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mintyc

23 karma · joined August 16, 2018

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mintyc··on Directory Opus is a complete replacement for Explorer
Some further thoughts and a more positive spin based on watching the (breathtakingly fast) what's new video...

Several of the features regarding merging, synchronisation, metadata handling are available now (not in the 'DOpus 12 light' release from 2017 I was using).

I will gladly pay my money for the pro version and look forward to using the latest version with my own cat videos.

(Still consider the features as too configurable and not easily 'discoverable' particularly for 'normal' rather than 'tech' users)

I also recognise how amazingly talented the small DOpus12 team are. They've implemented something that Microsoft should have done....

mintyc··on Directory Opus is a complete replacement for Explorer
Opus12 is undeniably useful.

Some additional features would be useful.

e.g. those of attribute changer https://www.petges.lu/ modifies metadata between source and destination without changing the underlying identical files.

e.g. personally find winmerge and winscp a simpler solution to some aspects of comparison and synchronisation (but need setup)

Overall I do use Opus regularly but largely to just get a count of the contents of a directory (avoiding a manual file propperties right click on the folder.)

I appreciate the software development costs, but £25 for a single node locked license is steep. I'd like to see that extended to at least a couple of PCs + a laptop as many advanced users (who can regex :) ) are likely to have at least a couple of PCs round the house in these work from home days.

Overall 3.5 out of five - undeniably powerful but interface is too fussy

mintyc··on HTTP/2-exclusive threats caused by implementation flaws and RFC imperfections
Wow. A fantastic set of descriptions, service and detection tooling from portswigger and colleagues.

The fact that http/1 downgrading is so prevalent and unlikely to change in the short term is the point.

mintyc··on Zig Makes Rust Cross-Compilation Just Work
An extension of the zig ideas is making self contained portable and very small binaries that run everywhere from bare metal to any OS using a cross platform libc and configuring GCC or clang appropriately.

Check out cosmopolitan at https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html and background at https://justine.lol/ape.html

Aside: Zig and Zag were humourous puppet characters with attitude for adults in the UK. Always made me smile on the 'big breakfast' show in the 90s.

mintyc··on Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)
As noted below, my initial wording was unhelpful and misplaced.

The infrastructure costs are covered by sponsors. The 'They should monetise' was a 'they' that I now understand are external organisations rather than nixos themselves.

mintyc··on Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)
Issue 34 is now closed. My thanks to the patience of people there who have clarified and improved the visibility of licensing.
mintyc··on Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)
I'm really impressed with it and am ONLY seeking clarity. I'll be extremely happy if I can use it standalone. Copyright, licensing are all I'm looking at.

e.g. Something like AGPL is considered copyleft and not compatible with 'open source' ethos. Still 'free' but the additional non-compete cloud service clause is both a sensible move, but something I'd just like to understand.

Your statement of 'what's wrong with people' is what is getting me. Borderline defensive. I'm definitely not knocking the product, quite the reverse. Its so good I want to embrace it wholeheartedly.

I have no problem paying for things, contributing voluntarily to a great product.

Its good to see that various organisations are committed to funding the infrastructure costs etc. (which negates my comment about storage servers).

As to monetisation,kind of irrelevant but was referring to paid services at the bottom of https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Ecosystem

mintyc··on Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)
It looks impressive but it isn't clear how much you have to pay for services from them. It isn't free and you aren't in control. Your snapshots and abilities to rollback etc are likely to be dependent on their storage servers.

They certainly should monetise, but not making it clear is what I object to. I've raised as an issue for clarification in their community wiki.

https://github.com/nix-community/wiki/issues/34

mintyc··on Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)
Update: The original post is from January 2019.

Ashley Broadley's github page at https://github.com/ls12styler sadly doesn't contain a repo with his rust dev work to date (I will ask him as it has some really good stuff in the article.)

----

Very nice. I'm doing similar at the moment. Maybe take a look at

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/mifrjj/what_extra_dev...

A list of useful cargo built in and third party sub commands.

As you note, common recommended app crates (source) should be gathered separately.

I have several other links and ideas eg supporting different targets such as x86_64-linux-unknown-musl but too long for this post!

mintyc··on LZ4 – Extremely fast compression
https://blog.logrocket.com/rust-compression-libraries/

Although implementations arein rust, I assume the provided benchmarks are representative of any optimised implementation...

Many compressor algorithms are compared on several data sets.

The results tables show compressed size, compression and decompression times for a number of normal and pathological cases.

Get a good feel about strengths and weaknesses.

Some algs really go downhill in pathological cases, such as with random data.

Do consider encryption too though you probably want to do that on the compressed data set where possible.

Sometimes external encryption means you will be stuck with something close to pathological...

mintyc··on VSCode, Dev Containers and Docker
To be truly portable it is worth considering whether your newly created Dev environment can work without the internet or in an air-gapped environment.

Vscode can be problematic in that respect. Typically with dependencies used by an extension often assuming they can reach out to other servers.

I look at initial internet facing container creation as a separately managed snapshot process to grab dependencies which then gets configured for particular Dev, build, test, runtime and release containers that are built by the dependency collecting original container.

Ie something like vscode isn't installed in the internet facing container, it is installed in the offline build of a Dev container. This is where the difficulties lay in my approach.

mintyc··on Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry
Wasn't a criticism, just an observation from a 'user' when a key bit of infrastructure is directed by a single or small team.

You are opening up a technology that you are crafting for your own purposes in the best spirit of sharing.

Personally I'm wary of relying on any project driven in this way.

Inspiring, but not something I'm personally keen on using directly.

I do feel grateful that you've given this as an option and I do feel slightly parasitic in not providing a tangible positive contribution instead.

mintyc··on The Impossible Mirror Scene in 'Contact'
Jodie Foster knows how to pick a great movie. Both Contact and Anna and the king are right up there with the best.
mintyc··on Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry
Cap'n'proto has a number of drawbacks both from the 'one man band' pov. (Witness the two year lull when Kenton went sandstorming), an awkward API and limited language support.

Personally I don't think there is a perfect protocol because different people want different things whether self describing, easy/optimised memory management, zero copy, partial decode. The list goes on....

At a pinch, flatbuffers with flexbuffer evolution would be close to my goals but I'd much prefer having a meta description of messages and perhaps access ,authentication, transport security and use that (e.g. an OpenAPI v3.1 spec) to generate an implementation whether in protobuf, msgpack, JSON, ASN1 etc. whichever is suitable for a use case and using an appropriate transport whether quic, TCP, UDP.

Some of the high performance work I've seen uses ASN.1 on a very large virtual server at 100Gb line rates because the messages lend themselves to parallel decode.

I think Mike Acton had it right by suggesting things are tailored to the data needs and not overgeneralised.

mintyc··on Cosmopolitan Libc: build-once run-anywhere C library
A couple more links that may be helpful in this pursuit:

https://sagargv.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-building-portable-li... and

https://blog.ksub.org/bytes/2016/07/23/ld.so-glibcs-dynanic-...

Watch out for the implications of licenses etc.

mintyc··on I've been merging microservices back into the monolith
There is an alternate view of what microservices should be. Check out the sample chapter for Monolith to microservice by Sam Newman. As described in this article, microservices seem like just a way to horizontally scale development and deployed implementations. Nothing like independently deployable network functions corresponding to business needs.
mintyc··on First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces
I still don't understand why people want their code dependent on the web.

I want to share my one true dev environment, but I want to be able to do this on my private premises setup without internet access.

I don't trust the internet and things like codespaces not to leak my company's code whether nominally in a private repository or not.

I don't trust using internet dependencies either.

Even something like pair programming etc with a shared view of a project is very appealing, but again, it needs to be appealing in a private context and not dependent on public access.

What might be OK for an open source project is unlikely to be true for a company's valuable IP, but people just seem to get carried away.

Secure first, managed dependencies first. Please.

mintyc··on Head of Danish intelligence suspended after whistleblowers hand over information
On the flip side intelligence also uncovers huge networks of despicable people.

https://www.thelocal.dk/20161021/danish-man-ran-scandinavian...

mintyc··on Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps
Once all tesla vehicles use starlink for sending back data to Tesla HQ I'm not sure much will be left for 'rural' broadband.

Nice to pick up the grants though.

mintyc··on Self-publishing and the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps
Any news on what will no doubt become the definitive guide to kubernetes (no pressure).
mintyc··on Show HN: Royalty-Free SVG Illustrations and Animations
Everyone knows that there is only one way to mount your toilet roll and that is so the paper flips over the top and to the front :)

The author was hedging their bets and providing comfort to those poor misguided heathens who disagree.

mintyc··on Show HN: Royalty-Free SVG Illustrations and Animations
Thanks for the material.

The icons in particular look useful.

I'm always torn whether to offer a (very personal) critique, but the man/woman characters aren't to my taste but I'm sure others will love them.

mintyc··on OpenSSF: Open Source Security Foundation
Such a shame these initiatives don't build on existing standards working groups but go away and reinvent a wheel instead.

Take a look for instance at ETSI TC Cyber, or ETSI NFV Sec.

Even more available in specific domains, such as intelligent transport systems (ISG WG5)

Let's have one more standard promoting another agenda and set of priorities.

Open standards should also promote consolidated standards.

mintyc··on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to PlantUML
PlantUML has morphed into a two part tool. Its original purpose was to visualise various forms of UML diagrams.

More recently it has utilised its underlying graphviz to create a more general 'graphviz on steroids' diagramming tool (referred to as the PlantUML standard library).

The original UML diagrams can be styled to look modern, but normally are shown in a default slightly old-fashioned and uninspiring visual style. Such a shame if that's your impression.

As mdaniel posted, just a refresh of the colour scheme can modernise the look of UML diagrams

https://real-world-plantuml.com/umls/4831648155697152

The second part covered by this hitchhikers guide shows a modern take on visualising component relationships.

Both parts allow visualisation as code, but otherwise have different purposes.

I wish we'd see more UML examples in a modern style.

(I'd also recommend MarkDeep for documentation. Includes these + markdown, math, doxygen integration and more)

mintyc··on FlexBuffers
My experience with capn proto was a mixed bag.

Quite apart from its neglect for years as Kenton was working on sandstorm.io, I found the low level access interfaces to extract best performance to be both fiddly and often rely on an intimate knowledge of the internals.

As is often the case, maximum performance for your use case requires more intimate detail.

I can't remember, but some of these zero copy protocols may still require byte order swapping on mixed endian systems. (But cache access times probably dwarf the byte swapping)

mintyc··on FlexBuffers
Or even schema-for-type, schema-for-value-validation

Just as an aside. The new version of OpenAPI (v3.1 RC) for REST interfaces now fully supports the json-schema validation mechanism so we may see an uptake in use of json schema.

Its not perfect and has some holes.

mintyc··on Geany – A flyweight IDE
Geany was a useful tool a while back, but no longer is packaged for centos and lost its key selling point for me which was a decent GDB plugin debugger at a time where there weren't too many other UIs for GDB.

I'm not so bothered about lightweight as I need horsepower to build my projects anyway.

The world has moved on from hand scripted build commands. (for better or worse).

mintyc··on Generation of diagrams and flowcharts from text in a similar manner as markdown
markdeep which includes plantuml and various other tools. Note too that plantUML has evolved into a more general diagramming tool with standard library icons
mintyc··on 5G and Shannon’s Law
Lots of work has already been carried out.

I think you misunderstand the concept of directional beamforming. The antennas in question in a phased array are 'elements' that cooperate to steer a more focussed beam in a given direction.

The phone in your pocket when transmitting (whether 3G/4G/5G) is the biggest contribution to your personal health. Not a base station.

I'd be concerned much more about low and mid band that can penetrate much further than high band. I am concerned about high band too (skin surface effects) but know nothing about this and assume work has been done to quantify and assess.

My biggest problem both with 5G hype and those that seek to cast doubt on it is that both sides misrepresent the 'facts' to suit their agenda. Sadly that's true in all walks of life.

mintyc··on 5G and Shannon’s Law
Agreed.

The point is that as more services migrate to higher bands or more spectrum is made available (TV spectrum partially reallocated, 3G is sunset), there is more capacity available for rural locations that need that lower band.

Lots of work on alternatives to fibre for those last few miles e.g. dedicated wireless links to local distribution nodes in villages.

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