Posts by Chris Gray 1

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

Re: Nikola

Having little patience and a horrible memory, I didn't even try to find tools to use (poor memory => forever forgetting how to do the things I need to do). So, I just wrote a couple of C programs. "tnall" produced thumbnails (exec-ing a standard Linux image program to do the actual work of course). "mkpage" took a text file that listed the images for the rows on the page, possibly with individual footers, along with the text and header material, and created the static (table-full!) web page. Can't recall when I created the tools - it was a long time ago.

So, I didn't have to learn anything new, and putting up a webpage of images just required choosing the images, creating descriptions, creating the surrounding text, and deciding where it should link into my website. And yes, many would consider the pages ugly. Check the wayback machine for www.graysage.com .

Unfortunately, to keep my ISP from getting unhappy with me, I recently unpermitted most of the directories of pages. I do now have higher bandwidth, but its been over a week and the various crawlers are *still* trying to access now-unpermitted stuff!

Google's memory safety plan includes rehab for unsafe languages

If the language lets you...

I believe the argument that a lot of folks make is that if the programming language lets you do X, then programmers will do X. With languages with a lot of implicit operations (which I personally think C++ is), it can be difficult for even a good reviewer to spot all uses of X. So, if X is a bad thing, there will be bad things in a lot of code.

Hence the attractiveness, to many, of an entirely new language. It doesn't let you do X. Or if it does, it requires special syntax to enable its use, and warns about each and every such occurrence. The former is safer, since developers can wrap the compiler and filter out warnings.

Using a new language also has the benefit (and cost, of course) of forcing a rewrite of code. As most progammers know, rewriting code, even in the same programming language, often produces good improvement, and often bug fixes.

I am *not* a C++ guru, so I'll ask: would it be at all possible to modify compiler sources to produce such an alternate language?

(I've always started my languages/compilers from scratch, so have no experience in hacking existing compilers.)

Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight

LTS forever!

Same here on the LTS only.

By chance, my ancient laptop is currently unpacking/installing 24.04 right now.

I upgraded my internet, supposedly to 1G/200M. Testing shows flat 100Mbs both ways. Hmm. Even worse, they are now blocking SMTP and HTTP, so my domain is now pretty-much gone. Sniff. Ping works, so the new IP has propagated.

Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

Re: No unified inbox please!

I sort-of squinted at the config files and did monkey-see, monkey-do. Worked, too.

Then on one new machine I couldn't get the new installation to deal with anything except machine-local emails. That was years ago, so I can't give details. Eventually gave up and went with Postfix. That's been all good so far.

I actually still send some emails with /bin/mail. Alpine for attachments. Detest web mail.

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

Oh yesssssssss

Those who want me to spend money and waste time on this, upvote the idea. :-) As a Lego person and computer programmer, it would be required by my guild memberships to buy one and build one. Given the size of the tape, I wonder how much one can make it do? There isn't anywhere enough state to make a MIPS-3000 emulator to boot Linux on. Even with a tape large enough, it would likely take years to boot!

Oh, Zed release at: http://www.graysage.com/Zed/New

Altman reportedly asks Biden to back a slew of multi-gigawatt-scale AI datacenters

marketing?

Is he just ridiculously overasking in order to actually get something a lot smaller?

Not a fan of this current round of "AI" stuff. How about we actually put some smarts into it first?

Current stuff has its uses, but Altmann is way over in the crazy realm with this.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: A number of things wrong with this reply

Replying to myself. The MTS consortium had 8 members. A few others dabbled. Still not "a lot". See the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Terminal_System

System didn't actually include email. A fellow in the math department wrote an email system, "show:mail".

Re: A number of things wrong with this reply

"A lot of University mainframes"?????? My alma mater ran MTS (lots of memories of software built), and my recollection is that there were something like *four* universities which ran it.

But yes, it was a good system. Supported lots of terminals connected through a terminal concentrator (e.g. DECWriters), but also supported IBM-3270's and clones. I believe the number of active interactive users could range up to 500 and beyond. Ours was originally on an actual IBM box with 32Meg of RAM, but that eventually got upgraded to an Amdahl 470(?).

Xockets rockets Nvidia: Blackwell debut threatened by DPU patent claims

x87

The earliest I can think of were the floating point chips. The most recognizable name would be the x87 chips (e.g. 8087) from Intel, but my gut tells me that wasn't the earliest. Something about decimal math...

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: BeOS

I remember seeing the ads for BeBox in magazines. Seemed like a good thing. I found out on usenet, however, that system and libraries must use the C++ classes that Be defined in order to do much of anything. No real ABI. As a compiler-writer looking to port his stuff, that killed it for me. I stuck with Amiga's, then Linux.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Amiga all the way

Back in the 8-bit days I was drooling over the Apple-II for the simple reason it had a proper keyboard. Typing class in school and computers at the University meant that there was no way I was going to be happy on chicklet keyboards. (Like the friggen horrors on many of today's slim laptops!). But, I never could afford it.

I eventually was able to buy an early-ish Amiga 1000. The store I bought it from was not able to get the Amiga monitors right away, so they loaned me a small green-screen monitor. I kept the system in my work office (can't recall why!), and one thing it ran a lot of was a Mandelbrot program written in Basic. It was a looong time to produce a screen (in green) with that, but we did.

A friend and I started a software company, which became an official Amiga developer. He got his Amiga through that program. That company didn't stay on Amiga's long, however. I eventually went through A2000 (then it was A2500), A3000 and A4000T. In fact I ordered the A4000T a couple days *after* hearing that Commodore was going under - I was in the middle of all things Amiga (Draco, Empire(?)) and I had no interest in changing. Eventually I went straight to Red Hat Linux.

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

Lovely Beasts

I first used an 11/45 for an Operating Systems course. We each had a disk pack to play with. I have no recollection of what we were required to accomplish. :-)

Nice, simple, instruction set. Wrote the core of a Forth interpreter(?) in PDP-11 assembler.

A PDP-11/60 was my first non-mainframe code target for a compiler. I treated it as a stack machine, and proceeded to make it fail on my code. Turns out its microcode didn't like some of the instructions I generated. Then got permission to use the 11/45 and it worked!

80 years ago, IBM gave Harvard University one of the world's earliest computers

Solid!

Memories... some of us bought some of those from a surplus store. Those things were built solid - like any early IBM stuff. The local model railroad club used them for power control panels - the wires and plugs of appropriate plugboards worked quite well for it.

What I don't see in the Wikipedia picture is what we called "men". They were plugs that simply connected one hole with an adjacent hole. They had a "handle" with a top "head" on it.

No idea what happened to them - the building the club used is long gone.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: Amstrad 6128

RAM disk from banked memory? I guess its inevitable that someone else did that. I was quite proud of my version (no, it was never released - it depended on the DMA of the specific floppy controller, and the bank register of the specific dual-CPU card). And, it made using the machine much better - sooo much less disk drive whirring and thunking (mine were big 8" ones)!

Re: Theseus Ship

Ah, thank-you for verifying that CP/M didn't use command-line switches. That raised a bell when I read it. There was nothing stopping an individual program from using them, I expect. I can't recall how a program received command-line arguments, and I'm not going to go look at old Draco sources! I'm busy with more important stuff - watch that web directory in a few days.

Re: Alternate origin story

Hmm. You sure about CP/M on the COCO? COCO generally referred to the Radio Shack Colour Computer, which had a Motorola 6809 processor (it had an 8x8=>16 multiply!). I don't recall CP/M being ported to anything other than 8080/8085/Z-80. I had a COCO for a while, and it essentially just ran BASIC and games. The 6809 was a couple years after the 8080.

Re: My 1st yobbish was MP/M 8-16

Grr. Epson, not Epsom. I'm an old salt.

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

I didn't remember dBase-II swapping like that, but now that you mention it... I still have a dBase-II directory here on my Linux box, and I see a file called "dbaseovr.com" - that might be the overlay.

I used it to write 3 different store and/or inventory systems for local small companies. And looking, I see that I still have the source for all 3. Me, a pack rat? :-) Two have files like "012085$i.dbf" - I'm guessing those are test database files.

I also have 3 commercial games: Adventure, Enchanter, OrbQuest, and my own "Explore" game system - way better!!!

I used "VEdit" for editting. But, a friend bought a kit (which I helped build) for a CP/M computer. She didn't have an editor, so I wrote my Ded (Draco EDitor) for her. Not sure she ever used it much, but I switched to using it - I had seen microemacs able to handle multiple files in memory, so I made Ded do that, and that was enough to make me switch. It "compressed" files you editted - turned runs of spaces (like in source code) into a count.

Re: My 1st yobbish was MP/M 8-16

I had one of those boards in my system. It was a *very* expensive system - 20 slot S-100 box, dual 8" floppy box, Epsom MX-80 printer and a small terminal (Adds Viewpoint?), 1200 baud modem. I didn't have MP/M, but I remember trying it out at a local computer store.

I don't really know why, but I wrote an 8080 emulator for the 8088 side, and it actually ran some of the CP/M programs I had. A couple of games didn't work - maybe they used undocumented BIOS stuff. My Draco stuff *did* work, so maybe I was thinking about make an 8086 version of it - never did, though.

Fresh programmer's editor on Linux lies Zed ahead

Re: Competing claim

Thanks for the info.

I used to hang out on newsgroup comp.arch before my ISP dropped NNTP support, and it was the same time as a complex change of residence. But, about a decade ago there was a bit of discussion on that newsgroup.

I had briefly had a bit more up on my website, but didn't want to get bogged down with website issues, especially before I was ready for any kind of general release (and I'm still not).

Having the name linked to an editor with some aspects of a bad reputation is doubly unfortunate.

I'll go back into hiding now.

Re: Competing claim

I'm fine with the claim for the programming language. My editor, decades ago, was "ded" (Draco Editor), and I long since stopped caring about that. However, I have a lot of investment in "Zed" as my programming language, etc. Way too much to even think about coming up with and changing to another name.

Of course an El Reg comment is not the right place. Where is? I am completely absent from any "scene".

(Huge delay in responding - my ISP went down for several hours.)

Competing claim

You see my tag on this article. I am the Chris Gray who created the Draco programming language and utilities, first for the 8080 CPU on CP/M and later for the 68000 CPU on AmigaOS. I have done a few other programming languages and compilers. My current project (active for almost 25 years) is called Zed. It is somewhat Draco-like in syntax, but it is designed to be memory safe and yet efficient. Based on the timeline you see that this predates Rust by quite a bit.

The current version of the compiler only runs on Linux so far, but I expect running it under Windows WSL should be fine - I've run Zed-created X86-64 binaries there.

Currently, main execution is under the system's internal bytecode engine, but over the last several months, I've got X86-64 native code generation going, creating Linux Elf object files. I still use "gcc" as the "linker". The "zedc" binary (99.9% Zed code) needs to have the bytecode engine integrated into it, since much of the language and libraries use compile-time execution to do their work.

I hereby lay public claim to the name "Zed" for a programming language, compiler, tools, etc.

When will it be released? Who knows - I'm currently fiddling with my file disassembler - the idea is to provide tools needed for others to readily create code generators for other architectures - ARM64 and RISC-V being the initial thoughts. Any volunteers?

Note: since Zed is a safe programming language, my desire is that *all* of the system be written in itself, thus avoiding lots of questions about a safe language written in an unsafe one.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Pedestrian here

I've never owned a vehicle in my (now rather long) life. Always walked, taken public transit, or mooched rides from friends. Yes, it constrains where I live, but for the last few years walking through wooded-with-creek areas involves a one block walk, then down a path.

I *DON'T* want noisemakers on EVs. I want all of the remaining ICE vehicles to go away. I like quiet. In this urban setting, speeds are not highway speeds (although I'm surrounded by multilane roads).

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

Just a *few* obscenities

Try as I might, I couldn't get access to my Health Care records from my somewhat-out-of-date Linux machines. I really wanted to get to see that stuff. After a phone session with a quite polite and willing (and Indian-accented) help person, the conclusion is that they simply do not support Linux.

So, I ordered a new laptop from Amazon. Works fine. WSL is cool and runs my code. The advertisement crap, etc. is *very* annoying. Luckily, I'm here by myself, so the occasional "F**K OFF!" doesn't bother anyone.

I still struggle with using the trackpad - instructions I found online are on my desktop.

I saw somewhere what to do to get WSL to source my .Xresources on startup, but can't find it now. Anyone know what to do there?

Python, Flutter teams latest on the Google chopping block

Re: > it is there to make PROFITS

HTMX? Never heard of it. Neither has Wikipedia. Good link?

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Pay El Reg?

Reading all this made me feel guilty. Decided its time for a payment to El Reg. How do I do that?

I don't run an ad-blocker, I run NoScript. I'm fine with ads, unless they are ugly video ones, but I don't want to run scripts in my browser from all over the web.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Highly enjoyable read

Hey, I resemble that comment!

(How many recall that usage? :-) )

Even though I don't have a beard - they itch too much.

Re: What Is A “Workstation”?

I was thinking I hadn't ever worked on a system that worked that way, and then realized that I had. I was in a classroom with an Amiga screen projected on a monitor. I had my Amiga (3000?) there running an AmigaMUD server. Craig was my volunteer running a client connected over a serial port. We were interacting for a while. Then something occurred to me, and I live-edited the scenerio programming to reverse the direction of his movement arrow keys. Heh! Since AmigaMUD automatically persisted everything, any screwup could have made the game unplayable. However, I think you could always get into "god"/"wizard"/"programmer" mode and then fix things.

Disagree

The problem with those dynamic languages is that using them doesn't scale well. The human mind can only encompass so much at a time, and what would have been produced in those languages would not have been maintainable - complex programs were basically only comprehensible for a short time by the mind that produced them.

Where programming languages are going now is towards helping the human brain deal with complexity. Issues like the low-level problems when programming with simple C are pretty much solved - it just takes time for the solutions to spread out and replace previous tools. And, the new solutions don't introduce much overhead - far less so than doing everything dynamically.

All IMHO of course!

Mozilla decides Trusted Types is a worthy security feature

Strong Typing

When a new opportunity for programming/scripting arises, they are often done with "dynamic" typing because that is easier to use and is thought to be more powerful.

Several years later and that new programming area starts to mature, and programmers in the area (and users!) start to realize the inherent weakness of that sort of stuff. Protections are added as things mature. Humans are fallible - as projects in a given area get more and more complex, fallible humans more and more often create subtle security holes which bad guys can exploit for money.

A couple of examples:

C playing free and loose with pointers and arrays ... C++ helps ... stronger typing and array/pointer protections come about in new languages, and those languages get adopted more and more. E.g. Rust, dlang.

Javascipt => Typescript

And now we have web scripting abominations being tackled.

Good!

I'm ready to bathe in the upcoming flames.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Excellent

Thanks for pointing those out. I think I never got a reply message the last time I tried Eternal September (with gnus), and had since forgotten about it. Maybe the web-based ones will work better for me.

I do miss comp.arch !

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

seen it

I see both delays now. I run Firefox, but I do not block ads. I'm perfectly OK with watching a bit of advertisement to help pay for the service. What I *do* block, using "NoScript", is Javascript from places I do not want running software on my computer. That includes all "social media" sites. And "googletagletmanager". And, I've had almost 3400 views on my posted videos. Yeah, I know, that's miniscule, but still... :-)

Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff

the example

You can see how it messed up with the example picture. The image shows a container labelled as a 600ml glass (look on the left). The graduated markings only go upto 400ml. Someone with actual *understanding* will probably say 400ml, but might also misinterpret what the question actually is and say 600ml. Without understanding the actual norms of measurement, 600ml is the right answer, I think. Similar for someone who isn't good at English - "highest amount this class measures" versus "amount this glass holds".

Note that the computer understood the mis-stated question ("class", not "glass").

Japan cruises ahead with drive-thru EV charging trial

Re: Vehicle ID based charging

I'll consume a bit of flamebait....

"acceleration"

You do recall the early stories about how the Tesla Model S beat the gas supercars in 0-60 acceleration?

Re: Wow

Just the one. Although its got some tape around it near the mini-USB.

Re: Wow

These things are worth trying, but I think there have been lots of questions about practicality, efficiency and safety.

Is wear and tear on connectors that big an issue? I know the scale is completely different, but my cellphone has survived 10 or so years of every-second-day charging, using just a micro-USB. Its on its 3rd battery.

Also, I don't know in general, but the electric buses we have here use an overhead charging system where a pantograph-like thing raises up from the roof of the bus to contact charging bars in the ceiling of the bus garage ("bus barn"). When down, they are disguised from paranoid folks by some higher side "wings" on the bus.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Re: Ugh!

I know I'm incredibly old-fashioned, but it seems to me to be more efficient if there is only one set of "drawing commands" on the system, rather than umpteen. There has to be at least one, and it makes more sense to me to have it in the server, which is closer to the hardware, than in each client. The clients, or at least the huge libraries they use, have to have a lot of code to find out from the server what the hardware is like and what facilities it has. Why implement/duplicate all that?

You and I differ over "lightweight". Lightweight to me concerns the total amount of code involved in accomplishing something safely and correctly. Adding bloated stuff with its own untyped programming language is just plain wrong to me.

If X clients are communicating with the server via sockets, how on earth can they see what other clients are doing? They can likely infer a bit based on what the window manager tells them, but that's about it.

With a system using shared memory between the server and its clients, visibility is much higher, and it is that which I very strongly dislike.

Have you guessed that I have no need whatsoever for high performance games and fancy rendering?

Ugh!

Personally I use very little of the capability of any desktop manager. I just don't need them in my usage pattern. What I do need is knowing that any problems I encounter in my code are likely my fault, and not the fault of some other huge, unsafely-written blob of code that insists on having read-write access to my address space. In other words, I insist on talking to a display system only through sockets. Unless there is some other mechanism that allows the communication without granting it any access to stuff I care about?

Last time this topic came up, I think I heard about something called "X-Wayland"(?) that sits on top of Wayland and provides the X socket interface to clients to use the desktop. That I can put up with, although it sounds like a kludge and a resource hog.

Red Hat retires mailing list, leaving Linux loyalists to read between the lines

Efficiency

This old goat remembers when CPU power had to be carefully shepherded. In that environment, a system that gets interrupts for work requests is more efficient than one that requires polling for work. Much less looping around doing nothing, when there are background things that also want attention.

As the author sort-of mentions, email is an interrupt which you can choose to ignore; forums, web-pages, etc. require polling.

The difference here is that it is the human's attention that is being wasted by polling, not CPU cycles.

Scientists suggest possible solution to space-induced bone loss

Re: ...treatment for brain changes and other detrimental health effects of space exposure...

Hmm. A bunch of the early graphics on B-5 were done on Amigas with Video Toasters. I didn't have a Toaster, but my guess is that they didn't do 1080P resolution. So, blu ray would require upscanning. Might mess up the pattern done on the Vorlon ships. I've had B-5 on DVD for years, and with the strikes on in Hollywood, it might be time to play them again. Either that or continue on with "Murder She Wrote".

US amends hypersonic weapons strategy: If you can't zoom with 'em, boom 'em

Pebbles

Given how fast the hypersonic stuff is going, can't you "just" arrange to have a bunch of very hard "pebbles" in front of it? Ideally the pebbles are moving in an arc to maximize their interception likelihood. How about a bit of spent uranium as their core, even though that won't be viewed very well by those living below.

This profiler chatbot promises to help speed up your Python – we can believe it

Usually not a good idea

1) The python runtime environment may not have enough information available about the program ("introspection") to do that.

2) The runtime required to do the optimization may be well be a lot bigger than the actual runtime, so the whole is much slower.

3) Why spend all that extra effort (runtime) each time you run the program, when doing it once yields better runtime for all runs?

That said, there *may* be situations where what you suggest is useful.

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

Enough?

Only 2 million times more RAM? Are they sure that's enough, given how software is written nowadays?

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

Must be optional

Might I suggest some rules for such a tiler:

If the window has been manually resized and moved by the user, then *never* move or resize it automatically.

If the window has had a given size/position for a long time and is used often, then *never* move/resize it automatically.

I used to use Gnome2. Gnome3 came. Hated it. Found Mate. Still using it more than a decade later.

Why? I do not spend time interacting with the window manager. Monitor is old 1280 x 1024, in portrait mode. It has the tool, etc. bar vertically on the right. That leaves room for a pair of 80 column, full height windows side by side. The right hand one is Gnu emacs. The left hand one is a shell. Buffers in emacs come and go. Testing of my code, email, file handling, etc. run in the left window. A shell buffer in emacs is also used, but tends to be for things that don't produce a lot of output.

If a window manager that I cannot control ever fiddles with those two windows just because I temporarily open up another window, then I will find where the developer lives.... :-)

Web browser? That means I'm taking a break from programming - the two main windows are iconified.

Lately I've often had a PDF viewer for the X86-64 architecture active, but it comes and goes iconified as needed.

I do not want a system that relies on my very poor memory to find key combinations or weird names to control my system and run things. Give me menus!!!!

OctoX is a radical Rust implementation of a very old OS for RISC-V

Re: You are not expected to understand this.

Agreed. Its cool, but not terrible. *Of course* the process ending call does not return. Even though its existence as a standard C call makes it look like it should if you don't actually read it.

I did similar things a couple of times for thread termination. It was a bit of a thrill to watch them work, I will admit!

When I first looked into an old Linux kernel (writing code for hardware to plug into a bus and work shared-memory-wise with the kernel), I was definitely disturbed to see that it included the same device header file(s) twice. Its been years, but I think the first time was to add the devices to the device tables(s), and the second time was to compile the actual driver code. Doing it that way meant that it was all in one file, so was less likely to get broken, but it sure broke expectations! Dunno if it still works that way.

SpaceX says, sure, Starship blew up but you can forget about the rest of that lawsuit

Re: Read the fine print!!

Exactly! A "way" doesn't have to be safe or legal does it? Just find the closest un-fenced-off spot and drive your massive SUV thingy in the right direction until you either get there or it stops moving.

On second thought - fence, what fence?

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

emacsclient?

Do any of these fancy email clients let you use $EDITOR to edit your email? (Al)pine does, and that is the main reason why I stick with it.

'Strictly limit' remote desktop – unless you like catching BianLian ransomware

Passwords

It is only briefly mentioned, but there does not appear to be a bug directly involved - the baddies just guess passwords. So, perhaps the most important lesson is to use better passwords!

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Hmmm

Was the copter unreliable because of a long history of software patches not installed, or were the patches not installed because of a long history of unreliability leading to no interest in maintaining them?

Perhaps just a vicious circle of at least those two.

The return of the classic Flying Toasters screensaver

turn it off

I just looked, and indeed my 6(?) year old Linux release does have xscreensaver installed. But, I never use it.

Instead, I long ago put a widget in Ubuntu Mate's task/status/menu bar thingy that executes the following script:

#! /bin/bash

sleep 10

xset dpms force off

When I'm heading away from the computer I click on the widget (I use the screensaver icon for it), move the mouse pointer to somewhere out of the way, and go. 10 seconds later, X tells the monitor to go inactive. Which it does, saving screen *and* power.