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Another older terminal JS library that might interest people is https://www.masswerk.at/termlib/

oso2kon Mt32-pi: A baremetal Roland MT-32 emulator

This would be so awesome in ISA or PCI form factor

oso2kon Elk: A low footprint JavaScript engine for embedded systems

IIRC, at the time, building on DOS w/djgpp was fully supported since leJOS is designed to be fairly OS independent. There's not much room for an OS in the Lego Mindstorms MCU. You can think of it a bit like how people today build minimal Rust or Go-lang OS experiments.

oso2kon Elk: A low footprint JavaScript engine for embedded systems

There were several very small implementation of JVM over the years. One semi-popular one was leJOS for Legos Mindstorms. At one point, I recall even building it for DOS to test some things.

https://lejos.sourceforge.io/

oso2kon Work Hard (2007)

Knowing a preemptive shortcut is also "working hard".

1) Knowing when to apply previous experience is a skill that requires work and practice. 2) Someone else knowing a shortcut that I don't know means they worked hard when I was not observing them.

oso2kon Txiki.js: Tiny JavaScript runtime built with QuickJS and libuv

And used to be under 10 MB.

https://groups.google.com/g/v8-users/c/OaC4TQQjxFg

oso2kon Txiki.js: Tiny JavaScript runtime built with QuickJS and libuv

QuickJS [0] quotes a 210KiB binary.

[0] https://bellard.org/quickjs/

oso2kon Prisma – ORM for Node.js and TypeScript

Maybe it's too late to change the name. When Palo Alto Networks acquired Twistlock (Container Scanning/Security products) 2 years ago [0], they folded it in & renamed it to Prisma Cloud [1].

Food for thought if prisma.io team is watching.

[0] https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/company/press/2019/palo-alt...

[1] https://blog.paloaltonetworks.com/2019/11/cloud-prisma-cloud...

oso2kon Was the NE2000 really that bad?

Probably something with a rtl8129/39/69 chip. I had a few dozens of those NICs in the late 90s and early 2000s university computer labs I worked at. They’re so common that they’re (almost) a standard in x86 emulation (see qemu, VirtualBox, etc.).

oso2kon NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

Many advocate for the use of Thorium instead.

oso2kon NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

More than likely, 99% of that cost is the container and the apparatus to make use of its energy. [0][1]

[0] https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-most-expensive-element-606...).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci....

oso2kon Zero Bug Tolerance

For me, it's the Principle of Least Surprise [0]. While you may consider it a browser bug, but, your bug is not checking for the set of enabled product features and browser version then warning the user, or (better) protecting the user somehow from that situation. You might not have the resources to fix the browser issue. But, you are aware of the situation and it seems rude to not take the opportunity to "apologize" for issue when it occurs or you know it will occur. Imagine now your system is a Safety Critical System [1]. Not warning could harm someone by using your system or allow someone to be harmed by being caught unawares.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishm...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety-critical_system

oso2kon Dual-port 100GbE PCI-E 4.0 network cards are now under $1300

You can pick up used HP NC523SFP or NC552SFP (better!) NICs for about $15-$25 each off eBay. The drivers fell out of support on RHEL8/CentOS8 but I think Fedora Server, RHEL7/CentOS7 and Ubuntu Server are fine with them. TrueNAS can make use of them as well. Then all you need is a 10GbE switch that can do bonding. Or, just make yourself a router with a bunch of dual port NICs.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/LOT-OF-2-593717-B21-HPE-NC523SFP-DU...

oso2kon Zone of Death (Yellowstone)

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

   Rules have never stopped a "bad person" from doing something.
   Rules aren't made to keep the "bad person out";
   they're made to keep the "good people in".

I wish I knew who originated it. I can't seem to recall where I heard it now.

oso2kon 2 times 3 can sometimes equal 7 with Android's Neural Network API

Because of "The Secret Number" (https://youtu.be/qXnFr1d7B9w)?

oso2kon Bélády's Anomaly

It's a good thing that FIFO isn't the only Memory & Cache Replacement Strategy [0]. Way back when, I wrote a Cache Simulator in HTML+JS [1][2]. Hasn't aged well; you used to be able to drag and drop a list a file containing a list of addresses. I ought to clean it up and make it functional again.

I've sometimes wondered if a Cache Line Size-aware Strategy could significantly improve Garbage Collection. I've mentally toyed with the idea of a Linked List of bitmaps of Arenas (made of Cache Line Sized chunks) with a Reference Counter bitlist could improve GC performance. It could even be extended for use in non-OOP languages with the GCC RAII Cleanup Extension [3], even for primitive and other non-OOP types.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_replacement_policies

[1] https://github.com/lpsantil/CacheSimulator/blob/master/index...

[2] http://lpsantil.github.io/CacheSimulator/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initia...

oso2kon Show HN: Raspberry Pi 400 with a $2 IPS 240x240 micro display

https://youtu.be/50614QMNQPo

Maybe this would be a place to start.

oso2kon PC DOS Reimagined

There was also that XEDOS, that never officially saw the light of day. But some of those feature apparently made it into MS-DOS 2.x and appear as those *nix-like features that DOS had from 2.0+.

https://youtu.be/Vo8NG8T4rWs

oso2kon PC DOS Reimagined

Also, the 286 was the last time we had truly synchronized, 0-wait state CPU-RAM combination with the 16MHz 286 and 16MHz RAM.

oso2kon A Brief History of Unreal Mode (2018)

Less accidental; more like undocumented. BIOSes have used Unreal Mode, EMMs/XMSs can or temporarily use Unreal mode, Intel's SMM use it. There's even some evidence modern processors still support & use it.

One downside to Unreal Mode is that leaves the processor in in a state where naughty or non-standard TSRs, Interrupts, BIOS ROM code, and programs can cause hard lock ups.

oso2kon A Brief History of Unreal Mode (2018)

It wasn't unheard of for DOS games to create or require floppy bootdisks just to run their game. Also, we had CONFIG.SYS menus back then too.

oso2kon Busybox-based Linux distro from scratch

Hahaha. I did that too based on the LinuxDevices article. I even had a few conversations with the author.

https://linuxdevices.org/turning-the-sega-dreamcast-into-a-l...

oso2kon Use `nproc` and not grep /proc/cpuinfo

I think logic still holds. There’s an order magnitude more cache in today’s server CPUs. There’s higher likelihood today that your thread or process will remain in the cache, keeping it performant.

oso2kon Use `nproc` and not grep /proc/cpuinfo

Another thought, I don’t know if Alpine Linux or other musl-libc based systems will have ‘nproc’ if, for instance, you’re running containers or other minimal systems.

oso2kon Use `nproc` and not grep /proc/cpuinfo

Right. So on Mac or other BSDs, you want use a ‘sysctl’.

oso2kon Use `nproc` and not grep /proc/cpuinfo

I see suggestions to use ‘make -j$(nproc)’. However, I was taught when learning MPI programming 20 years ago, you want think at least “one to load, one to run”. The idea being that processes and threads waiting on IO will sleep/yield while another process or thread can continue executing. An especially useful strategy if you can afford the RAM (trading RAM for CPU). Consequently, I tend to run twice as many ‘make’ jobs as threads on my systems.

oso2kon Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

BASH and CSV ok? I've used this kanban.bash [0] and it works well enough.

[0] https://github.com/coderofsalvation/kanban.bash

oso2kon Show HN: QuickPYTHON

This is awesome! A QBASIC/QuickBASIC like environment for Python.

One thing that made QBASIC so approachable was its Help system. So easy to navigate and find the info/function/argument you needed.

oso2kon When the English Witnessed Battles in the Sky

Cash's "Riders in the Sky" is based on Native American mythology [0]. Cash felt it important to highlight Native American history and struggles [1]. "Riders in the Sky" was only one of many such songs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Ghost)_Riders_in_the_Sky:_A_C...

[1] https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/american-indian-rig...

oso2kon Smash: An efficient compression algorithm for microcontrollers

This sounds like it shares some similarities with LZ4.