Blogroll Updates

I updated my blogroll project on GitHub.  The real problem is that my feed reader at work is broken, so I got NetNewsWire at home and imported the feeds from my blogroll project.  Consequently:

mjg59’s URL has been updated to follow the blog’s move.

nullprogram was removed for becoming an AI-only feed.  I was reading it to expand my technical horizons, and it is no longer technical.  Something to ponder: if an LLM is so good that “no code” is practical, why would anyone even need a CMake debugger, instead of asking their LLM to go fix it?

The AWS CodeDeploy Agent was removed from the releases because we no longer depend on it.  The agent was always last to support an Ubuntu LTS, often delaying many months when everyone else was ready within weeks.  The whole time, there would be either no communication, or “we’ll get it this month” replies that would be proven extremely false.  This dissatisfaction limited CodeBuild to only one system, which is now mothballed, and if it ever comes back, it will be on ECS/Fargate.

jquery-color was also removed because we no longer depend on it… or if we do, it should not be hard to make a pure CSS replacement.  jquery itself lives on in “old-foo”, which I believe is showing just a couple of admin-only pages under the otherwise-React-based Foo2 intranet site.

The actual problem with the feed reader at work is that Akregator from Flathub has decided that it can’t access its feeds in ~/.var/app/..., which seems to imply some sort of packaging error.  But it’s been going on for enough weeks that I finally took action.  I had chosen Flatpak because the in-repo version regularly deleted its feeds, so going back isn’t an option.  Ubuntu effectively never updates software once the release has been shipped.

systemd took my VPS offline for five days

systemd's randomized device names changed, so enp0s3 no longer matched enp0s4, and the network didn't come up.  It took me a bit to notice, hence the five days.  I don't even know if it's a problem with a new kernel or if the provider's virtio_net configuration changed, because journalctl basically locks up when trying to look three or more boots back.  Alas!

It took so long to notice because of spam, more or less. I normally look at mail on my phone and respond (if not urgent) from the desktop, but under siege by a 1:40 ham-to-spam ratio, I quit looking at my phone. Unfortunately, I'm also out of the habit of opening Thunderbird unprompted on the desktop.

Pop!_OS ‘Unboxing’ Experience

Editor’s Note: This article does not appear to have been published when written, about two weeks into using and customizing Pop!_OS.  This entry contains the original draft, followed by the two-month update.

Initial Thoughts

It took me a while to get settled into Pop!_OS on the new work laptop.  Of course, after leaving a fairly vanilla Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” for Windows in 2012, and using Mac OS X (Mountain Lion through Catalina) at work over roughly the same time period, there was bound to be an adjustment period.  I will focus on bits of the user experience that really stand out as being subpar here; no “oh no, the shortcut is different.”

(For a snapshot of the times: Ubuntu 10.04 would have been using Gnome 2.30, Firefox 3.6, Python 2.6, and Linux 2.6.32.  KDE 4.4 was available, marking Canonical’s first LTS with a KDE 4 version.  It was the first to abandon brown-and-orange as the color theme.  Judging by reviews, the Zune Marketplace still existed at that time, too.)

Perhaps the first thing I noticed was the lack of a maximize button on the windows.  This seemed particularly weird, because the functionality was still present with a double-click in the title bar, or Super+M.  It would be a few days before I would accidentally scroll the settings pane and reveal toggles for both Minimize and Maximize buttons.  The settings window and the hidden scrollbar had conspired to look exactly like a non-scrollable window.

Another peculiarity is the lack of some settings within Settings: both the “Extensions” and “Startup Applications” are completely separate.  Extensions have their own settings pages within that app, except that COSMIC components may not have settings, or may have a settings page with a message that they can be configured from the Desktop section in the Settings app.

Bear in mind that I mostly haven’t used Gnome in a decade, particularly because Gnome 3 upended everything.  (I would later learn that some of this was aping the Mac instead of aping Windows; hurrah for open source “innovation.”) Thus, I’m not entirely sure of what the boundary between Gnome and Pop!_OS’ customizations are, but the end result is rather confusing.  Is this layout logical to someone, or am I looking at a manifestation of Conway’s Law?

Two Month Update

I think it’s Conway’s Law.  It’s rather under-documented which component provides which features, but through experimentally turning Pop Shell off and on, I have learned that it is responsible for:

1. The good/nice launcher on Super+/
2. The “focus the window in a direction” shortcuts, Super+(Arrow key)
3. The window-tiling menu/feature, shown in the system menu area

Getting information on Pop!_OS has been a bit of a problem.  Because it partially customizes Gnome, information on the internet for Gnome may not apply.  Because it is semi-modular, if any of the Pop-specific components are turned off, then information about Pop may also not apply.  Although, that is kind of my fault for not leaving everything on.

However, there’s also a curious benefit to having multiple systems in use: if one breaks, the other may still work.  At some point, launching Flatpaks (which I have put in the system repository) via the Dock started freezing the UI for a bit, not even responding to mouse-move. On the other hand, launching them through Pop Shell’s Super+/ launcher causes no trouble whatsoever.

Having lived at many places on the “up-to-date” vs “actually works” spectrum, and being old and grumpy, my own preference is for something more-working than Pop!_OS, even if it’s less up-to-date.  It might be a while before I go to the effort, though, partly because this is my first EFI/secure boot system, and I don’t want to break it.  Work depends on this hardware.

Void Linux first impressions

Note: Void Linux may have updated Firefox since this post was originally drafted on 2022-09-25.  The point remains that it was terribly outdated when observed.

I tried Void Linux… twice.  The first time, in VirtualBox, I got DenverCoder’d: the guest additions package was missing, and none of the incantations would bring it out of hiding.  I even copied and pasted the package name to ensure no typos were made.

The next attempt, I put it in virt-manager.  After installing, there was an surprisingly large system update required, which only brought Firefox forward to 91.10.0 ESR.  Today, the entire 91.x branch is no longer being updated (as Firefox 105 and 102.3 ESR have been released), and even “.10” is three releases behind.

This does not bode well for the security of the piece of software that will face the most hostile code.

Beyond that, the keyboard layout was an extreme usability problem.  I haven’t typed on Qwerty as a primary layout in 20 years, and it turns out that I’m losing the ability to switch my brain back to Qwerty at all.  Despite choosing the Dvorak variant in the installer (and the live environment via setxkbmap), the installed system needed some particularly arcane config editing to get Dvorak fully in place.  X11 runs without an Xorg.conf, so one is expected to create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and drop a fragment in there, instead, which must be written from scratch.  There were no on-disk examples found.

I will note that I could have set XFCE itself to use Dvorak instead of the system settings, but that would not have altered the login screen.

Despite the XFCE+musl installer being over 800 MB, it did not install an email client.  In fact, it seems like there are only settings, Firefox, and a terminal.  Maybe the installer has great potential for size reduction.

I still don’t know what the point of XBPS is.  It doesn’t seem to be particularly interesting from a user perspective.  The options remind me of pacman but that’s about it.

In any case, like Puppy, I’ve reached the point where I don’t know what to do with the installation next, because I didn’t have plans for it from the start. I just wanted to get a feeling for it.  I know they wrote their own package manager (which looks suspiciously similar to pacman at the UI level), but I don’t really know why. Nothing jumps out as being particularly better/different about it.

Puppy Linux First Impressions

I’ve used a lot of mainstream systems.  For the past 10 years, my primary desktops have been Mac (work) and Windows (home); before then, I spent over a decade moving through Red Hat 7, FreeBSD 4, Gentoo, Kubuntu 7.04, and regular Ubuntu through 10.04.  I spent memorable chunks of time using fwvm2, WindowMaker, Gnome 1, and KDE 3.  After an experiment with Amazon Linux 1, work standardized on Ubuntu for servers, starting with 14.04.

I say all this to say, I had some warning that Puppy Linux™ was different; there was something about filesystem “layers” and, in theory, being able to build your own like a mixtape. Well, it delivered on being different.

Because first, I had to set up my network.  I found out that a decent chunk of the help is actually online, so I was greeted with Pale Moon telling me “server not found” a few times.  I had the driver files available, but I didn’t have the devx or kernel-sources SFS layers.  I managed to find them on SourceForge, and once the driver installed (quite seamlessly, no-dkms mode), I finally got a network configured with the most-advanced wizard.  It seems that is the only place to be offered to allow WPA2 to be used with the device, since it (or its driver?) isn’t allow-listed already.

I updated Pale Moon, and then, since I was online, why not visit tumblr?  The dash rendered fine, albeit chewing on 100% of a CPU core, but then asking to make a new post crashes (white screen) once the editor loads.  I did not get to announce to the world that I was using Puppy, from Puppy.

(Because my toolchain for Decoded Node posts is on Windows, I am not making this post from Puppy, either.)

The next thing I need to do is figure out what I want to do with this thing. I don’t really have a goal for it yet.

Stream Programming, Without Streams

Editor’s note: Following is a brief draft from two years ago.  I’m cleaning out the backlog and faking HUGE POST COUNTS!! for 2018, I guess.

I wrote before that I don't “use” stream programming, but I've come to realize that it's still how I think of algorithms and for loops.  Input enters at the top, gets transformed in the middle, and yields output at the bottom.

It's like I look at a foreach loop as an in-line lambda function.  The concept may not be explicitly named, and the composition of steps built into lower-level control flow… but inside my head, it's still a “sequence of operations” on a “stream of data.”

There doesn't seem to be much benefit to building up “real” streams in a language that doesn't have them either built-in or in the standard library. It creates another layer where the things that have been built can only interoperate with themselves, and a series of transformations can no longer share state.  And, a PHP array can be passed to any array_* function, where (last I even checked) our handmade streams or Iterators cannot.

Scaling

How it feels when we try to procure stuff. Maybe we’re just a personal sized business?

This is only getting worse, as each AWS hardware generation raises the machine size floor.

My Blogger Pipeline

For the past couple of years, I’ve been uncomfortable with the notion of Google watching my every thought as I type into a draft on the Blogger site. (Since a post whose working title was “VPNs are hard,” apparently.)

As a coder, everything can be solved with the code-hammer, so I wrote 7 KB of PHP. Now, I can write locally in Markdown, then run markup-menu.php.  This is a stupidly simple program that takes a unique filename prefix, finds the matching *.md file, and passes it to the much larger markup.php.

That program takes a file, preprocesses the Markdown a bit for compatibility with Blogger’s “preserve line breaks” setting, and post-processes the resulting HTML to iron out a few more quirks.  That file can be copypasta’d into Blogger.

Once there, it gets Blogger dressing like tags, then I click Preview.  If nothing’s wrong, it gets posted, as if it sprang fully formed from my head into Blogger.

Server Cleanup

Some stuff on sapphirepaw.org has been 404’d into the dustbin of history. Pretty much everything from before 2010 is gone now, much of it ‘unlisted.’ Stuff like bug reports on pre-Blink Opera and PHP 5.2, pictures from events I attended and talks I gave, and my wallpaper section. The latter was built as a demo/learning PHP app, and it turned out to be really timely in 2005. It was something I could point at and say, “I built that in PHP/MySQL,” right when I was looking for my first tech job. But it’s not something I’ve been at all interested in updating since—either code or data—so I removed it.

Along with those changes, the remaining pages are static now. I used to have a tiny little framework that wrapped page content with header, navigation, and footer, configured by a little PHP block in the source, then served the page. But there’s no real need to render that on every request, so I turned the framework into a static site generator. All the links get rewritten, too. The PHP URLs still work, but the server simply issues redirections to the static pages.

There was one hitch to the main process: libxml2 (PHP's DOMDocument->loadHTML()) doesn't recognize HTML5, only HTML 4.0. I had to figure out how to use the Masterminds HTML5 parser instead.

There was one page I wanted to keep (for now) that was dealing with more dynamic content, and that was termitheme’s themes.php page. That had to be converted to SQLite for the site builder to use local data instead of a MySQL connection.

I finally deleted all the old themes and graphics from /css, too, because my sense of design has matured along with the capabilities of CSS over the years. Would I ever resurrect the deep blue theme of years past? It would look dated. I'd have to design a new, modern theme (merely inspired by the old one) anyway.

Bitcoin

I used to regret, just a little bit, not getting into Bitcoin as soon as I'd heard about it (2012?)  But, I probably would have bought via Mt. Gox given their largeness and fame at the time.

1. Gox is missing 850,000 BTC, of which 750,000 belong to customers.  Per bankruptcy filing.
2. Gox is also missing 2.8 billion yen, about 27.6 million USD today.  Per bankruptcy filing.
3. Hackers claim to have scans of passports that were submitted to Gox.  Per anonymous group that has at least two bits of inside info (call recording, source code).

Now I'm more relieved than anything.  It's like I dodged bullets by not showing up at the scene of the crime.

The Forgotten Gem: LDAP

I keep wanting a "configuration lookup service" with the following properties:

• Optimized for a read-heavy workload (config stays the same for months).
• Hierarchical structure (by data center, by server group, by specific host if necessary).
• Queryable at any level.

From what I understand, it looks like this LDAP was practically designed for this.  But I've never seen anyone use it for anything but user accounts, which seems like kind of a waste.

Random Idea: BBU SSD

Given that RAM doesn't seem to be that expensive anymore (there are plenty of choices for 2GB DDR3 sticks around $20 at NewEgg right now), why not put a bit more onboard an SSD along with a small rechargeable battery?

The extended RAM would be dedicated to a large page cache, which would do its best to hold frequently-written data (to extend the flash life by avoiding writes to it for as long as possible.)  A landing zone the size of this cache would be reserved in the NAND, and in event of sudden power loss, the pages pending in the DRAM would be dumped into the landing zone under battery power.

Presumably, the 400+ MB/s that current SSDs quote for sequential writes involve the overhead of the OS, host interface, and wear-leveling scheme, and represents a lower bound on performance of the panic save.  On a 2A drive writing 2.00 GB, also intended to be conservative numbers, 5.12 seconds of power is required, for consumption of 170 mAh.

(If the manufacturer quoted their transfer speed in SI and I'm actually writing GiB of data, those numbers change to 382 MiB/s yielding 5.37 seconds of transfer time and 179 mAh of power.  No big deal.)

It's All Programming

Programming codifies a process into something that can be executed on a machine.  But this is psychologically no different than codifying any other process into a set of rules for any interpreter, not necessarily mechanical.

The link between programming code and law has been noted in the past: the laws try to leave no room for argument, so they become long, and subject to similar problems as computer code.  Particularly unintended consequences: witness the spate of sexting prosecutions that try to brand teens as sex offenders for a decade for sending nude—or sometimes even just swimsuit—pics to their significant other.

Laws writ small are the ordinary rules of everyday life.  Those Dilbert moments where you receive multiple conflicting rules?  Those are bugs.

Bugs in Production

The amount that a bug hitting production annoys me turns out to be proportional to log(affected_users / time) * stupidity_of(bug).  If nobody can use the core functionality of the app because of something that would have failed a perl -c check, that yields a lot more angst than "some non-critical task doesn't work for one (uniquely configured) client when the day of the month is 29 or more," even though the latter is often more difficult to diagnose.

Yeah.  I crashed our site the other day over a trivial logging change, intended to gather debugging information for a rare condition of the latter sort.  It was so trivial it couldn't possibly go wrong, meaning stupidity_of(bug) was quite large.

An Exercise in Optimizing PHP

Last winter, I was optimizing a PHP reporting script for no real reason besides practicing optimization.

Add Multiply Exponentiate Tetrate

A random thought occurred to me today:

1. Multiplication is iterated addition.  (= (* 5 4) (reduce + (take 4 (repeat 5))))
2. Exponentiation is iterated multiplication.  (= (expt 5 4) (reduce * (take 4 (repeat 5)))) ; if you've imported clojure.contrib.math/expt
3. So what do you get if you iterate exponentiation?  Is it useful?

Another way to look at the question is: logarithms strength-reduce by one level, hence the log rules like (= (+ (log a) (log b)) (log (* a b))) and the definition of log as the inverse of exponentiation, just as division and subtraction invert multiplication and addition.  What, then, is the law for (expt (log a) (log b))?  Again, this should be the log of our mystery operation on a and b.

It turns out Wikipedia has me covered.  A tiny little section on the Exponentiation page links off to tetration, Ackermann function, and Knuth's up-arrow notation.  There goes my night.

(Bonus: I finally have all the background to understand the third panel of xkcd 207. #latetotheparty)