Posts by Alan J. Wylie 723 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Aug 2009
The small edition of Grml is a half-gigabyte download and if you have a large UEFI System Partition, you can keep the Grml squashfs directly in your ESP and boot it from there, without any removable media, root partition, or anything else.
Memories of Tom's root and boot, except 500 times the size.
1) tomsrtbt is "The most Linux on one floppy disk" for: rescue recovery panic & emergencies tools to keep in your shirt pockets whenever you can't use a hard drive
It's been a while since I read /The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/, but isn't there a quote in it where the AI says something like "shall I stop hurling steel encased rocks at Cheyenne Mountain, because it isn't there anymore?"
I can sort of imagine using lasers in some way "dropping" atoms onto a substrate in a way that is already done when doping
Molecular-beam epitaxy perhaps?
A friend of mine used to do this at Heriot-Watt before he retired. Have a look at some of the images on-line for stainless steel flange porn.
Like Star Trek, Iain Banks, Asimov, or Heinlein
More likely, Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
P.S., is the phrase "a rack packed full of high-end AI fear" an apposite typo?
I posted this here last year in a thread titled Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe
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.
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
There used to be licensing issue, too.
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".
> 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.
I hope that was 451 (Ray Bradbury reference).
Dependency, s/Nebraska/Moscow/
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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"
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.
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.
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.
I once had an email blocked by one university because it referenced The University of Sussex (or was it Essex?)
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.
"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."
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"
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 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.
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.
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.
