reminds me I had an email address @kagi.com, a long, long time ago :-)

Same here, mine has been running overclocked to 5ghz for about 10 years (?) now and I refused to upgrade it by quite a few "lakes". Sure now it's getting pummeled by hugely multicores newer processors, but for a long time, it was top of the range.

Not entirely sure we are going the right way tho. In the last 3 months or so (aka 2 major kernel versions), I had to add stuff to my command line to make my perfectly working workstation work again. X99 motherboard, worked for years.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="mitigations=off acpi_enforce_resources=lax pci=noaer intel_iommu=off"

All of them due to various problems I had to 'google and cut paste bits and see if it works'. I'm considered a bit of an expert, and I only understand fully one of the added parameter, and why it's needed.

Ah, someone like minded. I work best, by far, very early on -- max 11am... then perhaps a bit more in the afternoon, but mostly doing 'admin' sort of things. All the big programming bits are done early on.

Don't?

I often now wake up at 3 or 4am. I just get up, do things, and perhaps have a nap later. That's the nice thing about working from home. Or I don't have a nap, but go to bed super early (8pm!!), that way, 3 or 4am still give me 6+ hours sleep anyway.

I get my best work done early in the morning too. I can work until perhaps 11, and I can then goof off, take the dogs for a long walk, go fishing etc. Then perhaps sit back at my desk later mid afternoon on for another couple of hours.

brexit. Everyone in the media try to ignore the elephant in the room. But, brexit. I know several companies who are winding down, because they can't export. Just too much trouble and money. It is everywhere, and nobody talks about it.

brexit.

Is this written by "AI", or auto-generated? or?

Stuff like: "Phosphorus cycles took place at the same" as a title.. Hmm... Or perhaps someone with a keyboard that inserts random commas in the text?

"We have learned before that oxygen levels decrease, creating mass extinction on Earth. Besides, the evolution of tree roots may have driven mass extinctions, according to a new study."

TBH, you can do pretty much the same without an arduino at all. A FTDI cable and the right command line tool will allow you to program an AVR easily enough!

FTDI has a 'bitbang' mode that can work as a SPI (or well in this case, a ISP!) peripheral and lowish speed, and that's pretty much all you need.

Haven't the people making the standards other things to do, like, integrating useful features instead of duplicating incbin.h [0] years after that feature worked?

https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin/blob/main/incbin.h

Same here, it's like GraphicConverter, no brainer buying a licence now and then. In the case of VueScan, I wouldn't really need it as I don't use it often, but it counts as 'asset' instead of feeling like i'm a cow to be milked.

One absolutely essential companion to gdb is 'rr' [0], it's a 'post mortem' debugger, but unlike a core file, you can replay the action, in reverse if necessary. You can reverse-cont, reverse-step create watchpoints, run forward again etc etc. It's absolutely amazing!

[0]: https://rr-project.org/

I can almost guarantee that you will add more bugs to your code trying to 'recover' from a malloc failing than just letting your process crash, and hopefully get launched at a better time.

The /correct/ way to write a production code is to assume your program will crash at some point, and it should be able to recover from for example, out of sequence starting. Even if it's not malloc(), the scheduler might kill you for its own reasons.

What do you DO if malloc fails? Cry for help? Oh oops, "cry()" might need to allocate memory.

Also, I was writing code when int was 16 bits, and quite frankly, the size of int was never really a huge problem in porting code, and I ported a LOT of code. I found a lot more problems trying to find code that were trying to 'fix unfixable" errors, like IO errors.

I tried the -fanalyser recently with a piece of C code. OMG. pages and pages and pages of "possible-NULL" and other "c/m/realloc(...) could return NULL!". Really, if I'm in a situation where *alloc() returns NULL, I'm happy for the program to SIGBUS, the machine is probably in a sorry state and there's no safe "software" path that would make it all magically better.

The clang analyser, or cppcheck is a LOT more pragmatic about these things. the gcc one is SO noisy as to make it useless at the minute, TBH.

Disclaimer: I'm actually a fan of gcc!

Ah, I also bought a SE/30 recently, as part of a batch of an upgraded 128->plus, an original SE, and my prize: the SE/30. All working too.

The reason I bought the SE/30 is because it's the computer I had on long term loan for my very first "paying" gig as developer, I was 17: making the software that drove the audio system for the Lille (FR) brand new metro lines back then.

Wrote the software in Turbo Pascal, to run on a smaller mac -- it had a GPIO card that drove 2 big REVOX tape reels, and was rewinding them in sequence while the other played elevator music. It also had a selector and an 'alarm' button to trigger digital announces from the control room, in case of problems on the metro line. The audio played on 10th's of stations, for years.

After a few mishaps (finding tapes torn to completely shreds in the computer room, because the 'beginning of tape' signal hadn't worked really well after rewinding!) it worked absolutely flawlessly until late 1999. I should have charged more :-)

It also had an easter egg! It was playing an 'happy birthday' message to myself every year, in every stations, early day on my birthday. Nobody ever complained :-)

I eventually returned the SE/30, and was given a PowerBook 140, which wasn't as fast, but hey, laptop baby, and, I still own that one!

I'm the one who pointed attribute cleanup to them tho (on twitter no less) -- apparently they weren't aware of it... ? https://twitter.com/BusError/status/1481706530831585284

I know what recursion means thank you so much. If you get $100 income, get a 20% tax on that, and then get another 20% tax on... not $80 but on the /previous/ $100, you are paying recursive taxes. Thats what the old "CSG" was (replaced by something else but in the same 'spirit'), in france. You are being taxed on amount you already been taxed on.

Ahah, it's always expensive time for the french taxpayer -- always have been! They even have recursive layer of taxes, where you pay taxes on amounts that have... already been removed from your revenue as... taxes.

Ah, I wrote Zilot -- a PalmOS emulator for the Mac, in the 1990s ;-)

I had the french secret service come and interrogate me in ~88 (bad cop/good cop) because I had doctored a RS232 cable to be NULL modem, to be able to connect to the X25 "transpac" network using a terminal. I was 'drafted' in the army back then, basically unpaid slave labour, and I was risking 40+ days in prison for sabotage. I 'escaped' due to a coupe of forward thinking officers who didn't think that was a way to handle a smart 18yo kid.

I've discovered Iosevka a while back, and never looked back. EVERYTHING is Iosevka now. Code, terminals, editors, file managers, the whole flippin lot. I LOVE it, it's like that 80 columns mode on old apple IIs, just perfectly legible, and double the amount of data. I now get 4 panes of terminals side-by-side on my screen, 95 columns wide (and as many rows as I'd like). Christmas!

Here what I emailed in 2008 to the author of an article that was already debunking their 'research'. I know it's easy, now, to mock them (and well deserved in many ways, but at one point, they were influential, for the good of the like of Little Me in any case.

  Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:15:42 +0000
  To: baez@xxx.edu
  Subject: Regarding the Bogdanoff

  Hi John,

  I'm a french engineer, 39, living in england. I've read your very interesting
  article on <http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html> (which was pointed at
  by
  http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/the_case_of_m_s_el_naschie.html)
  and just wanted to pinch in from another direction.

  I've been interested in technology since in my 10s (I started programming
  computers at 12, and never stopped since) and I'm afraid to say that my
  interest in anything scientific, engineering, astronomical etc is probably due
  for a large part to the Bogdanoff's TV programs in the very early 80s. In
  fact, I know quite a few friends with similar background who remember these
  shows not necessarily 'fondly' but remember as them being the 'key point' in
  an afternoon otherwise filled with inflatable and/or fury creatures on TV.

  So, in a 'french' way, they are quite similar to for example Sir Patrick
  Moore, the revered TV presenter here in the UK. Oh I'm sure they probably have
  a large dose of self-interest that Sir Patrick lacks, but in my case it did
  fit a very similar purpose. I'm not sure how large an impact they had on the
  whole, but in my case it did.

  Given that, I do agree that this shenanigan to get doctorates is both stupid
  and embarrassingly crude, however, I've worked with enough 'doctors' to know
  that many of them haven't contributed anything to anything in their entire
  life, and thats if they're able to tie they own shoes. My opinion is that the
  brothers deserved Hon Doctorates from a random and suitably posh university to
  celebrate their indirect but real contribution to the scientific world (in the
  like of little me for example), and deserved it a hell of a lot more than many
  'celebrities' that get these for having played football well or similar
  frivolous reasons.

  In any case, thanks for the very informative piece!

  Best Regards,
  (I'm a real person, not a Bogdanoff in disguise ! ;-))

So clicked the link, was presented with that useless cookie page. Begrudgingly accepted because really, I go there so rarely I don't really care. Then it was "Ho, do you want to be notified of..." beeeeeeeep no I don't go the F away. I still haven't READ anything yet mind you....

So I scroll down 2 pixels and a huge neon blue banner invites me to DO SUBSCRIBE FORE MORE COOL STUFF.

Hmm sorry, what was the link I clicked on about, can't remember already - poof delete tab.

Actually I use them a lot, on single track roads in the UK, they provide a MUCH better coverage around the front/side of the car -- I don't know how many critter I managed to dodge because I saw their eyes in the hedges.

Yes, the stalk is there, buf if you use it, black cars come to your house, remove your BMW and replace it with a Wolkswagen! Us BMW drivers are all terrified of using them!