Posts by Alan J. Wylie

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

The answer

For added giggles, they could have asked it for the square root of 1764.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Good timing for purchasing my new computer

31 July, I bought 64GB of ECC RAM.

2 x 32GB Kingston KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA DDR5 5600MT/s ECC Unbuffered Memory DIMM

(KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) £295.33 (+ £59.07 VAT)

Today, it's £489.29 for 1x32GB

https://www.kingstonmemoryshop.co.uk/kingston-ksm56e46bd8km-32ha-32gb-ddr5-5600mt-s-ecc-unbuffered-memory-ram-dimm

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

PERQ / Accent / Mach

Back around 1980, I briefly evaluated an ICL PERQ workstation, running PNX (yes, really!). It could run several other operating systems, including Accent, which was a predecessor of Mach.

Wikipedia articles: PERQ, Accent

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: K&R C

Example:

$ grep -A3 sig_catch sig_catch.c

void sig_catch(sig,f)

int sig;

void (*f)();

{

$ grep sig_catch *.h

sig.h:extern void sig_catch();

$

K&R C

A decade ago I worked for a cyber security company that used qmail. I tried to drag the code kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and failed.

It reminds me of the code I wrote in the 80's, (though I did a lot of linting). No function prototypes or type checking.

Re: Interesting

There used to be licensing issue, too.

Debian Mail Questions

qmail is distributed under a licence which prohibits the distribution of modified binaries. Debian's policy requries that mail transfer agents conform to certain standards in order to be included in Debian as packages. qmail doesn't meet all of these standards in its standard upstream form, so it's impossible for Debian to distribute a qmail binary package which satisfies both policy and upstream

Though 18 years ago, DJB changed it to "Public Domain".

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Alan B'stard in 1991

> Here's an idea... Why don't we plant a tiny explosive charge in every mobile device,

Alan B'stard had an exploding wallet back in 1991.

New Statesman episode: Labour of Love

Capita fined £14M after 58-hour delay exposed 6.6M records

Re: Is that a joke ?

> You want to make an example ? 10% of 2.4 billion is 240 million.

Fine them 10 times the total remuneration, during the year of the breach and the previous and subsequent years, of the members of the board of directors, including all bonuses and resignation pay-offs.

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

"a 400 error page"

I hope that was 451 (Ray Bradbury reference).

Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russia-based Yandex dev

Obligatory xkcd

Dependency, s/Nebraska/Moscow/

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

"Should this data be held indefinitely?"

Birthlink, who keep (kept?) records of adoptions in Scotland, so that children could, if they so desired, trace their birth parents, found out the hard way (BBC) that some records should not be deleted. ICO monetary penalty notice

The UK’s cartographer maps mission to help people and business

Re: 45 years ago

P.S. Here's a photo of Prof Frisch at the 1948 Solvay Conference. Lots of famous names, though it doesn't quite match the one in 1927.

45 years ago

I worked for Laser-Scan Labs in Cambridge and spent a lot of time in Southampton installing a Fastrak for the Ordnance Survey at the time that they started doing digital mapping. I lost track of the number of times I demonstrated it scanning the 1:1250 map of Prebend's Bend (NZ 2741 NW) in Durham.

For a history, see Paul Hardy's web site and in particular his photos. We had lots of eminent visitors: Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and Margaret Thatcher.

LSL was founded by Otto Frisch, I've spotted his name in the news recently: he and Rudolf Peierls did the maths for the feasibility of an air dropped nuclear fission bomb (Prof Frisch, together with his aunt Lise Meitner, coined the phrase "Atomic Fission") and their paper was instrumental in starting its development.

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: Kernel 6.16 and ancient AMD processors

It was all to do with the new kernel configuration option "X86_NATIVE_CPU"

Optimize for the current CPU used to compile the kernel.

Use this option if you intend to build the kernel for your

local machine.

which uses those gcc options to optimise your build

Kernel 6.16 and ancient AMD processors

Linus also had something to say about my aging AMD FX-8350 processor (from 2012) after I reported that objtool didn't support its instruction set which caused the 6.16 build to crash with multiple errors and warnings:

And yeah, I think it's bulldozer-specific, which explains why nobody sees it (because bulldozer was one of the not-very-great AMD uarchs before they got it right with Zen).

Australia’s attempt to join the space race lasts just 14 seconds

Re: It's not brain science

As recently deceased Tom Lehrer said

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun"

Wikipedia article

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Lenna

I do like that the image that goes with this article on the Latest News page subtly references the "Lenna" image that started it all.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: Ring, ring ...

They are stardust, but they are not golden.

Re: VAX field service engineers

It's not just electricity - just getting a ring caught on something and it's quite painful

My mother was in the WAAF during the war, some of the time she was servicing airplanes. Lots of stories to tell - the technicians were "encouraged" to go up in the plane on the first flight after servicing. Winding up the undercarriage on an Avro Anson. Pilots showing off with aerobatics and trying to impress the attractive young woman sitting next to them. But what sticks in the mind most is the scar from a ring that got caught on the fuselage as she got out.

VAX field service engineers

I can still remember, in the early 80's DEC VAX field service engineers removing their wedding ring before working anywhere near the computer's backplane. Apparently the current available from the power supply could heat the ring to red heat in only a short contact.

And I can still remember FIELD / SERVICE and SYSTEST / UETP too. The good old days of insecurity.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

I once had an email blocked by one university because it referenced The University of Sussex (or was it Essex?)

Law firm 'didn't think' data theft was a breach, says ICO. Now it's nursing a £60K fine

Re: "Commitment" is not enough

Better than the old BS5750.

Some of us are old enough to remember Def Stan 05-21

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Smoking hairy golfballs

They're left with racks of molten silicon

As Jim Gray said: "smoking hairy golfballs"

paper

Interview

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

Arthur? Who's Arthur?

Thanks for that. The interview would have been early 2001. I hadn't done any work on ARM for more than ten years at that time. P.S. I got the job.

Please note the "I'll get my coat" icon before giving me a thumbs down.

32-bit registers, 26-bit memory addresses. The upper six bits of the program counter held the CPU flags

I remember an interview where answering one of the questions required realising that since all instructions were word aligned, the lower two bits could be (ab)used for storing state.

"from hand-crafted Arm assembly language to high-level language (eg, portable ANSI C)."

Why not be up-to-date and use Rust?

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Feynman

Plus several hundred for the Feynman title reference.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

And in one story, Bob's intern is called Peter-Fred Young

What position do you get appointed to if your CV mentions "CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN"?

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

Re: WTF is "leepfrog.com"

I thought the max size of an SPF record was 255 characters / 512 bytes?

Sort of. Note that there are multiple double quote delimited strings in their record.

RFC 7208 section 3.3

"TXT records containing multiple strings are useful in constructing records that would exceed the 255-octet maximum length of a character-string within a single TXT record."

WTF is "leepfrog.com"

OPM have one of the most ridiculous SPF records I've ever seen.

opm.gov. 300 IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:205.131.184.50/32 ip4:205.131.184.51/32 ip4:205.131.177.50/32 ip4:205.131.177.151/32 ip4:205.131.184.52/32 ip4:205.131.177.152/32 ip4:205.131.184.125/32 " "ip4:205.131.184.126/32 ip4:205.131.177.125/32 ip4:205.131.177.126/32 ip4:73.23.28.0/24 ip4:208.76.128.0/21 ip4:66.159.72.186/32 ip4:216.230.115.73/32 ip4:216.52.6.89/32 " "ip4:216.230.115.69/24 ip4:66.169.72.166/24 ip4:216.230.114.66/24 ip4:216.230.101.69/24 ip4:66.169.72.176/32 ip4:173.201.193.170/24 ip4:107.20.210.250/32 ip4:52.1.14.157/32 " "ip4:52.6.44.126/32 ip4:52.207.153.36/32 ip4:65.196.93.7/32 ip4:96.43.152.64/28 ip4:96.43.152.80/32 " "ip4:149.19.38.227/32 " "ip4:149.19.37.167 ip4:149.19.38.138 ip4:149.19.37.159 ip4:149.19.37.32 ip4:149.19.37.73 ip4:149.19.37.55 " "ip4:163.120.86.44 ip4:163.120.86.62 ip4:149.19.37.109 ip4:149.19.37.33 ip4:149.19.37.49 ip4:149.19.37.86 ip4:163.120.86.56 ip4:163.120.84.26 ip4:149.19.38.45 " "ip4:163.120.84.80 ip4:149.19.38.69 ip4:149.19.38.87 ip4:149.19.38.105 ip4:163.120.84.62 ip4:163.120.84.37 ip4:149.19.38.63 ip4:163.120.84.20 " "ip4:52.61.131.175/32 ip4:52.61.131.176/28 ip4:52.61.135.175/32 ip4:52.61.135.176/28 ip4:34.206.132.87/32 ip4:18.233.74.128/32 include:spf.protection.outlook.com" " a:usalearning.net mx:usalearning.net include:e2ma.net exists:%{i}._spf.mta.salesforce.com include:leepfrog.com -all"

Naïve Reg hack thinks he can beat Christmas food comas once and for all

Re: Castlerigg stone circle and computing history

Not North, the book you refer to wasn't published until 1996, twenty years after my schooldays, by which time I'd moved on to other interests, but your post triggered a memory of Alexander Thom. Another part of the "research" we did at school was investigating the precision with which students could pace out a "Megalithic yard".

I do have a copy of Euan MacKie's "The Megalith Builders".

Trekking poles

Trekking poles are invaluable for crossing streams in spate, even if they spend the rest of the time strapped to your rucksack.

Also, +1 for Paramo, but even a Paramo "waterproof" jacket and Berghaus overtrousers won't stop you getting soaked to the skin in the worst weather (been there, done that).

Layer up, with a synthetic wicking layer against the skin.

Taking it to the extreme, don't bother with a waterproof top, instead wear a Paramo/Buffalo/Montane smock.

Jackets come in two lengths. The shorter ones may be more fashionable and better when belaying a climber, but they can leave an exposed gap around your midriff above your overtrousers. Paramo do both lengths, I have one of each. I found my short padded Paramo top in a charity shop in Kendal with £5 on the ticket. I gave them a lot more than that for it.

Castlerigg stone circle and computing history

Back in the 70's, when my brother, sister and I were at school in Keswick, we did a project on Castlerigg Stone Circle and "leylines".

The local education authority provided the school with an HP 9830A calculator/ BASIC computer.

The physics master lent us an ex-Canadian Army gunsight - a compact theodolite. We surveyed all the stones, I did the 3D trig to calculate where on the slope of Blencathra the sun would rise on midsummer morning and stayed up overnight to catch it. Helpful teachers and students with driving licenses drove us to other stone circles. My brother wrote a program for the HP 9830A to calculate the "leylines" between them, then created random points and ran the program again to see whether we got a similar result.

We entered the project into two competitions, one run by Computer Weekly and the BBC's "Young Scientists of the Year".

We came second in the CW competition and were donated an ICT (the forerunner of ICL) 1902 computer, and reached the finals of YSotY.

More details at my brother's website.

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

Lyon equipment make just the thing (image)

web site

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: what does ~* do?

Quoting the original article: Emacs backup files

emacs appends ~ to the filename when creating backup files.

$ cd .emacs.d

$ ls *~

bbdb~ gnus.el~ viper~ vm.el~

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Nikola

For my personal, self hosted web site I used to use Blosxom, but it's getting old in the tooth. I recently moved to Nikola, available as a package in Gentoo. It's a Python program that takes as input plain text files with some HTML markup and turns them into more featured HTML. Fortunately importing my old site was pretty easy using the RSS support in Blosxom.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

BBC News today: Smartphones: "I feel guilty for not buying my daughter one for school"

Girl without smartphone unable to join in lesson

A mum has said her 11-year-old daughter returned home from school in tears because she did not have a smartphone to use in class.

Celeste Lewis said she felt guilty after her daughter Ava's school, Whitchurch High in Cardiff, encouraged pupils to use their phones in lessons to do things like look up locations on Google Earth.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Taking a company's source code and preparing it for release to the wild is not a simple process. I've been there, done that for OpenSTA

back in 2001.

IIRC, it involved checking the copyright of everything, removing author's names (some no longer worked for Cyrano, we didn't want people being bothered by support requests) and not least, removing any jokes or bad language from the comments.

Re: LOL

It seems to have been like this for a while. discussion at GitHub Community

The github-actions bot has responded.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: Cookies too?

Cookie-AutoDelete may be what you are looking for

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

No Annoying Music

There's also a version with no annoying background music

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

This on twitter at 19:00 UTC. CUPS is one of Openprinting's projects.

<cite>

Simone Margaritelli @evilsocket

Mark this. 1 hour to go.

https://openprinting.github.io/codeofconduct/

</cite>

Re: Its confirmed to be cups-browsed

If it is cups-browsed, then I've got nothing to worry about. It's [N]ot installed. And no server I've ever managed has had it (or cups) installed either. "all GNU/Linux systems (plus others)"? Hardly.

[I] net-print/cups (2.4.7-r2@06/02/24): The Common Unix Printing System

[N] net-print/cups-bjnp (2.0.3-r1): CUPS backend for canon printers using proprietary USB over IP BJNP protocol

[N] net-print/cups-browsed (2.0.0): helper daemon to browse for remote CUPS queues and IPP network printers

[I] net-print/cups-filters (2.0.0-r1@04/06/24): Cups filters

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs

Good article explaning the issue from Matthew Garrett

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70348.html

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Critical systems do not fail because a person makes a mistake, but because insufficient controls fail to prevent the mistake. Dr. Johannes Ullrich

Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

I can remember sitting in a pub with a load of Ferranti employees and contractors one lunchtime in 1993, listening to the news on a radio, waiting for the announcement of bankruptcy. We'd already put all our personal and corporate belongings in our cars.

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Fission is easier, but that doesnt make it better. Burning Coal is even easier and cheaper

Have a read of this article by Otto Frisch On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations

The recent discovery of coal (black, fossilized plant remains) in a number of places offers an interesting alternative to the production of power from fission. Some of the places where coal has been found show indeed signs of previous exploitation by prehistoric men, who, however, probably used it for jewels and to blacken their faces at religious ceremonies.

The power potentials depend on the fact that coal can be readily oxidized, with the production of a high temperature and energy of about 0.0000001 megawatt days per gram. That is, of course, very little, but large amounts of coal (perhaps millions of tons) appear to be available.

The chief advantage is that the critical amount is very much smaller for coal than for any fissile material. Fission plants become, as is well known, uneconomical below 50 megawatts, and a coal-driven plant may be competitive for small communities (such as small islands) with small power requirements.

...