sparcpile

Simon Winchester has written several great books that I've thoroughly enjoyed over the years. He's one of my favorite non-fiction authors.

A pair of books called The Atlantic and The Pacific; detailing the history of the ocean, people in it and around it. The Perfectionists, about precision engineering

This also the same company that smuggled artifacts out of Iraq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal

It did come to a head with the case of United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty Ancient Cuneiform Tablets and Approximately Three Thousand Ancient Clay Bullae

It is an interesting idea to use these in mock-ups for the TFMS replacement as long as they were example and not hard HF/CHI requirements.

I would not trust college students with no experience in HF/CHI to create GUI requirements for a mission critical application like TFMS. While it is not safety critical, traffic flow management is mission critical.

Yes, C++ has CppCon, so that conference is making money for the organizers.

There is no money in a C/C++ Conference. Conferences are held so that the organizers can make a profit from tickets and booth fees.

With the EFI stub in the Linux kernel and the ability to embed an initrd in the kernel, you can boot a small distribution with just the kernel file. The only issue is that it takes a long time to load a very large kernel into memory like that.

I tried that with a buildroot based hypervisor I created for my home lab.

There have been some attempts to capture sites that became the ghosts or disappeared completely. During the dotcom bubble through 2008, Steve Baldwin(co-author of Netslaves) had that as a side project.

https://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/

Our Incredible Journey still does this, with more snark and humor.

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

The author re-worded iterative development where you start with a skeleton and slowly build out. Their example was to build out a simple build pipeline with stub projects that are replaced over time.

The Practice of Programming(Kernighan and Pike 1999) https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/tpop.webpage/ goes into much better details of the iterative development that is actually being done by the author. If you know the overall design of your program, you build out the skeleton with everything stubbed out. As you iterate through development, those stubs are fleshed out into fully working components.

The analogy of mise-in-enplace works if you have a ready for reusable components (COTS, FOSS, or personal) that you quickly pull off the shelf and combine into the larger product. Mise means having everything ready to go; you have your set of reusable components and subsystems that you can quickly pull together to make a new product.

The XML backup that is available in the Server and Datacenter editions was not meant to be used for anything other than toy instances. The documentation suggested that you restore from database backups and copies of the home directory that contained all the attachments.

Whenever possible, I've always used SQL backups (MariaDB or PostgreSQL) to clone or restore JIRA instances. The database information will accept changes in the base URL without issues. It makes setting up testing and mimic environments pretty easy.

When I recently had to move a project to a new instance that I didn't have jira-administrator access to, I had to provide the server admins a set of CSV exports of our JIRA project so that it could be imported over properly. All of the tasks subtasks, and linking had to be provided in separate CSV files because JIRA would fail to export more than 20000 entries in a single file.

It took weeks worth dry runs and checkouts to make sure it would be successful. This was because we had to give this other team a long list of custom fields, workflows, and schemes that represented our software development and program management methodologies.

On the transition date, I was out of the office on a prearranged cancer treatment. I still got texts from people freaking out while I was sitting in the cancer ward getting my infusion. I told them that I couldn't even look it anything until I got back in the office after my treatment and recovery period. Thankfully, they managed to limp along get 80% of the issues resolved within 2-3 days.

TheRasteri on had a set of Youtube videos where we created a DOS/Windows 98 gaming PC using the Vortex86DX and when through a set of benchmarks and comparisons. The retro enthusiast community started about the WeeCee that he created.

https://youtu.be/6cXdWMOl8QE?t=45

Edit to change the YouTube video start time to where the TheRasteri gets into the details of the Vortex86 history and benchmarking.

NCommander had a multi-part stream of building LFS up to Firefox. He's gotten up to building Xorg and the Firefox prereqs so far. I don't know when he plans on doing the final push to building Firefox.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCh0XjyIAKU

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egzyIFsQ3Nw

He also managed to dig up a copy of the proto LiveCD of Yggdrasil Linux and get it working.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cynd0guSUvM

There is an interesting fork of LFS that uses Musl instead of glibc.

https://github.com/dslm4515/Musl-LFS

I played with it for a while as the base OS for my KVM hypervisor servers.

A couple of years ago, I tried to find all the source archives for the old LFS releases. I ended up using the Debian and kernel.org archives to find most of the old package versions. Packages from before 2004 started disappearing like as86 and the PowerPC patches. I was never able to find the PowerPC patches because they were never mirrored on anything but FTP sites. The Internet Archive did not pick up any of those mirrors. https://archive.org/details/linuxfromscratch-releases

I eventually replaced the Musl-LFS build and replaced it with a buildroot set of configs and scripts when I had issues replicating my work with later package versions. Buildroot allowed me to more rapidly test and deploy my hypervisor config. I wanted a simple /etc/rc init like what was in SunOS 4, no GRUB, and QEMU with VDE networking.

I ended up with SYSLINUX for BIOS MBR and gummiboot(before it was converted into systemd-boot) for EFI because my EFI machine (Dell R810) did not allow for direct booting of EFI binaries.

Perpetual Stews are an interesting thing. A couple years ago, I found out about Burgoo, which is an Appalachian stew. Burgoo is the subject of many cookoffs and festivals there.

Perpetual Stews were a way of stretching food so that every little bit was a help.

As a warning, if you use JFR in the Oracle Java SDK, you have to pay a commercial license. If you want to avoid the legion of Oracle lawyers, only use JFR in OpenJDK.

https://docs.oracle.com/javacomponents/jmc-5-4/jfr-runtime-g... https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-subscription...

The No Place of Honor came from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant report out of Sandia National Lab back in 1993. It is good read about long time and how to deal with communicating messages through the ages. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/...

US-40 from I-95 to Atlantic City is still very rural. When I lived in the DC area, I would take US-40 from I-95 to go the FAA's Technical Center at the Atlantic City airport because it was nicer drive and you get to see interesting sites.

Among them:

1. The Cowtown Rodeo in Woodstown, NJ with the giant cowboy statue at the cowboy supply store across the street.

2. An ancient Radio Shack store

3. Many road-side fruit and lunch stands.

4. A car repair shop with a painted stack of tires.

5. A store named 'Ted's Taxidermy' across the street from an airpark in Buena, NJ.

(edited for formatting)

Boothbay is a nice area as well. When the Boothbay Harbor's beach gets too crowded, The nearby Pemaquid Point Lighthouse has a good park and pocket beach. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay are also nearby.

We've visited that area a few times since we moved to Maine.

After medical and recreational weed was legalized, the lost weed company is not really needed. Their prices were pretty high and have stayed that way.

We use grace to provide graphs of resource usage for our end users. We wrote a tool that pulls together acct and other data sources to provide a graph of usage over time. It made it very easy for them to tell us that at 0300, 0442, 0529, the resource usage spiked, which makes looking through application logs much easier.

I still use NEdit when I develop code. I don't like 1GB+ RAM IDEs like Eclipse or VSCode when I can get things done in a smaller text editor and a command line. I'll use vi for small edit jobs or quick text. NEdit comes out when I need to move code blocks around or need to compare.

Some of my co-workers said it was weird that I used it because the other editors will do instant linting and suggest code for Ansible YAML. I've found that not using VSCode or Eclipse forced me to learn more about the language and I am now the local subject matter expert on Ansible.

It wasn't good. During his tenure, he had the university create a deal with Kaplan to brand Kaplan University as Purdue Global and get the Indiana legisture to pass a sweetheart law for it. The result is that Purdue's name as a very good engineering school is mud.

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/purdue-global-got-irs-sta...

Nathan Lineback has an article with more screenshots on his site. His review is over 20 years old now. http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html

For the wireless connections listed (Telstra, Opus, and Vodaphone), I do wonder how much of this are on the same physical tower and network. Certain parts of this multi-home connection would be running off the same physical network due to how wireless providers provision out their towers. They will share physical space on a tower and even an underlying fiber run out to the local POP.

This may be a situation of someone being too clever by half.

The program's name was AAS, the Advanced Automation System. It was designed to be a full end-to-end system replacement for the HOST mainframe systems that were the FAA's backbone. This included terminal, en-route, oceanic, and every other system that was managing aircraft. AAS is discussed as a failure because it had significant mission and requirements creep. FAA kept on piling on requirements and IBM kept saying yes.

The FAA also had issues managing it because it was so large. It was a multi-billion program with millions of SLOC in the early 90s. Simply put, this was a not a cat video website. The tool suite was on AIX 3.2.5 running on RS/6000s using CMVC for source code management.

This was all designed in the mid-80s with implementation starting in the late 80s through the mid 90s. AAS was originally designed after the mass firings of the ATC specialists and the shutdown of PATCO, the original ATC union. AAS was actually a entire suite of programs. AAS was overall program and funding vehicle. IBM Federal deployed a few of the sub-programs like ISSS, TCCC, and others successfully to the FAA.

It was originally developed by IBM Federal Systems and deployed on then-new RS/6000s. AAS failed because of mission creep and the fact it was entirely too large. The program ended after IBM Federal Systems was sold off to Loral and then merged into Lockheed Martin. The head of the ATC group at the time, Bob Stevens, discovered that LM would make more money if FAA cancelled the project and split it up into much smaller programs. Bob called up the FAA Administrator and made the deal to cancel the program since the scope creep was too much. FAA had already sent out a couple of cure letters to get things back on track, but this time the FAA agreed that it was time to cut bait on it.

Initially, what was the en-route portion of AAS was re-done as the Display System Replacement (DSR), which replaced the radar and data positions in the en-route facilities. The concepts of AAS were then rolled into NextGen, which is the FAA's family of programs to modernize its ATC systems.

Ada was used (originally OC Systems's Ada83 and Ada95 PowerAda compilers) for everything in AAS. An Ada-based middleware called FlightDeck was developed to implement all the underlying libraries and subsystems that you need for highly available applications for AAS, including clustering, failover, heartbeats, monotonic time, and multiple levels of redundancy. That middleware is still being today for the systems that IBM Federal, Lockheed Martin, and now Leidos are maintaining and developing like ERAM. After LM bought out what was IBM Federal, they sold it off in 2015 to Leidos because LM wanted to focus more on hardware.

(Source: I work on the later programs that Ada is used on and listened to all stories that were told me by the people who worked on AAS).

DevOps = sysadmin

SecOps = sysadmin has to apply the CIS/SCAP/whatever security template to the machine

DevSecOps = developer also has to apply the CIS/SCAP/whatever security template to their machine

It all ends up becoming marketing jargon for suits looking to follow the next big trend.

His previous work has been software games, which make up a fair share of his income along with YouTube ads. He quit his real job to be a YouTube personality and sell software on the side.

The design goal of the X16 was to try to make a 8bit computer out of modern stock for close to $100. The concept was to have an easily fixable computer with no bespoke parts.

That goal got blown out of the water due to the realities of custom system design. The costs shot up in order to fulfill other requirements like the graphics and sound. Originally, David didn't want any FPGAs at all, but had to do that to get a viable graphics port.

From what I remember others says, even the 2MB RAM might get knocked down to 1MB or less.

The entire project itself is the nostalgia of a 8bit home computer, but the need to have it connected to modern parts like mice, keyboard, and displays.

The 1.6 series was the last to use the old-style version of up to three version levels. 2.0 was the start of the version.release scheme.

I've been using NetBSD for over 20 years now and I keep coming back to it when I want a coherent and minimal base operating system.

I've used for daily driver workstations, file servers, and network services over the years.

I loved it when an instructor at Stevens Tech built a class around using NetBSD for a UNIX programming class. I pulled down the youtube videos and website for my own copy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431

Venture Capital firms love to use throw debt at an asset so that they can have a cash windfall. The result is that the assets can never pay off the debt and end up declaring bankruptcy. See K-Mart, Sears, Toys R' Us, and anything that a vulture capitalist touches.

A good location for ambient music is the Hearts of Space service. https://v4.hos.com/home

https://v4.hos.com/about/a-brief-profile-of-space-and-ambien...

The article was behind a paywall, but in the past few years, the show has been getting away from staple goods to make it more difficult for contestants to win.

The Perfect Bid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdFKZtZop7A) went over this in more detail after a player and long time watcher (Ted Slauson) managed to win both showcases. For years, the show had used a set of household goods that had a consistent price. Ted memorized all of the prices and won both showcases at the end.

The producer freaked out over the incident and started to use more items and ones that add-ons that made guessing the price more difficult. They did that because they didn't want their winnings budget blown out. In recent years, they have been using more generic items like 'free utilities for a year' to make it more random.