Planet Linux Australia

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Tim Serong — TANSTAAFL

It’s been a little over a year since our Redflow ZCell battery and Victron Energy inverter/charger kit were installed on our existing 5.94kW solar array. Now that we’re past the Southern Hemisphere spring equinox it seems like an opportune time to review the numbers and try to see exactly how the system has performed over its first full year. For background information on what all the pieces are and what they do, see my earlier post, Go With The Flow.

As we look at the figures for the year, it’s worth keeping in mind what we’re using the battery for, and how we’re doing it. Naturally we’re using it to store PV generated electricity for later use when the sun’s not shining. We are also charging the battery from the grid at certain times so it can be drawn down if necessary during peak times, for example I set up a small overnight charge to ensure there was power for the weekday morning peak, when the sun isn’t really happening yet, but grid power is more than twice as expensive. More recently in the winter months, I experimented with keeping the battery full with scheduled charges during most non-peak times. This involved quite a bit more grid charging, but got us through a couple of three hour grid outages without a hitch during some severe weather in August.

I spent some time going through data from the VRM portal for the last year, and correlating that with current bills from Aurora energy, and then I tried to compare our last year of usage with a battery, to the previous three years of usage without a battery. For reasons that will become apparent later, this turned out to be a massive pain in the ass, so I’m going to start by looking only at what we can see in the VRM portal for the past year.

The VRM portal has three summary views: System Overview, Consumption and Solar. System Overview tells us overall how much total power was pulled from the grid, how much was exported to the grid, how much was produced locally, and how much was consumed by our loads. The Consumption view (which I wish they’d named “Loads”, because I think that would be clearer) gives us the same consumption figure, but tells us how much of that came from the grid, vs. what came from the battery vs. what came from solar. The Solar view tells us how much PV generation went to the grid, how much went to the battery, and how much was used directly. There is some overlap in the figures from these three views, but there are also some interesting discrepancies, notably: the “From Grid” and “To Grid” figures shown under System Overview are higher than what’s shown in the Consumption and Solar views. But, let’s start by looking at the Consumption and Solar views, because those tell us what the system gives us, and what we’re using. I’ll come back after that to the System Overview, which is where things start to get weird and we discover what the system costs to run.

The VRM portal lets you chose any date range you like to get historical figures and bar charts. It also gives you pie charts of the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days and 365 days. To make the figures and bar charts match the pie charts, the year we’re analysing starts at 4pm on September 25, 2021 and ends at 4pm on September 25, 2022, because that’s exactly when I took the following screenshots. This means we get a partial September at each end of the bar chart. I’m sorry about that.

Here’s the Consumption view:

Consumption view from VRM portal, 2021-09-25 16:00 – 2022-09-25 16:00

This shows us that in the last 12 months, our loads consumed 10,849kWh of electricity. Of that, 54% (5,848kWh) came from the grid, 23% (2,506kWh) came direct from solar PV and the final 23% (2,494kWh) came from the battery.

From the rough curve of the bar chart we can see that our consumption is lower in the summer months and higher in the winter months. I can’t say for certain, but I have to assume that’s largely due to heating. The low in February was 638kWh (an average of 22.8kWh/day). The high in July was 1,118kWh (average 36kWh/day).

Now let’s look at the Solar view:

Solar view from VRM portal, 2021-09-25 16:00 – 2022-09-25 16:00

In that same time period we generated 5,640kWh with our solar array, of which 44% (2,506kWh) was used directly by our loads, 43% (2,418kWh) went into the battery and 13% (716kWh) was exported to the grid.

Unsurprisingly our generation is significantly higher in summer than in winter. We got 956kWh (average 30kWh/day) in December but only 161kWh (5.3kWh/day) in June. Peak summer figures like that mean we’ll theoretically be able to do without grid power at all during that period once we get a second ZCell (note that we’re still exporting to the grid in December – that’s because we’ve got more generation capacity than storage). The winter figures clearly indicate that there’s no way we can provide anywhere near all our own power at that time of year with our current generation capacity and loads.

Now look closely at the summer months (December, January and February). There should be a nice curve evident there from December to March, but instead January and February form a weird dip. This is because we were without solar generation for three weeks from January 30 – February 11 due to replacing a faulty MPPT. Based on figures from previous years, I suspect we lost 500-600kWh of potential generation in that period.

Another interesting thing is that if we compare “To Battery” on the Solar view (2,418kWh) with “From Battery” on the Consumption view (2,494kWh), we see that our loads consumed 76kWh more from the battery than we actually put into it with solar generation. This discrepancy is due to the fact that in addition to charging the battery from solar, we’ve also been charging it from the grid at certain times, but the amount of power sent to the battery from the grid isn’t broken out explicitly anywhere in the VRM portal.

Now let’s look at the System Overview:

System Overview view from VRM portal, 2021-09-25 16:00 – 2022-09-25 16:00

Here we see the same figures for “Production” (5,640kWh) and “Consumption” (10,849kWh) as were in the Consumption and Solar views, and the bar chart shows the same consumption and generation curves (ignore the blue overlay and line which indicate battery minimum/maximum and average state of charge – that information is largely meaningless at this scale, given we cycle the battery completely every day).

Now look at “To Grid” and “From Grid”. “To Grid” is 754 kWh, i.e. we somehow sent 38kWh more to the grid than came from solar. “From Grid”, at 8,531kWh, is a whopping 2,683kWh more than the 5,848kWh grid power consumed by our loads (i.e. close to half as much again).

So, what’s going on here?

One factor is that we’re charging the battery from the grid at certain times. Initially that was a few hours overnight and a few hours in the afternoon on weekdays, although the afternoon charge is obviously also provided by the solar if the sun is shining. For all of July, August and most of September though I was using a charge schedule to keep the battery full except for peak times and maintenance cycle nights, which meant quite a bit more grid charging overnight than earlier in the year, as well as grid charging most of the day during days with no or minimal sunshine. Grid power sent to the battery isn’t visible in the “From Grid” figure on the Consumption view – that view shows only our loads, i.e. the equipment the system is powering – but it is part of the “From Grid” figure in the System Overview.

Similarly, some of the power we export to the grid is actually exported from the battery, as opposed to being exported from solar generation. That usually only happens during maintenance cycles when our loads aren’t enough to draw the battery down at the desired discharge rate. But again, same thing, that figure is present here on the system overview page as part of “To Grid”, but of course is not part of the “To Grid” figure on the Solar view.

Another factor is that the system itself needs some amount of power to operate. The Victron kit (the MultiPlus II Inverter/Chargers, the Cerbo GX, the MPPT) use some small amount of power themselves. The ZCell battery also requires power to operate its pumps and fans. When the sun is out this power can of course come from solar. When solar power is not available, power to run the system needs to come from some combination of the remaining charge in the battery, and the grid.

On that note, I did a little experiment to see how much power the system uses just to operate. On July 9 (which happened to be a maintenance cycle day), I disabled all scheduled battery charges, and I shut off the DC isolators for the solar PV, so the battery would remain online (pumps and fans running) but empty for all of July 10. The following day I went and checked the figures on the System Overview, which showed we drew 35kWh, but that our consumption was 33kWh. So, together, the battery doing nothing other than running its pumps and fans, plus the Multis doing nothing other than passing grid power through, used 2kWh of power in 24 hours. Over a year, that’s 730kWh. As mentioned above, ordinarily some of that will be sourced from mains and some from solar, but if we look at the total power that came into the system as a whole (5,640kWh from solar + 8,531kWh from the grid = 14,171kWh), 730kWh is just slightly over 5% of that.

The final factor in play is that a certain amount of power is naturally lost due to conversion at various points. The ZCell has a maximum 80% DC-DC stack efficiency, meaning in the absolute best case if you want to get 10kW out of it, you have to put 12.5kW in. In reality you’ll never hit the best case: the lifetime charge and discharge figures the BMS currenly shows for our ZCell are 4,423 and 3,336kWh respectively, which is a bit over 75%. The Multis have a maximum efficiency of 96% when doing their invert/charge dance, so if we grid charge the battery, we lose at least 4% on the way in, and at least 4% on the way out as well, going to and from AC/DC. Again, in reality that loss will be higher than 4% each way, because 96% is the maximum efficiency.

A bunch of the stuff above just doesn’t apply to the previous system with the ABB inverter and no battery. I also don’t have anything like as much detailed data to go on for the old system, which makes comparing performance with the new system fiendishly difficult. The best comparison I’ve been able to come up with so far involves looking at total power input to the system (power from grid plus solar generation), total consumption by loads (i.e. actual locally usable power), and total power exported.

Prior to the Victron gear and Redflow battery installation, I had grid import and export figures from my Aurora Energy bills, and I had total generation figures from the ABB inverter. From this I can synthesise what are hopefully reasonably accurate load consumption figures by adding adding grid input to total PV generation minus grid export.

I had hoped to do this analysis on a quarterly basis to line up with Aurora bills, because then I would also be able to see how seasonal solar generation and usage went up and down. Unfortunately the billing for 2020 and 2021 was totally screwed up by the COVID-19 pandemic, because there were two quarters during which nobody was coming out to read the electricity meter. The bills for those quarters stated estimated usage (i.e. were wrong, especially given they estimated grid export as zero), with subsequent quarters correcting the figures. I have no way to reliably correlate that mess with my PV generation figures, except on an annual basis. Also, using billing periods from pre-battery years, the closest I can get to the September 25 based 2021-2022 year I’m looking at now is billing periods starting and ending in mid-August. But, that’s close enough. We’ve still got four pretty much back-to-back 12 month periods to look at.

YearGrid InSolar InTotal InLoadsExport
2018-20199,0316,68215,71311,8273,886
2019-20209,3246,46815,79212,2553,537
2020-20217,5826,34713,92910,3583,571
2021-20228,5315,64014,17110,849754

One thing of note here is that in the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 years, our annual consumption was pretty close to 12MWh, whereas in 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 it was closer to 10.5MWh. If I had to guess, I’d say that ~1.5MWh/year drop is due to a couple of pieces of computer equipment that were previously always on, now mostly running in standby mode except when actually needed. A couple of hundred watts constant draw is a fair whack of power over the course of a year. Another thing to note is the big drop in power exported in 2021-2022, because most of our solar generation is now used locally.

The thing that freaked me out when looking at these figures is that in the battery year, while our loads consumed 491kWh more than in the previous non-battery year, we pulled 949kWh more power in from the grid! This is the opposite of what I had expected to see, especially having previously written:

In the eight months the system has been running we’ve generated 4631kWh of electricity and “only” sent 588kWh to the grid, which means we’ve used 87% of what we generated locally – much better than the pre-battery figure of 45%. I suspect we’ve reduced the amount of power we pull from the grid by about 30% too, but I’ll have to wait until we have a full year’s worth of data to be sure.

– by me at the end of Go With The Flow

When I wrote that, I was looking at August 31, 2021 through April 27, 2022, and comparing that to the August 2020 to May 2021 grid power figures from my old Aurora bills. The mistake I must have made back then was to look at “From Grid” on the Consumption view, rather than “From Grid” on the System Overview. I’ve just done this exercise again, and the total grid draw from our Aurora bills from August 2020 to May 2021 is 4,980kWh. “From Grid” on the Consumption view for August 2021 to May 2022 is 3,575kWh, which is about 30% less, but “From Grid” on the System Overview is 4,754kWh, which is only about 5% less. So our loads pulled about 30% less from the grid than the same time the year before, but our system as a whole didn’t.

Now let’s break our ridiculous September-based year down further into months, to see if we can see more detail. I’ve highlighted some interesting periods in bold.

MonthGrid InSolar InTotal InLoadsExport
Sep 21 (part)1531012542136
Oct 216366291,26598855
Nov 214307471,17786697
Dec 212329561,188767176
Jan 226524501,10282274
Feb 2247043090063883
Mar 224985681,06681364
Apr 2260937798677527
May 229102381,1489533
Jun 221,1141611,27510732
Jul 221,1632231,386111811
Aug 229103751,28596664
Sep 22 (part)7543851,13985792
Total8,5315,64014,17110,849754

December is great. We generated about 25% more power than our loads use (956/767=1.25), and our grid input was only about 30% of the total of our loads (232/767=0.30).

January and February show the effects of missing three weeks of potential generation. I mean, just look at December through February 2021-2022 versus the previous three summers.

PV Generation December through January 2018-2022
 2018-20192019-20202020-20212021-2022
December919882767956
January936797818450
February699656711430

June and July are terrible. They’re our highest load months, with the lowest solar generation and we pulled 3-4% more power from the grid than our loads actually consumed. I’m going to attribute the latter largely to grid charging the battery.

If I dig a couple of interesting figures out for June and July I see “To Battery” on the Solar view shows 205kWh, and “From Battery” on the Consumption view shows 558kWh. Total consumption in that period was 2,191kWh, with the total “From Grid” reported in System Overview of 2,277kWh. Let’s mess with that a bit.

Bearing in mind the efficiency numbers mentioned earlier, if 205kWh went to the battery from PV, that means no more than 154kWh of what we got out of the battery was from PV generation (remember: real world DC-DC stack efficiency of about 75%). The remaining 404kWh out of the battery is power that went into it from the grid. And that means at least 538kWh in (404/0.75). Note that total from grid for these two months was 86kWh more than the 2,191kWh used by our loads. If I hadn’t been keeping the battery topped up from the grid, I’d’ve saved at least 134kWh of grid power, which would have brought our grid input figure back down below our consumption figure. Note also that this number will actually be higher in reality because I haven’t factored in AC/DC conversion losses from the Multis.

Now let’s look at some costs. When I started trying to compare the new system to the previous system, I went in thinking to look at in in terms of total power input to the system, total consumption by loads, and total power exported. There’s one piece missing there, so let’s add another couple of columns to an earlier table:

YearGrid InSolar InTotal InLoadsExportTotal Outwhat?
2021-20228,5315,64014,17110,84975411,6032,568

The total usable output of the system was 11,603kWh for 14,171kWh input. The difference between these two figures – 2,568kWh, or about 18% – went somewhere else. Per my earlier experiment, 5% is power that went to actually operate the system components, including the battery. That means about 13% of the power input to the system over the course of the year must have gone to some combination of charge/discharge and AC/DC conversion (in)efficiencies. We can consider this the energy cost of the system. To have the ability to time-shift expensive peak grid electricity, and to run the house without the grid if the sun is out, or from the battery when it has charge, costs us 18% of the total available energy input.

Grid power has energy costs too, but we’re not usually aware of this because it happens somewhere else. I haven’t yet found Tasmanian figures, but this 2021 Transmission Annual Planning Report PDF from Powerlink in Queensland has historical figures showing that about 7% of generation there went to auxiliaries, i.e. fans and pumps and things running at the power stations. And according to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), 10% of grid power generated is lost during transmission and distribution. Stanwell (a power company in Queensland) have a neat explainer of all this on their What’s Watt site.

Finally, speaking of expensive grid electricity, let’s look at how much we paid Aurora Energy over the past four years for our power. The bills are broken out into different tariffs, for which you’re charged different amounts per kilowatt hour and then there’s an additional daily supply charge, and also credits for power exported. We can simplify that by just taking the total dollar value of all the power bills and dividing that by the total power drawn from the grid to arrive at an effective cost per kilowatt hour for the entire year. Here it is:

YearFrom GridTotal BillCost/kWh
2018-20199,031$2,278.33$0.25
2019-20209,324$2,384.79$0.26
2020-20217,582$1,921.77$0.25
2021-20228,531$1,731.40$0.20

So, the combination of the battery plus the switch from Flat Rate to Peak & Off-Peak billing has reduced the cost of our grid power by about 20%. I call that a win.

Going forwards it will be interesting to see how the next twelve months go, and, in particular, what we can do to reduce our power consumption. A significant portion of our power is used by a bunch of always-on computer equipment. Some of that I need for my work, and some of that provides internet access, file storage and email for us personally. Altogether, according to the UPSes, this kit pulls 200-250 watts continuously, but will pull more than that during the day when it’s being used interactively. If we call it 250W continuous, that’s a minimum of 6kWh/day, which is 2,190kWh/year, or about 20% of the 2021-2022 consumption. Some of that equipment should be replaced with newer, more power efficient kit. Some of it could possibly even be turned off or put into standby mode some of the time.

We still need to get a heat pump to replace the 2400W panel heater in our bedroom. That should save a huge amount of power in winter. We’re also slowly working our way through the house installing excellent double glazed windows from Elite Double Glazing, which will save on power for heating and cooling year round.

And of course, we still need to get that second ZCell.

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Paul Wise — FLOSS Activities September 2022

Focus

This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian QA services: deploy changes
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication

  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors

All work was done on a volunteer basis.

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Francois Marier — Upgrading from chan_sip to res_pjsip in Asterisk 18

After upgrading to Ubuntu Jammy and Asterisk 18.10, I saw the following messages in my logs:

WARNING[360166]: loader.c:2487 in load_modules: Module 'chan_sip' has been loaded but was deprecated in Asterisk version 17 and will be removed in Asterisk version 21.
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35468 in deprecation_notice: chan_sip has no official maintainer and is deprecated.  Migration to
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35469 in deprecation_notice: chan_pjsip is recommended.  See guides at the Asterisk Wiki:
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35470 in deprecation_notice: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Migrating+from+chan_sip+to+res_pjsip
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35471 in deprecation_notice: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Configuring+res_pjsip

and so I decided it was time to stop postponing the overdue migration of my working setup from chan_sip to res_pjsip.

It turns out that it was not as painful as I expected, though the conversion script bundled with Asterisk didn't work for me out of the box.

Debugging

Before you start, one very important thing to note is that the SIP debug information you used to see when running this in the asterisk console (asterisk -r):

sip set debug on

now lives behind this command:

pjsip set logger on

SIP phones

The first thing I migrated was the config for my two SIP phones (Snom 300 and Snom D715).

The original config for them in sip.conf was:

[2000]
; Snom 300
type=friend
qualify=yes
secret=password123
encryption=no
context=full
host=dynamic
nat=no
directmedia=no
mailbox=10@internal
vmexten=707
dtmfmode=rfc2833
call-limit=2
disallow=all
allow=g722
allow=ulaw

[2001]
; Snom D715
type=friend
qualify=yes
secret=password456
encryption=no
context=full
host=dynamic
nat=no
directmedia=yes
mailbox=10@internal
vmexten=707
dtmfmode=rfc2833
call-limit=2
disallow=all
allow=g722
allow=ulaw

and that became the following in pjsip.conf:

[transport-udp]
type = transport
protocol = udp
bind = 0.0.0.0
external_media_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
external_signaling_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
local_net = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0

[2000]
type = aor
max_contacts = 1

[2000]
type = auth
username = 2000
password = password123

[2000]
type = endpoint
context = full
dtmf_mode = rfc4733
disallow = all
allow = g722
allow = ulaw
direct_media = no
mailboxes = 10@internal
auth = 2000
outbound_auth = 2000
aors = 2000

[2001]
type = aor
max_contacts = 1

[2001]
type = auth
username = 2001
password = password456

[2001]
type = endpoint
context = full
dtmf_mode = rfc4733
disallow = all
allow = g722
allow = ulaw
direct_media = yes
mailboxes = 10@internal
auth = 2001
outbound_auth = 2001
aors = 2001

The different direct_media line between the two phones has to do with how they each connect to my Asterisk server and whether or not they have access to the Internet.

Internal calls

For some reason, my internal calls (from one SIP phone to the other) didn't work when using "aliases". I fixed it by changing this blurb in extensions.conf from:

[speeddial]
exten => 1000,1,Dial(SIP/2000,20)
exten => 1001,1,Dial(SIP/2001,20)

to:

[speeddial]
exten => 1000,1,Dial(${PJSIP_DIAL_CONTACTS(2000)},20)
exten => 1001,1,Dial(${PJSIP_DIAL_CONTACTS(2001)},20)

I have not yet dug into what this changes or why it's necessary and so feel free to leave a comment if you know more here.

PSTN trunk

Once I had the internal phones working, I moved to making and receiving phone calls over the PSTN, for which I use VoIP.ms with encryption.

I had to change the following in my sip.conf:

[general]
register => tls://555123_myasterisk:password789@vancouver2.voip.ms
externhost=myasterisk.dyn.example.com
localnet=192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
tcpenable=yes
tlsenable=yes
tlscertfile=/etc/asterisk/asterisk.cert
tlsprivatekey=/etc/asterisk/asterisk.key
tlscapath=/etc/ssl/certs/

[voipms]
type=peer
host=vancouver2.voip.ms
secret=password789
defaultuser=555123_myasterisk
context=from-voipms
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
allow=g729
insecure=port,invite
canreinvite=no
trustrpid=yes
sendrpid=yes
transport=tls
encryption=yes

to the following in pjsip.conf:

[transport-tls]
type = transport
protocol = tls
bind = 0.0.0.0
external_media_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
external_signaling_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
local_net = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
cert_file = /etc/asterisk/asterisk.cert
priv_key_file = /etc/asterisk/asterisk.key
ca_list_path = /etc/ssl/certs/
method = tlsv1_2

[voipms]
type = registration
transport = transport-tls
outbound_auth = voipms
client_uri = sip:555123_myasterisk@vancouver2.voip.ms
server_uri = sip:vancouver2.voip.ms

[voipms]
type = auth
password = password789
username = 555123_myasterisk

[voipms]
type = aor
contact = sip:555123_myasterisk@vancouver2.voip.ms

[voipms]
type = identify
endpoint = voipms
match = vancouver2.voip.ms

[voipms]
type = endpoint
context = from-voipms
disallow = all
allow = ulaw
allow = g729
from_user = 555123_myasterisk
trust_id_inbound = yes
media_encryption = sdes
auth = voipms
outbound_auth = voipms
aors = voipms
rtp_symmetric = yes
rewrite_contact = yes
send_rpid = yes
timers = no

The TLS method line is needed since the default in Debian OpenSSL is too strict. The timers line is to prevent outbound calls from getting dropped after 15 minutes.

Finally, I changed the Dial() lines in these extensions.conf blurbs from:

[from-voipms]
exten => 5551231000,1,Goto(2000,1)
exten => 2000,1,Dial(SIP/2000&SIP/2001,20)
exten => 2000,n,Goto(in2000-${DIALSTATUS},1)
exten => 2000,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-BUSY,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-BUSY,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,n,Hangup
exten => _in2000-.,1,Hangup(16)

[pstn-voipms]
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/${EXTEN})
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/1${EXTEN})
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _011X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _011X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _011X.,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/${EXTEN})
exten => _011X.,n,Hangup()
exten => _00X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _00X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _00X.,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/${EXTEN})
exten => _00X.,n,Hangup()

to:

[from-voipms]
exten => 5551231000,1,Goto(2000,1)
exten => 2000,1,Dial(PJSIP/2000&PJSIP/2001,20)
exten => 2000,n,Goto(in2000-${DIALSTATUS},1)
exten => 2000,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-BUSY,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-BUSY,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,n,Hangup
exten => _in2000-.,1,Hangup(16)

[pstn-voipms]
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(PJSIP/${EXTEN}@voipms)
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(PJSIP/1${EXTEN}@voipms)
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _011X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _011X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _011X.,n,Dial(PJSIP/${EXTEN}@voipms)
exten => _011X.,n,Hangup()
exten => _00X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _00X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _00X.,n,Dial(PJSIP/${EXTEN}@voipms)
exten => _00X.,n,Hangup()

Note that it's not just replacing SIP/ with PJSIP/, but it was also necessary to use a format supported by pjsip for the channel since SIP/trunkname/extension isn't supported by pjsip.

Lev Lafayette — Compiling Your Python

It still generates a little bit of surprise to discover that there are people who use Python on a daily basis that are apparently quite unfamiliar with compiling said code. Or perhaps not; it is, after all, the world's most popular programming language, it has a syntax that's cleaner than many older languages, it has an enormous collection of extensions, and so forth. As a result, there are many people who use Python, but perhaps not so many who have the inquisitiveness and courage, to dive a little deeper. This short article is a deeper dive to understand a little more about the language.

The first common (novice) mistake is that Python is an interpreted language and can't be compiled. It most certainly can and is "compiled", but not in the same way that a compiled language (e.g., C/C++, Fortran, Pascal) is. If this sounds confusing one needs to dig a little into the architecture.

A Python program is compiled before being interpreted, but this step is hidden at the surface level. When Python is executed it generates byte code. This byte code is transformed and interpreted by the Python Virtual Machine which then converts the byte code to binary machine code that the computer processor can output.

A top-level Python source file can be compiled in the following manner:


$ python -m py_compile helloworld.py

Or, with multiple files:


$ python -m py_compile helloworld.py hellosystem.py hellogalaxy.py ...

Running this will generate a __pycache__ that will contain the byte-code (e.g., helloworld.cpython-38.pyc) version of the program. This binary byte-code can be directly invoked (e.g., python3 helloworld.cpython-38.pyc).

The distinction between byte code interpreted by the PVM and machine code is very important, as sometimes people believe (armed with this new information) that because Python can be compiled that this will lead to much faster execution. This is incorrect. A compiled Python script does not run any faster than a non-compiled script. So why would one want to do this?

The short answer is that a program doesn't just run, it must also load its environment and including any other programs, modules, packages, etc that have been imported. If the runtime of a program is quite long then the advantage of compiling a Python program is relatively less, and conversely, a Python program with a short runtime or one that imports a number of additional programs is going to have a more significant advantage. In any case, there will be some performance improvement because all Python programs will be converted to byte code and interpreted by the PVM anyway. The example helloworld.py has an improvement of over 300% in real time, for example. This is not bound by simplicity or length, by the way. For example, a complex mathematical Python program can take a very long time to load, but runtime execution is very quick. Testing, as always, is the best solution.

There are two other advantages to using compiled Python. The first is that the byte code provides some protection against unwanted changes in a shared environment, for example, a careless contributor who in their passion to fix what looks like a bug makes a modification to the source code and breaks the program. Of course, a version control system should be used but even then an additional layer of protection is often worthwhile. The second advantage is that compilation often will result in a significantly smaller file and when coupled with the faster load times, this is particularly useful for websites, embedded environments, and especially when using Python for network programming. Seriously, in such an environment when it's waiting for a trigger it is critical for a fast response; this can be achieved by having the modules like socket, stmplib, base64, etc already loaded.

All silver linings are attached to clouds, however, and compiling Python is no different. The byte code is designed for the particular system architecture it was compiled in and therefore is not exactly transportable to a new system: "different machine, different Python", as the saying goes. Thus distribution will, at the very least, require distributing all the relevant .py files for implementation.

There are, being computing, many further elaborations that one could engage in. For example, I have not discussed the deeper optimisation options for compilation and the pitfalls that could result. Nor have I raised the details of the interpreter and the evaluation loop, or the distinction between implementations at that level (e.g., CPython, Jython, IronPython, PyPy, etc). Finally, perhaps in a simpler direction, I have not discussed the use of the compile() function which converts s specified source as a code object to be executed, such as by eval() or exec(). These will be discussed at another time. In the meantime, if performance matters, you probably should compile your Python code.

,

Russell Coker — Links September 2022

Tony Kern wrote an insightful document about the crash of a B-52 at Fairchild air base in 1994 as a case study of failed leadership [1].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful medium article “We Should Not Endure a King” describing the case for anti-trust laws [2]. We need them badly.

Insightful Guardian article about the way reasonable responses to the bad situations people are in are diagnosed as mental health problems [3]. Providing better mental healthcare is good, but the government should also work on poverty etc.

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful Locus article about some of the issues that have to be dealt with in applying anti-trust legislation to tech companies [4]. We really need this to be done.

Ars Technica has an interesting article about Stable Diffusion, an open source ML system for generating images [5], the results that it can produce are very impressive. One interesting thing is that the license has a set of conditions for usage which precludes exploiting or harming minors or generating false information [6]. This means it will need to go in the non-free section of Debian at best.

Dan Wang wrote an interesting article on optimism as human capital [7] which covers the reasons that people feel inspired to create things.

Related posts:

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Linux Australia — Introducing Everything Open

Linux Australia introduces a new grassroots open technologies conference starting in 2023, Everything Open.

The past two years have taken their toll on open source communities within Australia. We have seen communities around many projects go from holding regular meetups, sometimes multiple in the one city, to now being close to non-existent. This is something that we were starting to see signs of prior to 2020, with a number of community group leaders looking to step back after having run meetups and other events for several years. Unfortunately COVID-19 exacerbated this situation, preventing many people from running community events, which still have not recovered to where they previously were.

Our communities have always been very strong. Linux Australia has helped many different groups over the years, and continues to provide support for the open source and open technologies communities within Australia. We have had teams come together to run online conferences for PyCon AU, linux.conf.au and DrupalSouth over the past two years, which is a huge testament to the dedication of our volunteers who continued to deliver our world-class events to everyone, even with ever changing and unknown situations. More recently we have seen DrupalSouth launch their in person conference in October this year, which is the first in person event that we have auspiced since COVID-19 emerged. This is reflective of our communities’ desire to continue holding events, and to also start meeting in person again, allowing people to catch up with friends and colleagues they have not seen for many months or years.

As we look towards what our next iteration of community events will be, we need to do this while keeping in mind that our society has changed. Planning physical events, especially our conferences, has always been a challenging task for our volunteers to undertake. We now have to add in extra unknowns, such as how many people are able, and willing, to travel to attend a conference, how to continue to make the event accessible to as many people as possible, how to minimise the risk of Coronavirus, and more recently, how to juggle increasing costs for running an event while still keeping tickets affordable.

It is with all of this in mind that Linux Australia has decided to organise Everything Open 2023, a new conference that embraces all facets of open technology. There will be presentations on Linux, open source software, open hardware, standards, formats and documentation, and of course the communities that surround them. There will be technical deep-dives into all of these topics, while also providing beginner and intermediate level presentations for those who are newer to the subject. The schedule will be put together based on the session proposals that we receive, after going through review by our Session Selection Committee, whose members come from a wide range of open technology backgrounds.

Over the past few years there have been several discussions around what changes should be made to linux.conf.au in the future. We have also received ongoing feedback from delegates and their employers, speakers, and sponsors, both potential and actual, which have shown some common themes. Linux Australia is incorporating constructive suggestions from the community into our future events, starting with Everything Open. A key part of this is ensuring the event is inclusive and open to everyone, no matter their connection or usage of open technologies. All of the presentations will have clear topic tags within the schedule, to allow delegates to find presentations in the areas they are most interested in. There will also be some themed tracks, grouping sets of talks together, to allow communities to come together within the event.

It is also important that we continue to run a grassroots, community focused event in the spirit of linux.conf.au – which is what Everything Open will be. We will continue to have a volunteer organising committee looking after all of the planning and delivery of the event, with a core team working over the coming months and expanding out to a wider group of volunteers on the ground during the conference. We will continue to record all presentations and make them freely available to everyone after the event.

We are looking forward to coming together at Everything Open 2023 and delivering another quality conference for our whole community. We can’t wait to see you there.

The post Introducing Everything Open appeared first on Linux Australia.

,

Adrian Chadd — Installing a kickstart ROM adapter in my Amiga 1000, or "Nothing works, and nothing makes sense"

The Amiga 1000 is a slick looking machine. It however loads its ROM from floppy disk. The Wikipedia Article on the Amiga 1000 explains why.

I wanted to put a Kickstart 1.3 ROM in my Amiga 1000. There are adapters out there you can build and install. I chose one, followed the instructions, and it didn't work.

After a whole lot of digging I finally got it working and now I'm documenting what hilarity I found.

I started with this one from the amiga community. The PCB manufacturing files are available on PCBWAY as a shared project. So, I got the board made, did the board mods on my Amiga 1000, and set it up. No bueno.

Let's go over the mods first before I explain why it didn't work.

First up, the Amiga 1000 has a pair of small ROMs (lower and upper 8 bits of the data bus) to bootstrap the ROM image from floppy disk, throw it into the write once memory store and then kick it appropriately to take over the ROM memory address range. The ROM address range is $F80000 -> $FFFFFF - a 512KiB region. But, this ROM isn't that big at all.

The schematic calls out what's going on pretty clearly. This is for the early revision Amiga 1000, with the U5N / U5P ROMs populated.


The /OE lines (pin 22) go to /ROM01 on the PALs, which (among other things) enables the ROMs only when the write-once memory store isn't active and we're in the ROM region.

But look at the other bits going on.

First, pin 1 is going to +5 volts, instead of A16. Pin 27 is going to A15 instead of .. the processor R/W pin? Weird. Anyway, let's look at these ROMs.

First confusing thing here - the ROMs addressing starts from A0 to A14. The 68000 bus however doesn't have an A0 - it's A1 to A23, and then there's upper/lower byte select lines. So, this ROM A0 is the CPU bus A1, the ROM A1 is CPU bus A2, etc.

Pin 1 is NC - it'd be ROM A15 on a 64k x 8 ROM. Ie, Amiga/68000 A16. And pin 27 is ROM 14, Amiga/68000 A15. That makes sense.

What's happening with the OTHER /CS line though?

On U5N/U2N, the /CS2 lines in the schematic to go W2 and W5. The intention looks to be whether A16 or A17 acts as a chip select line to enable either the lower or upper set of ROMs. If you wanted 32KiB ROMs then you'd want A16 to be the /CS2 control. If you wanted 64KiB ROMs then you'd want A17 to be the /CS2 control.

In theory, if everything is wired up fine, this means you can fit 256KiB of ROMs by fitting four 64KiB ROMs and jumpering things appropriately. You'd want:

  • W2 to be CPU A16
  • W1 to be CPU A15
  • W3 to be CPU A14
  • W4 to be CPU A17
  • W5 to go via the 74LS04 to invert A17 as the /CS2 line, so either the U5N/U5P is enabled, or the U2N/U2P is enabled.
However, this just plainly didn't match what's on my board. After trying a couple times to do the whole mod, I started to question whether the PCB matched the schematic. Hint, it ... didn't.

Here's what the PCB layout looks like, front:


and back:


You can see where you need to cut W1, W2, W3, W4 (and W5, but I didn't) to turn it into a selectable jumper set.

So, I buzzed out both the ROM board and the Amiga 1000 board to see what was going on. And what I found was ... pretty amusing. I removed all four jumpers and:

  • 68000 D0..D15 are OK
  • 68000 A1..A15 are OK
  • 68000 A16, A17 - not OK!
  • 68000 A18 - OK!
The A18 line made it to the ROM board via one of the wires soldered to the write-once RAM board. The ROM /CS line was soldered to the write-once RAM board as well.

Then I went digging on the ROM board. Let's use ROM numbering now, starting at A0 (cause that's how my notes went.) A0 to A8, A9, A10, A11, A13 used the "even" ROM address lines. A15 used pin 1 on the odd side. A16 on the kickstart ROM mapped to /CS2 on the odd side. A17 on the kickstart ROM mapped to the 4 pin connector and over to the write-once memory board. Same with the ROM /CS line.

So, I had some culprits.
  • /CS2 maps to ROM A16 which is Amiga/68000 A17. Ok, so maybe I can play with that on the Amiga side using W4, right?
  • Where the heck was Amiga/68000 A16 being routed?
  • ROM A15 on odd pin 1 should be controlled by W2, either being Amiga/68000 A16, or +5v, right?
Ok, so then I started buzzing the jumpers and finding out where they went. I then made my first discovery - the trace to ROM /CS2 ? It was tied to CPU A16. No matter what. So, I couldn't flip W4 to the alternate configuration - that shorted ROM /CS2 and CPU A16 to CPU A17. Which means I could not use the /CS2 pin on the ROM adapter, I had to run a separate wire to connect it to CPU A17 and have it end up on the right ROM pin!

Ok, so. I did that. I routed ROM A16 to the middle pin of W4 and ROM A17 to the right hand pin of W4. The rest of the jumpers mirrored the original configuration of the Amiga 1000.

.. but then, nothing. Ok. I went looking at what else could be missing. Then I found the fun reason - the kickstart adapter PCB didn't at all hook up the /BYTE control line to anything. It was just floating. This is problematic for things like DiagROM or the flash based ROM replacements which expect /BYTE to be set correctly for word access. So, I soldered a wire to +5v so it would be tied high and enable word mode.

Success! The ROM booted to a green screen! Ew.

So, in went the Amiga DiagROM. And DiagROM booted! And gave me a lovely screen of horizontal bars! Now, they're supposed to hint at which data line could be busted, but they were all light green and I was told by the author that it may also be not finding enough chip RAM. He suggested a 5V UART directly attached to the UART TX pin on Paula, and that's what I did.

And he was right - it was only detecting 64k of chip RAM.

I was very confused. I slept on it. The next day I fired up the DiagROM again but with some fast RAM attached, so DiagROM would actually start all the way. Then I used the memory editor to edit regions of chip RAM to see how it behaved. The RAM behaved .. fine? Until I looked a bit closer.

The first 64KiB of chip RAM was mirrored in the second.

The third 64KiB of chip RAM was mirrored in the fourth.

etc.

That told me A16 was stuck. But, it couldn't be the whole of A16, or the ROM code wouldn't get very far. No, it was something to do with RAM. Or, to be clear, the address decoding of chip RAM. I had a late night idea that day- what if the bit wasn't stuck, but it .. wasn't being routed?

So I buzzed the chip RAM address bus, here:


These go up to the write-once memory board, so I buzzed A16 on pin 10 of that chip and ... bam. Nothing. No connection to CPU A16.

Then I buzzed the jumpers. And I found the last thing that super surprised me.

The left hand side of W4, that was connected to the CPU A16 and /CS2 line? That pin goes to the RAM A16 line.

And so does the W2 jumper. The left hand side of W2 is RAM A16. The middle is ROM A16. The right is +5v.

So, the PCB routing seems hella wrong there.

So, after removing two pins from my adapter, routing /CS and A17 directly out as wires for A16 and A17, and hooking them up as shown, DiagROM started and all chip RAM was found. When I flipped out the Diag ROM for a Kickstart 1.3 ROM, it also worked fine.



As you can see, the jumper positions are basically where they were for an unmodified board, except that I'm manually grabbing the Amiga/68000 A16/A17 lines and running them to the ROM adapter (and those pins are removed from both odd/even connectors!)

Well, that was fun. "Fun". I have a second Amiga 1000 here, I may choose a different path for its upgrades.

,

Tim Riley — Open source status update, August 2022

August’s OSS work landed one of the last big Hanami features, saw another Hanami release out the door, began some thinking about memory usage, and kicked off a fun little personal initiative. Let’s dive in!

Conditional slice loading in Hanami

At the beginning of the month I merged support for conditional slice loading in Hanami. I’d wanted this feature for a long time, and in fact I’d hacked in workarounds to achieve the same more than 2 years ago, so I was very pleased to finally get this done, and for the implementation work to be as smooth as it was.

The feature provides a new config.slices setting on your app class, which you can configure like so:

module MyApp
  class App < Hanami::App
    config.slices = %w[admin]
  end
end

For an app consisting of both Admin and Main slices and for the config above, when the app is booted, only the Admin slice will be loaded:

require "hanami/prepare"

Hanami.app.slices.keys # => [:admin]

Admin::Slice # exists, as expected
Main         # raises NameError, since it was never loaded

As we see from Main above, slices absent from this list will not have their namespace defined, nor their slice class loaded, nor any of their Ruby source files. Within that Ruby process, they effectively do not exist.

Specifying slices to load can be very helpful to improve boot time and minimize memory usage for specific deployed workloads of your app.

Imagine you have a subset of background jobs that run via a dedicated job runner, but whose logic is otherwise unneeded for the rest of your app to function. In this case, you could organize those jobs into their own slice, and then load only that slice for the job runner’s process. This arrangement would see the job runner boot as quickly as possible (no extraneous code to load) as well as save all the memory otherwise needed by all those classes. You could also do the invserse for your main deployed process: specify all slices except this jobs slice, and you gain savings there too.

Organising code into slices to promote operational efficiency like this also gives you the benefit of greater clarity in the separation of responsibilities between those slices: when a single slice of code is loaded and the rest of your app is made to disappear, that will quickly surface any insidious dependencies from that slice to the rest of your code (they’ll be raised as exceptions!). Cleaning these up will help ensure your slices remain useful as abstractions for reasoning about and maintaining your app.

To make it easy to tune the list of slices to load, I also introduced a new HANAMI_SLICES env var that sets this config without you having to write code inside your app class. In this way, you could use them in your Procfile or other similar deployment code:

web: HANAMI_SLICES=main,admin bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb
feed_worker: HANAMI_SLICES=feed bundle exec rake jobs:work

This effort was also another example of why I’m so happy to be working alongside the Hanami core team. After initially proposing a more complex arrangement including separate lists for including or excluding slices, Luca jumped in and help me dial this back to the much simpler arrangement of the single list only. For an Hanami release in which we’re going to be introducing so many new ideas, the more we can keep simple around them, the better, and I’m glad to have people who can remind me of this.

Fixed how slice config is applied to component classes

Our action and view integration code relies on their classes detecting when they’re defined inside a slice’s namespace, then applying relevant config from the slice to their own class-level config object. It turned out our code for doing this broke a little when we adjusted our default class hierarchies. Thanks to some of our wonderful early adopters, we picked this up quickly and I fixed it. Now things just work like you expect however you choose to configure your action classes, whether through the app-level config.actions object, or by directly updating config in a base action class.

In doing this work, I became convinced we need an API on dry-configurable to determine whether any config value has been assigned or mutated by the user, since it would help so much in reliably detecting whether or not we should ignore config values at particular levels. For now, we could work around it, but I hope to bring this to dry-configurable at some point in the future.

Released Hanami 2.0.0.beta2

Another month passed, so it was time for another release! With my European colleagues mostly enjoying some breaks over their summer, I hunkered down in chilly Canberra and took care of the 2.0.0.beta2 release. Along with the improvements above, this release also included slice and action generators (hanami generate slice and hanami generate action, thank you Luca!), plus a very handle CLI middlewares inspector (thank you Marc!):

$ hanami middlewares

/    Dry::Monitor::Rack::Middleware (instance)
/    Rack::Session::Cookie

The list of things to do over the beta phase is getting smaller. I don’t expect we’ll need too many more of these releases!

Created memory usage benchmarks for dry-configurable

As the final 2.0 release gets closer, we’ve been doing various performance tests just to make sure the house is in order. One thing we discovered is that Hanami::Action is not as memory efficient as we’d like it to be. One of the biggest opportunities to improve this looked to be in dry-configurable, since that’s what is used to manage the per-class action configuration.

I suspected any effort here would turn out to be involved (and no surprise, it turned out to be involved 😆), so I thought it would be useful as a first step to establish a memory benchmark to revisit over the course of any work. This was also a great way to get my head in this space, which turned out to take over most of my September (but more on that next month).

Quietly relaunched Decaf Sucks

Decaf Sucks was once a thriving little independent online café review community, with its own web site (starting from humble beginnings as a Rails Rumble entry in 2009) and even native iOS app (two iterations, in fact).

I was immensitely proud of what Decaf Sucks became, and for the collaboration with Max Wheeler in building it.

Unfortunately, as various internet APIs changed, the site atrophied, eventually became disfunctional, and we had to take it down. I still have the database, however, and I want to bring it back!

This time around, my plan is to do it as a fully open source Hanami 2 example application. Max is even on board to bring back all the UI goodness. For now, you can follow along with the early steps on GitHub. Right now the app is little more than the basic Hanami skeleton with added database integration and a CI setup (Hello Buildkite!), but I plan to grow it bit by bit. Perhaps I’ll try to have something small that I can share with each of these monthly OSS updates.

After Hanami 2 ships, hopefully this will serve as a useful resource for people wanting to see how it plays out in a real working app. And beyond that, I look forward to it serving once again as a place for me to commemorate my coffee travels!

,

Russell Coker — Storing Local Secrets

In the operation of a normal Linux system there are many secrets stored on behalf of a user. Wifi passwords, passwords from web sites, etc. Ideally you want them to be quickly and conveniently accessible to the rightful user but also be as difficult as possible for hostile parties to access.

The solution in GNOME and KDE is to have a wallet that is encrypted to store such passwords, the idea is that if a hostile party gets access to a PC that doesn’t use full disk encryption then the secrets will be protected. This is an OK feature. In early versions it required entering a password every time you logged in. The current default mode of operation is to have the login password used to decrypt the wallet which is very convenient.

The problem is the case where the user login password has a scope larger than the local PC, EG a domain login password for Active Directory, Kerberos, or similar systems. In such a case if an attacker gets the encrypted wallet that could facilitate a brute force attack on the password used for domain logins.

I think that a better option for this would be to store wallets in a directory that the user can’t access directly, EG a mode 1770 directory with group “wallet”. Then when logging in a PAM process running as root could open the wallet and pass a file handle to a process running in the context of the user. For access apart from login there could be SETGID programs to manage it which could require authenticating the user’s password before any operation that exports the data so that a vulnerability in a web browser or other Internet facing program can’t just grab the file contents.

Storing the data in a file that needs a SETGID or root owned process to access it doesn’t preclude the possibility of encrypting that file. The same encryption options would be available including encrypting with the login password and unlocking at login time via PAM. The difference is that a brute force attack to discover the login password would first require breaking the security of one of those SETGID programs to get access to the raw data – direct attacks by running the wallet open command repeatedly could be managed by the usual rate limiting mechanisms and logging in the system logs.

The same methods could be used for protecting the secret keys for GPG and SSH which by default are readable by all processes running in the user context and encrypted with a passphrase.

The next issue to consider is where to store such an restricted directory for wallets. Under the user home directory would give the advantage of having the same secrets operate over a network filesystem and not need anything special in backup configuration. Under /var/lib would give the advantage of better isolation from all the less secret (in a cryptographic sense) data in the user home directories.

What do you think?

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,

Tim Serong — An S3 Storage Experiment

My team at SUSE is working on a new S3-compatible storage solution for Kubernetes, based on Ceph’s RADOS Gateway (RGW), except without any of the RADOS bits. The idea is that you can deploy our s3gw container on top of Longhorn (which provides the underlying replicated storage), and all this is running in your Kubernetes cluster, along with your applications which thus have convenient access to a local S3-compatible object store.

We’ve done this by adding a new storage backend to RGW. The approach we’ve taken is to use SQLite for metadata, with object data stored as files in a regular filesystem. This works quite neatly in a Kubernetes cluster with Longhorn, because Longhorn can provide a persistent volume (think: an ext4 filesystem), on which s3gw can store its SQLite database and object data files. If you’d like to kick the tyres, check out Giuseppe’s deployment tutorial for the 0.2.0 release, but bear in mind that as I’m writing this we’re all the way up to 0.4.0 so some details may have changed.

While s3gw on Longhorn on Kubernetes remains our primary focus for this project, the fact that this thing only needs a filesystem for backing storage means it can be run on top of just about anything. Given “just about anything” includes an old school two node Pacemaker cluster with DRBD for replicated storage, why not give that a try? I kinda like the idea of a good solid highly available S3-compatible storage solution that you could shove into the bottom of a rack somewhere without too much difficulty.

It’s probably eight years since I last deployed Pacemaker and DRBD, so to refresh my memory I ran with SUSE’s latest Highly Available NFS Storage with DRBD and Pacemaker document, but skipped all the NFS bits. That gives a filesystem mounted on one node, which will fail over to the other node if something breaks. On top of that, we need to run the s3gw container, the s3gw-ui container, an nginx HTTPS reverse proxy to smoosh those two together, and a virtual/floating IP, so the whole lot is accessible to the outside world.

Here’s the interesting parts of my Pacemaker configuration:

# crm configure show
[...]
primitive drbd_s3 ocf:linbit:drbd \
        params drbd_resource=s3 drbdconf="/etc/drbd.conf" \
        op monitor interval=29s role=Master \
        op monitor interval=31s role=Slave
primitive fs_s3 Filesystem \
        params device="/dev/drbd0" directory="/data" fstype=ext4 \
        meta target-role=Started \
        op start timeout=60s interval=0 \
        op stop timeout=60s interval=0 \
        op monitor interval=20s timeout=40s
primitive https nginx \
        op start timeout=40s interval=0 \
        op stop timeout=60s interval=0 \
        op monitor timeout=30s interval=10s \
        op monitor timeout=30s interval=30s \
        op monitor timeout=60s interval=20s
primitive s3-ip IPaddr2 \
        params ip=192.168.100.50 \
        op monitor interval=10 timeout=20
primitive s3gw podman \
        params image="ghcr.io/aquarist-labs/s3gw:latest" run_opts="-p 7480:7480 -v/data:/data" \
        op start interval=0 timeout=90s \
        op stop interval=0 timeout=90s \
        op monitor interval=30s timeout=30s
primitive s3gw-ui podman \
        params image="ghcr.io/aquarist-labs/s3gw-ui:latest" run_opts="-p 8080:8080 -e RGW_SERVICE_URL=https://s3gw.sleha.test" \
        op start interval=0 timeout=90s \
        op stop interval=0 timeout=90s \
        op monitor interval=30s timeout=30s
group g-s3 fs_s3 s3gw s3gw-ui https s3-ip
ms ms-drbd_s3 drbd_s3 \
        meta master-max=1 master-node-max=1 clone-max=2 clone-node-max=1 notify=true
colocation col-s3_on_drbd inf: g-s3 ms-drbd_s3:Promoted
order o-drbd_before_fs Mandatory: ms-drbd_s3:promote g-s3:start
[...]

The g-s3 group ensures that the ext4 filesystem (fs_s3), s3gw container (s3gw), s3gw-ui container (s3gw-ui), nginx instance (https) and virtual IP (s3-ip) all run on the same node, and start one after another. The colocation and ordering constraints ensure that g-s3 runs on whichever node is currently the DRBD (ms-drbd_s3) primary.

The important pieces of glue here are:

  • The fs_s3 resource mounts /dev/drbd0 on /data
  • The s3gw resource passes -p 7480:7480 -v/data:/data to podman, so the container can write to /data on the host, and the S3 service is accessible via HTTP on port 7480.
  • The s3gw-ui resource passes -p 8080:8080 -e RGW_SERVICE_URL=https://s3gw.sleha.test to podman, so the UI is accessible via HTTP on port 8080, and it expects the S3 service to be externally available via https://s3gw.sleha.test.
  • nginx is configured to reverse proxy https://s3gw.sleha.test to http://localhost:7480, and https://s3gw-ui.sleha.test to http://localhost:8080.
  • I’ve got an entry in /etc/hosts to point s3gw.sleha.test and s3gw-ui.sleha.test at the virtual IP (192.168.100.50).
  • I’m using self-signed certificates (openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout cert.key -out cert.pem) for s3gw and s3gw-ui, so I had to go visit both https://s3gw.sleha.test and https://s3gw-ui.sleha.test in my browser and accept the SSL certificate before the UI would work.
  • The DRBD config, nginx config and SSL certificates and keys need to be present on all nodes. I used csync2 for this.

Here’s my /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. I’m not entirely convinced I’ve got everything 100% right here, but it seems to work (this is, incredibly, my first time doing anything with nginx, and my first time dealing with CORS):

worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
    use epoll;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;

    server {
        listen       80;
        return       301 https://$host$request_uri; 
    }

    server {
        listen       443 ssl;
        server_name  s3gw.sleha.test;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/s3gw.access.log;

        location / {
            proxy_set_header        Host $host;
            proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin 'https://s3gw-ui.sleha.test';
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods 'GET,HEAD,PUT,POST,DELETE';
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers '*';
            add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';

            if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
                add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin 'https://s3gw-ui.sleha.test';
                add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods 'GET,HEAD,PUT,POST,DELETE';
                add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers '*';
                add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
                add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
                add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
                return 204;
            }

            proxy_pass          http://localhost:7480;
            proxy_read_timeout  90;
            proxy_redirect      http://localhost:7480 https://s3gw.sleha.test;
        }

        ssl_certificate      cert.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key  cert.key;
        ssl_protocols        TLSv1.2;
        ssl_session_cache    shared:SSL:1m;
        ssl_session_timeout  5m;
        ssl_ciphers  HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers  on;
    }

    server {
        listen       443 ssl;
        server_name  s3gw-ui.sleha.test;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/s3gw-ui.access.log;

        location / {
            proxy_set_header        Host $host;
            proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

            proxy_pass          http://localhost:8080;
            proxy_read_timeout  90;

            proxy_redirect      http://localhost:8080 https://s3gw-ui.sleha.test;
        }

        ssl_certificate      cert-ui.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key  cert-ui.key;
        ssl_protocols        TLSv1.2;
        ssl_session_cache    shared:SSL:1m;
        ssl_session_timeout  5m;
        ssl_ciphers  HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers  on;
    }
}

A couple of important points about Pacemaker’s support for running containers with podman:

So what was the end result? TL;DR: It pretty much All Just WorkedTM, which is exactly what you’d hope for when running a new application on a mature HA stack. I can use s3cmd to mess around with the S3 service, and use my web browser to play with the UI. Failover is nice and quick (think: a few seconds) if I kill a node. For the sake of convenience I did this experiment on a couple of VMs using the external/libvirt STONITH plugin, but I don’t expect a real deployment to be hugely different in behaviour. Also, I’d forgotten how good Pacemaker is at highlighting poorly behaved applications – prior to this experiment the s3gw-ui container didn’t stop well, but we weren’t aware of that until I tried a manual failover which took too long and resulted in an unexpected STONITH due to a stop timeout. Moritz has since fixed that.

One thing I tripped over when doing this deployment was the correct values to use for the access_key and secret_key of the default user when talking to the S3 service. These are actually settable for the s3gw container via the RGW_DEFAULT_USER_ACCESS_KEY and RGW_DEFAULT_USER_SECRET_KEY environment variables, but if left unset, they default to “test” and “test” respectively. The interesting bits of my s3cmd.cfg are thus:

access_key = test
secret_key = test
host_base = https://s3gw.sleha.test/
host_bucket = htts://s3gw.sleha.test/%(bucket)

In retrospect I probably should have added -e RGW_DEFAULT_USER_ACCESS_KEY=tserong -e RGW_DEFAULT_USER_SECRET_KEY=do_not_tell_anyone_this_is_your_password to the run_opts parameter of the s3gw resource in the Pacemaker config.

,

Russell Coker — Links Aug 2022

Armor is an interesting technology from Manchester University for stopping rowhammer attacks on DRAM [1]. Unfortunately “armor” is a term used for DRAM that looks fancy for ricers so finding out whether it’s used in production is difficult.

The Reckless Limitless Scope of Web Browsers is an insightful analysis of the size of web specs and why it’s impossible to implement them properly [2].

Framework is a company that makes laptop kits you can assemble and upgrade, interesting concept [3]. I’ll keep buying second hand laptops for less than $400 but if I wanted to spend $1000 then I’d consider one of these.

FS has an insightful article about why unstructured job interviews (IE the vast majority of job interviews) give a bad result [4].

How a child killer inspired Ayn Rand and indirectly conservatives all around the world [5]. Ayn Rand’s love of a notoriously sadistic child killer is well known, but this article has a better discussion of it than most.

60 Minutes had an interesting article on “Foreign Accent Syndrome” where people suddenly sound like they are from another country [6]. 18 minute video but worth watching. Most Autistic people have experience of people claiming that they must be from another country because of the way they speak. Having differences in brain function lead to differences in perceived accent is nothing new.

The IEEE has an interesting article about the creation of the i860, the first million-transistor chip [7].

The Game of Trust is an interactive web site demonstrating the game theory behind trusting other people [8].

Here’s a choose your own adventure game in Twitter (Nitter is a non-tracking proxy for Twitter) [9], can you get your pawn elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire?

Related posts:

  1. Links July 2022 Darren Hayes wrote an interesting article about his battle with...
  2. Links Jan 2022 Washington Post has an interesting article on how gender neutral...
  3. Links May 2022 dontkillmyapp.com is a web site about Android phone vendors who...

Simon Lyall — Audiobooks – August 2022

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson

Compares the Allied and Axis powers in just about every aspect one by one and in the majority find the Allies ahead. Strongly recommend to those interested in WW2. 5/5

The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

The final Bond novel by Fleming. Bond investigates gangsters and spies in Jamaica. Readable but not the best in the series. 3/5

The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke

A Hard Core SciFi story set in the year 2109 involving an asteroid threatening to hit earth and the life of captain of the ship sent to stop it. Fans of Clarke and similar authors will enjoy 3/5

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of the New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

A history of Hedge Funds in the US up to just after the 2008 crash. Profiles of people and companies at each stage. Interesting and easy to follow. 3/5

My Audiobook Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all

Share

,

Linux Australia — Council Meeting 27th April 2022 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

  • Joel Addison (President)
  • Wil Brown (Vice-President)
  • Clinton Roy (Secretary)
  • Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
  • Jonathan Woithe (Council)
  • Neil Cox (Council)

Apologies

  • Lilac Kapul (Council)

Meeting opened at 19:33 AEST by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Clinton Roy

2. Log of correspondence

  • Mail from Katie about PyCon AU archives, discussed below.

3. Items for discussion

  • Katie McLaughlin – PyCon AU Server Exports. (original request was 16 Sept 2021)
    • “I wanted to know if you could provide any exports/downloads of hosted websites that you have on your systems; it’s okay if it’s a duplicate, we’ve found some of the web crawlers missed pages”
      Github Ref: https://github.com/pyconau/archives Missing data:

      • 2013: some sponsor logos missing
      • 2014: missing friday schedule content and talks
      • 2016: missing saturday/sunday schedule and talks
      • 2017: schedule complete, but most talk info missing
    • Which years does LA have stored? Can we supply Katie with any archives?
    • Does the Admin team have time to do this just now or can we give Katie a ball-park timeframe?
    • ACTION ITEM: Joel and Clinton will help with this, in conjunction with Admin Team.

4. Items for noting

NIL

5. Other business

  • Neill advises that Wise stuff is sorted, just needs to do one last transfer for LCA22.

Meeting closed at 20:30. Next meeting scheduled for 11 May 2022.

The post Council Meeting 27th April 2022 – Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.

Linux Australia — Council Meeting 13th April 2022 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

  • Joel Addison (President)
  • Wil Brown (Vice-President)
  • Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
  • Jonathan Woithe (Council)
  • Neil Cox (Council)
  • Lilac Kapul (Council) – joined part way through Admin Team report

Apologies

  • Clinton Roy (Secretary)

Meeting opened at 19:35 AEST by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Jonathan.

2. Log of correspondence

  • Drupal – David Sparks (apology)
  • Admin team – Steve Walsh and Mike Beattie
    • Linux.au and opensource.au claim requests lodged. Linux.au is contended by linux.net.au (Netregistry, have put in a claim) and linux.id.au (a Redhat person, no claim from them yet). Suggest we reach out to The Linux Foundation to get a statement that we are acting on their behalf to protect the Linux trademark in Australia. Then draft a letter (or possibly get a lawyer to do this) which states this, and provide it to the other contending parties.
      AI – Joel: Contact Linux Foundation about this.
      Opensource.au is uncontended, so that’s ours.
    • Q from Lilac: Linux Australia held some historical trademarks which have now expired. Should these be reconsidered in light of the domains we hold?
      A from Joel and others: The “Linux” trademark was allowed to lapse because of uncertainties surrounding the overlap of Linux Australia and the Linux Foundation. Whether these are pursued is up to Council.
      Lilac commented that we should have a strong case for most of the expired trademarks because we held them in the past. She has suggested that we should consider this, especially the more obvious ones.
    • Mail migration trial this weekend, the final one will be on ANZAC day long weekend.  A test plan has been devised.
      When complete, the president, VP, treasurer and secretary address archives will be accessible through webmail and so on (rather than just through the audit trail system). Archiving is at the start of the email chain.
    • Q from Lilac: What is the process for reviewing past conversations?
      A from Steve: Currently, the mailman archive is used.  Joel added that the query should be directed to Council.
    • Q from Lilac: How long does it take for the admin team to respond to requests for review of archived material?
      A from Steve: The admin team are all aware of the requirements to respond within a set time interval. There are sufficient resources to respond appropriately.
    • Admin team is planning a test restore of CiviCRM in the June/July timeframe. This will involve a mock election.
  • Joomla – Patrick Jackson
    • They are not running events, so the need to attend event meetings is reduced.
  • PyCon AU – Richard Jones
    • Not required to attend, as per the discussion at the last event meeting.
  • Flounder – Ian Brown for Russell Coker
    • Ian will present at start of May about terraform in cloud platforms. A future talk (by someone else) over time will deal with OpenStack.
    • Matrix chat room is active (see “Social media” section of website).  File storage solutions are a focus at present. Concern about indexing on google. OSS Calendaring solutions are a challenge (Ian uses horde).
    • Chat rooms have 15 members currently. Attendance at monthly meetings does not require membership of the chat rooms.
    • Ian is happy with the way it’s developing at present.
    • flounder.linux.org.au is the URL for the group. It’s a WordPress site.
    • Website is run by Ian. Michael administers the Matrix chat. Another runs the mailing list. Russell Coker runs everything else. Ian (or Russell) will confirm how many are involved in organising.
    • Q from Russell Stuart: Who are the points of contact? This is required under the subcommittee policy.
      A from Ian: These are now on the website. Russell is happy with this.

3. Items for discussion

  • Grant Application from Lyndsey Jackson for Big Sand Band – Regional SA
    • Jonathan outlined the grant application and summarised the information provided in the web presentation (link provided in application). Feedback from the community was also covered. The primary concern raised by the community  was the use of software which is not Open Source (but is free-to-use) for parts of the funded activity. This is one of several components to the activity, the others being outreach, inclusion and regional development.
    • Russell: It is difficult to square this with what Open Source stands for. The activity is worthy but he questions the alignment.
    • Lilac: The film festival is the showcase of the assets which can be reused. It’s also outreach. LA values mentions open culture/data/technology, which this grant works on.
    • Joel: Would be more comfortable if money was for producing the assets rather than travel. Is interested in the compilation of lists of resources and people who can do this sort of thing which is also mentioned in the grant.
    • Neill: It is the best grant application he’s seen. Is concerned about the technology being used. Would encourage a review of the platform for future events, or encourage them to use formats that can be easily used in OSS software.
    • Lilac: believes the overall grant application is consistent with the LA values statement. Not overly concerned with the travel component.
    • Russell: Where will the assets be made available? We should ask them about this.
    • Joel: We could offer to host the assets, put them on the mirror site, and so on. Funding travel is not necessarily an issue – conferences do this (The “outreach and inclusion” travel grants for example). Suggest we reach out to Lyndsey to offer to help with this.
    • Wil: The grant proposal is for something a little different. It’s inclusive, in a regional area, and is outreach in it’s purest sense. It aligns with what open community means.
    • Lilac: Could matching funding be pursued by Lyndsey from government programs?
    • Motion: That the Linux Australia Council approve the grant proposal from Lyndsey Jackson for the Big Sand Band event. Seconded by Neill.  Motion is passed (5 for, 1 against).
    • Suggestions to include in response: Matching fund options (Lilac to send information through after the Council meeting). Ask how the assets will be published. Suggest the possibility to use the LA website and mirror site to distribute assets in a way that’s open and accessible.  LA is happy to work with the event organisers on this.
  • Wil – Use of Element/Matrix/IRC. Clarity over priority of usage.  General discussions vs only urgent stuff.
    • Use email for discussions generally as it’s a formal record of the communication. People can read it in their own time and it’s easier to incorporate into other documents if required.
    • Matrix/IRC is used for things that are time critical. Can have discussions on chat, but keeping context is a bit harder. It’s harder to minute if it turns out to be necessary.
    • Q from Lilac: What response timeframes are expected?
      A: There are no specific guides. Respond when you can. Chat is perhaps more time critical.

Due to the lateness of the hour, it was agreed to defer discussion of these policy changes to the next Council meeting on 27 April 2022.

  • Neill: status of Wise payments for rami.io and Mind’s Eye Creative
    • Russell has been in touch with Wise. They promised to do something today. It doesn’t appear they did. Russell will call again in a couple of days.

4. Items for noting

  • Joel: Insurance renewal is being processed
  • Joel: Google Cloud Platform has been shutdown for the most part. Some static files and container images still remain, to be cleaned up once appropriate replacements are in place. Costs have reduced to close to $0, too early to know actual projected remaining cost per month.

5. Other business

Other business carried to future meeting due to running overtime.

Meeting closed at 20:57. Next meeting scheduled for 27 April 2022.

The post Council Meeting 13th April 2022 – Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.

Linux Australia — Council Meeting 30th March 2022 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

  • Joel Addison (President)
  • Wil Brown (Vice-President)
  • Clinton Roy (Secretary)
  • Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
  • Jonathan Woithe (Council)
  • Lilac Kapul (Council) – joined 19:12, after PR vote

Apologies

  • Neil Cox (Council)

Meeting opened at 20:00 AEDT by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Clinton

2. Log of correspondence

  • Prod from Gold Coast LUG

3. Items for discussion

  • A bunch of Linux Australia PRs are open, how do we decide on merging them?
    • Review this recent one during the meeting: https://github.com/linuxaustralia/constitution_and_policies/pull/44
    • Clinton raises a motion to accept PR 44 to the CoC.
    • Second: Wil Brown.
    • All in favour, passed unanimously.
    • No one against, no abstentions.
    • ACTION ITEM Joel to accept PR44 to the CoC.
    • ACTION ITEM for council, review all remaining PRs in time for the next meeting.

4. Items for noting

  • Joel has been looking at all the domain name stuff, has been working with the admin team to put in submissions for the domains we care about. Got approvals immediately. Some personal anecdotes, some are successful, some not so much so. We have contacted taslug and pyconau subcommittees for domain requests. Still need to reach out to slug.
  • Grant request has been received, will be discussed during the next meeting, after the two week community consultation period is done.

5. Other business

  • Meeting time change (JEA) – Daylight saving ends this weekend, so I propose we change the meeting time to 7:30pm AEST/7:00pm ACST from April 13 onwards, until daylight savings starts again
  • ACTION ITEM: Joel to update google calendar invite with the updated times for daylight savings end.
  • Update from Lilac about governance training pricing and quotes
    • TL;DR have some pricing information, still following up some, will present in further detail at next committee meeting
  • Verbal update from Lilac on progress in reaching out to Brisbane-based meetup groups

Meeting closed at 20:40. Next meeting scheduled for 13 April 2022.

The post Council Meeting 30th March 2022 – Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.

Linux Australia — Council Meeting 16th March 2022 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

  • Joel Addison (President)
  • Wil Brown (Vice-President)
  • Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
  • Jonathan Woithe (Council)
  • Neill Cox (Council)
  • Lilac Kapul (Council)

Apologies

  • Clinton Roy (Secretary)

Meeting opened at 20:05 AEDT by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Joel

2. Log of correspondence

NIL

3. Items for discussion

  • Drupal – Dave Sparks
    • Working through budget at the moment ready to present back to LA
    • No firm plans on holding an in person event this year, but there are some borders opening which makes things more encouraging
    • Working on getting people interested in Drupal and giving a pathway into it, rebuilding the committee after some turnover.
    • Working on marketing to the community and working with sponsors to keep people engaged, but one key thing being worked on is enticing people to come to work on Drupal as a career. A number of organisations are finding it difficult to attract people, so looking at how the Drupal group can assist in some way.
    • Volunteers are quite busy at the moment, time of the year is playing a part in this.
    • Medium to long term goal to build more relationships with other open source communities, would also like to expand more on finding new volunteers.
    • Admin overhead for the team is not high, main thing is keeping communication going – meetups, sponsors, events, etc
  • Admin Team – Steve Walsh
    • Mail server work is being planned for ANZAC Day weekend. Looking at doing a trial change over Easter weekend, and then doing proper changeover later.
    • Another thing to be looked at is the old web server. This has a number of old LCA archive sites and other subdomains, so need to look at cleaning this up. The LCA archives need some work to cleanup old links that no longer exist, but on the whole these could be put up public again and then make fixes as needed.
    • Domain (linux.com.au) was renewed today
    • Steve will get a list of all of the domains for us to review and then we can work out what domains we should look at registering the root .au domain for.
    • There was a request from someone for hosting with a large number of IP addresses, which is not possible, but team will reach out to them to check on whether they still want the hosting without the IP addresses.
  • PyCon AU – Richard Jones
    • There will not be a conference in 2022. Announcement was sent out and website has been updated to note this.
    • Leigh has talked to Adelaide Convention Centre and they were happy to push the deposit back to 2023, so this made the decision easier for the team.
    • Request from committee for exports of all of the sites that were hosted on LA infrastructure, this has not been completed
      • ACTION: Joel to follow up with Admin Team
    • DNS update needs to be made to retire the pycon-au.org domain, with only the pycon.org.au domain being used from here forward.
    • Council meetings – invite to meeting in a few months, then re engage properly around October/November
    • Most of the original Adelaide team will be back to run 2023, so volunteers are looking good for the core team.
    • The team have encouraged people to attend their local Python user groups in the meantime, which is one of the sources of new volunteers as well.
    • Expect there to be some loss of transient attendees given there has not been an in person event for a few years, and no conference this year. However there are still a large number of people who are very interested in attending again. Lower numbers will be budgeted for.
  • WordPress – Wil Brown
    • Reached out to organisers for the WordCamps and meetups to see if anyone is interested in running a conference in 2022.
    • Out of 17 active meetup groups (AU + NZ), only 6 have been run online over the past two years.
    • Would not be surprised if there are no conferences in 2023 as well due to the main volunteers not being ready to commit to events again.
  • Flounder – Russell Coker
    • Group is going reasonably well, number of members is smaller than expected so looking to build this up more.
    • A number of members are now using Matrix and Mastadon to communicate and share information.
    • Possibly looking at running tutorials on open source phones and capture the flag contests.
    • There are a couple of other people who have stepped up to assist with Matrix and website.
    • Would like to reach out to more people to let them know about it, any suggestions welcome. Lilac to send details of some university groups.

4. Items for noting

  • NIL

5. Other business

  • Website Committee
    • Sae Ra would like to help out with updating the current website.
    • Joel is fine with this, but would like to talk to Clinton about this as well, as to whether he would like assistance with posting minutes
    • Council is in support of this in principle. Would like there to be an approval process so we are aware of what is changing. Look to use standard WordPress approvals.
    • ACTION: Joel to reach out to Sae Ra and Clinton about this.
  • OSI Voting
    • At this stage we are not close enough to OSI to make an informed decision on voting
    • Voting closes at 9am Monday 21 March US Pacific Time
    • Lilac asks whether LA would be interested in nominating for such positions in the future. Russell notes that overall this won’t happen unless someone or a group are interested in doing it, and have time to do so. If someone would like to do this they are welcome to raise this with Council.

Meeting closed at 21:20. Next meeting scheduled for 30 March 2022.

The post Council Meeting 16th March 2022 – Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.

Linux Australia — Council Meeting 2nd March 2022 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

  • Joel Addison (President)
  • Wil Brown (Vice-President)
  • Clinton Roy (Secretary)
  • Jonathan Woithe (Council)
  • Russell Stuart (Treasurer) (showed up just in time for the grants discussion)
  • Lilac Kapul (Council) (showed up at the Makerspace discussion)

Apologies

  • Neil Cox (Council)

Meeting opened at 20:08 AEDT by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Clinton Roy

2. Log of correspondence

  • From Kathy Reid: Building a data trust for speech data from Linux Australia conferences – a plan, and an ask

On face value it appears to be a good concept, the danger is working out how much to spend to get legal advice that is useful without working on precedent. Will suggests crowd funding. Kathy mentions a few organisations going down this route, it might be useful communicating with them. Joel suggests it comes through the grant program, this will force a lot of questions to the fore.

ACTION ITEM: Secretary to respond, in principle the council supports the concept. Group should go through the grants to flesh out the proposal and provide more specific costings that the council can evaluate, in the fullness of time. Make it clear that the council is happy to communicate and discuss this further before the grant is proposed.

  • From Clinton Roy:  Google Cloud payment failure

ACTION ITEM: Clinton and Joel to investigate google cloud.

3. Items for discussion

  • 2022 Grants Program: Russell feels comfortable with having slightly lower budget for the grants program.

Motion: Jonathan moves a motion to open up the 2022 grants program to $20k.
Seconded: Joel
In favour: all
Abstain: none
Against: none
Motion has passed.

ACTION ITEM: Jonathan to go through the budget and make the grant funding changes.

4. Items for noting

  • Lilac suggests having official governance training for the council with AICD. Rough guess of $3000-$4000. Russell says this gets close to the limit of money we prefer to spend on overheads.  Lilac says that it is incumbent on LA to provide such training for the organisation to behave in a professional manner and not let things slip up. Joel doesn’t want to make a decision until there are full costings layed out. Russell thinks that LA being as open as we are, publishing all our financial records makes some of this moot. Russell suggests waiting for the outcome of the late filing before making any decisions. ACTION ITEM Lilac to send more details through to the list for more discussion next meeting.

Meeting closed at 20:54. Next meeting scheduled for 16 March 2022.

The post Council Meeting 2nd March 2022 – Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.

Linux Australia — Council Meeting 16th Feburary 2022 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

  • Joel Addison (President)
  • Wil Brown (Vice-President)
  • Clinton Roy (Secretary)
  • Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
  • Jonathan Woithe (Council)
  • Neil Cox (Council)

Apologies

  • Lilac Kapul (Council)

Meeting opened at 20:03 AEDT by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Clinton Roy

2. Log of correspondence

  • Andrew Donnellan – Upcoming events for sponsorship

3. Items for discussion

  • Mailing Lists – Aim to cleanup mailing lists and archive those that are no longer in active use. Joel has put together a spreadsheet listing everything. People are encouraged to have a look. Russell suggests being harsher, require a community to have a moderator.

4. Items for noting

  • Drupal Update, David Sparks speaking.

In person events have been postponed for a few years, they’re sitting tight and waiting until things become clear. Back up options are a big online event, or a series of smaller online events. Notes that some people are pretty sick of being online. There’s also the option of having two separate events in Australia and NZ. They postponed their post-conf survey from last year, and have sent that out now. Want to continue using the professional marketing and event organiser, got new audience. Want to do some professional paid marketing this year. Put together some paid support for local meetups. They want to tidy up their lists of organisers/attendees/sponsors, to be able to engage better. Have a draft budget that they’re working through, will likely show that to the council in the March catch up. Want to look at improving the pathways into Drupal, want to bring new people into the industry. Had a working group last year, but it fell by the wayside with everything on.

Q by Clinton: Did you modify the survey to ask about conferences.

A: yes, after receiving feedback they wanted more online last year. Now getting some feedback that people are desparate for in person contact.

Q by Joel: What’s the lead time in deciding on in person events this year?

A: About six months, the Drupal calendar is quite packed, would need to know by March.

Q: What support are you looking to provide to your meetup organisers?

A: Had a range of requests – venue costs, promotion and marketing. Trying to get some new people involved with running the meetups, so trying to come up with basic run sheets and checklists to support people.

If they had two conferences, would try to line them up on the same dates, and would try to share some speakers via online. Have had good interest from sponsors, which is good. The bigger sponsors prefer the in-person events.

  • Admin Team, Steve and Mike speaking.

Got the migration of the website done in house. Election was held, with no issues. There’s some clean up to go after the election, one of Sae Ra’s requests to get the mail sorted got put aside. Steve says it was effectively a second full time job to move the election. Mail is a bit of a mess, there’s loops and stuff going on. IP address renewal, got receipt of payment. There’s still an issue with the mail of a council member, needs to be looked at closer. A slightly broader discussion about email ensues. Mike did some updates on hosts. A major update to kernel and proxmox, should hopefully fix a few little problems. May be going ahead with their second face to face, depending on everything.

  • Joomla, Nathan Morrow speaking.

Had a slow start to the week, a few of the older committee members had resigned, got a few new people on the hook. A new release of Joomla late in the year has kept most of the members busy. Plan to have the constitution ready for the members in March, and once that’s ratified, can bring that to the council. One of the signatories of the LA account has stepped down, so that position will need to be replaced.

  • Flounder, Russell Coker speaking.

Had one meeting so far, around a dozen people. Aim of the group is to be an online only group, only provide stuff that’s unique and not available elsewhere. Roughly half and half Aus/NZ. Focus on hands on, interactive content. Russell would like a DNS entry from LA, flounder.linux.org.au would work. Would also like a mailing list.

Russell moves a motion that Linux Australia authorises flounder.linux.org.au and a flounder mailing list.
Seconded: Jonathan
Yes: unanimous
No: none
Abstain: none
The motion is passed.

5. Other business

  • GPO box renewal ACTION ITEM Clinton will forward onto Russell for payment.
  • Google cloud – we’re still paying approx $200 a month, Joel still plans on closing this down within a month.
  • Catalyst cloud hosting invoice, ACTION ITEM Joel is going to do a little bit of an investigation before we decide on paying it, and to properly close down the account.
  • NSW Fair trading, they did not receive our previous Tier one Annual Return, Russell has sorted that now.

Meeting closed at 21:00. Next meeting scheduled for 2 March 2022.

The post Council Meeting 16th Feburary 2022 – Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.

Linux Australia — Council Meeting 2nd February 2022 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

  • Joel Addison (President)
  • Wil Brown (Vice-President)
  • Clinton Roy (Secretary)
  • Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
  • Jonathan Woithe (Council)
  • Neil Cox (Council)

Apologies

  • Lilac Kapul (Council)

Meeting opened at 20:07 AEDT by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Clinton Roy

2. Log of correspondence

  • Logan LUG

3. Items for discussion

  • A round of introductions by each member, as this is our first meeting.
  • Association Requirements. Joel mentions everything required to be stored about the council, by the public officer: name, address, commencement date. Disclosure of interest register. Joel has created a couple of spreadsheets where all this information can be documented, such that the public officer has access if ever required. Clinton asks if there’s an official list of conflicts.
    • ASIC Director Ids. Russell speaks on it. Required for trusts, companies, organisations with an ABN. Becomes mandatory in November.  Clinton suggests we put it in the spreadsheet.
  • .au domains. The date for purchasing them is coming up (March?). The council needs to work out what domains to attempt to purchase. Linux.org.au and opensource.org.au are the obvious candidates. ACTION ITEM: Joel to communicate with the admin team to get a fuller list of domains. ACTION ITEM: go through sub committees, go through registered business names.
  • PyCon AU $100k deposit. We discuss whose call it is to make a decision on the deposit. ACTION ITEM: Secretary to write an email to PyCon AU subcommittee, suggest they have a meeting with the venue ASAP. The council does not wish to push anyone into running a conference unless they want to. Request a date by which the venue needs a decision.
  • Gold Coast LUG Subcommittee -needed for virtual events? We don’t have quite all the information required for subcommittee V3.
    Joel raises a motion to accept The Gold Coast Lug Subcommittee going forward.
    Seconded: Neill
    Abstain: none
    For: all
    Against: none.
    Motion succeeds unanimously.
    ACTION ITEM: Russell to ask Steve for all required details.
  • Did we need to do anything for Flounder? ACTION ITEM: Clinton to invite Russell Coker to next subcommittee meeting.

4. Items for noting

  • ACTION ITEM Clinton needs to do the AGM minutes.

5. Other business

  • Rusty Wrench Award
    • Need address to send award to: Clinton has the address. ACTION Clinton will ask about address security and go from there.
  • LA PO BOX – keys: Will to take ownership of the keys from Julian and start checking.

Meeting closed at 21:00. Next meeting scheduled for 16 February 2022.

The post Council Meeting 2nd February 2022 – Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.

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Simon Lyall — Audiobooks – July 2022

The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

A general history of the library. Main problems are a bit verbose and skipping Asia but enough to keep my interest. 3/5

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman

Wasn’t able to finish this. Just kept repeating the same thing over and over again. Forgot the “Pop” in “Popular social science”. Just read a summary like the linked Guardian review. 2/5

Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War 1945-1960 by James D. Hornfischer

What it says on the description. Covering Nuclear power and weapons, the Revolt of the Admirals the early Cold war and Korea. 3/5

Inside the Star Wars Empire: A Memoir by Bill Kimberlin

Some ILM stories but less than what some people might expect and mixed in with other things. Definitely not film-by-film coverage. But still fun. 3/5

Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story by John Bloom

Story of the Space-based phone system. The books concentrates on the complex deals to save it after it’s original failure and Motorola’s plan to de-orbit it. 3/5

The Accidental Scientist: The Role of Chance and Luck in Scientific Discovery by Graeme Donald

A short book of short chapters covering various stories of scientific discovery. Fun Breezy read. 3/5

My Audiobook Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all

Share

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Russell Coker — TSIG Error From SSSD

A common error when using the sssd daemon to authenticate via Active Directory on Linux seems to be:

sssd[$PID]: ; TSIG error with server: tsig verify failure

This is from sssd launching the command “nsupdate -g” to do dynamic DNS updates. It is possible to specify the DNS server in /etc/sssd/sssd.conf but that will only be used AFTER the default servers have been attempted, so it seems impossible to stop this error from happening. It doesn’t appear to do any harm as the correct server is discovered and used eventually. The commands piped to the nsupdate command will be something like:

server $SERVERIP
realm $DOMAIN
update delete $HOSTNAME.$DOMAIN. in A
update add $HOSTNAME.$DOMAIN. 3600 in A $HOSTIP
send
update delete $HOSTNAME.$DOMAIN. in AAAA
send

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Tim Riley — Open source status update, May–July 2022

Hi there friends, it’s certainly been a while, and a lot has happened across May, June and July: I left my job, took some time off, and started a new job. I also managed to get a good deal of open source work done, so let’s take a look at that!

Released Hanami 2.0.0.alpha8

Since we’d skipped a month in our releases, I helped get Hanami 2.0.0.alpha8 out the door in May. The biggest change here was that we’d finished relocating the action and view integration code into the hanami gem itself, wrapped up in distinct “application� classes, like Hanami::Application::Action. In the end, this particular naming scheme turned out to be somewhat short lived! Read on for more :)

Resurrected work using dry-effects within hanami-view

As part of an effort to make it easy to use our conventional view “helpers� in all parts of our view layer, I resurrected my work from September 2020(!) on using dry-effects within hanami-view. The idea here was to achieve two things:

  1. To ensure we keep only a single context object for the entire view rendering, allowing its state to be preserved and accessed by all view components (i.e. allowing both templates, partials and parts all to access the very same context object)
  2. To enable access to the current template/partial’s #locals from within the context, which might help make our helpers feel a little more streamlined through implicit access to those locals

I got both of those working (here’s my work in progress), but I discovered the performance had worsened due to the cost of using an effect to access the locals. I took a few extra passes at this, reducing the number of effects to one, and memoziing it, leaving us with improved performance over the main branch, but with a slightly different stance: the single effect is for accessing the context object only, so any helpers, instead of expecting access to locals, will instead only have access to that context. The job from here will be to make sure that the context object we build for Hanami’s views has everything we need for an ergonomic experience working with our helpers. I’m feeling positive about the direction here, but it’ll be a little while before I get back to it. Read on for more on this (again!).

Unified application and slice

The biggest thing I did over this period was to unify Hanami’s Application and Slice. This one took some doing, and I was glad that I had a solid stretch of time to work on it between jobs.

I already wrote about this back in April’s update, noting that I’d settled on the approach of having a composed slice inside the Hanami::Application class to providing slice-like functionality at the application level. This was the approach I continued with, and as I went, I was able to move more and more functionality out of Hanami::Application and into Hanami::Slice, with that composed “application slice� being the thing that preserved the existing application behaviour. At some point, a pattern emerged: the application is a slice, and we could achieve everything we wanted (and more) by turning class Hanami::Application into class Hanami::Application < Hanami::Slice.

Turning the application into a slice sublcass is indeed how I finished the work, and I’m extremely pleased with how it turned out. It’s made slices so much more powerful. Now, each slice can have its own config, its own dedicated settings and routes, can be run on its own as a Rack application, and can even have its own set of child slices.

As a user of Hanami you won’t be required to use all of this per-slice power features, but they’ll be there if or when you want them. This is a great example of progressive disclosure, a principle I follow as much as possible when designing Hanami’s features: a user should be able to work with Hanami in a simple, straightforward way, and then as their needs grow, they can then find additional capabilities waiting to serve them.

Let’s explore this with a concrete example. If you’re building a simple Hanami app, you can start with a single top-level config/settings.rb that defines all of the app’s own settings. This settings object is made available as a "settings" component registration in both the app as well as all its slices. As the app grows and you add a slice or two, you start to add more slice-specific settings to this component. At this point you start to feel a little uncomfortable that settings specific to SliceA are also available inside SliceB and elsewhere. So you wonder, could you go into slices/slice_a/ and drop a dedicated config/settings.rb there? The answer to that is now yes! Create a config/settings.rb inside any slice directory and it will now become a dedicated settings component for that slice alone. This isn’t a detail you had to burden yourself with in order to get started, but it was ready for you when you needed it.

Another big benefit of this code reorganisation is that the particular responsibilities of Hanami::Application are much clearer: its job is to provide the single entrypoint to the app and coordinate the overall boot process; everything else comes as part of it also being a slice. This distinction is made clear through the number of public methods that exist across the two classes: Application now has only 2 distinct public methods, whereas Slice currently brings 27.

There’s plenty more detail over in the pull request: go check it out!

The work here also led to changes across the ecosystem:

This is one the reasons I’m excited about Hanami’s use of the dry-rb gems: it’s pushing them in directions no one has had to take them before. The result is not only the streamlined experience we want for Hanami, but also vastly more powerful underpinnings.

Devised a slimmed down core app structure

While I had my head down working on internal changes like the above, Luca had been thinking about Hanami 2 adoption and the first run user experience. As we had opted for a slices-only approach for the duration of our alpha releases, it meant a fairly bulky overall app structure: every slice came with multiple deeply nested files. This might be overwhelming to new users, as well as feeling like overkill for apps that are intended to start small and stay small.

To this end, we agreed upon a stripped back starter structure. Here’s how it looks at its core (ignoring tests and other general Ruby files):

├── app/
│   ├── action.rb
│   └── actions/
├── config/
│   ├── app.rb
│   ├── routes.rb
│   └── settings.rb
├── config.ru
└── lib/
    ├── my_app/
    │   └── types.rb
    └── tasks/

That’s it! Much more lightweight. This approach takes advantage of the Hanami app itself becoming a fully-featured slice, with app/ now as its source directory.

In fact, I took this opportunity to unify the code loading rules for both the app and slices, which makes for a much more intuitive experience. You can now drop any ruby source file into app/ or a slices/[slice_name]/ slice dir and it will be loaded in the same way: starting at the root of each directory, classes defined therein are expected to inhabit the namespace that the app or slice represents, so app/some_class.rb would be MyApp::SomeClass and slices/my_slice/some_class would be MySlice::SomeClass. Hat tip to me of September 2021 for implementing the dry-system namespaces feature that enabled this! 😜

(Yet another little dry-system tweak came out of preparing this too, with Component#file_name now exposed for auto-registration rules).

This new initial structure for starter Hanami 2.0 apps is another example of progressive disclosure in our design. You can start with a simple all-in-one approach, everything inside an app/ directory, and then as various distinct concerns present themselves, you can extract them into dedicated slices as required.

Along with this, some of our names have become shorter! Yes, “application� has become “app� (and Hanami::Application has become Hanami::App, and so on). These shorter names are easier to type, as well as more reflective of the words we tend to use when verbally describing these structures.

We also tweaked our actions and views integration code so that it is automatically available when you inherit directly from Hanami::Action, so it will no longer be necessary to have the verbose Hanami::Application::Action as the superclass for the app’s actions. We also ditched that namespace for both routes and settings too, so now you can just inherit from Hanami::Settings and the like.

Devised a slimmed down release strategy

Any of you following my updates would know by now that the Hanami 2.0 release has been a long time coming. We have ambitious goals, we’re doing our best, and everything is slowly coming together. But as hard as it might’ve been for folks who’re waiting, it’s been doubly so for us, feeling the weight of both the work along with everyone’s expectations.

So to make sure we can focus our efforts and get something out the door sooner rather than later, we decided to stagger our 2.0 release. We’ll start off with an initial 2.0 release centred around hanami, hanami-cli, hanami-controller, and hanami-router (enough to write some very useful API applications, for example), then follow up with a “full stack� 2.1 release including database persistence, views, helpers, assets and everything else.

I’m already feeling empowered by this strategy: 2.0 feels actually achievable now! And all of the other release-related work like updated docs and a migration guide will become correspondingly easier too.

Released Hanami 2.0.0.beta1!

With greater release clarity as well as all the above improvements under our belt, it was time to usher in a new phase of Hanami 2.0 development, so we released 2.0.0.beta1 in July! This new version suffix represents just how close we feel we are to our final vision for 2.0. This is an exciting moment!

And a bunch more

This update is getting rather long, so let me list a bunch of other Hanami improvements I managed to get done:

Outside my Hanami development, a new job and a new computer meant I also took the change to reboot my dotfiles, which are now powered by chezmoi. I can’t speak highly enough of chezmoi, it’s an extremely powerful tool and I’m loving the flexibility it affords!

That’s it from me for now. I’ll come back to you all in another month!

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Lev Lafayette — Psychic Vampires from Without and Within

The past few days I've been quite influenced by a short essay by Brianna Wiest, which starts with quite a kicker: "It is the hardest thing you will ever have to do, and it will also be the most important: stop giving your love to those who aren’t ready to love you. Stop having hard conversations with people who don't want to change." Ultimately, this is arguing for equality in all relationships. Equality is not a matter of capability or social position. Everyone is unequal in some regard; some people are stronger, some people are smarter, some people know more, some people are richer or have higher status, etc. Individual differences and capabilities are inevitable. Social differences, especially systemic differences (wealth, power) are a little out of our control, barring social change through effective collective effort.

But between people, the one thing that we can be equal in our relationships is concern, care, and effort relative to personal capacity. In other words, if you make a consistent effort to help a person when they are in need, and they are conspicuously absent when you need help, then it is probably best that you redirect your attention elsewhere. As charming as they may be (and they often are when they are at their best) one needs to develop protection against psychic vampires because ultimately they will hurt you.

Psychic vampires exist along a continuum of conscious to unconscious action. On the first extreme, we're dealing with people who are almost certainly are narcissistic [psycho, socio]paths, conscious manipulators who are empowered by the emotional energy they drain from their dependent flock. Obviously, such people are to be avoided at all costs and best left to the professionals to deal with. On the other extreme are those who due to their own impulsivity or lack of security, is a lot needier and have more affective instability. They may even be aware of their vampiric behaviour and feel terribly guilty about it. Unlike the pathological, if one is willing, able, and patient, then these vampiric souls can become a better version of themselves. It will take time and effort because they are, in effect, learning to establish new and unfamiliar pathways in their own brain. Some vampires you want to dispel; others you wish to turn.

Letting go does not just involve vampiric people but also vampiric activities and attachments in one's own life. Most psychic vampires are not like that all the time (indeed, some can be utterly amazing people when they're not being draining), and all of us can be a little bit vampiric at times. Identifying our own vampiric behaviours towards others and toward ourselves, is essential. Are we wasting other people's time and draining their energy? Are we wasting our own time and our energy? When one makes an assessment of the time and activities that we engage in that do not help ourselves and others, when supposedly so-called fun and harmless distractions take up excess time and emotional attachment, then we're in the realm of vampirism. We're literally sucking the life from others and from ourselves, retarding our own personal development and empathy. It is little wonder to discover that clarity in one's own self-concept and associated activities also enhance empathy towards others. This brings us back to the original essay; how do you think empathic people treat others?

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Russell Coker — Links July 2022

Darren Hayes wrote an interesting article about his battle with depression and his journey to accepting being gay [1]. Savage Garden had some great songs, Affirmation is relevant to this topic.

Rorodi wrote an interesting article about the biggest crypto lending company being a Ponzi scheme [2]. One thing I find particularly noteworthy is how obviously scammy it is, even to the extent of having an ex porn star as an executive! Celsuis is now in the process of going bankrupt, 7 months after that article was published.

Quora has an interesting discussion about different type casts in C++ [3]. C style casts shouldn’t be used!

MamaMia has an interesting article about “Action Faking” which means procrastination by doing tasks marginally related to the end goal [3]. This can mean include excessive study about the topic, excessive planning for the work, and work on things that aren’t on the critical path first (EG thinking of a name for a project).

Apple has a new “Lockdown Mode” to run an iPhone in a more secure configuration [4]. It would be good if more operating systems had a feature like this.

Informative article about energy use of different organs [5]. The highest metabolic rates (in KCal/Kg/day) are for the heart and kidneys. The brain is 3rd on the list and as it’s significantly more massive than the heart and kidneys it uses more energy, however this research was done on people who were at rest.

Scientific American has an interesting article about brain energy use and exhaustion from mental effort [6]. Apparently it’s doing things that aren’t fun that cause exhaustion, mental effort that’s fun can be refreshing.

Related posts:

  1. Links June 2022 Google did some interesting research on the impact of discrimination...
  2. Links March 2022 Anarcat wrote a great blog post about switching from OpenNTP...
  3. Links Jan 2022 Washington Post has an interesting article on how gender neutral...

Russell Coker — Workstations With ECC RAM

The last new PC I bought was a Dell PowerEdge T110II in 2013. That model had been out for a while and I got it for under $2000. Since then the CPI has gone up by about 20% so it’s probably about $2000 in today’s money. Currently Dell has a special on the T150 tower server (the latest replacement for the T110II) which has a G6405T CPU that isn’t even twice as fast as the i3-3220 (3746 vs 2219) in the T110II according to passmark.com (AKA cpubenchmark.net). The special price is $2600. I can’t remember the details of my choices when purchasing the T110II but I recall that CPU speed wasn’t a priority and I wanted a cheap reliable server for storage and for light desktop use. So it seems that the current entry model in the Dell T1xx server line is less than twice as fast as fast as it was in 2013 while costing about 25% more! An option is to spend an extra $989 to get a Xeon E-2378 which delivers a reasonable 18,248 in that benchmark. The upside of a T150 is that is uses buffered DDR4 ECC RAM which is pretty cheap nowadays, you can get 32G for about $120.

For systems sold as workstations (as opposed to T1xx servers that make great workstations but aren’t described as such) Dell has the Precision line. The Precision 3260 “Compact Workstation” currently starts at $1740, it has a fast CPU but takes SO-DIMMs and doesn’t come with ECC RAM. So to use it as a proper workstation you need to discard the RAM and buy DDR5 unbuffered/unregistered ECC SO-DIMMS – which don’t seem to be on sale yet. The Precision 3460 is slightly larger, slightly more expensive, and also takes SO-DIMMs. The Precision 3660 starts at $2550 and takes unbuffered DDR5 ECC RAM which is available and costs half as much as the SO-DIMM equivalent would cost (if you could even buy it), but the general trend in RAM prices is that unbuffered ECC RAM is more expensive than buffered ECC RAM. The upside to Precision workstations is that the range of CPUs available is significantly faster than for the T150.

The HP web site doesn’t offer prices on their Z workstations and is generally worse than the Dell web site in most ways.

Overall I’m disappointed in the range of workstations available now. As an aside if anyone knows of any other company selling workstations in Australia that support ECC RAM then please let me know.

Related posts:

  1. ECC RAM in a Cheap Machine In a comment on my previous post about ECC RAM...
  2. Dell PowerEdge T105 Today I received a Dell PowerEDGE T105 for use by...
  3. Advice on Buying a PC A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing...

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Lev Lafayette — The Future of the University in the Age of the Internet : An Australian Perspective

This year I completed my MHEd thesis (early) to complete the degree in this field. The following is the abstract and link to the study.

Abstract

One component of the broad sweep of educational history is the qualitative changes in information and communication technologies, in which each new development both building on top of its previous and extending its scope. The development of networked information and communication technologies in contemporary times, "the Internet", potentially provides a new mode of communication whose limiting factors include capacities of the physical systems and the allocation of economic resources. This macrological inquiry suggests that these foundational matters have been largely overlooked when considering educational technology and as a result four research themes are raised; (i) the identification of the demographic importance and trends of higher education., (ii) the economics of higher education, particularly the notion of cost-disease in service sectors and positive externalities, (iii) the engineering restrictions and licensing restrictions to software applications, and (iv) user-experiences of existing educational software. A prescriptive conclusion raises policy matters concerning the need for more extensive public funding, the adoption of open-source licensing for applications and educational content, and the use of client-server models rather than the trend toward cloud-based software architecture.

http://levlafayette.com/files/mhed590-thesis.pdf

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Adrian Chadd — Fixing a third commodore plus/4, or "god damnit adrian stop it"

Here's a fun and easy one to fix.

One commodore plus/4. Here's what it displayed.


Looks like the TED chip is outputting something, but it isn't setup right.

So I pop it open. There's the right clock on pin 1 of the CPU - switching between 1 and 2MHz as it does. Ok, so let's check the ICs.

Hm, there's something wrong with the CPU pins.


And this socket ... is kinda busted looking. One whole side of pins just aren't making contact correctly.


Anyway. I removed the socket, replaced it with a new one and ... well, that was it!


The end!



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Simon Lyall — A minimal viable Light Rail for Auckland

Background

In late January 2022 the government announced that it was building a $15 billion light rail line from the Airport to the City Center via Mount Roskill. The line would be tunneled for about half it’s length.

The response from the Transport community was not positive. The price tag was extremely high especially on a per-kilometre basis for what it delivered. The likely result seemed to be further years of planning before cancellation when a pro-road National Government is elected.

This article will cover one alternative. It is a fairly low cost surface light-rail line that can be built quickly and expanded later.

Overview of the alternative line

The idea of the line was sparked by this twitter thread:

” The very original musings by AT for LR had a Stage 1 which simply ran from Wynyard to Eden Terrace. Something similar could be brought back to serve a large, master-planned renewal project around the Dom Rd Junction. ”

Tweet by ScootFoundation

My expansion on Scoot’s proposal would be a short version of the street level Light Rail line originally proposed by Auckland Transport. It would be cover just 3.3 kilometres from The Civic Corner to Eden Quarter along Queen Street and Dominion Road.

The system is a simple two-line surface running light rail. In the inner section (north of Mayoral Drive) it would run on two reserved centre lanes at street level allowing pedestrians to easily cross. Further out in areas of lower pedestrian volume the lanes would be raised or fenced to discourage traffic further and allow higher speeds. In the innermost sections cars would be limited while in the outer sections they would have a lane on each side of the road but parking would be largely removed.

Vehicles would be 33 metre low floor (or 70% low floor) vehicles like the CAF Urbos 3. Overhead power would be used.

A 5 unit CAF Urbos 3.

The Route

The line would start at the Civic Corner (near Te Wai o Horotiu rail station and Aotea Square) and run south to Dominion Road to the Eden Quarter shopping area between Bellwood Avenue and Valley Road.

Route with Stations

The Civic Corner is where the current Dominion Road buses terminate so it would be the same destination for most current riders (except those going to the Universities). Stopping the line here would also avoid the heavily built up northern 800 metres of Queen Street where there will be conflicts with local merchants.

Just South of the Civic Corner Stop

The line would go south across Mayoral Drive and then climb up Queen Street. At some point up the hill it would in into a tunnel under Karangahape Road. There would be a stop near here. This could be on one side of the tunnel or perhaps even inside it.

A train emerages from the short tunnel under Karangahape Road

The line would then continue along Upper Queen Street before turning into Ian McKinnon Drive and following it to Dominion Road. Along this section we should future-proof the line for a future branch along New North Road.

Heading up Ian McKinnon Drive

The next stop of the line would be on Dominion Road near View Road. This area is a mix of offices, light industry, apartments and houses and is ripe for increased density.

The rough location of the View Road Stop

The line would then continue south down the hill, across Walters/Valley Road and terminating before it reach Bellwood Avenue at the Eden Quarter stop. This stop would be placed to allow passengers to easily transfer to and from Dominion Road buses. It is also a short walk to Eden Park.

The location of the Eden Valley stop

At the final stop the driver would walk to the other end of the train for the return journey.

Operation

Making the conservative assumptions that each train averages 15 km/h in the inner city section and 30km/h in the other sections with a wait of 30 seconds at each stop we get the following travel times:

Stop nameDistance
from Civic		Average
Speed		Travel Time
Civic0mn/aDepart 00:00
Karangahape Road800m15 km/hArrive 03:15
Depart 03:45
View Road2600m30 km/hArrive 07:20
Depart 07:50
Eden Quarter3230m30 km/hArrive 09:00

This would be an average speed of 21km/h which possibly could be increased, especially along the Southern sections where there are fewer conflicts with pedestrians and cars.

Assuming we allocate 2 minutes at each end for turnaround then each vehicle would takes just 22 minutes to completed the whole route. This means that just five vehicles should be able to maintain a headway (interval between trains) of 5 minutes in both directions.

Line Capacity with a train every 5 minutes and using 33m light rail cars carrying 210 people (as in the Auckland light rail proposed) would be 2500 passengers/hour in each direction. This comfortably exceeds what the current double-decker buses carried in peak mornings during 2019.

The line should be designed to allow two cars per train bringing length to 66m. If these were brought in and headway was reduced to three minutes then capacity would be 8400 passengers/hour.

Buses coming towards to the city would drop off passengers at a stop just before Bellwood Avenue. They then turn left down Bellwood Avenue to Eden Park and then return along Walters Road before making a right-hand turn back into Dominion Road and stopping to pick up passengers before heading south.

Route for Dominion Road buses

Currently buses at peak hour take 11 minutes via Queen Street and 18 minutes via Mount Eden Road and Symonds Street, so this would save time for most passengers even with the transfer between bus and light rail.

Service Facility

The line would need a small service facility for vehicle storage and maintenance. This would eventually be replaced when the line is extended but would be needed to serve the initial fleet.

A property would need to be purchased and built. Probably near View Road although there are other options such as public land on Ian McKinnon Drive.

Building it.

Total distance would be just 3.3 kilometres which should be build-able for perhaps $NZ 300m including around seven vehicles. The cost of nearly $100m/kilometre reflects the fairly short line in a built-up area but is actually quite conservative. Costs of similar systems overseas are usually less.

In his original twitter thread Scoot suggested a prive of $100m and that a large part of the cost could be covered by a special rate on developments in the area.

Construction should be possible in 3-4 years especially with best practice of working 12+ hours per day. A comparison might be the 5.5km Lund Tramway which was build for ~$NZ 250m in 3.5 years.

Future Extensions

Extensions should be planned as soon as possible to allow a continuous stream of work. I plan to detail these in a later article but they could include:

  • North along Queen Street to Customs Street. Probably with a stop around Wyndham Street – 750m
  • North-East from Queen/Customs to Wynyard Quarter. 1-1.5km
  • South on Dominion Road to State Highway 20 – 4km
  • South along New North Road and Sandringham Road as far as SH20 – 5km
  • A replacement maintenance facility will also need to be built. Probably near SH20
  • Further extensions south of SH20.

Questions

Q: What about the Airport and Mangere?

A: We should not try and serve these areas with the same line as the Dominion and Sandringham Road. Instead a high capacity Light Metro line though Mangere Town Centre, Onehunga, Manukau Road, Newmarket could serve them, See Matthew Beardsworth’s article If we’re going to tunnel light rail, do it right! .

Q: What about going to Britomart?

A: Britomart would be the natural place to terminate the line. However I think there will be strong opposition to any disruption from the local business owners that would delay the project. Building the line only as far North as the Civic Corner avoids the most heavily built-up shopping stretch of Queen Street.

However I think the link to Britomart should be a priority and should be built as soon as possible. Building it later avoids it delaying the initial build of the line.

Q: Won’t this line eventually fill up?

A: The line should handle several times the peak 2019 Dominion Road and Sandringham Road demand. If demand eventually exceeds that then there are options ranging from lengthening the vehicles to building new lines to take demand ( eg along Mount Eden Road). Part of the problem with the government’s current proposal is one line is expected to cover all requirements.

Q: Won’t this reduce car capacity into the CBD?

A: Yes it will. But currently there are only 900 people in 800 cars using Dominion Road during the peak hour (less in Queen Street) . The initial capacity of the Light rail will be 3 times that. Also the line will reduce the numbers of buses going into the CBD.

Q: Would the overhead lines be unsightly?

A; Most of the photographs about include overhead lines. They tend to be fairly inconspicuous. Systems that do away with them cost much or and are non-standard.

Q: What about University Students?

A: The line would unfortunately remove direct access to the Universities. Students would have two main options:
1. Get off at the Karangahape Road stop, walk to Symonds Street and catch a bus further down Symonds Street.
2. Get off at Civic Stop and walk up the hill.

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Simon Lyall — Audiobooks – June 2022

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood’s Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

An account of the last 5 years of the streaming wars as multiple new services were launched. Tries to cover most of the main US services and how they responded to the threat of Netflix. 3/5

Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro

3rd Volume of Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson covering 1949-1960. Large sections on Johnson gaining control of the Senate, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1956 Democratic presidential nomination. 4/5

Write It All Down: How To Put Your Life on the Page by Cathy Rentzenbrink

A short book about who to write a memoir as well as general advice about writing (especially a book). Interesting and nice to listen to. 3/5

My Audiobook Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all

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Tim Serong — Hack Week 21: Keeping the Battery Full

As described in some detail in my last post, we have a single 10kWh Redflow ZCell zinc bromine flow battery hooked up to our solar PV via Victron inverter/chargers. This gives us the ability to:

  • Store almost all the excess energy we generate locally for later use.
  • When the sun isn’t shining, grid charge the battery at off-peak times then draw it down at peak times to save on our electricity bill (peak grid power is slightly more than twice as expensive as off-peak grid power).
  • Opportunistically survive grid outages, provided they don’t happen at the wrong time (i.e. when the sun is down and the battery is at 0% state of charge).

By their nature, ZCell flow batteries needs to undergo a maintenance cycle at least every three days, where they are discharged completely for a few hours. That’s why the last point above reads “opportunistically survive grid outages”. With a single ZCell, we can’t use the “minimum state of charge” feature of the Victron kit to always keep some charge in the battery in case of outages, because doing so conflicts with the ZCell maintenance cycles. Once we eventually get a second battery, this problem will go away because the maintenance cycles automatically interleave. In the meantime though, as my project for Hack Week 21, I decided to see if I could somehow automate the Victron scheduled charge configuration based on the ZCell maintenance cycle timing, to always keep the battery as full as possible for as long as possible.

There are three goals somewhat in tension with each other here:

  • Keep the battery full, except during maintenance cycles.
  • Don’t let the battery get too full immediately before a maintenance cycle, lest the discharge take too long and maintenance still be active the following morning.
  • Don’t schedule charges during peak electricity times (we still want to draw the battery down then, to avoid using the expensive gold plated electrons the power company sends down the wire between 07:00-10:00 and 16:00-21:00).

Here’s the solution I came up with:

  • On non-maintenance cycle days, set two no-limit scheduled charges, one from 10:00 for 6 hours, the other from 21:00 for 10 hours. That means the battery will be charged from the grid and/or the sun continuously, except for peak electricity times, when it will be drawn down. Our loads aren’t high enough to completely deplete the battery during peak times, so there will always be some juice in case of a grid outage on non-maintenance cycle days.
  • On maintenance cycle days, set a 50% limit scheduled charge from 13:00 for 3 hours, so the battery won’t be too full before that evening’s maintenance cycle, which kicks in at sunset. The day after a maintenance cycle, set a no limit scheduled charge from 03:00 for 4 hours. At our site, maintenance has almost always finished before 03:00, so there’s no conflict here, and we still have time to get some charge into the battery to handle the next morning’s peak.

Now, how to automate that?

The ZCell Battery Management System (BMS) has a REST API which we can query to find out useful information about the battery. Unfortunately it won’t actually tell us for certain whether maintenance will be run on any given day, but we can get the maintenance time limit, and subtract from that the amount of time that’s passed since the last maintenance cycle. If the resultant figure is less than one day, we know that maintenance will happen today. It is possible for maintenance to happen at other times, e.g. I can force maintenance manually, and also it can happen more often than every three days if you mess with the allowed days setting in the BMS, so this solution arguably isn’t perfect, but I think it’s good enough under the circumstances, at least at our site.

The Victron Cerbo GX (the little box that controls everything) runs Linux, and you can easily get root on it, so it’s possible to write scripts that run locally there. Here’s what I ended up with:

One important point about installing things on the Cerbo GX, is that the root partition is overwritten during firmware updates, but there’s a separate data partition which is preserved. The root user’s home directory is symlinked to /data/home/root, so my script lives at /data/home/root/sched.py to ensure it remains present. Then we need to get it into /etc/crontab, which doesn’t survive firmware updates. This is done by adding a /data/rc.local script which the Cerbo GX runs on boot:

After a few days of testing and observation, I can confirm that it all works perfectly! At least, at our site, right now, with our current loads and daylight ours. The whole thing will want revisiting (or probably just turning off) as we get into summer, when we’ll be able to rely on significantly more sunlight to keep the battery full than we get now. I may well just go back to a single 03:00-for-four-hours grid charge then, once the days are nice and long. See how we go…

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Tim Riley — Joining Buildkite, and sticking with Ruby

Last week I finished up at Culture Amp, and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining Buildkite as an engineer!

My time at Culture Amp was special. It was my first role after a decade of running Icelab with Max and Michael. Culture Amp hired everyone at Icelab after we decided to close the business, providing both a smooth transition and new opportunities to a singular group. I built a great working relationship with my manager, I was trusted to do big things, and I relished the chance to work with and learn from a large group of engineers. I’m deeply thankful for all of this.

Towards the end, I was serving as Culture Amp’s Director of Back End Engineering, and moving into engineering management. However, as any astute reader of this blog might attest, I am deeply motivated by hands on programming work, and all the learning and collaboration opportunities that go with it. I realised it was not the time to draw that chapter to a close (it might never!), and through that consideration I connected with Buildkite.

I’m excited to join Buildkite for many reasons! It’s a great Australian company with heart and personality. It brims with people I’ve long dreamt of working with. Developer tooling is an area close to my heart. And they’re growing a (majestic) Ruby app at the core of their tech. I can’t wait to dig in.

For me, this is also an intentional decision to stick with Ruby. The work I’m doing in Ruby OSS right now might be one of the biggest “dents in the universe” I get to make. I want to see this effort through, to complete our vision for Hanami 2.0, then learn from how it’s adopted by our community.

I have some time off between jobs, which I’ll use to give our Hanami work a real boost: I’ll be commiting nearly 6 weeks of full-time work to Hanami! Based on previous experience, this should see me get through what otherwise might have taken 6 months of part-time effort. I’m hoping this will get us significantly closer to 2.0. I’ll likely start another tweet thread of my efforts, so find me on Twitter if you’d like to follow along!

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Simon Lyall — Audiobooks – May 2022

The Penguin History of New Zealand by Michael King

The definitive single volume NZ History book. Publish in 2003 it is still relatively up-to-date. Designed for the general reader, easy to follow and fairly comprehensive. 4/5

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

A study of ways governments has forced change on their population for the convenience of the state rather than the people. eg forced resettlement. 3/5

Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car by Alex Davies

The story of the Autonomous car industry. Mainly framed around the DARPA Grand Challenge races and disgraced engineer Anthony Levandowski. Pretty good. 3/5

Transatlantic Television Drama: Industries, Programs, and Fans Edited by Hills, Hilmes, & Pearson

A series of semi-academic articles on the exchanges of Television programmes between the US and UK. Felt like 30% introductions but some good bits. 3/5

The Hero Code: Lessons Learned From Lives Well Lived by William H. McRaven

10 short chapters each on a specific virtue & a story to illustrate it. Courage, Humility, Sacrifice, Integrity, Compassion, Perseverance, Duty, Hope, Humor, and Forgiveness. 3/5

You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

After falling into a funk Bond is sent to Japan on a difficult mission. I felt this didn’t age very well and was below average for the Bond books. 3/5

My Audiobook Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all

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Adrian Chadd — Getting new simgen backdrops on my amiga 500

This'll be nice and short.

I wanted to add some new backgrounds to simgen, which is a hack on Amiga Workbench 1.3 setups which allows for a 1 or 2 bpp (2 or 4 colour) background image.

Part of it is figuring out how to convert to a suitably formatted IFF (interchange file format) for an Amiga. I didn't want to install photoshop or do photo conversion on the Amiga. Yeah I'm lazy.

So the TL;DR is:

  • https://github.com/Pixinn/rgb2amiga - rgb2amiga converts images to IFF using Imagemagick 6. Yes, make sure you install ImageMagick 6 as the latest version API has changed enough for this to fail compilation.
  • Make sure you resize the original image to a suitable resolution for your desktop - I'm using 640x200, and I'll play with 640x256 later.
  • Make sure you also realise the output screen is 4:3, so crop appropriately.
  • Run the program, and see what happens.
Here's the input and output images:





Yes I know I didn't crop it to the right aspect ratio; I just wanted to see if it worked before I spun cycles on optimising things.


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Adrian Chadd — It took me WAY too long to get this gotek to work...

 The short version - when you buy an actual OG Gotek with the OG Gotek firmware, it doesn't work in any convenient way that is documented on any of the retro computing sites, because you DEFINITELY need to flash it with different firmware.

Ok, so the less short version!

I picked up a busted Amiga 500 for free to help repair an Amstrad CPC464 for someone. It had a busted ROM socket, busted RAM and some other random crap that I needed to fix. Oh and 50 of the keys were not working, and the key membrane was broken!

So everything above is fixed - and I still need to fix the RTC in the A501 memory expansion - but now I need to get it to boot. And I don't have a spare floppy drive for this.

But I did have a Gotek - I bought it for the IBM PC stuff, but I ended up bootstrapping it using USB 3.5 inch floppy drives.

.. and it didn't work. And I didn't understand why.

So, the summary.

I wanted to flash the FlashFloppy Gotek stuff from https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy/wiki/Firmware-Programming. Easy peasy. Get a UART hooked up and connect to FreeBSD.

Didn't work. Welp.

After reading around I found that someone tried at 9600, because it just wouldn't work faster.

I did that and well now it does. It's quite possible if I added the 10k pull-ups mentioned on the flashfloppy hardware mods section that I'd have more luck.



.. and flashing it from FreeBSD:


Easy.

Ok, next. Hooking it up. Set it to be device 0, remove another config jumper. Easy. Also, apparently the pinout is .. reversed on the amiga 500? In any case, pay super close attention to the orientation of the floppy drive connectors.


Anyway. Now it works. I then followed the installation instructions for a USB stick and whacked Workbench 1.3 images on - and now it boots fine into workbench 1.3. I've ordered a replacement mounting frame for the Gotek board so it can sit in with the case closed - but for now the machine works.

Well, besides the RTC. That's next. Ugh.

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Tim Riley — Open source status update, April 2022

April was a pretty decent month for my OSS work! Got some things wrapped up, kept a few things moving, and opened up a promising thing for investigation. What are these things, you say? Let’s take a look!

Finished centralisation of Hanami action and view integrations

I wrote about the need to centralise these integrations last month, and in April, I finally got the work done!

This was a relief to get out. As a task, while necessary, it felt like drudge work – I’d been on it since early March, after all! I was also conscious that this was also blocking Luca’s work on helpers all the while.

My prolonged work on this (in part, among other things like Easter holidays and other such Real Life matters) contributed to us missing April’s Hanami release. The good thing is that it’s done now, and I’m hopeful we can have this released via another Hanami alpha sometime very soon.

In terms of the change to Hanami apps, the biggest change from this is that your apps should use a new superclass for actions and views:

require "hanami/application/action"

module Main
  module Action
    # Used to inherit from Hanami::Action
    class Base < Hanami::Application::Action
    end
  end
end

Aside from the benefit to us as maintainers of having this integration code kept together, this distinct superclass should also help make it clearer where to look when learning about how actions and views work within full Hanami apps.

Enabled proper access to full locals in view templates

I wound up doing a little more work in actions and views this month. The first was a quickie to unblock some more of Luca’s helpers work: making access to the locals hash within templates work like we always expected it would.

This turned out to be a fun one. For a bit of background, the context for every template rendering in hanami-view (i.e. what self is for any given template) is an Hanami::View::Scope instance. This instance contains the template’s locals, makes the full locals hash available as #locals (and #_locals, for various reasons), and uses #method_missing to make also make each local directly available via its own name.

Luca found, however, that calling locals within the template didn’t work at all! After I took a look, it seemed that while locals didn’t work, self.locals or just plain _locals would work. Strange!

Turns out, this all came down to implementation details in Tilt, which we use as our low-level template renderer. The way Tilt works is that it will compile a template down into a single Ruby method that receives a locals param:

def compile_template_method(local_keys, scope_class=nil)
  source, offset = precompiled(local_keys)
  local_code = local_extraction(local_keys)

  # <...snip...>

  method_source << <<-RUBY
    TOPOBJECT.class_eval do
      def #{method_name}(locals)
        #{local_code}
  RUBY

Because of this, locals is actually a local variable in the context of that method execution, which will override any other methods also available on the scope object that Tilt turns into self for the rendering.

Here is how we were originally rendering with Tilt:

tilt(path).render(scope, &block)

My first instinct was simply to pass our locals hash as the (optional) second argument to Tilt’s #render:

tilt(path).render(scope, scope._locals)

But even that didn’t work! Because in generating that local_code above, Tilt will actually take the locals and explode it out into individual variable assignments:

def local_extraction(local_keys)
  local_keys.map do |k|
    if k.to_s =~ /\A[a-z_][a-zA-Z_0-9]*\z/
      "#{k} = locals[#{k.inspect}]"
    else
      raise "invalid locals key: #{k.inspect} (keys must be variable names)"
    end
  end.join("\n")
end

But we don’t need this at all, since hanami-view’s scope object is already making those locals available individually, and we want to ensure access to those locals continues to run through the scope object.

So the ultimate fix is to make locals of our locals. Yo dawg:

tilt(path).render(scope, {locals: scope._locals}, &block)

This gives us our desired access to the locals hash in templates (because that locals key is itself turned into a solitary local variable), while preserving the rest of our existing scope-based functionality.

It also shows me that I probably should’ve written an integration test back when I introduced access to a scope’s locals back in January 2019. 😬

Either way, I’m excited this came up and I could fix it, because it’s an encouraging sign of just how much of this view system we’ll be able to put to use in creating a streamlined and powerful view layer for our future Hanami users!

Merged a fix to stop unwanted view rendering of halted requests

Thanks to our extensive use of Hanami at Culture Amp, my friend and colleague Andrew discovered and fixed a bug with our automatic rendering of views within actions, which I was happy to merge in.

Shipped some long awaited dry-configurable features

After keeping poor ojab waiting way too long, I also merged a couple of nice enhancements he made to dry-configurable:

I then released these as dry-configurable 0.15.0.

Started work on unifying Hanami slices and application

Last but definitely not least, I started work on one of the last big efforts we need in place before 2.0: making Hanami slices act as much as possible like complete, miniature Hanami applications. I’m going to talk about this a lot more in future posts, but for now, I can point you to a few PRs:

  • Introducing Hanami::SliceName (a preliminary, minor refactoring to fix some slice and application name determination responsibilities that had somehow found their way into our configuration class).
  • A first, abandoned attempt at combining slices and applications, using a mixin for shared behaviour.
  • A much more promising attempt using a composed slice object within the application class, which is currently the base of my further work in this area.

Apart from opening up some really interesting possibilities around making slices fully a portable, mountable abstraction (imagine bringing in slices from gems!), even for our shorter-term needs, this work looks valuable, since I think it should provide a pathway for having application-wide settings kept on the application class, while still allowing per-slice customisation of those settings in whichever slices require them.

The overall slice structure is also something that’s barely changed since I put it in place way back in late 2019. Now it’s going to get the spit and polish it deserves. Hopefully I’ll be able to share more progress on this next month :) See you then!

Adrian Chadd — Amiga 1200 - Kickstart 3.1.4 upgrade, but not upgrading to AmigaOS 3.1

 So I splurged a couple bucks on the updated AmigaOS 3.1.4 from Hyperion. It came with both the ROMs and AmigaOS. Now, I have 3.1 installed already, and I wanted to just drop in the ROMs.

It almost worked.

It looks like they moved some libraries from the ROM out to disk/RAM in order to make space.



So I figured they were on one of the installation disks, and....

Easy peasy. I copied icons.library and workbench.library to my system partition and rebooted. All good!



It's really quite slick how Kickstart ROMs are basically a bootloader and then a whole bunch of libraries, some of which form the core OS and some are actually just libraries. I'm sad this concept didn't show up elsewhere.





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Rusty Russell — Pickhardt Payments Implementation: Finding ?!

So, I’ve finally started implementing Pickhardt Payments in Core Lightning (#cln) and there are some practical complications beyond the paper which are worth noting for others who consider this!

In particular, the cost function in the paper cleverly combines the probability of success, with the fee charged by the channel, giving a cost function of:

? log( (ce + 1 ? fe) / (ce + 1)) + ? 路 fe 路 fee(e)

Which is great: bigger ? means fees matter more, smaller means they matter less. And the paper suggests various ways of adjusting them if you don’t like the initial results.

But, what’s a reasonable ? value? 1? 1000? 0.00001? Since the left term is the negative log of a probability, and the right is a value in millisats, it’s deeply unclear to me!

So it’s useful to look at the typical ranges of the first term, and the typical fees (the rest of the second term which is not ?), using stats from the real network.

If we want these two terms to be equal, we get:

? log( (ce + 1 ? fe) / (ce + 1)) = ? 路 fe 路 fee(e)
=> ? = ? log( (ce + 1 ? fe) / (ce + 1)) / ( fe 路 fee(e))

Let’s assume that fee(e) is the median fee: 51 parts per million. I chose to look at amounts of 1sat, 10sat, 100sat, 1000sat, 10,000sat, 100,000sat and 1M sat, and calculated the ? values for each channel. It turns out that, for almost all those values, the 10th percentile ? value is 0.125 the median, and the 90th percentile ? value is 12.5 times the median, though for 1M sats it’s 0.21 and 51x, which probably reflects that the median fee is not 51 for these channels!

Nonetheless, this suggests we can calculate the “expected ?” using the median capacity of channels we could use for a payment (i.e. those with capacity >= amount), and the median feerate of those channels. We can then bias it by a factor of 10 or so either way, to reasonably promote certainty over fees or vice versa.

So, in the internal API for the moment I accept a frugality factor, generally 0.1 (not frugal, prefer certainty to fees) to 10 (frugal, prefer fees to certainty), and derive ?:

? = -log((median_capacity_msat + 1 – amount_msat) / (median_capacity_msat + 1)) * frugality / (median_fee + 1)

The median is selected only from the channels with capacity > amount, and the +1 on the median_fee covers the case where median fee turns out to be 0 (such as in one of my tests!).

Note that it’s possible to try to send a payment larger than any channel in the network, using MPP. This is a corner case, where you generally care less about fees, so I set median_capacity_msat in the “no channels” case to amount_msat, and the resulting ? is really large, but at that point you can’t be fussy about fees!

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Simon Lyall — Audiobooks – April 2022

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming

Bond tracks Blofeld to a Swiss hideout. He infiltrates it and must discover and foil Blofeld’s plot. A romantic subplot adds interest. 3/5

The years of Lyndon Johnson 2 – Means of Ascent by Robert Caro

LBJ dodges the war, makes serious money from radio stations and steals the 1948 Senate Primary. Easy to follow and fascinating. 4/5

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan

The book is 90% interviews and talks to a wide range of people involved with the movie. A wealth of interesting stories. 4/5

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green

Mainly covering early 2020 to mid-2021, Each author writes alternating chapters covering the development and rollout of the vaccine. 3/5

Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe

A story of the author taking the chain through various stages. Keys ways they did business compared to other firms and stayed profitable. 4/5

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley

Examples of how innovation works in the real world followed by the characteristics of innovation, how to promote it, and how it can go wrong. 4/5


My Audiobook Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all

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Tim Riley — Two years of open source status updates

Back in March of 2020, I decided to take up the habit of writing monthly status updates for my open source software development. 22 updates and 25k words later, I’m happy to be celebrating two years of status updates!

As each month ticks around, I can find it hard to break away from cutting code and write my updates, but every time I get to publishing, I’m really happy to have captured my progress and thinking.

After all, these posts now help remind me I managed to do all of the following over the last two years (and these were just the highlights!):

  • Renamed dry-view to hanami-view and kicked off view/application integration (Mar 2020)
  • Received my first GitHub sponsor (Apr 2020), thank you Benny Klotz (who still sponsors me today!)
  • Shared my Hanami 2 application template (May 2020)
  • Achieved seamless view/action/application integration (May 2020)
  • Brought class-level configuration to Hanami::Action (Jun 2020)
  • Introduced application-level configuration for actions and views (Jul 2020)
  • Added automatic inference for an action’s paired view, along with automatic rendering (Jul 2020)
  • Introduced application integration for view context classes (Jul 2020)
  • Supported multiple boot file dirs in dry-system, allowing user-replacement of standard bootable components in Hanami (Aug 2020)
  • Rebuilt the Hanami Flash class (Aug 2020)
  • Resumed restoring hanami-controller features through automatic enabling of CSRF protection (Sep 2020)
  • Added automatic configuration to views (inflector, template, part namespace) (Oct 2020)
  • Released a non-web Hanami application template (Oct 2020)
  • Started the long road to Hanami/Zeitwerk integration with an autoloading loader for dry-system (Nov 2020)
  • Introduced dedicated “component dirâ€� abstraction to dry-system, along with major cleanups and consistency wins (Dec 2020/Jan 2021)
  • Added support for dry-system component dirs with mixed namespaces (Feb/Mar/Apr 2021)
  • Released dry-system with all these changes, along with Hanami with working Zeitwerk integration (Mar/Apr 2021)
  • Ported Hanami’s app configuration to dry-configurable (May 2021),
  • Laid the way for dry-configurable 1.0 with some API changes (May/Jul 2021)
  • Returned to dry-system and added configurable constant namespaces (Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct 2021)
  • Introduced compact slice source dirs to Hanami, using dry-systems constant namespaces (Sep/Oct 2021)
  • Added fully configurable source dirs to Hanami (Nov/Dec 2021)
  • Shipped a huge amount of dry-system improvements over two weeks of dedicated OSS time in Jan 2022, including the overhaul of bootable components as part of their rename to providers, as well as partial container imports and exports, plus much more
  • Introduced concrete slice classes and other slice registration improvements to Hanami (Feb 2022)
  • Refactored and relocated action and view integration into the hanami gem itself, and introduced Hanami::SliceConfigurable to make it possible for similar components to integrate (Mar 2022)

This is a lot! To add some extra colour here, a big difference betwen now and pre-2020 is that I’ve been working on OSS exclusively in my personal time (nights and weekends), and I’ve also been slugging away at a single large goal (Hanami 2.0, if you hadn’t heard!), and the combination of this can make the whole thing feel a little thankless. These monthly updates are timely punctuation and a valuable reminder that I am moving forward.

They also capture a lot of in-the-moment thinking that’d otherwise be lost to the sands of time. What I’ve grown to realise with my OSS work is that it’s as much about the process as anything else. For community-driven projects like dry-rb and Hanami, the work will be done when it’s done, and there’s not particularly much we can do to hurry it. However, what we should never forget is to make that work-in-progress readily accessible to our community, to bring people along for the ride, and to share whatever lessons we discover along the way. The passing of each month is a wonderful opportunity for me to do this 😀

Finally, a huge thank you from me to anyone who reads these updates. Hearing from folks and knowing there are people out there following along is a huge encouragement to me.

So, let’s keep this going. I’m looking forward to another year of updates, and—checks calendar–writing April’s post in the next week or so!

,

Tim Riley — Salubrious Ruby: Don’t mutate what you don’t own

When we’re writing a method in Ruby and receiving objects as arguments, a helpful principle to follow is “don’t mutate what you don’t own.”

Why is this? Those arguments come from places that we as the method authors can’t know, and a well-behaved method shouldn’t alter the external environment unexpectedly.

Consider the following method, which takes an array of numbers and appends a new, incremented number:

def append_number(arr)
  last_number = arr.last || 0
  arr << last_num + 1
end

If we pass in an array, we’ll get a new number appended in the returned array:

my_arr = [1, 2]
my_new_arr = append_number(my_arr) # => [1, 2, 3]

But we’ll also quickly discover that this has been achieved by mutating our original array:

my_arr = [1, 2]
my_new_arr = append_number(arr) # => [1, 2, 3]
my_arr # => [1, 2, 3]

We can confirm by an object equality check that this is still the one same array:

my_new_arr.eql?(my_arr) # => true

This behavior is courtesy of Ruby’s Array#<< method (aka #append or #push), which appends the given object to the receiver (that is, self), before then returning that same self. This kind of self-mutating behaviour is common across both the Array and Hash classes, and while it can provide some conveniences in local use (such as a chain of #<< calls to append multiple items to the same array), it can lead to surprising results when that array or hash comes from anywhere non-local.

Imagine our example above is part of a much larger application. In this case, my_arr will most likely come from somewhere far removed and well outside the purview of append_number or whatever class contains it. As the authors of append_number, we have no idea how that original array might otherwise be used! For this reason, the courteous approach to take is not to mutate the array, but instead create and return a new copy:

def append_number(arr)
  last_number = arr.last || 0

  # There are many ways we can achieve the copy; here's just one
  arr + [last_number]
end

This way, the caller of our method can trust their original values to go unchanged, which is what they would likely expect, especially if our method doesn’t give any hint that it will mutate.

my_arr = [1, 2]
my_new_arr = append_number(arr) # => [1, 2, 3]
my_arr # => [1, 2]

This is a very simple example, but the same princple applies for all kinds of mutable objects passed to your methods.

A more telling story here comes from earlier days of Ruby, around how we handled options hashes passed to methods. We used to do things like this:

def my_method(options = {})
  some_opt = options.delete(:some_opt)
  # Do something with some_opt...
end

my_method(some_opt: "some value")

Using trailing options hashes like this was how we provided “keyword arguments” before Ruby had them as a language feature. Now the trouble with the method above is that we’re mutating that options hash by deleting the :some_opt key. So if the user of our method had code like this:

common_options = {some_opt: "some value"}

first_result = my_method(common_options)
second_result = my_method(common_options)

We’d find ourselves in trouble by the time we call my_method the second time, because at that point the common_options hash will no longer have some_opt:, since the first invocation of my_method deleted it — oops!

This is a great illustration of why modern Ruby’s keyword arguments work the way they do. When we accept a splatted keyword hash argument like **options, Ruby ensures it comes into the method as a new hash, which means that operations like options.delete(:some_opt) do in fact become local in scope, and therefore safe to use.

So now that we’ve covered both arrays and hashes now as Ruby’s most common “container” objects, what about the other kinds of application-specific structures that we might encounter in real world codebases? Objects representing domain models of various kinds, an instance of an ActiveRecord::Base subclass, even? Even in those cases, this principle still holds true. Our code is easier to understand and test when we can reduce the number of dimenstions to its behaviour, and mutating passed-in objects is a big factor in this, especially if you think about methods calling other methods and so on. There are ways we can design our applications to make this a natural approach to take, even for rich domain objects, but that is a topic for another day!

Until then, hopefully this walkthrough here can serve as a reminder to keep our methods courteous, to respect mutable values provided from outside, and wherever possible, leave them undisturbed and unmutated. Salubrious!

Bonus content! In preparing this post, I thought about whether it might be helpful to note that Ruby is a “pass by reference” language, since that’s the key underlying behavior that can result in these accidental mutations. However, my intuition here was actually back to front! Thanks to this wonderful stackoverflow answer, I was reminded that Ruby is in fact a “pass by value” language, but that all values are references.

,

Tim Serong — Go With The Flow

We installed 5.94kW of solar PV in late 2017, with an ABB PVI-6000TL-OUTD inverter, and also a nice energy efficient Sanden heat pump hot water service to replace our crusty old conventional electric hot water system. In the four years since then we’ve generated something like 24MWh of electricity, but were actually only able to directly use maybe 45% of that – the rest was exported to the grid.

The plan had always been to get batteries once we are able to afford to do so, and this actually happened in August 2021, when we finally got a single 10kWh Redflow ZCell zinc bromine flow battery installed. We went with Redflow for several reasons:

  • Unlike every other type of battery, they’re not a horrible fire hazard (in fact, the electrolyte, while corrosive, is actually fire retardant – a good thing when you live in a bushfire prone area).
  • They’re modular, so you can just keep adding more of them.
  • 100% depth of discharge (i.e. they’re happy to keep being cycled, and can also be left discharged/idle for extended periods).
  • All the battery components are able to be recycled at end of life.
  • They’re Australian designed and developed, with manufacturing in Thailand.

Our primary reasons for wanting battery storage were to ensure we’re using renewable energy rather than fossil fuels, to try to actually use all our local power generation locally, and to attain some degree of disaster resilience.

Being in Tasmania, most of our grid power is from renewable sources anyway (hydro), so the renewable energy argument may seem a little weak at first, unless you cast your mind back to the time some idiot decided to deplete our dams by selling a whole lot of hydro-generated power to Victoria in an El Niño year, then the Basslink cable broke and Tasmania had to fire up a bunch of diesel generators to get through winter. Good times.

On the local generation and use front, as I mentioned at the start of this post, we’ve previously exported more than half the energy we generated, but the feed-in tariff we get from Aurora (the power company) is only $0.06501 per kWh. Compare that to the rate we pay for grid energy ($0.29852/kWh peak or $0.139/kWh off-peak). Say we exported 13.2MWh in the last four years, we would have received about $858 worth of credit… But then when we drew power back from the grid at night, or on cloudy days, we would have paid somewhere between $1834-$3940 for that same amount of power. Treating the grid as a proxy for battery storage does not make any sort of financial sense.

As for disaster resilience, we don’t often have grid outages, but we do have them, and that can be a problem. Notably, all our potable water comes from rainwater tanks attached to the house and shed, and the pumps that push that water to the taps are electric, so if the grid is down we don’t have running water. Sure, I can get water out of the tanks with a bucket or a jug, and that’s fine for a little drinking or handwashing, but it’s not good long term. Then there’s our fridges and freezer – at any given time we’re likely to have a lot of stored frozen meat from animals we farm. We don’t want to lose that in a potential extended grid outage, as could happen in bushfire season or during a severe weather event. Also, it’s nice to still have power for our local network and NBN kit, so we can check the TasNetworks Power Outages page to find out WTF is going on.

Complete grid independence would be nice, and with our current power utilisation and a single Redflow battery we could almost do it in the height of summer, or even on some good days in spring or autumn, where we can generate all we need to run the house during the day and charge the battery to 100%, then draw it down overnight. The kink is that Redflow batteries need to undergo a maintenance cycle at least every three days where they are completely discharged for a few hours. If you’re grid connected you don’t really notice this, because the maintenance cycle commences at sunset and once the battery is drained you’re just using grid power again until the sun comes up, but it does mean we can’t be grid independent even if we theoretically have enough PV generation to do so, until we get a second battery (with more than one ZCell, the maintenance cycles are interleaved so at least one battery will always have some power in it).

The other problem with grid independence is that as much as Tasmania is excellent for solar PV generation in summer, it sucks in winter. Looking at our generation and usage figures for 2019, from mid-May to mid-August we were only able to generate 17% of the power we used, and I’ve seen days where we only generated 1-2kW in the entire day. Compare that with summer when we’ve peaked above 40kW some days in December.

Still, if the grid went away for a long time in the warmer half of the year with our current setup, it’d be irritating every few nights, but I reckon we’d manage OK. Of course, there would be some adjustments required to minimise our utilisation: I’d set the blockout timer on the Sanden so the hot water only heated during daylight hours, I’d turn most of our computer equipment off overnight, we’d try to avoid using the microwave at the same time as any other chunky electrical appliance so as not to pull more than 3kW continuously from the ZCell, there’s some lights we usually leave on that we’d just turn off, and so forth. In the colder half of the year, well, I guess we’d try to eat all the frozen food quickly then limp along as best as possible. We would still have some power, some of the time.

When we originally had the PV installed, it was AC coupled, i.e. the solar panels were connected to the inverter, and the inverter was connected to the grid, along with our loads. Our choice of inverter (ABB) was partly because it was Selectronic certified, and at the time we knew Redflow to be working with Selectronic battery inverters. Once we finally got to contacting Murray Roberts from Lifestyle Electrical Services in order to get a quote and talk about installation, circumstances had changed. It turns out that the Selectronic kit just doesn’t like flow batteries with their need to be completely discharged periodically. Victron Energy gear on the other hand works really well with – and is fully supported for use with – Redflow’s ZCell batteries. Lesson learned: with changing technology it doesn’t always pay to plan too far in advance.

Murray initially proposed a setup which would have hooked straightforwardly into our AC coupled solar, i.e. the ABB inverter and PV cells would remain connected as is, then there’d be a Victron energy meter to measure what was coming from the PV and from the grid, a Victron MultiPlus II inverter/charger to charge the battery and pull from the battery to run some loads, plus a Victron Cerbo GX and GX Touch to provide monitoring and control. Some of our power circuits to the house would be hooked up as Essential House Loads (i.e. to be supported by the battery during a grid outage), and some would be Non-Essential House Loads, i.e. powered by the grid and/or PV, but without battery backup. The Victron Cerbo GX and the Redflow ZCell Battery Management System (BMS) are internet connected to hook up with Victron’s VRM portal, which provides handy monitoring tools and graphs, and to allow remote support and assistance and firmware updates. The initial proposal looked something like this:

AC Coupled Solar schematic. Some detail missing (e.g. isolators) but you get the idea.

That configuration would have involved the least messing around, and met our goals of:

  • Utilising as much of your own energy as possible locally.
  • Dealing with occasional/unexpected grid outages (modulo the ZCell maintenance cycle).

But, it still fundamentally relied on the grid. With AC coupled solar, if the grid goes down your inverter automatically goes into anti-islanding mode, and won’t give you any power from your PV array even if the grid is down during the day and the sun is shining on your panels. Your first thought here may be “wait, if the grid is down but I still have sunlight, surely I should still have power”, and that’s an understandable reaction, but anti-islanding is actually a safety feature. If the juice goes from the PV cells to the inverter to the grid and your loads, and you’re exporting power while a power company employee is doing maintenance works on the grid side, you could electrocute them. This would not be a good thing.

A perhaps less obvious problem with this setup is that you can’t black start the site during an extended grid outage. If the grid is down and the inverter is thus in anti-islanding mode, you have no way to get power to restart the system and recharge the battery from empty (unless you’ve also got a generator). “But the grid never goes down for that long…” you might say, until you look at the outages really severe bushfires can cause (think: East Gippsland in the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires).

After some further discussion, Murray proposed getting rid of the ABB inverter, and doing DC coupled solar instead, with a Victron MPPT RS hooked up to the PV, two MultiPlus IIs, so that we could handle up to 10kW of power (that’s the maximum limit of all loads and grid export), with all house loads hooked up as Essential, so they can be supplied by whatever combination of grid, solar and battery power is available at any given time. Voilà:

DC Coupled Solar schematic. Again, some detail missing, but mostly accurate.

One thing that’s missing in the above diagram is a manual changeover switch we had installed later, so that if there’s ever a fault in the Victron cluster that requires major works, but the grid is still up, we can manually switch all our loads back over to the grid side for the duration. Not that I expect to need that functionality, but better to have it than not just in case.

The 10kW maximum has proven to be fine, by the way – we just don’t ever put anything like that much power through the system at once. During the day we might pull 400-700W continuously with spikes from 1-3kW or occasionally 4-5kW when multiple heavier loads come on. I think the highest we’ve managed was 7kW very briefly one time with a panel heater and the microwave and the hot water and the clothes dryer and gods only know what else was on at the time, the point is it’s not easy to get the load that high. Note that we currently have a gas stove and oven – if we switched that to electric we might want to be a bit cautious about running lots of other heavy loads while cooking, but I suspect we’d still be fine in general.

Rhys, one of Murray’s crew, did a fantastic job of installing all the kit over several days, then Murray came out to do the final commissioning and bring the system online on August 31, 2021. Here’s a couple of pictures:

RedFlow ZCell battery, 2x Victron MultiPlus IIs, Victron MPPT RS
MPPT again, with ethernet switch, sub board, Victron Cerbo GX and ZCell BMS off to the right.

The transparent box in the above photo contains the Cerbo GX and the ZCell BMS, along with a little 12V backup power supply so that those things keep running if the grid fails and the ZCell is at 0% State of Charge (SoC). The ethernet switch above the sub board hooks up to the network point I installed previously when I was using a Raspberry Pi to monitor the ABB inverter’s generation. It’s Power-over-Ethernet, run from a UPS in my office which also keeps the NBN box and router alive, so the whole system still has internet access for about an hour even if all other power sources are dead (handy if there were some sort of fault and we needed remote assistance).

Here’s what the main switchboard looks like now. The leftmost switch (“Main switch (grid supply)”) turns grid power on/off to the sub board under the house, which goes from there to the Multis’ AC input. The AC out comes back up here to the right-hand switch (“Victron Sub Board Backup Supply”) and thence to all the loads (the various switches in the middle).

Do not fuck with the electricity.

Inside the house there’s a neat little touchscreen console (the Victron GX Touch), which connects via an HDMI cable in the wall to the Cerbo under the house. This shows you what everything is doing at any given time, provides notifications of alarms (e.g.: “Grid Lost”) and has a series of menus for configuring the system. The exact same console is also accessible via a web browser or mobile phone, either over the local network, or remotely via the VRM portal.

Three days after everything was up and running, we went out to run some errands and came back home in the afternoon to discover the Cable PI device in our kitchen beeping like mad. All the power was still on in the house. I called Murray in a bit of a panic thinking something was broken, but it turned out we were experiencing an actual grid outage over a large area – all the way from Grove to Leslie Vale, 802 properties were without power due to wires down in strong wind, and the PV was powering our house. We didn’t feel a thing. The UPS in my office noticed a small dip for a second or two when the grid failed, but the microwave clock was still on, and other computer gear not hooked up to a UPS remained up during the cutover. And the battery kept on charging – it was at 65% SoC when the grid went out and up to 83% by the time the grid came back.

This was just awesome.

A few days after that, suddenly, at 19:39 on September 6, we were without power. The grid was up, but the Victron kit had shut down. This was not awesome. It happened during the ZCell’s regular maintenance cycle, and at the time we got a warning in the BMS logs, and a battery high voltage warning from the MPPT. It was unclear then exactly what the problem was though – our MPPT RS was a newer model so maybe it was different somehow from what had been previously tested? Also, we discovered the DVCC setting still needed to be turned on, so maybe that was the issue. Anyway, I power cycled the Victron kit and everything was fine again until a couple of weeks later on September 19, when the system shut down again during a maintenance cycle, and again coinciding with battery high voltage warnings.

Because of the previous shutdown, Murray had been in contact with Simon Hackett from Redflow, and Simon subsequently enabled the “DC-coupled PV – feed in excess” setting. The assumption here was that the extra power being delivered from the ZCell during the maintenance discharge wasn’t absorbed by our house loads, i.e. it was trying to discharge at 1kW, but our loads were utilising less than that, and there was nowhere for the excess to go, hence the shutdown. Enabling “DC-coupled PV – feed in excess” allows power from the DC bus to be sent to the grid if necessary, which turns out to be the case at our site. A second ZCell would mitigate this because the one under maintenance would simply be able to dump to the other (assuming it wasn’t already full), but we only have one battery so far.

At this point, after those two final settings changes (and a firmware update) the system was operating exactly as it should. Everything was configured correctly, and we could survive grid outages if there was charge in the battery and/or the sun was up. Our electricity meter was replaced on September 21 so we could switch to Tariff 93 Peak & Off-Peak billing. There were no further unexpected shutdowns. Everything was totally fine, except we were still seeing these weird battery high voltage warnings during the ZCell maintenance cycle, reported by both the BMS and the MPPT.

MPPT Alarm #2 Battery high voltage

This is something neither Murray nor Simon had seen before. What followed was several weeks of troubleshooting and analysis, which I found absolutely fascinating.

I was keeping detailed notes of what happened during each maintenance cycle, and what I saw in the BMS logs, and on the Cerbo console. Several maintenance cycles later I discovered a correlation between the battery high voltage warnings, and sudden large changes in AC loads, notably when a 2400W panel heater in our bedroom turned itself on and off overnight. Also, the high voltage warnings seemed to be more likely to occur if we went into maintenance with a high state of charge, versus a low state of charge.

Overnight load spikes

Simon, who knows and understands how the ZCell behaves during maintenance, explained about the Energy Extraction Device, which is part of the unit whose purpose is to deliberately drain the battery down to zero for maintenance in a timely fashion. He wondered if there was some issue where very high power demands at short notice, while the the EED was active, were causing the DC bus voltage to fluctuate and in turn cause the MPPT to respond in an unusual manner. We experimented with changing settings on the BMS to activate the EED later than usual in the maintenance cycle (“Start maintenance when SoC below x%”), and also experimented with limiting inverter output on the Multis, and tweaking the maximum charge voltage.

After a few more cycles of observation, the suspicion became that the MPPT itself wasn’t at fault, rather it was just being the messenger. Maybe these odd voltage spikes had always happened at other sites too, but the new MPPT RS units were doing a better job of noticing them?

Later in October, Simon noticed that we were seeing spikes very close to when the battery was nearly completely empty. At that point in time, the EED was telling the Multis that it had a 10 amp output capacity, but if the Multis tried to draw on that to handle a sudden rise in load (as from our panel heater for example), the battery voltage would collapse, and the system would oscillate a bit between those two states. That behaviour was fixed with a small firmware change which I believe later landed in the BMS 1.1.11 release. Unfortunately, that change by itself didn’t make the high voltage warnings go away.

A few days after that, we suddenly had a slew of #201 – Internal DC voltage errors from the MPPT, so we were back to being concerned that maybe there was something wrong with that piece of equipment, especially given those errors began to crop up more often as time passed.

MPPT Alarm #201 – Internal DC voltage error.

Victron’s documentation ominously stated that this error meant “a measurement circuit inside the unit is broken” and the unit “is really broken, not safe for use, and if it hadn’t stopped working already then it would have stopped working soon”. Clearly a replacement or repair was in order, but I’ll get to that later.

On November 4, looking at the logs I’d collected from November 2, Simon noticed that one of the high battery voltage warnings happened at quite a high state of charge (72%), which meant it wasn’t really about the battery running out of energy and having the voltage collapse. It looked like it was the EED being over-drawn, regardless of how much energy was still in the battery. It turns out there’s a thing that the ZCell does to handle surge demand when the EED is on, called an “EED switchback”. ZCells internally have three contactors, for Charge, Discharge and EED (also known as Strip). In normal operation, the C and D contactors are on, and E is off, so the battery can be charged or discharged at will, and the EED is doing nothing. During maintenance, the EED comes on, but it can’t deliver more than 20 amps. If the site pulls more than the EED can supply, the battery goes back to normal operation (C and D on, E off) while the high demand is present. Once the high demand goes away, it switches the EED back on, to keep discharging at the normal rate of 1kW. But, by default, that switchback process only happens five times per battery maintenance cycle so as to avoid the potential for excessive cycling of the contactors in weird edge cases.

Looking at our overnight load with the panel heater on, there’s loads of spikes from below 1kW to above 1kW, so we were getting through that switchback limit very quickly. After that, with the high load from the panel heater, it was entirely possible that the Multi cluster would try to pull more power than the EED could provide, and the EED would shut down in response, resulting in weirdness on the DC bus. Simon’s suspicion for why this hadn’t been seen before was that it needed at least four casual factors to be present at once:

  1. Site demand is spiky for the entire night.
  2. The spikes start below 1kW and end above 1kW to use up the switchback quota.
  3. The site has only one battery (if a second battery were present it would handle the surge load while the first was in maintenance).
  4. The two Multis are capable of running far more load than the battery can service.

If we were to change or remove any one of those factors, we wouldn’t see the problem. So, as a test, Simon changed the switchback limit from 5 to 50, and I watched what happened during the next maintenance cycle. The status page of the BMS web interface shows, among other things, the current state of the contactors. Here’s an example with C and D on, and E off:

The ZBM logs also show the contactor state over time. Here’s a snippet I’ve colourised to make the state changes obvious:

If we take the above section of ZBM logs from 2021-11-08 23:15 to 23:29, it looks like we had “_ D E” up until 23:17, then switched to “C D _” from 23:18 to 23:26, then finally to “_ _ E” at 23:27. Based on this I’d imagine we had one switchback event that lasted eight minutes. But I had earlier noticed on the status page that the contactors seemed to be toggling more rapidly, so I wrote a little script to scrape the BMS REST API once per second and dump that to a file, which shows Charge and EED toggling on/off about ten times in that window:

2021-11-08T23:14:28+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:17:59+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:18:29+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:18:34+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:18:56+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:19:14+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:19:20+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:19:54+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:20:17+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:20:18+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:20:49+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:21:19+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:21:22+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:21:46+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:21:51+11:00    "_ D _"
2021-11-08T23:21:54+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:22:23+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:22:26+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:22:43+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:22:45+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:23:26+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:23:30+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:23:43+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:24:30+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:24:34+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:24:43+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:25:35+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:25:39+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:25:49+11:00    "C D _"
2021-11-08T23:26:40+11:00    "C D E"
2021-11-08T23:26:44+11:00    "_ D E"
2021-11-08T23:26:49+11:00    "_ _ E"

On the assumption we were hitting way more switchbacks than expected, Simon just went and set the maximum switchback count to 999. A few days later, taking the log from my script, I saw something like 150-160 switchbacks, but given we’d set the limit way high, that fixed all the high voltage warnings, except for one, right at the very end of the maintenance cycle when the discharge limit from the ZCell drops from 10 amps to 0 amps.

Simon discussed this final spike with the folks who built the EED, and found that when current draw from the EED stops, there is a voltage spike, of very low energy, for 10ms, and it can rise as high as 64V during that period before dropping back to the expected 57V. It’s normal for the EED to do this, and as there’s no real energy in it, it won’t be damaging anything. The thing about our site seems to be the new MPPT RS, with a new voltage sensing circuit that’s actually capable of noticing the spike, whereas the other gear (the MultiPlus IIs) misses it because it’s so short. The advice from the electrical engineer was to try adding more capacitors on the DC bus to absorb the spike. We already had two 47,000uF capacitors on there, so Murray went and ordered two more.

With the high battery voltage warnings out of the way, we were back to the #201 Internal DC voltage errors from the MPPT. On the assumption the unit was indeed faulty in that regard we requested a replacement, but Victron came back and said the problem could be fixed by replacing two resistors on the main board of the unit. I guess that makes sense – if you can fix a problem with $2 worth of resistors, that’s three orders of magnitude cheaper than replacing the whole unit.

By then we were getting into December, and what with pandemic-related shipping delays and the Christmas holiday period, it was later in January before we were able to get the additional capacitors installed on the DC bus, and replace the resistors in the MPPT’s voltage sensing circuit. The additional capacitors went just fine, the replacement resistors not so much. Once the MPPT was powered back up it claimed there was zero volts coming from the PV, even though the sun was shining, and the LCD display started flickering strangely. Something was definitely broken here, so we powered it back down, and Simon arranged for a replacement unit to be sent out, which took another few weeks, which is a damn shame in January/February, being prime solar PV generation time.

The delay did however allow me to spend some time messing around with scheduled charges to see if there was a cost benefit to grid-charging the battery during off-peak times, then drawing it back down during peak, because the reality is we’re going to want to do this in winter when there’s not much sun, so why not try it out in advance? TL;DR: Yes, it’s worth grid charging the battery off-peak, provided you use all that power during peak times, but it’s a bit irritating trying to figure out exactly what you’ll save. In one of my tests it was the difference between paying $3.85 for about 20kWh of usable electricity in a 24 hour period versus paying $4.70, so it’s not insignificant.

Rhys came out and installed the replacement MPPT on February 11, and was done by the middle of the day. Everything was running beautifully again, but when the unit came online there were ten instances of the dreaded #201 Internal DC Voltage Error, along with a #27 Charger Short Circuit. I used the VictronConnect app on my phone to see if I could get any more information directly from the MPPT. It told me there was a firmware update available from v1.05 to v1.08, so I went looking for information about that, and discovered that Victron’s error code documentation had been updated since I first saw it back in late October. In addition to the ominous warnings about broken measurement circuits it now also said:

“Make sure to update the firmware to at least v1.08, in previous firmwares the limits were too strict. And it could trigger falsely during MPPT start-up in the morning and MPPT shutdown in the evening.”

So I updated the firmware, and writing this now, two and a half months later, we’ve not seen a single #201 since. Could this have always been a firmware issue? Maybe, given the “accepted answer” on this Victron Community forum post says that firmware version v1.08 “solves the vast majority of MPPT RS, and Inverter RS, Error 201 issues”. Or maybe it was both – maybe we had a broken bit of kit and broken firmware too. Either way, it’s fixed now.

I continued to monitor regular maintenance cycles, and also deliberately forced maintenance a couple of times with a high state of charge to try to stress it as much as I could. During those periods I saw something like 3-10 switchbacks, so Simon set our switchback limit back down from 999 to 30. I understand a future Redflow firmware update will change this default for everyone to somewhere between 25-50, and I’m very happy that this unexpected testing at our site resulted in firmware improvements that will presumably benefit other ZCell users too.

By late April we’d been through 33 maintenance cycles since the extra capacitors went in, with 26 of those occurring since the new MPPT was installed. There had been only three occasions when the BMS briefly noticed alleged high battery voltages in that time. The MPPT was completely silent until April 20 when we got three battery high voltage warnings within an 8 minute interval right at the end of the maintenance cycle, when the battery was almost completely empty. But the weather had also started to get cold, and those errors coincide with a spike from our panel heater, which is consistent with our earlier observations about load spikes with the EED on being “difficult” and really just points to replacing the panel heater with a heat pump. Heat pump are way more energy efficient, have much smoother load, and can also be used for cooling in summer (they’re called “reverse cycle air conditioners” on the mainland).

That’s about the end of the story. The system is brilliant, and we could not be happier with the support we’ve received from Simon at Redflow, who’s been extremely generous with his time and knowledge, and Murray and Rhys of Lifestyle Electrical Services. Thanks for everything guys, I’ve learned a lot. In the eight months the system has been running we’ve generated 4631kWh of electricity and “only” sent 588kWh to the grid, which means we’ve used 87% of what we generated locally – much better than the pre-battery figure of 45%. I suspect we’ve reduced the amount of power we pull from the grid by about 30% too, but I’ll have to wait until we have a full year’s worth of data to be sure. We’ve also survived or shortened at least five grid outages with durations from a few minutes to a few hours.

The next thing to do is get a second ZCell, and possibly eventually think about a third. Given our current generation capability, two ZCells would allow us to store and utilise 100% of our generated power locally. We’d also have the ability to handle grid outages at any time, because with two batteries the maintenance cycles interleave and they can be configured to always ensure there’s a minimum amount of charge somewhere. A third would allow us to look at Standby Power System (SPS) mode where one battery is fully charged, then put into hibernation where it can remain for months. This sounds like a great way to have backup storage available for grid outages in the middle of winter when there’s no sunlight.

Appendix A – Settings Worth Messing With

Scheduled charging on the Cerbo GX console

In summer I scheduled charges of the battery to 15% between the hours of 04:00 and 08:00, and 30% between the hours of 15:00-17:00. Peak electricity hours during daylight savings are 08:00-11:00 and 17:00-22:00, and I found that a 15% charge overnight from the grid was enough to have a bit in the battery for the morning peak before the PV really got going. The afternoon charge was there mostly just in case we had a cloudy day – we’d usually get way more charge than that from the sun anyway. Now that we’re off daylight savings, peak hours change to 07:00-10:00 and 16:00-21:00, so I’ve set it to a 30% charge from 03:00-07:00 and a 50% charge from 14:00-16:00, which seems to be about right given our general peak utilisation and decreasing sunlight. I’m unlikely to set the afternoon charge higher than 50% because I don’t want to potentially go into a maintenance cycle with the battery very full, but I may re-evaluate that as we get deeper into winter.

It’s worth mentioning that during a scheduled charge, the power will come from wherever the Victron gear can find it, so if the sun is shining, you’ll be charging from the PV, not the grid. One thing to note is that during the scheduled charge period, the battery will not be used to support loads, even if it’s currently got a higher SoC than your limit. Some power will trickle away slowly though, I assume to run the pumps and supporting electronics of the battery itself.

My choice of timing for the overnight charge (four hours up to the start of the morning peak) is me wanting to have some power in the battery for as long as possible overnight in case of outages, without potentially interfering with maintenance cycles, which typically will have finished some time in the wee hours.

I also set up a 15% charge on weekend mornings. This doesn’t save us any money at all (actually it’ll be costing us a couple of tens of cents) because weekends are all off-peak power. The reason is again to have some opportunistic grid backup. Before I set this up we had an outage at 07:45 one Saturday morning with the battery empty, and had to wait until about 09:30 for the PV to bring the battery up to 10% again before everything came back online. Still, that then got us through the remainder of the grid outage which finished at about 10:15.

Battery Maintenance Settings on the ZCELL BMS

On the Battery Maintenance screen of the ZCell BMS, I’ve got “Immediate maintenance for batteries with an EED” turned off, and “Start Maintenance When SoC Below 25%” enabled. This is to try to reduce the amount of time the EED runs, to limit switchbacks caused by our spiky load. In summer I also set “Daily SoC Limit Before Maintenance” to 50%, so the battery would not let itself be charged more than half way on those long hot days with late sunsets and early sunrises. This was to minimise maintenance cycle time, because I’d previously seen occasions where we went into maintenance with 100% SoC, and the cycle didn’t finish before the following morning when the sun came up. I also had a couple of times where I guess some timeout expired and the ZCell went into its final chemical maintenance state while it still had a few percent of charge. Not letting it get very full on maintenance days avoids these situations. Now that we’re getting towards winter I’ve removed that limit because the nights are longer and I expect our evening power utilisation to be higher, i.e. we should naturally use up whatever power we’re able to generate in plenty of time during winter maintenance cycles.

It’s also worth checking the latitude and longitude are set correctly on the Site Configuration page, because that’s how the BMS figures out when the sun sets and thus when to start maintenance by default.

Appendix B – VRM Portal

The VRM portal is a remote monitoring and management web interface which Victron provides gratis for users of their hardware. It provides a realtime view of the same live utilisation information you can get from the Cerbo console, plus handy graphs of solar, grid and battery consumption.

Consumption 2022-04-26. Red is grid, yellow is solar, blue is battery.

It also provides detailed graphs of just about anything you can think of from any of the system components. It’s extremely useful. Without this I never would have been able to correlate the battery high voltage warnings with load spikes and changes in the ZCell discharge current limits.

Viewing a bunch of interesting detail all at once

The data for the advanced graphs is stored for at least six months, and the solar yield and consumption data is stored for at least 5 years. The alarm logs don’t hang around that long – I suspect it may just be showing the last 1000 entries. Somewhat irritatingly, most of these are usually low battery alarms that we don’t care about (you see a lot of them during maintenance cycles).

Appendix C – Security / Connectivity / Internet Access

The ZCell BMS and Victron Cerbo GX both need to be connected to the internet for firmware updates, remote support, and to work with the VRM portal. They don’t need to be connected 100% of the time, but they do want the connection for those reasons. The system will operate just fine if the internet is down though, and you don’t have to use the VRM portal if you don’t want to. I’ve put everything on a separate network, so I can access the BMS and the Cerbo console from my desktop/laptop/phone, but the BMS and Cerbo can’t do the reverse. It’s not that I don’t trust Redflow or Victron, it’s just sensible to keep systems that allow any form of remote access isolated from the rest of your internal network.

The BMS and Cerbo both provide WiFi APs for initial configuration. I’ve since turned those off. I can use the wired connection to the BMS to turn the WiFi back on if I ever need it, and I can do the same for the Cerbo from its console.

The Cerbo and MPPT both speak Bluetooth, so you can use the VictronConnect app to talk to them from your phone, to view status and update firmware.

Appendix D – Hackability

The ZCell BMS has a REST API, which is documented in the online help available from its web interface. This is how I was able to write a few scripts to log the battery state of charge, the contactor state, and the voltage and warning indicator status:

A bunch of Victron stuff is open source, notably Venus OS, which is the software that runs on the Cerbo. It looks fairly straightforward to get root on these things. It’s also possible to hook up the Victron kit to Home Assistant. I haven’t tried actually doing any of these things yet myself.

Appendix E – Aurora Plus

Having switched to Tariff 93 and gotten a fancy new electricity meter, we were able to use the Aurora Plus service from the power company. This provides a web interface and mobile phone app for viewing your power usage down to the hour, colour coded to indicate peak and off-peak usage and solar feed in. You also get a monthly, rather than quarterly bill. This all sounded pretty neat, so I signed up.

Aside from having used it to confirm that the figures I get from the VRM Portal and the power company actually match, it’s turned out to not be especially great.

While the electricity meter records usage information every 15 minutes, it’s only sent back to Aurora once per day, so the usage data is never actually live. Sure, you can see history, but this is useless for adjusting your power consumption on the fly. Compare that with the VRM Portal or Cerbo console, where I can see at a glance how much power is being used and how much solar is being generated right now and decide to turn appliances on or off appropriately.

Also, it nags you to give them money. It’s continually telling me I have a big red negative dollar balance, and periodically notifies me to “top up now to get ahead of your monthly bill”. No. I will pay the bill by the due date listed on the bill, after the bill actually arrives.

Finally, it costs eleven cents a day for the privilege of having the service. Under the circumstances I think I’m going to cancel it and just go back to quarterly billing.

Aurora+, trying to trick me into paying in advance.

Update 2022-06-17: I never got around to cancelling (you can’t do it online – you actually have to call and speak to someone), but I just received a notification saying “From 1 July 2022 you will no longer be charged 11c/day for aurora+”, so I’ve decided to keep it.

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BlueHackers — Free psychologist service at conferences: April 2022 update

We’ve done this a number of times over the last decade, from OSDC to LCA. The idea is to provide a free psychologist or counsellor at an in-person conference. Attendees can do an anonymous booking by taking a stickynote (with the timeslot) from a signup sheet, and thus get a free appointment.

Many people find it difficult taking the first (very important) step towards getting professional help, and we’ve received good feedback that this approach indeed assists.

So far we’ve always focused on open source conferences. Now we’re moving into information security! First BrisSEC 2022 (Friday 29 April at the Hilton in Brisbane, QLD) and then AusCERT 2022 (10-13 May at the Star Hotel, Gold Coast QLD). The awesome and geek friendly Dr Carla Rogers will be at both events.

How does this get funded? Well, we’ve crowdfunded some, nudged sponsors, most mostly it gets picked up by the conference organisers (aka indirectly by the sponsors, mostly).

If you’re a conference organiser, or would like a particular upcoming conference to offer this service, do drop us a line and we’re happy to chase it up for you and help the organisers to make it happen. We know how to run that now.

In-person is best. But for virtual conferences, sure contact us as well.

The post Free psychologist service at conferences: April 2022 update first appeared on BlueHackers.org.

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FLOSS Down Under - online free software meetings — April Hack Day Report

The hack day didn’t go as well as I hoped, but didn’t go too badly. There was smaller attendance than hoped and the discussion was mostly about things other than FLOSS. But everyone who attended had fun and learned interesting things so generally I think it counts as a success. There was discussion on topics including military hardware, viruses (particularly Covid), rocketry, and literature. During the discussion one error in a Wikipedia page was discussed and hopefully we can get that fixed.

I think that everyone who attended will be interested in more such meetings. Overall I think this is a reasonable start to the Hack Day meetings, when I previously ran such meetings they often ended up being more social events than serious hacking events and that’s OK too.

One conclusion that we came to regarding meetings is that they should always be well announced in email and that the iCal file isn’t useful for everyone. Discussion continues on the best methods of announcing meetings but I anticipate that better email will get more attendance.

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Tim Riley — Open source status update, March 2022

My OSS work in March was a bit of a grind, but I made progress nonetheless. I worked mostly on relocating and refactoring the Hanami action and view integration code.

For some context, it was back in May 2020 that I first write the action/view integration code for Hanami 2.0. Back then, there were a couple of key motivators:

  • Reduce boilerplate to an absolute minimum, to the extent that simply inheriting from Hanami::View within a slice would give you a view class fully integrated with the Hanami application.
  • Locate the integration code in the non-core gems themselves (i.e. in the hanami-controller and hanami-view gems, rather than hanami), to help set an example for how alternative implementations may also integrate with the framework.

Since then, we’ve learnt a few things:

  • As we’ve gone about refining the core framework, we’ve wound up having to synchronize changes from time to time across the hanami, hanami-controller, and hanami-view gems all at once.
  • Other Hanami contributors have noted that the original integration approach was a little too “magical,” and didn’t allow users any path to opt out of the integration code.

Once I finished my work on the concrete slice classes last month, I decided that now was the time to address these concerns, to bring the action and view class integrations back into the hanami gem, and to take a different approach to activating the integration code.

The work in progress is over in this PR, and thankfully, it’s nearly done!

The impact within Hanami 2 applications will be fairly minimal: the biggest change is that your base action and view classes will now inherit from application variants:

# slices/main/lib/action/base.rb

require "hanami/application/action"

module Main
  module Action
    class Base < Hanami::Application::Action
      # Previously, this inherited from Hanami::Action
    end
  end
end

By using this explicit application superclass for actions and views, we hopefully make it easier for our users to understand and distinguish between the integrated and standalone variants of these classes. This distinct superclass should also provide us a clear place to hang extra API documentation relating to the integrated behavior of actions and views.

More importantly for the overall experience, Hanami::Application::Action and Hanami::Application::View are both now kept within the core hanami gem. While the framework heads into this final stretch of work before 2.0 final, this will allow us to keep together the aspects of the integration that tend to change together, giving us our best chance at providing a tested, reliable, streamlined actions and views experience.

This is a pragmatic move above all else — we’re a team with little time, so the more we can do to give ourselves confidence in this integrated experience working properly, like having all the code and tests together in one place, the quicker we should be able to get to the 2.0 release. Longer term, we’ll want to provide a first-class integration story for third party components, and I believe we can lead the way in how we deliver that via our actions and views, but that’s now firmly a post-2.0 concern in my mind.

In the meantime, I did take this opportunity to rethink and provide some better hooks for classes like Hanami::Application::View to integrate with the rest of the framework, chiefly via a new Hanami::SliceConfigurable module. You can see how it works by checking out the code for Hanami::Application::View itself:

# frozen_string_literal: true

require "hanami/view"
require_relative "../slice_configurable"
require_relative "view/slice_configured_view"

module Hanami
  class Application
    class View < Hanami::View
      extend Hanami::SliceConfigurable

      def self.configure_for_slice(slice)
        extend SliceConfiguredView.new(slice)
      end
    end
  end
end

Any class that extends Hanami::SliceConfigurable will have its own .configure_for_slice(slice) method called whenever it is sublcassed within a module namespace that happens to match the namespace managed by an Hanami slice. Using the slice object passed to that hook, that class can then read any slice- or application-level config to set itself up to integrate with the application.

In the example above, we extend a slice-specific instance of SliceConfiguredView, which will copy across application level view configs, as well configure the view’s part namespaces to match the slice’s namespace. The reason we build a module instance here (this module builder pattern is a whole technique that I’ll gladly go into one day, but it’s a little out of scope for these monthly updates) is so that we don’t have to keep any trace of the slice as state on the class after we’re done using it for configuration, making it so the resulting class is as standalone as possible, and not offering any way for its users to inadvertently couple themselves to the whole slice instance.

Overall, this change is feeling quite settled now. All the code has been moved in and refactored, and all that’s left is a final polishing pass before merge, which I hope I can get done this week! A huge thank you to Sean Collins for his original work in proposing an adjustment to our action integration code. It was Sean’s feedback and exploratory work here that got me off the fence here, and made it so easy to get started with these changes!

That’s it for me for now. See you all again next month, hopefully with some more continued core framework polishing.

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Lev Lafayette — Microprocessor Trend Usage in HPC Systems for 2022-2023

Background

In 2018 Intel x86 microprocessors were particularly susceptible to the Meltdown security vulnerabilities, whereby any system that allowed out-of-order execution was potentially vulnerable to an attack where a process could read memory that it was not authorised to do so [1]. As this vulnerability did not affect AMD processors, suggestions were raised that AMD could be a more effective choice for HPC environments. In the same year, as a topic at International Supercomputing Conference, the European Processor Initiative (EPI), a program to develop processors for domestic supercomputers, based on ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) and RISC-V, "European Processor Accelerator" system-on-a-chip [2]. With the benefits of four years of hindsight, it is valuable to consider the current trends in microprocessor architecture.

A wide analysis was recently presented at HPCAsia2021 [3] that conducts a detailed analysis of the trends of the last 27 year from over 10,000 computers from the Top500, with even more detailed analysis of 28 systems from 2009 to 2019. Of particular note in this context is the steady growth in recent years of heterogeneous supercomputers i.e., systems with GPGPUs to 28% of the Top500 with an increase of 1% per annum. The authors note: "We expect this increasing trend will continue, particularly for addressing technological limitations controlling the power consumption", a claim that could certainly be justified with the use of Nvidia GPUs or Intel Xeon Phi (discontinued as of 2020) as co-processors. At the time most systems were clustered around 1 GB per core with only three contemporary systems at 2 GB per CPU core, there was a wide variation in compute performance and parallel file system storage, and an increasing use among the most powerful systems of burst buffer storage to overcome the performance gap between memory and the file system.

Recent Developments

It is also necessary to explore trend changes in microprocessor architecture, which are not covered by the HPCAsia paper, especially over the last eighteen months. In particular, there is an increasing growth of AMD EPYC processors, increasing its share almost five-fold in the top 500 in the June 2021 list compared to a year earlier, and present in half of the 58 new entries on the June 2021 list [4]. Also of note is AMD's HPC Fund for COVID-19 research, which includes a donation system with EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators. Specifically, AMD systems made up 49 of the systems compared to 11 a year ago, include 3 new entrants in the top 10, however none of these are systems with Instinct accelerators [5]. Intel is still dominant of course, with 431 systems in the Top 500 in July 2021, albeit down from 470 the previous year.

In the November 2021 list, there was one new entry in to the top 10 list, an AMD system (the Microsoft Azure system, "Voyager-EUS2") with NVIDIA A100 GPUs. In November 2021, AMD had four systems, Fujitsu one (albeit the first), Sunway one, IBM Power 9 two, and Intel Xeon two [6]. The total Top500 share for AMD rose to 73 for AMD for November 2021, and Intel's reduced to 401, although Intel added 42 new systems to AMDs 28 (however, AMDs core count of the new entries was higher). Much of this trend is driven by the EPYC Milan series, launched in March 2021, which compares strongly to Intel's Ice Lake, which came out a month later. Among accelerators, Nvidia's share in November 2021 was 143, roughly stable compared to the previous values of 138 and 141; Nvidia GPUs are in seven of the top 10 clusters and 14 of the top 20. It also can be stated with complete certainty that another AMD system, LUMI from a European consortium, will be in the top 10 at the next release [7]

Whilst the European Union's home-grown ARM/RISC-V exascale systems are not planned to be released in the public until 2023, it remains within its planned timeline, with the completion of stage one at the end of 2021 which included Rhea general-purpose processor, using ARM Neoverse V1 and with 29 RISC-V cores [8], with an emphasises on security, power utilisation, and integration with the European automotive industry. The EPI team heavily advocates the capacity of the open-source RISC-V acceleration to transform the HPC space, with a number of architectures including long-vector processing units, stencil and tensor accelerators, and variable precision accelerators.

At the moment, however, ARM-based systems only make up six computers in the Top500; however, that includes the world's top system, Fugaku, which is the world's first exascale system and has held the number one position since June 2020. Of the six ARM-based systems, five use Fujitsu processors, while the other one uses Marvell’s ThunderX2, a now-cancelled line. The prospect of ARM/RISC-V processors increasing their share in HPC depends very much on assembly-level or compiler software development. Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC), such as x86, provide a more comprehensive set of tools but at a cost of flexibility and power-consumption. RISC systems, in contrast, have a smaller instruction set and, whilst requiring more cycles to achieve the same task in most cases, can flexibly add new criteria and have a much lower power consumption for the same tasks.

In terms of SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) SPECspeed2017 and SPECrate2017 tests AMD's Milan outperforms Intel's Ice Lake in each of the 16 tests conducted in one and two socket versions, and for integer and floating point performance ratings [9]; this is perhaps unsurprising given that Milan offers more cores per processor (64 vs 40, albeit with individual cores at c25% lower speeds), increased PCIe lanes, very large L3 cache (up to 768 MB on the Milan-X with 3D-Cache) etc. The L3 cache will be particularly significant for simulation applications based on many data points and rapid read-writes, such as molecular modelling, climate and weather simulations, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, etc. Further, the Milan also offers up to 42% lower power usage and 50% less rack space requirements.

Whilst the Intel Ice Lake is a very significant advance from its Cannon Lake and Whiskey Lake predecessors, essentially it seems to be a generation behind AMD Epyc. However, it is worth noting that since Ice Lake, Intel's server generation has been upgraded to Rocket Lake with Sapphire Rapids promised in 2022 (Adler Lake, the equivalent desktop system is already available). Nevertheless, a comparison between Rocket Lake (Intel Core i9-11900T) and AMD's Milan Zen 3 (Epyc 75F3) server specifications also reveals that the AMD Milan is ahead. The Sapphire Rapids (originally expected last quarter 2021) does promise 64GB of L4 cache, this is obviously a far cry from Milan-X's 768 MB.

Perhaps it should be expected that Intel would offer heavy discounts to provide a more competitive offering, given the advantage to AMD systems on many baseline costs as well as performance (after all, Intel tried very hard in the US Supreme Court to invalidate AMD and other x86 licenses). Another advantage that is notable is that Intel offers a greater variety of Ice Lake systems compared to Milan systems, thus providing greater specialisation for diverse workloads which extends over other micro-architectures. For example, Intel's Alder Lake microprocessors are superior to equivalent AMD's Ryzen 5000 series on desktop systems [10]. Whilst this advantage has led to some rather up-beat end-of-year remarks from Intel, it would be wrong to automatically make the same comparison on server systems or, for that matter, to market share. Whilst in the past AMD has struggled financially, this has not been the case for some years, with obvious benefits to consumers: "AMD has literally never been in a stronger position to face Intel’s challenge. The company has now been profitable every year since 2018... What we actually have for the first time in at least 20 years is two financially stable and healthy x86 CPU design firms slugging it out for your dollars." [11]

Whilst both AMD and Intel use the same ISA, the implantation in micro-architecture is different. This initiates another area that Intel systems always enjoy an advantage due to market share is with extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture (e.g., AVX SIMD 256, AVX SIMD 512, for Intel, XOP for AMD, etc) and hardware-assisted virtualisation. For example, in the previous generation of micro-architecture extensions AMD adopted an over-clocking approach to replicate the performance of extensions on Intel micro-architectures [12]. As it turned out (c.f., Meltdown) Intel's own performance metrics were on less than secure foundations. Today, whilst AMD does make an effort to incorporate the instruction set extensions from Intel it is quite possible that performance can be suboptimal, ranging from "lower performance" to "export this environment variable for compatibility" for particular applications. One example of this has been seen with Gaussian and MATLAB applications, which requires an additional environment variable. These differences, and requirements for environment modifications, are most evident in software that makes use of the Intel MKL [13]. Note that with hardware-assisted virtualisation (e.g., Intel HAXM) competitors do not even pretend to aim for compatibility.

Overall, it must be said that whilst Intel's market position certainly remains in a majority in major HPC systems and it provides solid products with incremental improvements and a diverse range, the Milan-series of EPYC processors from Intel have kept match with comparable Intel systems and, with the enormous L3 cache, have really considered pinpointed where "big data" problems are in HPC systems. This has been a known problem for quite a while, between memory and the processor. Whilst many systems have talked about various solutions (such as reviving the old PDP-11 core memory idea with cache NVM), this is really the first architecture that has addressed the problem at scale. It would be unwise to overlook this opportunity as certainly does not take advantage of this problem the University of Melbourne's flagship supercomputer would lose significant ground and fall out from being a world-class system. All other things being roughly equal, any microarchitecture that deals with the processor-memory gap - Intel, AMD, or ARM - should be considered as a priority.

Certainly, a heterogeneous system in terms of processors is possible, as long as system engineers are aware of the potential need for build switches and multiple builds. This is no simple task; specific builds for heterogeneous systems that take advantage of the specific architecture is an often overlooked hurdle, especially when the software in question has a complex collection of dependent builds.

GPUs and Accelerators

In the GPU and accelerator space, the release of AMD's Instinct MI210 and MI210X in November 2021 can be compared very favourably to Nvidia's A100 with 80GB GPU released in November 2020 [14], although one can expect that Nvidia will have a major release with "Ampere Next" (aka "Hopper"), expected in March 2022, although it would require a very significant improvement (around fivefold across 64-bit floating point vector and matrix compute) to close the performance gap. Implied research [15] suggests that: "Coming to the performance numbers, the 'GPU-N' (presumably Hopper GH100) produces 24.2 TFLOPs of FP32 (24% increase over A100) and 779 TFLOPs FP16 (2.5x increase over A100) which sounds really close to the 3x gains that were rumored for GH100 over A100. Compared to AMD's CDNA 2 'Aldebaran' GPU on the Instinct MI250X accelerator, the FP32 performance is less than half (95.7 TFLOPs vs 24.2 TFLOPs) but the FP16 performance is 2.15x higher." [16]

For their own part, albeit delayed by a year more than than expected, Intel will certainly be launching the "Ponte Vecchio" Xe HPC GPU, although the promise of "petaflops in your palm" is quite plausible from released specifications. "What stands out almost immediately is the amount of L2 cache leveraged by Ponte Vecchio: 408MB vs just 16MB on the Instinct MI200 and 40MB on the A100. However, in terms of raw compute, AMD has a lot more vector units: 7,040 across 110 CUs, resulting in an overall throughput of 95.7 TFLOPs, compared to just 19.5 TFLOPs on the NVIDIA A100. However, each of Intel’s CUs will be better fed with much higher cache hit rates and wider XMX matrix units. The MI250X has an 8192-bit wide bus paired with 128GB of HBM2e memory capable of transfer rates of up to 3.2TB/s. Intel hasn’t shared any details regarding the bus width or memory configuration of PVC just yet." [17]

At the same time, technical management must keep a careful eye on the development of stage 2 of the European Processor Initiative and prepare in their mind that the next dominant processor type in high performance computing may very well not only be based on ARM/RISC-V systems, but even provided with open-source principles. This would be an extraordinary achievement as the consumer benefits of competitive performance without vendor-lockin would be enormous. There is even an international shift in this regard [18]; the European Union's EPI is explicitly aimed at reducing reliance on foreign technologies, which other major international powers are also engaging. In 2021, Russia revealed a programme based around RISC-V parts, combined with that country's Elbrus, and the People's Republic of China also has a RISC-V chip family (XiangShan) for personal computers, following the use of their Matrix-2000 and Sunway SW26010 RISC processors as a response to US sanctions on the export of Intel Xeon Phi systems.

Summary

* Heterogeneous systems (CPU/GPU) are now normal in HPC and this will expand to include other architectures.
* AMD Zen CPUs are increasing as a proportion of the Top500 and are overcoming MLK/AVX-512 concerns.
* RISC systems are currently a very small percentage, but include the top system. RISC-V will be important in the future.
* Despite very competitive hardware offerings from AMD and Intel, GPUs are still overwhelming dominated by Nvidia.

References

[1] CVE-2017-5754 Detail
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2017-5754

[2] Lev Lafayette, New Developments in Supercomputing, Presentation to Linux Users of Victoria, September 4, 2018
http://levlafayette.com/files/2018luvsupercomputers.pdf

[3] Awais Khan, Hyogi Sim, Sudharshan S. Vazhkudai, Ali R. Butt, Youngjae Kim. An Analysis of System Balance and Architectural Trends Based on Top500 Supercomputers. HPCAsia2021: International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021

[4] AMD Leads High Performance Computing Towards Exascale and Beyond, June 28, 2021
https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1012/amd-leads-high...

[5] AMD Quadrupled EPYC’s Top 500 Supercomputer Share In A Year, June 28, 2021
https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/amd-quadrupled-epyc-s-to...

[6] November 2021 Top 500
https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2021/11/

[7] Kurt Lust, EasyBuild on LUMI, a pre-exascale supercomputer, Proceedings of the 7th EasyBuild User Meeting, 24-28 January, 2022

[8] EPI Announces Successful Conclusion of European Processor Initiative Phase One, December 22, 2021
https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/epi-announces-successful-conclusion...

[9] AMD 3rd Gen Epyc CPUs Put Intel Xeon SPS on Ice in the Datacenter, NextPlatform, July 29, 2021
https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/07/29/amd-3rd-gen-epyc-cpus-put-intel-...
Nota Bene: Article sponsored by AMD.

[10] Paul Alcorn, CPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy 2022: Intel and AMD Processors Ranked, Tom's Hardware, January 8, 2022
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html

[11] Joel Hruska, Intel’s CEO is Wrong About AMD, ExtremeTech, January 19, 2022
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/330685-intels-ceo-is-wrong-about-amd

[12] Joel Hruska, Analyzing Bulldozer: Why AMD’s chip is so disappointing, ExtremeTech, October 24, 2011
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/100583-analyzing-bulldozers-scalin...

[13] Mingru Yang, MKL has bad performances on an AMD CPU, Nov 18, 2019
https://sites.google.com/a/uci.edu/mingru-yang/programming/mkl-has-bad-p...

[14] AMD Instinct MI200 Series Accelerator, December 2021
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/amd-instinct-mi200-datasheet.pdf

[15] Yaosheng Fu, Evgeny Bolotin, Niladrish Chatterjee et al, ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, Volume 19 Issue 1 March 2022
(pre-release available online December 2021)
https://doi.org/10.1145/3484505

[16] Hassan Mujtaba, Mysterious NVIDIA ‘GPU-N’ Could Be Next-Gen Hopper GH100 In Disguise, December 21, 2021
https://wccftech.com/mysterious-nvidia-gpu-n-could-be-next-gen-hopper-gh...

[17] Areej Syed, Intel Ponte Vecchio Specs. HarwareTimes, November 15, 2021
https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-ponte-vecchio-specs-1024-cores-408mb...

[18] Gareth Halfacree, First RISC-V computer chip lands at the European Processor Initiative, The Register, 22 Sep, 2021
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/22/first_riscv_epi_chip/

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Simon Lyall — Audiobooks – March 2021

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute
by Zac Bissonnette

The toys, the bubble and the crazy guy behind it all. Fun roller-coaster of a read. Second review. 4/5

Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There: How a Few Skinny Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America by David Hepworth

A bunch of amusing stories and observations of the British Invasion and it’s followups. I love Hepworth’s style but your mileage may vary. 3/5

This is Not Normal: The Politics of Everyday Expectations by Cass R. Sunstein

A fairly short book that packs some interesting ideas. Mainly concentrating how societal norms change. Worth a read. 4/5

Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 by Kristina Spohr

An analysis of the upheavals of 1989 and the 3 years that followed them. Especially following the actions of Bush, Gorbachev and Kohl, it is mostly a history of the leaders and their policies. 3/5

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich by Bernd Heinrich

Around 35 short ( main around 10-20 minutes ) essays on plants, insects and birds. A delight to listen to. 4/5

My Audiobook Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all

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,

Tim Riley — Let the shape of the code reflect its flow

Say you’re building a system for handling messages off some kind of queue. For each message, you need to run a series of steps: first to decode the message, next to wrap it in some common structure, and finally, to process the message based some logic provided by the users of your system.

Let’s imagine the queue subscription as provided: we’ll have a subscriber object that yields a message to us via a #handle method:

subscriber.handle do |message|
  # Here's where we need to hook our logic
end

For each of processing steps, let’s also imagine we have corresponding private methods in our class:

  1. #decode(message)
  2. #build_event(decoded_message) — with an “event” being that common structure I mentioned above
  3. #process(event)

With these set up, we could wire them all together in our handler block like so:

subscriber.handle do |message|
  process(build_event(decode(message)))
end

This is hard to grok, however. There’s a lot going on in that one line, and most critically, you have to read it inside out in order to understand its flow: start with decode, then work backwards to build_event and then process.

Instead, we should strive to let the shape of our code reflect its flow. We want to make it easy for the reader of the code to quickly understand the flow of logic even with just a glance.

One step in this direction could be to use intermediate variables to hold the results of each step:

subscriber.handle do |message|
  decoded_message = decode(message)
  event = build_event(decoded_message)
  process(event)
end

This isn’t bad, but the variable names at the beginning of the line add extra noise, and they push back the most meaningful part of each step — the private method names — into a less prominent location.

What I would recommend here is that we take advantave of Ruby’s Object#then to turn this into something that actually looks like a pipeline, since that’s the flow that we’re actually creating via these methods: the steps run in sequence, and the output of one step feeds into the next.

subscriber.handle do |message|
  message
    .then { |message| decode(message) }
    .then { |decoded| build_event(decoded) }
    .then { |event| process(event) }
end

This makes it much clearer that this is a pipeline of three distinct steps, with message as its starting point. Through the shape of those blocks, and the pipe separators distinguishing the block argument from the block body, it also brings greater prominence to the name of the method that we’re calling for each step.

Most importantly, we’ve made this code much more scannable. We’re giving the eye of the reader hooks to latch onto, via the repeated “thens” stacked on top of each other, in addition to their corresponding blocks. The shape of the code embodies its flow, and in doing so, we’ve created a table-of-contents-like structure that both summarises the behaviour, and can serve as a jumping off point for further exploration if required.

To further reduce noise here, we could try Ruby’s new numbered implicit block arguments:

subscriber.handle do |message|
  message
    .then { decode(_1) }
    .then { build_event(_1) }
    .then { process(_1) }
end

However, I’d consider this a step too far, since it takes away what is otherwise a helpful signal, with the block argument name previously serving as a hint to the type of value that we’re dealing with at each point in the pipeline.

By taking the time to consider the flow of our logic, and finding a way for the shape of code to embody that flow, we’ve made our code easier to understand, easier to maintain, and — why not say it? — truer to itself. This is a method I’d walk away from feeling very satisfied having written. Salubrious!

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Simon Lyall — Audiobooks – February 2022

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

A fairly straight story about the company, lots of fun anecdotes. A little biased towards founder Kevin Systrom, probably due to more access to him (and none to Zuckerberg). 3/5

A Walk Around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (And Know Nothing About) by Spike Calsen

Short chapters about various bits of infrastructure and the people who manage them. Not huge amounts of detail but a few gun facts on each. An okay quick listen. 3/5

Yeager: An Autobiography by Chuck Yeager

A well written account of an aviation legend’s life. Interesting stories of World War 2 service, test pilot and other parts of his career and life. 4/5

The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming

A first person account by a young women. Fleeing some unfortunately love affairs via a road trip she meets Gangsters and James Bond. Different feel from most Bond books. 3/5

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

After a heat-wave kills 20 million in India. A UN Agency (The head of which is the main character) and others start getting serious to reverse climate change. Interesting and engaging. 4/5

The years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert Caro

The first volume of the series covers Johnson from birth through his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in 1941. Detailed, entertaining and easy to follow. 4/5

My Audiobook Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all

Share

,

FLOSS Down Under - online free software meetings — March 2022 Meeting

Meeting Report

The March 2022 meeting went reasonably well. Everyone seemed to have fun and learn useful things about computers. After 2 hours my Internet connection dropped out which stopped the people who were using VMs from doing the tutorial. Fortunately most people seemed ready for a break so we ended the meeting. The early and abrupt ending of the meeting was a disappointment but it wasn’t too bad, the meeting would probably only have gone for another half hour otherwise.

The BigBlueButton system was shown to be effective for training when one person got confused with the Debian package configuration options for Postfix and they were able to share the window with everyone else to get advice. I was also confused by that stage.

Future Meetings

The main feature of the meeting was training in setting up a mailserver with Postfix, here are the lecture notes for it [1]. The consensus at the end of the meeting was that people wanted more of that for the April meeting. So for the April meeting I will add to the Postfix Training to include SpamAssassin, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. For the start of the next meeting instead of providing bare Debian installations for the VMs I’ll provide a basic Postfix/Dovecot setup so people can get straight into SpamAssassin etc.

For the May meeting training on SE Linux was requested.

Social Media

Towards the end of the meeting we discussed Matrix and federated social media. LUV has a Matrix server and I can give accounts to anyone who’s involved in FOSS in the Australia and New Zealand area. For Mastodon the NZOSS Mastodon server [2] seems like a good option. I have an account there to try Mastodon, my Mastodon address is @etbe@mastodon.nzoss.nz .

We are going to make Matrix a primary communication method for the Flounder group, the room is #flounder:luv.asn.au . My Matrix address is @etbe:luv.asn.au .

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FLOSS Down Under - online free software meetings — Mailing List

We now have a mailing list see https://lists.linux.org.au/mailman/listinfo/flounder for information, the address to post to the list is flounder@lists.linux.org.au..

We also have a new URL for the blog and events. See the right sidebar for the link to the iCal file which can be connected to Google Calendar and most online calendaring systems.

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Lev Lafayette — The HPC Certification Forum : A Call for NZ Contribution

The 2022 eResearch New Zealand conference was held on the 9th to 11th of February, co-hosted by New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), REANNZ, and Genomics Aotearoa, and preceded by Carpentaries Connect, a community of institutions and universities that run Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry workshops.

A brief presentation was given to the conference on the HPC Certification Forum and, in particular, a call for participation from New Zealand. The key elements of the presentation included identifying the growth of large datasets and complex problems, the demand for training by researchers, the formation and history of the HPC Certification Forum to provide an "HPC driving license", and the relationship between examinable material by the Forum and the delivery of content by institutions.

Aotearoa-New Zealand is identified as a country that could make a significant contribution to the HPC Certification Forum. In the past, it has made significant strides in reviewing and reviving the HPC Carpentry, and at least one institution (University of Waikato) has taught HPC usage to research scientists outside of specialist computer science courses. The range of potential participation was provided and encouraged to attendees.

,

Adrian Chadd — At least cross compiling for the Amiga 500 is easier than the 16 bit DOS mode PC stuff

I wanted to hack on Amigaterm (https://aminet.net/package/comm/term/amigaterm) a bit, but I found out that someone already had done that (https://aminet.net/package/comm/term/amigaterm_enh). They fixed some bugs and added speeds above 9600 baud - 19200 works fine on the Amiga 500, and 38400 works fine on the Amiga 1200.

But I wanted to add a couple more things - play with what Amiga calls "serial hardware flow control" (which is .. not quite what you expect...) and fix up xmodem receive to allow it to truncate data at a particular file size. Without the truncation option the written file is a multiple of the xmodem block size (128 bytes) which results in binaries you can't actually run.

Anyway.

There's a very nicely put together build framework targeting m68k Amiga at https://github.com/bebbo/amiga-gcc . I haven't built it yet on FreeBSD - just Ubuntu Linux and MacOS/X. Then I wanted to get amigaterm to compile for workbench 1.3 as that's what is on my Amiga 500. It turns out that's quite easy - you just need to use the right command line option (-mcrt=nix13), but you need to be sure that you're not trying to use library versions and functions that are later than what 1.3 supports.

This did trip me up - there's a ChangeFileSize() in later OS versions (4.0 I think?) that isn't in 1.3, but there is SetFileSize() in 1.3 (library version 36). I ended up opting for just not writing out the data instead of writing it out and truncating.

Now that this is working I think I'll go and see if using 128 byte receive data buffers when receiving xmodem packets works better than byte at a time. I need to go and understand how they handled timeouts so I don't end up waiting forever for data to show up. That may end up speeding up receive transfers a little.

What I'd really like to do is bring over or write very small zmodem receive library to really speed things up to make it less painful to transfer the 880 kilobyte disk images (ADF). That'll make bootstrapping things less painful in the future.

Next up is fixobj. The source for that is on the fish-010 disk so I modified it to compile here. It's hard-coded to search the last 128 bytes for the end of an executable binary, which matches the normal 128 byte xmodem block size.

Finally, I've put them both in github here - https://github.com/erikarn/amiga-code .

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Adrian Chadd — Getting stuff onto the Amiga 500, or "holy crap please include bootstrapping serial file transfer utilities in your OS"

Yes, I know I'm ranting about 1980s OSes, but to be quite frank, modern OSes on a variety of hardware still have a similar problem.

Wait, what do I mean you ask? Surely you will always have ethernet/wifi/USB available? I almost started writing a bit on that here given I end up working behind the scenes on modern hardware and a LOT has to be working before you can talk over the network or, heck, even boot your device. But I'll leave that for another day.

This is a similar thing to what I found in a previous blog post about boot-strapping an old PC/AT before I had useful media (read: disks and other working machines.) It's doubly tricky for the Amiga because of it's non-standard floppy disk format that can't be easily read on PCs, let alone written to. You need to have another Amiga, or some modern multi-format disk interface like the Catweasel. I lucked out and at least got working Workbench 1.3 Main and Extra disks with the Amiga 1000 I picked up - but no working Kickstart disk, hence why I'm working with the Amiga 500 right now.

Anyway, the goal of this is to get the following to work:

  • Figure out how to transfer a simple program to get a single binary over in a useful way;
  • Transfer a small enough program over to do xmodem/ymodem/zmodem;
  • Use that to bootstrap the tools to write disk image files to an Amiga 880K disk; and
  • Also write out a working Kickstart 1.3 disk for my Amiga 1000.
This is... surprisingly annoying to do.

Firstly, how to get the initial files over. Workbench didn't come with a file transfer program, even with AmigaDOS. xmodem was around in the late 70s so it could've been used. Oh well. Luckily the Extras disk includes AmigaBASIC which can speak to both the disk and the serial port. And there are guides out there for how to write a simple non-error-checking binary receive program - I used this one.

I also needed to make a null modem cable up. Now, the Amiga 500/1000 used some of the RS-232 port pins for things other than ground, so it's best you make one of your own. Here's what I used for my Amiga 500.



The Amiga 1000 uses a reversed serial port, and I will figure out that particular hilarity once I get it booting with Kickstart.

However! Not everything was, err, well documented. I remember Amiga stuff in the 90s, but not THAT well.

First up - the receive.bas program in the above link doesn't at all set the serial parameters. So before you start it you need to run the Serial preferences program and configure it up. It also assumes that you're using 1024 byte buffers, so you need to do the following:
  • Set the speed - I used 9600, it's somewhat reliable here;
  • 8/N/1, which is already setup;
  • Buffer size 1024 bytes, not 512 bytes;
  • Hardware flow control!
Then yes, on the linux side I did the same (stty 9600 -parenb cs8 crtscts -ixon -ixoff raw iutf8 -F /dev/ttyUSB0).

Ok, then running the program. It's best you get the data going into the ram disk, so set your file target as RAM:filename. Easy.

Except the block size thing. Apparently with the way AmigaBasic speaks to the serial driver the transfers have to be in block sized blocks, not just the file size. So you need to pad the file you're sending. The receive.bas program will write out the correct length for you.

I did something like this:

  • dd if=file bs=1024 conv=sync > /dev/ttyUSB0
That padded it correctly and .. well, after a few attempts I can get a ~ 20k binary to transfer OK.

Then comes the fun part, what to transfer. I started by transferring lharc. However, apparently the later versions don't work with Workbench 1.3! I had to use https://aminet.net/package/util/arc/LhA_e138 .

It took a few goes, but yes, I got a working lharc tool on the floppy disk.

Next up is transferring something less terrible to transfer files with. A lot of things are lha'ed, which is why I spent a lot of time trying to get lha to transfer. Next time I won't, I'll unpack them on the linux sending host and send the binaries.

I needed a small transfer program to work on Workbench 1.3. I found https://aminet.net/package/comm/term/amigaterm . It's small, it runs on Workbench 1.3 and it has xmodem support. Nice!

However! It's xmodem support doesn't ask for the receive file size, so it rounds it up to the nearest block size. No! Things like lha then don't seem to work right and binaries certainly don't run.

Ok, so how'd they do it in the 80s/90s? It turns out there's a little utility called "fixobj" which tries to find the actual end of a binary object inside a file and truncates it there. I unpacked https://aminet.net/package/misc/fish/fish-0010 and grabbed the small binary from it. Now I can transfer individual programs, like https://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/adf2disk11, to write out an ADF image to disk.

So, that's transferring right now upstairs via xmodem at 9600. Yeah it'll take a while. Luckily 901120  bytes (the size of an ADF image) is exactly 7040 blocks of 128 bytes each, which is what xmodem is using. Thus I should be OK without having to truncate stuff.

Once that's done I can start transferring things to get the IDE disk add-on I have here booting, and I can setup the rest of this Amiga 500 to do fun things.

What I think would've made this easier?
  • Some tiny xmodem program that can be transferred over serial relatively quickly, and can receive exact file sizes (ie it'll truncate the last block if needs be)
  • A program to actually truncate a file at a given offset so you can use amigaterm as-is to transfer files slowly but reliably, and then just manually truncate it to where it needs to be in order to use it.
  • ... and then some less tiny but working zmodem program that'll work with Workbench 1.3 to get files on and off the thing.
In any case I'm hoping by tonight I'll have this thing writing out ADF disk images OK albeit slowly, and I'll see if I can get zmodem working on something faster like 19200 baud.

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FLOSS Down Under - online free software meetings — First Meeting Success

We just had the first Flounder meeting which went well. Had some interesting discussion of storage technology, I learnt a few new things. Some people did the ZFS training and BTRFS training and we had lots of interesting discussion.

Andrew Pam gave a summary of new things in Linux and talked about the sites lwn.net, gamingonlinux.com, and cnx-software.com that he uses to find Linux news. One thing he talked about is the latest developments with SteamDeck which is driving Linux support in Steam games. The site protondb.com tracks Linux support in Steam games.

We had some discussion of BPF, for an introduction to that technology see the BPF lecture from LCA 2022.

Next Meeting

The next meeting (Saturday 5th of March 1PM Melbourne time) will focus on running your own mail server which is always of interest to people who are interested in system administration and which is probably of more interest than usual because of Google forcing companies with “a legacy G Suite subscription” to transition to a more expensive “Business family” offering.

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Stewart Smith — Adventures in the Apple Partition Map (Part 2 of the continuing adventures with the Apple Power Macintosh 7200/120 PC Compatible)

I “recently” wrote about obtaining a new (to me, actually quite old) computer over in The Apple Power Macintosh 7200/120 PC Compatible (Part 1). This post is a bit of a detour, but may help others understand why some images they download from the internet don’t work.

Disk partitioning is (of course) a way to divide up a single disk into multiple volumes (partitions) for different uses. While the idea is similar, computer platforms over the ages have done this in a variety of different ways, with varying formats on disk, and varying limitations. The ones that you’re most likely to be familiar with are the MBR partitioning scheme (from the IBM PC), and the GPT partitioning scheme (common for UEFI systems such as the modern PC and Mac). One you’re less likely to be familiar with is the Apple Partition Map scheme.

The way all IBM PCs and compatibles worked from the introduction of MS-DOS 2.0 in 1983 until some time after 2005 was the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme. It was outrageously simple: of the first 512 byte sector of a disk, the first 446 bytes was for the bootstrapping code (the “boot sector”), the last 2 bytes were for the magic two bytes telling the BIOS this disk was bootable, and the other 64 bytes were four entries of 16 bytes, each describing a disk partition. The Wikipedia page is a good overview of what it all looks like. Since “four partitions should be enough for anybody” wasn’t going to last, DOS 3.2 introduced “extended partitions” which was just using one of those 4 partitions as another similar data structure that could point to more partitions.

In the 1980s (similar to today), the Macintosh was, of course, different. The Apple Partition Map is significantly more flexible than the MBR on PCs. For a start, you could have more than four partitions! You could actually have a lot more than four partitions, as the Apple Partition Map is a single 512-byte sector for each partition, and the partition map is itself a partition. Instead of being block 0 (like the MBR is), it actually starts at block 1, and is contiguous (The Driver Descriptor Record is what’s at block 0). So, once created, it’s hard to extend. Typically it’d be created as 64×512-byte entries, for 32kb… which turns out is actually about enough for anyone.

The Inside Macintosh reference on the SCSI Manager goes through more detail as to these structures. If you’re wondering what language all the coding examples are in, it’s Pascal – which was fairly popular for writing Macintosh applications in back in the day.

But the actual partition map isn’t the “interesting” part of all this (and yes, the quotation marks are significant here), because Macs are pretty darn finicky about what disks to boot off, which gets to be interesting if you’re trying to find a CD-ROM image on the internet from which to boot, and then use to install an Operating System from.

Stewart Smith — Every time I program a Mac…

… the preferred programming language changes.

I never programmed a 1980s Macintosh actually in the 1980s. It was sometime in the early 1990s that I first experienced Microsoft Basic for the Macintosh. I’d previously (unknowingly at the time as it was branded Commodore) experienced Microsoft BASIC on the Commodore 16, Commodore 64, and even the Apple ][, but the Macintosh version was something else. It let you do some pretty neat things such as construct a GUI with largely the same amount of effort as it took to construct a Text based UI on the micros I was familiar with.

Okay, to be fair, I’d also dabbled in Microsoft QBasic that came bundled with MS-DOS of the era, which let you do a whole bunch of graphics – so you could theoretically construct a GUI with it. Something I did attempt to do. Programming on the Mac was so much easier to construct a GUI.

Of course, Microsoft Basic wasn’t the preferred way to program on the Macintosh. At that time it was largely Pascal, with C being something that also existed – but you were going to see Pascal in Inside Macintosh. It was probably somewhat fortuitous that I’d poked at Pascal a bit as something alternate to look at in the high school computing classes. I can only remember using TurboPascal on DOS systems and never actually writing Pascal on the Macintosh.

By the middle part of the 1990s though, I was firmly incompetently writing C on the Mac. No doubt the quality of my code increased after I’d done some university courses actually covering the language rather than the only practical way I had to attempt to write anything useful being looking at Inside Macintosh examples in Pascal and “C for Dummies” which was very not-Macintosh. Writing C on UNIX/Linux was a lot easier – everything was made for it, including Actual Documentation!

Anyway, in the early 2000s I ran MacOS X for a bit on my white iBook G3, and did a (very) small amount of any GUI / Project Builder (the precursor to Xcode) related development – instead largely focusing on command line / X11 things. The latest coolness being to use Objective-C to program applications (unless you were bringing over your Classic MacOS Carbon based application, then you could still write C). Enter some (incompetent) Objective-C coding!

Then Apple went to x86, so the hardware ceased being interesting, and I had no reason to poke at it even as a side effect of having hardware that could run the software stack. Enter a long-ass time of Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora on laptops.

Come 2022 though, and (for reasons I should really write up), I’m poking at a Mac again and it’s now Swift as the preferred way to write apps. So, I’m (incompetently) hacking away at Swift code. I have to admit, it’s pretty nice. I’ve managed to be somewhat productive in a relative short amount of time, and all the affordances in the language gear towards the kind of safety that is a PITA when coding in C.

So this is my WIP utility to be able to import photos from a Shotwell database into the macOS Photos app:

There’s a lot of rough edges and unknowns left, including how to actually do the import (it looks like there’s going to be Swift code doing AppleScript things as the PhotoKit API is inadequate). But hey, some incompetent hacking in not too much time has a kind-of photo browser thing going on that feels pretty snappy.

,

Robert Collins — hyper combinators in Rust

Recently I read Michael Snoyman’s post on combining Axum, Hyper, Tonic and Tower. While his solution worked, it irked me – it seemed like there should be a much tighter solution possible.

I can deep dive into the code in a later post perhaps, but I think there are four points of difference. One, since the post was written Axum has started boxing its routes : so the enum dispatch approach taken, which delivers low overheads actually has no benefits today.

Two, while writing out the entire type by hand has some benefits, async code is much more pithy.

Thirdly, the code in the post is entirely generic, except the routing function itself.

And fourth, the outer Service<AddrStream> is an unnecessary layer to abstract over: given the similar constraints – the inner Service must take Request<..>, it is possible to just not use a couple of helpers and instead work directly with Service<Request...>.

So, onto a pithier version.

First, the app server code itself.

use std::{convert::Infallible, net::SocketAddr};

use axum::routing::get;
use hyper::{server::conn::AddrStream, service::make_service_fn};
use hyper::{Body, Request};
use tonic::async_trait;

use demo::echo_server::{Echo, EchoServer};
use demo::{EchoReply, EchoRequest};

struct MyEcho;

#[async_trait]
impl Echo for MyEcho {
    async fn echo(
        &self,
        request: tonic::Request<EchoRequest>,
    ) -> Result<tonic::Response<EchoReply>, tonic::Status> {
        Ok(tonic::Response::new(EchoReply {
            message: format!("Echoing back: {}", request.get_ref().message),
        }))
    }
}

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    let addr = SocketAddr::from(([0, 0, 0, 0], 3000));

    let axum_service = axum::Router::new().route("/", get(|| async { "Hello world!" }));

    let grpc_service = tonic::transport::Server::builder()
        .add_service(EchoServer::new(MyEcho))
        .into_service();

    let both_service =
        demo_router::Router::new(axum_service, grpc_service, |req: &Request<Body>| {
            Ok::<bool, Infallible>(
                req.headers().get("content-type").map(|x| x.as_bytes())
                    == Some(b"application/grpc"),
            )
        });

    let make_service = make_service_fn(move |_conn: &AddrStream| {
        let both_service = both_service.clone();
        async { Ok::<_, Infallible>(both_service) }
    });

    let server = hyper::Server::bind(&addr).serve(make_service);

    if let Err(e) = server.await {
        eprintln!("server error: {}", e);
    }
}

Note the Router: it takes the two services and Fn to determine which to use on any given request. Then we just drop that composed service into make_service_fn and we’re done.

Next up we have the Router implementation. This is generic across any two Service<Request<...>> types as long as they are both Into<Bytes> for their Data, and Into<Box<dyn Error>> for errors.

use std::{future::Future, pin::Pin, task::Poll};

use http_body::combinators::UnsyncBoxBody;
use hyper::{body::HttpBody, Body, Request, Response};
use tower::Service;

#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct Router<First, Second, F> {
    first: First,
    second: Second,
    discriminator: F,
}

impl<First, Second, F> Router<First, Second, F> {
    pub fn new(first: First, second: Second, discriminator: F) -> Self {
        Self {
            first,
            second,
            discriminator,
        }
    }
}

impl<First, Second, FirstBody, FirstBodyError, SecondBody, SecondBodyError, F, FErr>
    Service<Request<Body>> for BinaryRouter<First, Second, F>
where
    First: Service<Request<Body>, Response = Response<FirstBody>>,
    First::Error: Into<Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync>> + 'static,
    First::Future: Send + 'static,
    First::Response: 'static,
    Second: Service<Request<Body>, Response = Response<SecondBody>>,
    Second::Error: Into<Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync>> + 'static,
    Second::Future: Send + 'static,
    Second::Response: 'static,
    F: Fn(&Request<Body>) -> Result<bool, FErr>,
    FErr: Into<Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync>> + Send + 'static,
    FirstBody: HttpBody<Error = FirstBodyError> + Send + 'static,
    FirstBody::Data: Into<bytes::Bytes>,
    FirstBodyError: Into<Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync>> + 'static,
    SecondBody: HttpBody<Error = SecondBodyError> + Send + 'static,
    SecondBody::Data: Into<bytes::Bytes>,
    SecondBodyError: Into<Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync>> + 'static,
{
    type Response = Response<
        UnsyncBoxBody<
            <hyper::Body as HttpBody>::Data,
            Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync + 'static>,
        >,
    >;
    type Error = Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync + 'static>;
    type Future =
        Pin<Box<dyn Future<Output = Result<Self::Response, Self::Error>> + Send + 'static>>;

    fn poll_ready(
        &mut self,
        cx: &mut std::task::Context<'_>,
    ) -> std::task::Poll<Result<(), Self::Error>> {
        match self.first.poll_ready(cx) {
            Poll::Ready(Ok(())) => match self.second.poll_ready(cx) {
                Poll::Ready(Ok(())) => Poll::Ready(Ok(())),
                Poll::Ready(Err(e)) => Poll::Ready(Err(e.into())),
                Poll::Pending => Poll::Pending,
            },
            Poll::Ready(Err(e)) => Poll::Ready(Err(e.into())),
            Poll::Pending => Poll::Pending,
        }
    }

    fn call(&mut self, req: Request<Body>) -> Self::Future {
        let discriminant = { (self.discriminator)(&req) };
        let (first, second) = if matches!(discriminant, Ok(false)) {
            (Some(self.first.call(req)), None)
        } else if matches!(discriminant, Ok(true)) {
            (None, Some(self.second.call(req)))
        } else {
            (None, None)
        };
        let f = async {
            Ok(match discriminant.map_err(Into::into)? {
                true => second
                    .unwrap()
                    .await
                    .map_err(Into::into)?
                    .map(|b| b.map_data(Into::into).map_err(Into::into).boxed_unsync()),
                false => first
                    .unwrap()
                    .await
                    .map_err(Into::into)?
                    .map(|b| b.map_data(Into::into).map_err(Into::into).boxed_unsync()),
            })
        };
        Box::pin(f)
    }
}

Interesting things here – I use boxed_unsync to abstract over the body concrete type, and I implement the future using async code rather than as a separate struct. It becomes much smaller even after a few bits of extra type constraining.

One thing that flummoxed me for a little was the need to capture the future for the underlying response outside of the async block. Failing to do so provokes a 'static requirement which was tricky to debug. Fortunately there is a bug on making this easier to diagnose in rustc already. The underlying problem is that if you create the async block, and then dereference self, the type for impl of .first has to live an arbitrary time. Whereas by capturing the future immediately, only the impl of the future has to live an arbitrary time, and that doesn’t then require changing the signature of the function.

This is almost worth turning into a crate – I couldn’t see an existing one when I looked, though it does end up rather small – < 100 lines. What do you all think?

Adrian Chadd — Hacking up an Amiga 500 for 1MB chip RAM and 512k slow RAM

 In a previous post I dumped a bunch of information I had learnt about what had happened in open source Amiga hackery. I've now gone and committed the initial hacks needed to prove that it works and document how I did it.

My goals here were:

  • Build one of the memory expansion Gary adapters that are out there - I chose the PeteAU design that I've checked in here;
  • Figure out how to modify a rev6 amiga 500 board so I can put 1MB of chip RAM in the provided sockets there (with the schematic available here);
  • Make it so a normal A501 512K RAM + RTC add-on can be plugged in to provide the 512k of slow RAM.
First up, it worked. Here's how dirty it is.




The overview is pretty conceptually easy.

  • The PeteAU Gary adapter (and I'm sure others!) use the RAS1 line into Agnus and its A19/A23 address line to map RAM into Agnus' other 512k addressable RAM space. The RAM expansions are thus muxed on breaking out CASL and CASU lines whilst enabling RAS1.
  • The little break out PCB there is the 74HCT139 dual 2-to-4 demux to decode the two address line bits from the Gary adapter + CASL/CASU lines from Agnus into four CASL/CASU lines.
  • The "first" bank from the PeteAU Gary adapter is mapped in as the second half of the 512k chip RAM - and as seen in the picture above, those bent legs are CASL/CASU lines.
  • The two tracks that run from U35 out to the trapdoor expansion connector are the CASL/CASU lines to said trapdoor expansion connector. I've cut those and wired them into the second CASL/CASU pair from the 74HCT139 demux.
  • No modifications are done on the A501 expansion board.
I've basically just migrated the 74CHT139 from the PeteAU Gary+RAM expansion adapter board back onto the Amiga 500 rev6 PCB.

Here's the relevant bits from the rev6 schematic:


The second bank of 512k chip RAM is U20,U21,U22,U23. It uses RAS1 and the same CASL/CASU that the first bank of 512k chip RAM and the expansion connector.

On the rev6 PCB the CASL/CASU tracks route from U35 to both the RAM and the expansion connector. Cutting the tracks going to the expansion connector is fine; they run there and stop.

Now, finding useful documentation for what to do.

First up, figuring out how to configure the Amiga 500 rev6 PCB.

  • J2 (the Agnus A19/A23) jumper was cut so it could be wired into the Gary adapter.
  • J7 (the EXP signal from the expansion connector to Gary to say the expansion RAM is there) is left alone, so the A501 can assert it if it's there.
I have found a better summary of what to put in the Gary adapter, so here it is.


And then how I configured my Gary adapter board:




  • JP1 and JP2 set to 2-3 - ie 1M chip
  • JP3 set to 1-2 - ie 1.5M slow (decoding all of the space, even if I'm not really decoding stuff from the 74HCT139 to more slow RAM)
  • JP4 set to 1-2 (ie, "more slow", so the Gary adapter is properly doing its thing)
And finally, how it looks when it's all done:





(Yes, I was playing with the default colours in the second one, I always disliked the orange.)

If I wanted more RAM then I could easily just piggy back more 41256's on top of the ones I've added and break out the CASL/CASU lines some more, but ... (a) I don't want to, and (b) in that case I'd really just go and build a full 1.5MB slow RAM expansion and undo what I did on the PCB here.

FLOSS Down Under - online free software meetings — First Meeting Agenda

The first meeting will start at 1PM Australian Eastern time (Melbourne/Sydney) which is +1100 on Saturday the 5th of February.

I will start the video chat an hour early in case someone makes a timezone mistake and gets there an hour before it starts. If anyone else joins early we will have random chat until the start time (deliberately avoiding topics worthy of the main meeting). The link http://b.coker.com.au will redirect to the meeting URL on the day.

The first scheduled talk is a summary and discussion of free software related news. Anyone who knows of something new that excites them is welcome to speak about it.

The main event is discussion of storage technology and hands-on training on BTRFS and ZFS for those who are interested. Here are the ZFS training notes and here are the BTRFS training notes. Feel free to do the training exercises on your own VM before the meeting if you wish.

Then discussion of the future of the group and the use of FOSS social media. While social media is never going to be compulsory some people will want to use it to communicate and we could run some servers for software that is considered good (lots of server capacity is available).

Finally we have to plan future meetings and decide on which communication methods are desired.

The BBB instance to be used for the video conference is sponsored by NZOSS and Catalyst Cloud.

,

OpenSTEM — Covering the federal election, before the election

Since PM Scott Morrison did not announce the federal election date last week, it will now be held somewhere between March and May (see the post from ABC’s Antony Green for details). Various aspects of elections are covered in the Civics & Citizenship Australian Curriculum in Years 4, 5 and 6. Students are interested in […]

The post Covering the federal election, before the election first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.

FLOSS Down Under - online free software meetings — Flounder Overview

Flounder is a new free software users group based in the Australia/NZ area. Flounder stands for FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) down under.

Here is my blog post describing the initial idea, the comment from d3Xt3r suggested the name. Flounder is a group of fish that has species native to Australia and NZ.

The main aim is to provide educational benefits to free software users via an online meeting that can’t be obtained by watching YouTube videos etc in a scope that is larger than one country. When the pandemic ends we will keep running this as there are benefits to be obtained from a meeting of a wide geographic scope that can’t be obtained by meetings in a single city. People from other countries are welcome to attend but they aren’t the focus of the meeting.

Until we get a better DNS name the address http://b.coker.com.au will redirect to the BBB instance used for online meetings (the meeting address isn’t yet setup so it redirects to the blog). The aim is that there will always be a short URL for the meeting so anyone who has one device lose contact can quickly type the URL into their backup device.

The first meeting will be on the 5th of Feb 2022 at 1PM Melbourne time +1100. When we get a proper domain I’ll publish a URL for an iCal file with entries for all meetings. I will also find some suitable way for meeting times to be localised (I’m sure there’s a WordPress plugin for that).

For the hands-on part of the meetings there will be virtual machine images you can download to run on your own system (tested with KVM, should work with other VM systems) and the possibility of logging in to a running VM. The demonstration VMs will have public IPv6 addresses and will also be available through different ports on a single IPv4 address, having IPv6 on your workstation will be convenient for you but you can survive without it.

Linux Australia has a list of LUGs in Australia, is there a similar list for NZ? One thing I’d like to see is a list of links for iCal files for all the meetings and also an iCal aggregator that for all iCal feeds of online meetings. I’ll host it myself if necessary, but it’s probably best to do it via Linux Australia (Linux Australasia?) if possible.

,

Jan Schmidt — Pulling on a thread

I’m attending the https://linux.conf.au/ conference online this weekend, which is always a good opportunity for some sideline hacking.

I found something boneheaded doing that today.

There have been a few times while inventing the OpenHMD Rift driver where I’ve noticed something strange and followed the thread until it made sense. Sometimes that leads to improvements in the driver, sometimes not.

In this case, I wanted to generate a graph of how long the computer vision processing takes – from the moment each camera frame is captured until poses are generated for each device.

To do that, I have a some logging branches that output JSON events to log files and I write scripts to process those. I used that data and produced:

Pose recognition latency.
dt = interpose spacing, delay = frame to pose latency

Two things caught my eye in this graph. The first is the way the baseline latency (pink lines) increases from ~20ms to ~58ms. The 2nd is the quantisation effect, where pose latencies are clearly moving in discrete steps.

Neither of those should be happening.

Camera frames are being captured from the CV1 sensors every 19.2ms, and it takes that 17-18ms for them to be delivered across the USB. Depending on how many IR sources the cameras can see, figuring out the device poses can take a different amount of time, but the baseline should always hover around 17-18ms because the fast “device tracking locked” case take as little as 1ms.

Did you see me mention 19.2ms as the interframe period? Guess what the spacing on those quantisation levels are in the graph? I recognised it as implying that something in the processing is tied to frame timing when it should not be.

OpenHMD Rift CV1 tracking timing

This 2nd graph helped me pinpoint what exactly was going on. This graph is cut from the part of the session where the latency has jumped up. What it shows is a ~1 frame delay between when the frame is received (frame-arrival-finish-local-ts) before the initial analysis even starts!

That could imply that the analysis thread is just busy processing the previous frame and doesn’t get start working on the new one yet – but the graph says that fast analysis is typically done in 1-10ms at most. It should rarely be busy when the next frame arrives.

This is where I found the bone headed code – a rookie mistake I wrote when putting in place the image analysis threads early on in the driver development and never noticed.

There are 3 threads involved:

  • USB service thread, reading video frame packets and assembling pixels in framebuffers
  • Fast analysis thread, that checks tracking lock is still acquired
  • Long analysis thread, which does brute-force pose searching to reacquire / match unknown IR sources to device LEDs

These 3 threads communicate using frame worker queues passing frames between each other. Each analysis thread does this pseudocode:

while driver_running:
    Pop a frame from the queue
    Process the frame
    Sleep for new frame notification

The problem is in the 3rd line. If the driver is ever still processing the frame in line 2 when a new frame arrives – say because the computer got really busy – the thread sleeps anyway and won’t wake up until the next frame arrives. At that point, there’ll be 2 frames in the queue, but it only still processes one – so the analysis gains a 1 frame latency from that point on. If it happens a second time, it gets later by another frame! Any further and it starts reclaiming frames from the queues to keep the video capture thread fed – but it only reclaims one frame at a time, so the latency remains!

The fix is simple:

while driver_running:
   Pop a frame
   Process the frame
   if queue_is_empty():
     sleep for new frame notification

Doing that for both the fast and long analysis threads changed the profile of the pose latency graph completely.

Pose latency and inter-pose spacing after fix

This is a massive win! To be clear, this has been causing problems in the driver for at least 18 months but was never obvious from the logs alone. A single good graph is worth a thousand logs.

What does this mean in practice?

The way the fusion filter I’ve built works, in between pose updates from the cameras, the position and orientation of each device are predicted / updated using the accelerometer and gyro readings. Particularly for position, using the IMU for prediction drifts fairly quickly. The longer the driver spends ‘coasting’ on the IMU, the less accurate the position tracking is. So, the sooner the driver can get a correction from the camera to the fusion filter the less drift we’ll get – especially under fast motion. Particularly for the hand controllers that get waved around.

Before: Left Controller pose delays by sensor
After: Left Controller pose delays by sensor

Poses are now being updated up to 40ms earlier and the baseline is consistent with the USB transfer delay.

You can also visibly see the effect of the JPEG decoding support I added over Christmas. The ‘red’ camera is directly connected to USB3, while the ‘khaki’ camera is feeding JPEG frames over USB2 that then need to be decoded, adding a few ms delay.

The latency reduction is nicely visible in the pose graphs, where the ‘drop shadow’ effect of pose updates tailing fusion predictions largely disappears and there are fewer large gaps in the pose observations when long analysis happens (visible as straight lines jumping from point to point in the trace):

Before: Left Controller poses
After: Left Controller poses

,

Colin Charles — This thing is still on?

Yes, the blog is still on. January 2004 I moved to WordPress, and it is still here January 2022. I didn’t write much last year (neither here, not experimenting with the Hey blog). I didn’t post anything to Instagram last year either from what I can tell, just a lot of stories.

August 16 2021, I realised I was 1,000 days till May 12 2024, which is when I become 40. As of today, that leads 850 days. Did I squander the last 150 days? I’m back to writing almost daily in the Hobonichi Techo (I think last year and the year before were mostly washouts; I barely scribbled anything offline).

I got a new Apple Watch Series 7 yesterday. I can say I used the Series 4 well (79% battery life), purchased in the UK when I broke my Series 0 in Edinburgh airport.

TripIt stats for last year claimed 95 days on the road. This is of course, a massive joke, but I’m glad I did get to visit London, Lisbon, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles without issue. I spent a lot of time in Kuantan, a bunch of Langkawi trips, and also, I stayed for many months at the Grand Hyatt Kuala Lumpur during the May lockdowns (I practically stayed there all lockdown).

With 850 days to go till I’m 40, I have plenty I would like to achieve. I think I’ll write a lot more here. And elsewhere. Get back into the habit of doing. And publishing by learning and doing. No fear. Not that I wasn’t doing, but its time to be prolific with what’s been going on.

The post This thing is still on? first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

,

Dave Hall — Close the Gate: Why You Need Egress Controls in your Security Groups

Open egress in your cloud environments is bad idea.

,

Dave Hall — Does GitHub Enterprise Cloud Make Your Organisation Less Secure?

GitHub’s oAuth scopes could leave organisations vulnerable.

,

Gary Pendergast — WordPress and web3

Blockchain. Cryptocurrency. Ethereum. NFTs. DAOs. Smart Contracts. web3. It’s impossible to avoid the blockchain hype machine these days, but it’s often just as difficult to decipher what it all means.

On top of that, discourse around web3 is extremely polarising: everyone involved is very keen to a) pick a team, and b) get you to join their team. If you haven’t picked a team, you must be secretly with the other team.

Max Read made a compelling argument that the web3 debate is in fact two different debates:

But, OK, what is the root disagreement, exactly? The way I read it there are two broad “is web3 bullshit?” debates, not just one, centered around the following questions:

Can the blockchain do anything that other currently existing technology cannot do and/or do anything better or more efficiently than other currently existing technology?

Will the blockchain form the architecture of the internet of the future (i.e. “web3”), and/or will blockchain-native companies and organizations become important and powerful?

Max Read — Is web3 bullshit?

I’m inclined to agree with Max’s analysis here: there’s a technical question, and there’s a business/cultural question. It’s hard to separate the two when every day sees new headlines about millions of dollars being stolen or scammed; or thousands of people putting millions of dollars into highly optimistic ventures. There are extreme positives and extreme negatives happening all the time in the web3 world.

With that in mind, I want to take a step back from the day-to-day excitement of cryptocurrency and web3, and look at some of the driving philosophies espoused by the movement.

Philosophies of web3

There are a lot of differing viewpoints on web3, every individual has a slightly different take on it. There are three broad themes that stand out, however.

Decentralised

Blockchain-based technology is inherently distributed (with some esoteric caveats, but we can safely ignore them for now). In a world where the web centres around a handful of major services, where we’ve seen the harm that the likes of Facebook and YouTube can inflict on society, it’s not surprising that decentralisation would be a powerful theme drawing in anyone looking for an alternative.

Decentralisation isn’t new to the Internet, of course: it’s right there in the name. This giant set of “interconnected networks” has been decentralised from the very beginning. It’s not perfect, of course: oppressive governments can take control of the borders of their portion of the Internet, and we’ve come to rely on a handful of web services to handle the trickier parts of using the web. But fundamentally, that decentralised architecture is still there. I can still set up a web site hosted on my home computer, which anyone in the world could access.

I don’t do that, however, for the same reason that web3 isn’t immune from centralised services: Centralisation is convenient. Just as we have Facebook, or Google, or Amazon as giant centralised services on the current web, we can already see similar services appearing for web3. For payments, Coinbase has established itself as a hugely popular place exchange cryptocurrencies and traditional currencies. For NFTs, OpenSea is the service where you’ll find nearly every NFT collection. MetaMask keeps all of your crypto-based keys, tokens, and logins in a single “crypto wallet”.

Centralisation is convenient.

While web3 proponents give a lot of credence to the decentralised nature of cryptocurrency being a driver of popularity, I’m not so sure. At best, I’m inclined to think that decentralisation is table stakes these days: you can’t even get started as a global movement without a strong commitment to decentralisation.

But if decentralisation isn’t the key, what is?

Ownership

When we talk about ownership in web3, NFTs are clearly the flavour of the month, but recent research indicates that the entire NFT market is massively artificially inflated.

Rather than taking pot-shots at the NFT straw man, I think it’s more interesting to look at the idea of ownership in terms of attribution. The more powerful element of this philosophy isn’t about who owns something, it’s who created it. NFTs do something rather novel with attribution, allowing royalty payments to the original artist every time an NFT is resold. I love this aspect: royalties shouldn’t just be for movie stars, they should be for everyone.

Comparing that to the current web, take the 3 paragraphs written by Max Read that I quoted above. I was certainly under no technical obligation to show that it was a quote, to attribute it to him, or to link to the source. In fact, it would have been easier for me to just paste his words into this post, and pretend they were my own. I didn’t, of course, because I feel an ethical obligation to properly attribute the quote.

In a world where unethical actors will automatically copy/paste your content for SEO juice (indeed, I expect this blog post to show up on a bunch of these kinds of sites); where massive corporations will consume everything they can find about you, in order to advertise more effectively to you, it’s not at all surprising that people are looking for a technical solution for taking back control of their data, and for being properly attributed for their creations.

The interesting element of this philosophy isn’t about who owns something, it’s who created it.

That’s not to say that existing services discourage attribution: a core function of Twitter is retweets, a core function of Tumblr is reblogging. WordPress still supports trackbacks, even if many folks turn them off these days.

These are all blunt instruments, though, aimed at attributing an entire piece, rather than a more targeted approach. What I’d really like is a way to easily quote and attribute a small chunk of a post: 3 paragraphs (or blocks, if you want to see where I’m heading 😉), inserted into my post, linking back to where I got them from. If someone chooses to quote some of this post, I’d love to receive a pingback just for that quote, so it can be seen in the right context.

The functionality provide by Twitter and Tumblr is less of a technologically-based enforcement of attribution, and more of an example of paving the cow path: by and large, people want to properly attribute others, providing the tools to do so can easily become a fundamental part of how any software is used.

These tools only work so long as there’s an incentive to use them, however. web3 certainly provides the tools to attribute others, but much like SEO scammers copy/pasting blog posts, the economics of the NFT bubble is clearly a huge incentive to ignore those tools and ethical obligations, to the point that existing services have had to build additional features just to detect this abuse.

Digital Bandits: The New Art Thieves Selling Stolen Works As NFTs

Monetisation

With every major blockchain also being a cryptocurrency, monetisation is at the heart of the entire web3 movement. Every level of the web3 tech stack involves a cryptocurrency-based protocol. This naturally permeates through the entire web3 ecosystem, where money becomes a major driving factor for every web3-based project.

And so, it’s impossible to look at web3 applications without also considering the financial aspect. When you have to pay just to participate, you have to ask whether every piece of content you create is “worth it”.

Again, let’s go back to the 3 paragraphs I quote above. In a theoretical web3 world, I’d publish this post on a blockchain in some form or another, and that act would also likely include noting that I’d quoted 3 blocks of text attributed to Max Read. I’d potentially pay some amount of money to Max, along with the fees that every blockchain charges in order to perform a transaction. While this process is potentially helpful to the original author at a first glance, I suspect the second and third order effects will be problematic. Having only just clicked the Publish button a few seconds earlier, I’m already some indeterminate amount of money out of pocket. Which brings me back to the question, is this post “worth it”? Will enough people tip/quote/remix/whatever me, to cover the cost of publishing? When every creative work must be viewed through a lens of financial impact, it fundamentally alters that creative process.

When you have to pay just to participate, you have to ask whether every piece of content you create is “worth it”.

Ultimately, we live in a capitalist society, and everyone deserves the opportunity to profit off their work. But by baking monetisation into the underlying infrastructure of web3, it becomes impossible to opt-out. You either have the money to participate without being concerned about the cost, or you’re going to need to weigh up every interaction by whether or not you can afford it.

Web3 Philosophies in WordPress

After breaking it all down, we can see that it’s not all black-and-white. There are some positive parts of web3, and some negative parts. Not that different to the web of today, in fact. 🙂 That’s not to say that either approach is the correct one: instead, we should be looking to learn from both, and produce something better.

Decentralised

I’ve long been a proponent of leveraging the massive install base of WordPress to provide distributed services to anyone. Years ago, I spoke about an idea called “Connected WordPress” that would do exactly that. While the idea didn’t gain a huge amount of traction at the time, the DNA of the Connected WordPress concept shares a lot of similar traits to the decentralised nature of web3.

I’m a big fan of decentralised technologies as a way for individuals to claw back power over their own data from the governments and massive corporations that would prefer to keep it all centralised, and I absolutely think we should be exploring ways to make the existing web more resistant to censorship.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are certainly benefits to centralisation. As long as people have the freedom to choose how and where they participate, and centralised services are required to play nicely with self hosted sites, is there a practical difference?

I quite like how Solid allows you have it both ways, whilst maintaining control over your own data.

Ownership Attribution

Here’s the thing about attribution: you can’t enforce it with technology alone. Snapchat have indirectly demonstrated exactly this problem: in order to not lose a message, people would screenshot or record the message on their phone. In response, Snapchat implemented a feature to notify the other party when you screenshot a message from them. To avoid this, people will now use a second phone to take a photo or video of the message. While this example isn’t specifically about attribution, it demonstrates the problem that there’s no way to technologically restrict how someone interacts with content that you’ve published, once they’ve been granted access.

Instead of worrying about technical restrictions, then, we should be looking at how attribution can be made easier.

IndieWeb is a great example of how this can be done in a totally decentralised fashion.

Monetisation

I’m firmly of the opinion that monetisation of the things you create should be opt-in, rather than opt-out.

Modern society is currently obsessed with monetising everything, however. It comes in many different forms: hustle culture, side gigs, transforming hobbies into businesses, meme stocks, and cryptocurrencies: they’re all symptoms of this obsession.

I would argue that, rather than accepting as fait accompli that the next iteration of the web will be monetised to the core, we should be pushing back against this approach. Fundamentally, we should be looking to build for a post scarcity society, rather than trying to introduce scarcity where there previously was none.

While we work towards that future, we should certainly be easier for folks to monetise their work, but the current raft of cryptocurrencies just aren’t up to the task of operating as… currencies.

What Should You Do?

Well, that depends on what your priorities are. The conversations around web3 are taking up a lot of air right now, so it’s possible to get the impression web3 will be imminently replacing everything. It’s important to keep perspective on this, though. While there’s a lot of money in the web3 ecosystem right now, it’s dwarfed by the sheer size of the existing web.

If you’re excited about the hot new tech, and feeling inspired by the ideas espoused in web3 circles? Jump right in! I’m certain you’ll find something interesting to work on.

Always wanted to get into currency speculation, but didn’t want to deal with all those pesky “regulations” and “safeguards”? Boy howdy, are cryptocurrencies or NFTs the place for you. (Please don’t pretend that this paragraph is investment advice, it is nothing of the sort.)

Want to continue building stuff on the web, and you’re willing to learn new things when you need them, but are otherwise happy with your trajectory? Just keep on doing what you’re doing. Even if web3 does manage to live up to the hype, it’ll take a long time for it to be adopted by the mainstream. You’ll have years to adapt.

Final Thoughts

There are some big promises associated with web3, many of which sound very similar to the promises that were made around web 2.0, particularly around open APIs, and global interoperability. We saw what happened when those kinds of tools go wrong, and web3 doesn’t really solve those problems. It may exacerbate them in some ways, since it’s impossible to delete your data from a blockchain.

That said, (and I say this as a WordPress Core developer), just because a particular piece of software is not the optimal technical solution doesn’t mean it won’t become the most popular. Market forces can be a far stronger factor that technical superiority. There are many legitimate complaints about blockchain (including performance, bloat, fit for purpose, and security) that have been levelled against WordPress in the past, but WordPress certainly isn’t slowing down. I’m not even close to convinced that blockchain is the right technology to base the web on, but I’ve been doing this for too long to bet everything against it.

Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.

—A. Gary Shilling

As for me, well… 😄

I remain sceptical of web3 as it’s currently defined, but I think there’s room to change it, and to adopt the best bits into the existing web. Web 1.0 didn’t magically disappear when Web 2.0 rolled in, it adapted. Maybe we’ll look back in 10 years and say this was a time when the web fundamentally changed. Or, maybe we’ll refer to blockchain in the same breath as pets.com, and other examples from the dotcom boom of the 1990’s.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

—John Gilmore

This quote was originally referring to Usenet, but it’s stayed highly relevant in the decades since. I think it applies here, too: if the artificial scarcity built into web3 behaves too much like censorship, preventing people from sharing what they want to share, the internet (or, more accurately, the billions of people who interact with the internet) will just… go around it. It won’t all be smooth sailing, but we’ll continue to experiment, evolve, and adapt as it changes.

Personally, I think now is a great time for us to be embracing the values and ideals of projects like Solid, and IndieWeb. Before web3 referred to blockchains, it was more commonly used in reference to the Semantic Web, which is far more in line with WordPress’ ideals, whilst also matching many of the values prioritised by the new web3. As a major driver of the Open Web, WordPress can help people own their content in a sustainable way, engage with others on their own terms, and build communities that don’t depend on massive corporations or hand-wavy magical tech solutions.

Don’t get too caught up in the drama of whatever is the flavour of the month. I’m optimistic about the long term resilience of the internet, and I think you should be, too. 🥳

,

Jan Schmidt — 2.5 years of Oculus Rift

Once again time has passed, and another update on Oculus Rift support feels due! As always, it feels like I’ve been busy with work and not found enough time for Rift CV1 hacking. Nevertheless, looking back over the history since I last wrote, there’s quite a lot to tell!

In general, the controller tracking is now really good most of the time. Like, wildly-swing-your-arms-and-not-lose-track levels (most of the time). The problems I’m hunting now are intermittent and hard to identify in the moment while using the headset – hence my enthusiasm over the last updates for implementing stream recording and a simulation setup. I’ll get back to that.

Outlier Detection

Since I last wrote, the tracking improvements have mostly come from identifying and rejecting incorrect measurements. That is, if I have 2 sensors active and 1 sensor says the left controller is in one place, but the 2nd sensor says it’s somewhere else, we’ll reject one of those – choosing the pose that best matches what we already know about the controller. The last known position, the gravity direction the IMU is detecting, and the last known orientation. The tracker will now also reject observations for a time if (for example) the reported orientation is outside the range we expect. The IMU gyroscope can track the orientation of a device for quite a while, so can be relied on to identify strong pose priors once we’ve integrated a few camera observations to get the yaw correct.

It works really well, but I think improving this area is still where most future refinements will come. That and avoiding incorrect pose extractions in the first place.

Plot of headset tracking – orientation and position

The above plot is a sample of headset tracking, showing the extracted poses from the computer vision vs the pose priors / tracking from the Kalman filter. As you can see, there are excursions in both position and orientation detected from the video, but these are largely ignored by the filter, producing a steadier result.

Left Touch controller tracking – orientation and position

This plot shows the left controller being tracked during a Beat Saber session. The controller tracking plot is quite different, because controllers move a lot more than the headset, and have fewer LEDs to track against. There are larger gaps here in the timeline while the vision re-acquires the device – and in those gaps you can see the Kalman filter interpolating using IMU input only (sometimes well, sometimes less so).

Improved Pose Priors

Another nice thing I did is changes in the way the search for a tracked device is made in a video frame. Before starting looking for a particular device it always now gets the latest estimate of the previous device position from the fusion filter. Previously, it would use the estimate of the device pose as it was when the camera exposure happened – but between then and the moment we start analysis more IMU observations and other camera observations might arrive and be integrated into the filter, which will have updated the estimate of where the device was in the frame.

This is the bit where I think the Kalman filter is particularly clever: Estimates of the device position at an earlier or later exposure can improve and refine the filter’s estimate of where the device was when the camera captured the frame we’re currently analysing! So clever. That mechanism (lagged state tracking) is what allows the filter to integrate past tracking observations once the analysis is done – so even if the video frame search take 150ms (for example), it will correct the filter’s estimate of where the device was 150ms in the past, which ripples through and corrects the estimate of where the device is now.

LED visibility model

To improve the identification of devices better, I measured the actual angle from which LEDs are visible (about 75 degrees off axis) and measured the size. The pose matching now has a better idea of which LEDs should be visible for a proposed orientation and what pixel size we expect them to have at a particular distance.

Better Smoothing

I fixed a bug in the output pose smoothing filter where it would glitch as you turned completely around and crossed the point where the angle jumps from +pi to -pi or vice versa.

Improved Display Distortion Correction

I got a wide-angle hi-res webcam and took photos of a checkerboard pattern through the lens of my headset, then used OpenCV and panotools to calculate new distortion and chromatic aberration parameters for the display. For me, this has greatly improved. I’m waiting to hear if that’s true for everyone, or if I’ve just fixed it for my headset.

Persistent Config Cache

Config blocks! A long time ago, I prototyped code to create a persistent OpenHMD configuration file store in ~/.config/openhmd. The rift-kalman-filter branch now uses that to store the configuration blocks that it reads from the controllers. The first time a controller is seen, it will load the JSON calibration block as before, but it will now store it in that directory – removing a multiple second radio read process on every subsequent startup.

Persistent Room Configuration

To go along with that, I have an experimental rift-room-config branch that creates a rift-room-config.json file and stores the camera positions after the first startup. I haven’t pushed that to the rift-kalman-filter branch yet, because I’m a bit worried it’ll cause surprising problems for people. If the initial estimate of the headset pose is wrong, the code will back-project the wrong positions for the cameras, which will get written to the file and cause every subsequent run of OpenHMD to generate bad tracking until the file is removed. The goal is to have a loop that monitors whether the camera positions seem stable based on the tracking reports, and to use averaging and resetting to correct them if not – or at least to warn the user that they should re-run some (non-existent) setup utility.

Video Capture + Processing

The final big ticket item was a rewrite of how the USB video frame capture thread collects pixels and passes them to the analysis threads. This now does less work in the USB thread, so misses fewer frames, and also I made it so that every frame is now searched for LEDs and blob identities tracked with motion vectors, even when no further analysis will be done on that frame. That means that when we’re running late, it better preserves LED blob identities until the analysis threads can catch up – increasing the chances of having known LEDs to directly find device positions and avoid searching. This rewrite also opened up a path to easily support JPEG decode – which is needed to support Rift Sensors connected on USB 2.0 ports.

Session Simulator

I mentioned the recording simulator continues to progress. Since the tracking problems are now getting really tricky to figure out, this tool is becoming increasingly important. So far, I have code in OpenHMD to record all video and tracking data to a .mkv file. Then, there’s a simulator tool that loads those recordings. Currently it is capable of extracting the data back out of the recording, parsing the JSON and decoding the video, and presenting it to a partially implemented simulator that then runs the same blob analysis and tracking OpenHMD does. The end goal is a Godot based visualiser for this simulation, and to be able to step back and forth through time examining what happened at critical moments so I can improve the tracking for those situations.

To make recordings, there’s the rift-debug-gstreamer-record branch of OpenHMD. If you have GStreamer and the right plugins (gst-plugins-good) installed, and you set env vars like this, each run of OpenHMD will generate a recording in the target directory (make sure the target dir exists):

export OHMD_TRACE_DIR=/home/user/openhmd-traces/
export OHMD_FULL_RECORDING=1

Up Next

The next things that are calling to me are to improve the room configuration estimation and storage as mentioned above – to detect when the poses a camera is reporting don’t make sense because it’s been bumped or moved.

I’d also like to add back in tracking of the LEDS on the back of the headset headband, to support 360 tracking. I disabled those because they cause me trouble – the headband is adjustable relative to the headset, so the LEDs don’t appear where the 3D model says they should be and that causes jitter and pose mismatches. They need special handling.

One last thing I’m finding exciting is a new person taking an interest in Rift S and starting to look at inside-out tracking for that. That’s just happened in the last few days, so not much to report yet – but I’ll be happy to have someone looking at that while I’m still busy over here in CV1 land!

As always, if you have any questions, comments or testing feedback – hit me up at thaytan@noraisin.net or on @thaytan Twitter/IRC.

Thank you to the kind people signed up as Github Sponsors for this project!

,

Lev Lafayette — Streamlined Workflow from Instrument to HPC

The complexity of many contemporary scientific workflows is well-known, both in the laboratory setting and the computational processes. One discipline where this is particularly true is biochemistry, and in 2017 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). This allows researchers to "freeze" biomolecules in mid-movement and visualize three-dimensional structures of them, aiding in understanding their function and interaction which is, of course, essential in drug discovery pipelines. However, cryo-EM unsurprisingly produces vast quantities of data which, when combined with the storage capabilities and processing capabilities available from High Performance Computing simulations, produces detailed 3D models of biological structures at sub-cellular and molecular scales.

Optimising the cyro-EM workflow is a significant challenge, from image acquisition with transmission electron microscopes and direct electron detectors, through to the preprocessing tasks of motion correction, particple picking and extraction, CTF estimation, then image classification and curation, image sharpening and refinement, and finally structure modelling. On the computational side, the right selection and balance of storage, network, GPU-enabled and optimised software is requisite.

Following previous presentations at eResearchAustralasia that have mapped the innovations of the University of Melbourne's HPC system, Spartan, an exploration is provided here on how a combination of Spectrum Scale storage, a significant LIEF-funded GPU partition, and the use of cryoSPARC contributes to rapid solutions and workflow simplifcation for cryo-EM structures, including SARS-CoV-2. Optimising the cyro-EM workflow is a significant challenge, from image acquisition, through to the preprocessing tasks of motion correction, participle picking and extraction, Contrast Transfer Function estimation, image classification and curation, sharpening and refinement, and finally structure modelling. On the computational side, there is the right selection of storage, network, GPU-enabled and optimised software. This short presentation will outline these steps and choices in a manner that is useful for other institutions.

  • Streamlined Workflow from Instrument to HPC. Presentation to eResearchAustralasia October 21, 2021.

    • ,

    Matt Palmer — Discovering AWS IAM accounts

    Let’s say you’re someone who happens to discover an AWS account number, and would like to take a stab at guessing what IAM users might be valid in that account. Tricky problem, right? Not with this One Weird Trick!

    In your own AWS account, create a KMS key and try to reference an ARN representing an IAM user in the other account as the principal. If the policy is accepted by PutKeyPolicy, then that IAM account exists, and if the error says “Policy contains a statement with one or more invalid principals” then the user doesn’t exist.

    As an example, say you want to guess at IAM users in AWS account 111111111111. Then make sure this statement is in your key policy:

    {
  "Sid": "Test existence of user",
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Principal": {
    "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::111111111111:user/bob"
  },
  "Action": "kms:DescribeKey",
  "Resource": "*"
}

    If that policy is accepted, then the account has an IAM user named bob. Otherwise, the user doesn’t exist. Scripting this is left as an exercise for the reader.

    Sadly, wildcards aren’t accepted in the username portion of the ARN, otherwise you could do some funky searching with ...:user/a*, ...:user/b*, etc. You can’t have everything; where would you put it all?

    I did mention this to AWS as an account enumeration risk. They’re of the opinion that it’s a good thing you can know what users exist in random other AWS accounts. I guess that means this is a technique you can put in your toolbox safe in the knowledge it’ll work forever.

    Given this is intended behaviour, I assume you don’t need to use a key policy for this, but that’s where I stumbled over it. Also, you can probably use it to enumerate roles and anything else that can be a principal, but since I don’t see as much use for that, I didn’t bother exploring it.

    There you are, then. If you ever need to guess at IAM users in another AWS account, now you can!

    ,

    Lev Lafayette — In The Long Run We Are All Dead

    "In The Long Run We Are All Dead: A Preliminary Sketch of Demographic, Economic, and Technological Trends for the University Sector"

    University participation and costs are both rising. What evidence is there that the public is receiving good value? Using demographic data, trends, and analysis from Australia, and considering contemporary developments in information and communications technology, a preliminary assessment is made for the economic and political future of the public university sector.

    Although the proportion of the population completing university education is increasing, so too is the per-student cost. Due to the cost-disease of the service sector, this cost is increasing greater relative to other sectors. Public funding in such a situation would normally be subject to strong political pressure, however, this is mitigated by claims of positive externalities from the sector.

    Recent econometric research breaks this down on a disciplinary level, calculating social and personal benefits with precision. Further, contemporary technologies challenge the traditional "iron triangle" of vectors of quality, cost, and access. This breaks down the traditional cost-disease model, allowing for the triangle to be expanded across the vectors, and potentially freeing up educator resources for more creative contributions. Of course, this assumes that creativity is not a process that can emerge through automation. Until that storm arrives, however, we ought to take advantage of favourable currents.

    Presentation to the University of Otago Higher Education Development Centre (HEDC) Symposium 2021

    ,

    Dave Hall — Your Terraform Module Needs an Opinion

    Learn why your Terraform modules should be opinionated.

    ,

    Chris Neugebauer — Talk Notes: On The Use and Misuse of Decorators

    I gave the talk On The Use and Misuse of Decorators as part of PyConline AU 2021, the second in annoyingly long sequence of not-in-person PyCon AU events. Here’s some code samples that you might be interested in:

    Simple @property implementation

    This shows a demo of @property-style getters. Setters are left as an exercise :)

    
def demo_property(f):
    f.is_a_property = True
    return f


class HasProperties:

    def __getattribute__(self, name):
        ret = super().__getattribute__(name)
        if hasattr(ret, "is_a_property"):
            return ret()
        else:
            return ret

class Demo(HasProperties):

    @demo_property
    def is_a_property(self):
        return "I'm a property"

    def is_a_function(self):
        return "I'm a function"


a = Demo()
print(a.is_a_function())
print(a.is_a_property)

    @run (The Scoped Block)

    @run is a decorator that will run the body of the decorated function, and then store the result of that function in place of the function’s name. It makes it easier to assign the results of complex statements to a variable, and get the advantages of functions having less leaky scopes than if or loop blocks.

    def run(f):

    return f()

@run
def hello_world():
    return "Hello, World!"

print(hello_world)

    @apply (Multi-line stream transformers)

    def apply(transformer, iterable_):

    def _applicator(f):

        return(transformer(f, iterable_))

    return _applicator

@apply(map, range(100)
def fizzbuzzed(i):
    if i % 3 == 0 and i % 5 == 0:
        return "fizzbuzz"

    if i % 3 == 0:
        return "fizz"
    elif i % 5 == 0:
        return "buzz"
    else:
        return str(i)

    Builders

    
def html(f):
    builder = HtmlNodeBuilder("html")
    f(builder)
    return builder.build()


class HtmlNodeBuilder:
    def __init__(self, tag_name):
       self.tag_name = tag_name
       self.nodes = []

   def node(self, f):
        builder = HtmlNodeBuilder(f.__name__)
        f(builder)
        self.nodes.append(builder.build())

    def text(self, text):
        self.nodes.append(text)

    def build(self):
      nodes = "\n".join(self.nodes)
       return f"<{self.tag_name}>\n{nodes}\n</{self.tag_name}>"


@html
def document(b):
   @b.node
   def head(b):
       @b.node
       def title(b):
           b.text("Hello, World!")

   @b.node
   def body(b):
       for i in range(10, 0, -1):
           @b.node
           def p(b):
               b.text(f"{i}")

    Code Registries

    This is an incomplete implementation of a code registry for handling simple text processing tasks:

    ```python

    def register(self, input, output):

    def _register_code(f):
    self.registry[(input, output)] = f
    return f

return _register_code

    in_type = (iterable[str], (WILDCARD, ) out_type = (Counter, (WILDCARD, frequency))

    @registry.register(in_type, out_type) def count_strings(strings):

    return Counter(strings)

    @registry.register( (iterable[str], (WILDCARD, )), (iterable[str], (WILDCARD, lowercase)) ) def words_to_lowercase(words): …

    @registry.register( (iterable[str], (WILDCARD, )), (iterable[str], (WILDCARD, no_punctuation)) ) def words_without_punctuation(words): …

    def find_steps( self, input_type, input_attrs, output_type, output_attrs ):

    hand_wave()

    def give_me(self, input, output_type, output_attrs):

    steps = self.find_steps(
    type(input), (), output_type, output_attrs
)

temp = input
for step in steps:
    temp = step(temp)

return temp

    ,

    Jan Schmidt — OpenHMD update

    A while ago, I wrote a post about how to build and test my Oculus CV1 tracking code in SteamVR using the SteamVR-OpenHMD driver. I have updated those instructions and moved them to https://noraisin.net/diary/?page_id=1048 – so use those if you’d like to try things out.

    The pandemic continues to sap my time for OpenHMD improvements. Since my last post, I have been working on various refinements. The biggest visible improvements are:

    • Adding velocity and acceleration API to OpenHMD.
    • Rewriting the pose transformation code that maps from the IMU-centric tracking space to the device pose needed by SteamVR / apps.

    Adding velocity and acceleration reporting is needed in VR apps that support throwing things. It means that throwing objects and using gravity-grab to fetch objects works in Half-Life: Alyx, making it playable now.

    The rewrite to the pose transformation code fixed problems where the rotation of controller models in VR didn’t match the rotation applied in the real world. Controllers would appear attached to the wrong part of the hand, and rotate around the wrong axis. Movements feel more natural now.

    Ongoing work – record and replay

    My focus going forward is on fixing glitches that are caused by tracking losses or outliers. Those problems happen when the computer vision code either fails to match what the cameras see to the device LED models, or when it matches incorrectly.

    Tracking failure leads to the headset view or controllers ‘flying away’ suddenly. Incorrect matching leads to controllers jumping and jittering to the wrong pose, or swapping hands. Either condition is very annoying.

    Unfortunately, as the tracking has improved the remaining problems get harder to understand and there is less low-hanging fruit for improvement. Further, when the computer vision runs at 52Hz, it’s impossible to diagnose the reasons for a glitch in real time.

    I’ve built a branch of OpenHMD that uses GStreamer to record the CV1 camera video, plus IMU and tracking logs into a video file.

    To go with those recordings, I’ve been working on a replay and simulation tool, that uses the Godot game engine to visualise the tracking session. The goal is to show, frame-by-frame, where OpenHMD thought the cameras, headset and controllers were at each point in the session, and to be able to step back and forth through the recording.

    Right now, I’m working on the simulation portion of the replay, that will use the tracking logs to recreate all the poses.

    ,

    Robert Collins — A moment of history

    I’ve been asked more than once what it was like at the beginning of Ubuntu, before it was a company, when an email from someone I’d never heard of came into my mailbox.

    We’re coming up on 20 years now since Ubuntu was founded, and I had cause to do some spelunking into IMAP archives recently… while there I took the opportunity to grab the very first email I received.

    The Ubuntu long shot succeeded wildly. Of course, we liked to joke about how spammy those emails where: cold-calling a raft of Debian developers with job offers, some of them were closer to phishing attacks :). This very early one – I was the second employee (though I started at 4 days a week to transition my clients gradually) – was less so.

    I think its interesting though to note how explicit a gamble this was framed as: a time limited experiment, funded for a year. As the company scaled this very rapidly became a hiring problem and the horizon had to be pushed out to 2 years to get folk to join.

    And of course, while we started with arch in earnest, we rapidly hit significant usability problems, some of which were solvable with porcelain and shallow non-architectural changes, and we built initially patches, and then the bazaar VCS project to tackle those. But others were not: for instance, I recall exceeding the 32K hard link limit on ext3 due to a single long history during a VCS conversion. The sum of these challenges led us to create the bzr project, a ground up rethink of our version control needs, architecture, implementation and user-experience. While ultimately git has conquered all, bzr had – still has in fact – extremely loyal advocates, due to its laser sharp focus on usability.

    Anyhow, here it is: one of the original no-name-here-yet, aka Ubuntu, introductory emails (with permission from Mark, of course). When I clicked through to the website Mark provided there was a link there to a fantastical website about a space tourist… not what I had expected to be reading in Adelaide during LCA 2004.

    From: Mark Shuttleworth <xxx@xxx>
    To: Robert Collins <xxx@xxx>
    Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004, 04:30

    Tom Lord gave me your email address, I believe he’s
    already sent you the email that I sent him so I’m sure
    you have some background.

    In short, I am going to fund some open source
    development for a year. This is part of a new project
    that I will be getting off the ground in the coming
    weeks. I don’t know where it will lead, it’s flying in
    the face of a stiff breeze but I think at the end of
    the day it will at least fund a few very good open
    source developers for a full year to work on the
    projects they like most.

    One of the pieces of the puzzle is high end source
    code management. I’ll be looking to build an
    infrastructure that will manage source code for
    between 100 and 8000 open source projects (yes,
    there’s a big difference between the two, I don’t know
    at which end of the spectrum we will be at the end of
    the year but our infrastructure will have to at least
    be capable of scaling to the latter within two years)
    with upwards of 2000 developers, drawing code from a
    variety of sources, playing with it and spitting it
    out regularly in nice packages.

    Arch and Subversion seem to be the two leading
    contenders for “next generation open source sccm”. I’d
    be interested in your thoughts on the two of them, and
    how they stack up. I’m looking to hire one person who
    will lead that part of the effort. They’ll work alone
    from home, and be responsible for two things. First,
    extending the tool (arch or svn) in ways that help the
    project. Such extensions will be released under an
    open source licence, and hopefully embraced by the
    tools maintainers and included in the mainline code
    for the tool. And second, they will be responsible for
    our large-scale implementation of SCCM, using that
    tool, and building the management scripts and other
    infrastructure to support such a large, and hopefully
    highly automated, set of repositories.

    Would you be interested in this position? What
    attributes and experience do you think would make you
    a great person to have on the team? What would your
    salary expectation be, as a monthly figure, for a one
    year contract full time?

    I’m currently on your continent, well, just off it. On
    Lizard Island, up North. Am headed today for Brisbane,
    then on the 17th to Launceston via Melbourne. If you
    happen to be on any of those stops, would you be
    interested in meeting up to discuss it further?

    If you’re curious you can find out a bit more about me
    at www.markshuttleworth.com. This project is much
    lower key than some of what you’ll find there. It’s a
    very long shot indeed. But if at worst all that
    happens is a bunch of open source work gets funded at
    my expense I’ll feel it was money well spent.

    Cheers,
    Mark

    =====
    —
    “Good judgement comes from experience, and often experience
    comes from bad judgement” – Rita Mae Brown

    ,

    Arjen Lentz — Classic McEleice and the NIST search for post-quantum crypto

    I have always liked cryptography, and public-key cryptography in particularly. When Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) first came out in 1991, I not only started using it, also but looking at the documentation and the code to see how it worked. I created my own implementation in C using very small keys, just to better understand.

    Cryptography has been running a race against both faster and cheaper computing power. And these days, with banking and most other aspects of our lives entirely relying on secure communications, it’s a very juicy target for bad actors.

    About 5 years ago, the National (USA) Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) initiated a search for cryptographic algorithmic that should withstand a near-future world where quantum computers with a significant number of qubits are a reality. There have been a number of rounds, which mid 2020 saw round 3 and the finalists.

    This submission caught my eye some time ago: Classic McEliece, and out of the four finalists it’s the only one that is not lattice-based [wikipedia link].

    For Public Key Encryption and Key Exchange Mechanism, Prof Bill Buchanan thinks that the winner will be lattice-based, but I am not convinced.

    Robert McEleice at his retirement in 2007

    Tiny side-track, you may wonder where does the McEleice name come from? From mathematician Robert McEleice (1942-2019). McEleice developed his cryptosystem in 1978. So it’s not just named after him, he designed it. For various reasons that have nothing to do with the mathematical solidity of the ideas, it didn’t get used at the time. He’s done plenty cool other things, too. From his Caltech obituary:

    He made fundamental contributions to the theory and design of channel codes for communication systems—including the interplanetary telecommunication systems that were used by the Voyager, Galileo, Mars Pathfinder, Cassini, and Mars Exploration Rover missions.

    Back to lattices, there are both unknowns (aspects that have not been studied in exhaustive depth) and recent mathematical attacks, both of which create uncertainty – in the crypto sphere as well as for business and politics. Given how long it takes for crypto schemes to get widely adopted, the latter two are somewhat relevant, particularly since cyber security is a hot topic.

    Lattices are definitely interesting, but given what we know so far, it is my feeling that systems based on lattices are more likely to be proven breakable than Classic McEleice, which come to this finalists’ table with 40+ years track record of in-depth analysis. Mind that all finalists are of course solid at this stage – but NIST’s thoughts on expected developments and breakthroughs is what is likely to decide the winner. NIST are not looking for shiny, they are looking for very very solid in all possible ways.

    Prof Buchanan recently published implementations for the finalists, and did some benchmarks where we can directly compare them against each other.

    We can see that Classic McEleice’s key generation is CPU intensive, but is that really a problem? The large size of its public key may be more of a factor (disadvantage), however the small ciphertext I think more than offsets that disadvantage.

    As we’re nearing the end of the NIST process, in my opinion, fast encryption/decryption and small cyphertext, combined with the long track record of in-depth analysis, may still see Classic McEleice come out the winner.

    The post Classic McEleice and the NIST search for post-quantum crypto first appeared on Lentz family blog.

    ,

    Lev Lafayette — Inaugural John Lions Distinguished Lectures, University of New South Wales

    The importance of John Lions to computing history has spanned decades and continues to do so. In 1976 he published, through the University of New South Wales, the Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code. The book was both explanatory for the UNIX kernel, but also as a teaching tool. The content was extraordinarily well-written, explaining difficult concepts with a remarkable coherence and also engaging in an early form of instructional scaffolding. When AT&T released UNIX v7 they specifically prohibited "classroom use" of the content, leading to thousands of educators, engineers, and learners around the world photocopying the "Lion's Book", making it the most illegally copied book in computer science history. It wasn't until 1996 when the Santa Cruz Operation, the new owners of UNIX, allowed for its legal publication. Of course, Lions was an academic (associate professor) and involved the community as the founding president of the Australian UNIX User's Group.

    With this in mind, the University of New South Wales organised an extraordinary one-day conference with some of the most impressive figures in global IT infrastructure for the last fifty years. UNIX co-creator (and B language inventor, and Go language co-creator) Ken Thompson started the day with Scientia Professor Gernot Heiser. A former student of John Lions, and chair of the organising committee, John O'Brien contributed with the always incredible Brian Kernighan in a thoroughly charming and clear description of the design principles behind UNIX. Kernighan, always able to enunciate these features, noted the great importance of operators such as pipes and redirection statements and the use of regular expressions. I could not help but feel a small sense of gratification knowing how much I emphasise these features in my own teaching. It is difficult to imagine what high performance computing would be like without such components.

    If there was an area that was somewhat unknown to me was the content-rich material by Margo Seltzer one of the original developers of BerkeleyDB, and she explored some of the conflicts that existed between databases and operating systems and how UNIX's development worked well with BerkeleyDB. Rob Pike, co-creator the Plan 9 operating system, co-author of the UNIX Programming Environment, and co-creator of the Go language, provided an inspiring overview of the development and recent innovations of the latter, while Andrew Tridgell, creator of Samba and rsync, gave his take on the development of FOSS over the years - and with a particular illustration of the "French cafe" method of learning proprietary protocols.

    It was not all deep-tech however, and the supporting processes are also a necessary (and often understated) part of the development of our major IT technologies. Butler Lampson spoke in a careful, detailed, and structured fashion on the design of computer systems and fielded a question on the relevant benefits of FOSS systems quite well. Elizabeth Churchill provided a very handy overview of how the emphasis on user experience over the years has a concurrent meeting for developer-experience, especially using Fuschia and Flutter, and current president of Linx Australia, Sae Ra Germaine, gave some handy advice on the management of communities, especially including the less salubrious parts.

    The final two presentations, by Gernot Heiser and Andy Tanenbaum, were certainly capstones on the formal proceedings of the day. Gernot gave a potted history and rather impressive current deployments of the sel4 microkernel which provides security and performance on the kernel layer. I am especially interested in its RISC-V implementation. The final presentation of the day was by Andy Tanenbaum, creator of Minix, and author of two of the most well-known books used in computer science education on Computer Networks and Operating Systems. Apart from raising the classic debate between himself and Linus Torvalds over the relative virtue of micro vs monolithic kernels. Tannenbaum did make the very important point that the Lions Book led directly to MINIX, which led to Linux, which lead to Android (and to which I will add with BSD UNIX and MacOS X also following having a lineage to Lions). In other words, almost everything that we really know about computing today has been profoundly influenced by John Lions.

    Finishing the day were announcements by Heiser for the establishment of the UNSW Centre for Critical Digital Infrastructure and a significant John Lions prize for Open Source aligned with the Centre. There were also final words by the UNSW Vice-Chancellor Ian Jacobs before we departed to an evening re-dedication of the John Lions Garden. It was during that time I engaged in conversation with his brother, his wife Marianne (who gave a charming speech), and his two daughters, both of who were impressed but I suspect a little mystified on the importance of their late father (Pixel, the family dog was quite a character as well). I must also mention, courtesy of spending of much of the day in his delightful company, the contributions of one John Wulff, and especially his basic assembler language, balad. I look forward to further correspondence with this very experienced engineer from a different era.

    ,

    Dave Hall — A Rube Goldberg Machine for Container Workflows

    Learn how can you securely copy container images from GHCR to ECR.

    ,

    Chris Neugebauer — Adding a PurpleAir monitor to Home Assistant

    Living in California, I’ve (sadly) grown accustomed to needing to keep track of our local air quality index (AQI) ratings, particularly as we live close to places where large wildfires happen every other year.

    Last year, Josh and I bought a PurpleAir outdoor air quality meter, which has been great. We contribute our data to a collection of very local air quality meters, which is important, since the hilly nature of the North Bay means that the nearest government air quality ratings can be significantly different to what we experience here in Petaluma.

    I recently went looking to pull my PurpleAir sensor data into my Home Assistant setup. Unfortunately, the PurpleAir API does not return the AQI metric for air quality, only the raw PM2.5/PM5/PM10 numbers. After some searching, I found a nice template sensor solution on the Home Assistant forums, which I’ve modernised by adding the AQI as a sub-sensor, and adding unique ID fields to each useful sensor, so that you can assign them to a location.

    You’ll end up with sensors for raw PM2.5, the PM2.5 AQI value, the US EPA air quality category, air pressure, relative humidity and air pressure.

    How to use this

    First up, visit the PurpleAir Map, find the sensor you care about, click “get this widget�, and then “JSON�. That will give you the URL to set as the resource key in purpleair.yaml.

    Adding the configuration

    In HomeAssistant, add the following line to your configuration.yaml:

    sensor: !include purpleair.yaml

    and then add the following contents to purpleair.yaml

    
 - platform: rest
   name: 'PurpleAir'

   # Substitute in the URL of the sensor you care about.  To find the URL, go
   # to purpleair.com/map, find your sensor, click on it, click on "Get This
   # Widget" then click on "JSON".
   resource: https://www.purpleair.com/json?key={KEY_GOES_HERE}&show={SENSOR_ID}

   # Only query once a minute to avoid rate limits:
   scan_interval: 60

   # Set this sensor to be the AQI value.
   #
   # Code translated from JavaScript found at:
   # https://docs.google.com/document/d/15ijz94dXJ-YAZLi9iZ_RaBwrZ4KtYeCy08goGBwnbCU/edit#
   value_template: >
     {{ value_json["results"][0]["Label"] }}
   unit_of_measurement: ""
   # The value of the sensor can't be longer than 255 characters, but the
   # attributes can.  Store away all the data for use by the templates below.
   json_attributes:
     - results

 - platform: template
   sensors:
     purpleair_aqi:
       unique_id: 'purpleair_SENSORID_aqi_pm25'
       friendly_name: 'PurpleAir PM2.5 AQI'
       value_template: >
         {% macro calcAQI(Cp, Ih, Il, BPh, BPl) -%}
           {{ (((Ih - Il)/(BPh - BPl)) * (Cp - BPl) + Il)|round|float }}
         {%- endmacro %}
         {% if (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) > 1000 %}
           invalid
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) > 350.5 %}
           {{ calcAQI((states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float), 500.0, 401.0, 500.0, 350.5) }}
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) > 250.5 %}
           {{ calcAQI((states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float), 400.0, 301.0, 350.4, 250.5) }}
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) > 150.5 %}
           {{ calcAQI((states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float), 300.0, 201.0, 250.4, 150.5) }}
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) > 55.5 %}
           {{ calcAQI((states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float), 200.0, 151.0, 150.4, 55.5) }}
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) > 35.5 %}
           {{ calcAQI((states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float), 150.0, 101.0, 55.4, 35.5) }}
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) > 12.1 %}
           {{ calcAQI((states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float), 100.0, 51.0, 35.4, 12.1) }}
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float) >= 0.0 %}
           {{ calcAQI((states('sensor.purpleair_pm25')|float), 50.0, 0.0, 12.0, 0.0) }}
         {% else %}
           invalid
         {% endif %}
       unit_of_measurement: "bit"
     purpleair_description:
       unique_id: 'purpleair_SENSORID_description'
       friendly_name: 'PurpleAir AQI Description'
       value_template: >
         {% if (states('sensor.purpleair_aqi')|float) >= 401.0 %}
           Hazardous
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_aqi')|float) >= 301.0 %}
           Hazardous
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_aqi')|float) >= 201.0 %}
           Very Unhealthy
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_aqi')|float) >= 151.0 %}
           Unhealthy
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_aqi')|float) >= 101.0 %}
           Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_aqi')|float) >= 51.0 %}
           Moderate
         {% elif (states('sensor.purpleair_aqi')|float) >= 0.0 %}
           Good
         {% else %}
           undefined
         {% endif %}
       entity_id: sensor.purpleair
     purpleair_pm25:
       unique_id: 'purpleair_SENSORID_pm25'
       friendly_name: 'PurpleAir PM 2.5'
       value_template: "{{ state_attr('sensor.purpleair','results')[0]['PM2_5Value'] }}"
       unit_of_measurement: "μg/m3"
       entity_id: sensor.purpleair
     purpleair_temp:
       unique_id: 'purpleair_SENSORID_temperature'
       friendly_name: 'PurpleAir Temperature'
       value_template: "{{ state_attr('sensor.purpleair','results')[0]['temp_f'] }}"
       unit_of_measurement: "°F"
       entity_id: sensor.purpleair
     purpleair_humidity:
       unique_id: 'purpleair_SENSORID_humidity'
       friendly_name: 'PurpleAir Humidity'
       value_template: "{{ state_attr('sensor.purpleair','results')[0]['humidity'] }}"
       unit_of_measurement: "%"
       entity_id: sensor.purpleair
     purpleair_pressure:
       unique_id: 'purpleair_SENSORID_pressure'
       friendly_name: 'PurpleAir Pressure'
       value_template: "{{ state_attr('sensor.purpleair','results')[0]['pressure'] }}"
       unit_of_measurement: "hPa"
       entity_id: sensor.purpleair

    Quirks

    I had difficulty getting the AQI to display as a numeric graph when I didn’t set a unit. I went with bit, and that worked just fine. 🤷�♂�

    ,

    Stewart Smith — An Unearthly Child

    So, this idea has been brewing for a while now… try and watch all of Doctor Who. All of it. All 38 seasons. Today(ish), we started. First up, from 1963 (first aired not quite when intended due to the Kennedy assassination): An Unearthly Child. The first episode of the first serial.

    A lot of iconic things are there from the start: the music, the Police Box, embarrassing moments of not quite remembering what time one is in, and normal humans accidentally finding their way into the TARDIS.

    I first saw this way back when a child, where they were repeated on ABC TV in Australia for some anniversary of Doctor Who (I forget which one). Well, I saw all but the first episode as the train home was delayed and stopped outside Caulfield for no reason for ages. Some things never change.

    Of course, being a show from the early 1960s, there’s some rougher spots. We’re not about to have the picture of diversity, and there’s going to be casual racism and sexism. What will be interesting is noticing these things today, and contrasting with my memory of them at the time (at least for episodes I’ve seen before), and what I know of the attitudes of the time.

    “This year-ometer is not calculating properly” is a very 2020 line though (technically from the second episode).

    ,

    Jan Schmidt — Rift CV1 – Getting close now…

    It’s been a while since my last post about tracking support for the Oculus Rift in February. There’s been big improvements since then – working really well a lot of the time. It’s gone from “If I don’t make any sudden moves, I can finish an easy Beat Saber level” to “You can’t hide from me!” quality.

    Equally, there are still enough glitches and corner cases that I think I’ll still be at this a while.

    Here’s a video from 3 weeks ago of (not me) playing Beat Saber on Expert+ setting showing just how good things can be now:

    Beat Saber – Skunkynator playing Expert+, Mar 16 2021

    Strap in. Here’s what I’ve worked on in the last 6 weeks:

    Pose Matching improvements

    Most of the biggest improvements have come from improving the computer vision algorithm that’s matching the observed LEDs (blobs) in the camera frames to the 3D models of the devices.

    I split the brute-force search algorithm into 2 phases. It now does a first pass looking for ‘obvious’ matches. In that pass, it does a shallow graph search of blobs and their nearest few neighbours against LEDs and their nearest neighbours, looking for a match using a “Strong” match metric. A match is considered strong if expected LEDs match observed blobs to within 1.5 pixels.

    Coupled with checks on the expected orientation (matching the Gravity vector detected by the IMU) and the pose prior (expected position and orientation are within predicted error bounds) this short-circuit on the search is hit a lot of the time, and often completes within 1 frame duration.

    In the remaining tricky cases, where a deeper graph search is required in order to recover the pose, the initial search reduces the number of LEDs and blobs under consideration, speeding up the remaining search.

    I also added an LED size model to the mix – for a candidate pose, it tries to work out how large (in pixels) each LED should appear, and use that as a bound on matching blobs to LEDs. This helps reduce mismatches as devices move further from the camera.

    LED labelling

    When a brute-force search for pose recovery completes, the system now knows the identity of various blobs in the camera image. One way it avoids a search next time is to transfer the labels into future camera observations using optical-flow tracking on the visible blobs.

    The problem is that even sped-up the search can still take a few frame-durations to complete. Previously LED labels would be transferred from frame to frame as they arrived, but there’s now a unique ID associated with each blob that allows the labels to be transferred even several frames later once their identity is known.

    IMU Gyro scale

    One of the problems with reverse engineering is the guesswork around exactly what different values mean. I was looking into why the controller movement felt “swimmy” under fast motions, and one thing I found was that the interpretation of the gyroscope readings from the IMU was incorrect.

    The touch controllers report IMU angular velocity readings directly as a 16-bit signed integer. Previously the code would take the reading and divide by 1024 and use the value as radians/second.

    From teardowns of the controller, I know the IMU is an Invensense MPU-6500. From the datasheet, the reported value is actually in degrees per second and appears to be configured for the +/- 2000 °/s range. That yields a calculation of Gyro-rad/s = Gyro-°/s * (2000 / 32768) * (?/180) – or a divisor of 938.734.

    The 1024 divisor was under-estimating rotation speed by about 10% – close enough to work until you start moving quickly.

    Limited interpolation

    If we don’t find a device in the camera views, the fusion filter predicts motion using the IMU readings – but that quickly becomes inaccurate. In the worst case, the controllers fly off into the distance. To avoid that, I added a limit of 500ms for ‘coasting’. If we haven’t recovered the device pose by then, the position is frozen in place and only rotation is updated until the cameras find it again.

    Exponential filtering

    I implemented a 1-Euro exponential smoothing filter on the output poses for each device. This is an idea from the Project Esky driver for Project North Star/Deck-X AR headsets, and almost completely eliminates jitter in the headset view and hand controllers shown to the user. The tradeoff is against introducing lag when the user moves quickly – but there are some tunables in the exponential filter to play with for minimising that. For now I’ve picked some values that seem to work reasonably.

    Non-blocking radio

    Communications with the touch controllers happens through USB radio command packets sent to the headset. The main use of radio commands in OpenHMD is to read the JSON configuration block for each controller that is programmed in at the factory. The configuration block provides the 3D model of LED positions as well as initial IMU bias values.

    Unfortunately, reading the configuration block takes a couple of seconds on startup, and blocks everything while it’s happening. Oculus saw that problem and added a checksum in the controller firmware. You can read the checksum first and if it hasn’t changed use a local cache of the configuration block. Eventually, I’ll implement that caching mechanism for OpenHMD but in the meantime it still reads the configuration blocks on each startup.

    As an interim improvement I rewrote the radio communication logic to use a state machine that is checked in the update loop – allowing radio communications to be interleaved without blocking the regularly processing of events. It still interferes a bit, but no longer causes a full multi-second stall as each hand controller turns on.

    Haptic feedback

    The hand controllers have haptic feedback ‘rumble’ motors that really add to the immersiveness of VR by letting you sense collisions with objects. Until now, OpenHMD hasn’t had any support for applications to trigger haptic events. I spent a bit of time looking at USB packet traces with Philipp Zabel and we figured out the radio commands to turn the rumble motors on and off.

    In the Rift CV1, the haptic motors have a mode where you schedule feedback events into a ringbuffer – effectively they operate like a low frequency audio device. However, that mode was removed for the Rift S (and presumably in the Quest devices) – and deprecated for the CV1.

    With that in mind, I aimed for implementing the unbuffered mode, with explicit ‘motor on + frequency + amplitude’ and ‘motor off’ commands sent as needed. Thanks to already having rewritten the radio communications to use a state machine, adding haptic commands was fairly easy.

    The big question mark is around what API OpenHMD should provide for haptic feedback. I’ve implemented something simple for now, to get some discussion going. It works really well and adds hugely to the experience. That code is in the https://github.com/thaytan/OpenHMD/tree/rift-haptics branch, with a SteamVR-OpenHMD branch that uses it in https://github.com/thaytan/SteamVR-OpenHMD/tree/controller-haptics-wip

    Problem areas

    Unexpected tracking losses

    I’d say the biggest problem right now is unexpected tracking loss and incorrect pose extractions when I’m not expecting them. Especially my right controller will suddenly glitch and start jumping around. Looking at a video of the debug feed, it’s not obvious why that’s happening:

    To fix cases like those, I plan to add code to log the raw video feed and the IMU information together so that I can replay the video analysis frame-by-frame and investigate glitches systematically. Those recordings will also work as a regression suite to test future changes.

    Sensor fusion efficiency

    The Kalman filter I have implemented works really nicely – it does the latency compensation, predicts motion and extracts sensor biases all in one place… but it has a big downside of being quite expensive in CPU. The Unscented Kalman Filter CPU cost grows at O(n^3) with the size of the state, and the state in this case is 43 dimensional – 22 base dimensions, and 7 per latency-compensation slot. Running 1000 updates per second for the HMD and 500 for each of the hand controllers adds up quickly.

    At some point, I want to find a better / cheaper approach to the problem that still provides low-latency motion predictions for the user while still providing the same benefits around latency compensation and bias extraction.

    Lens Distortion

    To generate a convincing illusion of objects at a distance in a headset that’s only a few centimetres deep, VR headsets use some interesting optics. The LCD/OLED panels displaying the output get distorted heavily before they hit the users eyes. What the software generates needs to compensate by applying the right inverse distortion to the output video.

    Everyone that tests the CV1 notices that the distortion is not quite correct. As you look around, the world warps and shifts annoyingly. Sooner or later that needs fixing. That’s done by taking photos of calibration patterns through the headset lenses and generating a distortion model.

    Camera / USB failures

    The camera feeds are captured using a custom user-space UVC driver implementation that knows how to set up the special synchronisation settings of the CV1 and DK2 cameras, and then repeatedly schedules isochronous USB packet transfers to receive the video.

    Occasionally, some people experience failure to re-schedule those transfers. The kernel rejects them with an out-of-memory error failing to set aside DMA memory (even though it may have been running fine for quite some time). It’s not clear why that happens – but the end result at the moment is that the USB traffic for that camera dies completely and there’ll be no more tracking from that camera until the application is restarted.

    Often once it starts happening, it will keep happening until the PC is rebooted and the kernel memory state is reset.

    Occluded cases

    Tracking generally works well when the cameras get a clear shot of each device, but there are cases like sighting down the barrel of a gun where we expect that the user will line up the controllers in front of one another, and in front of the headset. In that case, even though we probably have a good idea where each device is, it can be hard to figure out which LEDs belong to which device.

    If we already have a good tracking lock on the devices, I think it should be possible to keep tracking even down to 1 or 2 LEDs being visible – but the pose assessment code will have to be aware that’s what is happening.

    Upstreaming

    April 14th marks 2 years since I first branched off OpenHMD master to start working on CV1 tracking. How hard can it be, I thought? I’ll knock this over in a few months.

    Since then I’ve accumulated over 300 commits on top of OpenHMD master that eventually all need upstreaming in some way.

    One thing people have expressed as a prerequisite for upstreaming is to try and remove the OpenCV dependency. The tracking relies on OpenCV to do camera distortion calculations, and for their PnP implementation. It should be possible to reimplement both of those directly in OpenHMD with a bit of work – possibly using the fast LambdaTwist P3P algorithm that Philipp Zabel wrote, that I’m already using for pose extraction in the brute-force search.

    Others

    I’ve picked the top issues to highlight here. https://github.com/thaytan/OpenHMD/issues has a list of all the other things that are still on the radar for fixing eventually.

    Other Headsets

    At some point soon, I plan to put a pin in the CV1 tracking and look at adapting it to more recent inside-out headsets like the Rift S and WMR headsets. I implemented 3DOF support for the Rift S last year, but getting to full positional tracking for that and other inside-out headsets means implementing a SLAM/VIO tracking algorithm to track the headset position.

    Once the headset is tracking, the code I’m developing here for CV1 to find and track controllers will hopefully transfer across – the difference with inside-out tracking is that the cameras move around with the headset. Finding the controllers in the actual video feed should work much the same.

    Sponsorship

    This development happens mostly in my spare time and partly as open source contribution time at work at Centricular. I am accepting funding through Github Sponsorships to help me spend more time on it – I’d really like to keep helping Linux have top-notch support for VR/AR applications. Big thanks to the people that have helped get this far.

    ,

    Stewart Smith — libeatmydata v129

    Every so often, I release a new libeatmydata. This has not happened for a long time. This is just some bug fixes, most of which have been in the Debian package for some time, I’ve just been lazy and not sat down and merged them.

    git clone https://github.com/stewartsmith/libeatmydata.git

    Download the source tarball from here: libeatmydata-129.tar.gz and GPG signature: libeatmydata-129.tar.gz.asc from my GPG key.

    Or, feel free to grab some Fedora RPMs:

    Releases published also in the usual places:

    ,

    BlueHackers — World bipolar day 2021

    Today, 30 March, is World Bipolar Day.

    Vincent van Gogh - Worn Out

    Why that particular date? It’s Vincent van Gogh’s birthday (1853), and there is a fairly strong argument that the Dutch painter suffered from bipolar (among other things).

    The image on the side is Vincent’s drawing “Worn Out” (from 1882), and it seems to capture the feeling rather well – whether (hypo)manic, depressed, or mixed. It’s exhausting.

    Bipolar is complicated, often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, and when only treated with anti-depressants, it can trigger the (hypo)mania – essentially dragging that person into that state near-permanently.

    Have you heard of Bipolar II?

    Hypo-mania is the “lesser” form of mania that distinguishes Bipolar I (the classic “manic depressive” syndrome) from Bipolar II. It’s “lesser” only in the sense that rather than someone going so hyper they may think they can fly (Bipolar I is often identified when someone in manic state gets admitted to hospital – good catch!) while with Bipolar II the hypo-mania may actually exhibit as anger. Anger in general, against nothing in particular but potentially everyone and everything around them. Or, if it’s a mixed episode, anger combined with strong negative thoughts. Either way, it does not look like classic mania. It is, however, exhausting and can be very debilitating.

    Bipolar II people often present to a doctor while in depressed state, and GPs (not being psychiatrists) may not do a full diagnosis. Note that D.A.S. and similar test sheets are screening tools, they are not diagnostic. A proper diagnosis is more complex than filling in a form some questions (who would have thought!)

    Call to action

    If you have a diagnosis of depression, only from a GP, and are on medication for this, I would strongly recommend you also get a referral to a psychiatrist to confirm that diagnosis.

    Our friends at the awesome Black Dog Institute have excellent information on bipolar, as well as a quick self-test – if that shows some likelihood of bipolar, go get that referral and follow up ASAP.

    I will be writing more about the topic in the coming time.

    The post World bipolar day 2021 first appeared on BlueHackers.org.

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    Stewart Smith — The Apple Power Macintosh 7200/120 PC Compatible (Part 1)

    So, I learned something recently: if you pick up your iPhone with eBay open on an auction bid screen in just the right way, you may accidentally click the bid button and end up buying an old computer. Totally not the worst thing ever, and certainly a creative way to make a decision.

    So, not too long later, a box arrives!

    It arrived! Well packed and with the all important video adapter cable!

    In the 1990s, Apple created some pretty “interesting” computers and product line. One thing you could get is a DOS Compatibility (or PC Compatibility) card. This was a card that went into one of the expansion slots on a Mac and had something really curious on it: most of the guts of a PC.

    Others have written on these cards too: https://www.engadget.com/2009-12-10-before-there-was-boot-camp-there-were-dos-compatibility-cards.html and http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/12/09/blast-from-the-past-a-look-back-at-apples-dos-compatibility-cards/. There’s also the Service Manual https://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/misc/pc_compatibility_card.pdf with some interesting details.

    The machine I’d bought was an Apple Power Macintosh 7200/120 with the PC Compatible card added afterwards (so it doesn’t have the PC Compatible label on the front like some models ended up getting).

    The Apple Power Macintosh 7200/120

    Wikipedia has a good article on the line, noting that it was first released in August 1995, and fitting for the era, was sold as about 14 million other model numbers (okay not quite that bad, it was only a total of four model numbers for essentially the same machine). This specific model, the 7200/120 was introduced on April 22nd, 1996, and the original web page describing it from Apple is on the wayback machine.

    For older Macs, Low End Mac is a good resource, and there’s a page on the 7200, and amazingly Apple still has the tech specs on their web site!

    The 7200 series replaced the 7100, which was one of the original PowerPC based Macs. The big changes are using the industry standard PCI bus for its three expansion slots rather than NuBus. Rather surprisingly, NuBus was not Apple specific, but you could not call it widely adopted by successful manufacturers. Apple first used NuBus in the 1987 Macintosh II.

    The PCI bus was standardized in 1992, and it’s almost certain that a successor to it is in the computer you’re using to read this. It really quite caught on as an industry standard.

    The processor of the machine is a PowerPC 601. The PowerPC was an effort of IBM, Apple, and Motorola (the AIM Alliance) to create a class of processors for personal computers based on IBM’s POWER Architecture. The PowerPC 601 was the first of these processors, initially used by Apple in its Power Macintosh range. The machine I have has one running at a whopping 120Mhz. There continued to be PowerPC chips for a number of years, and IBM continued making POWER processors even after that. However, you are almost certainly not using a PowerPC derived processor in the computer you’re using to read this.

    The PC Compatibility card has on it a full on legit Pentium 100 processor, and hardware for doing VGA graphics, a Sound Blaster 16 and the other things you’d usually expect of a PC from 1996. Since it’s on a PCI card though, it’s a bit different than a PC of the era. It doesn’t have any expansion slots of its own, and in fact uses up one of the three PCI slots in the Mac. It also doesn’t have its own floppy drive, or hard drive. There’s software on the Mac that will let the PC card use the Mac’s floppy drive, and part of the Mac’s hard drive for the PC!

    The Pentium 100 was the first mass produced superscalar processor. You are quite likely to be using a computer with a processor related to the Pentium to read this, unless you’re using a phone or tablet, or one of the very latest Macs; in which case you’re using an ARM based processor. You likely have more ARM processors in your life than you have socks.

    Basically, this computer is a bit of a hodge-podge of historical technology, some of which ended up being successful, and other things less so.

    Let’s have a look inside!

    The PC Compatibility card on the left (installed), and oh, look, a graphics card on the right!

    So, one of the PCI slots has a Vertex Twin Turbo 128M8A video card in it. There is not much about this card on the internet. There’s a photo of one on Wikimedia Commons though. I’ll have to investigate more.

    Does it work though? Yes! Here it is on my desk:

    The powered on Power Mac 7200/120

    Even with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 that came with MacOS 8.6, you can find some places on the internet you can fetch files from, at a not too bad speed even!

    More fun times with this machine to come!

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    Rusty Russell — A Model for Bitcoin Soft Fork Activation

    TL;DR: There should be an option, taproot=lockintrue, which allows users to set lockin-on-timeout to true. It should not be the default, though.

    As stated in my previous post, we need actual consensus, not simply the appearance of consensus. I’m pretty sure we have that for taproot, but I would like a template we can use in future without endless debate each time.

    • Giving every group a chance to openly signal for (or against!) gives us the most robust assurance that we actually have consensus. Being able to signal opposition is vital, since everyone can lie anyway; making opposition difficult just reduces the reliability of the signal.
    • Developers should not activate. They’ve tried to assure themselves that there’s broad approval of the change, but that’s not really a transferable proof. We should be concerned about about future corruption, insanity, or groupthink. Moreover, even the perception that developers can set the rules will lead to attempts to influence them as Bitcoin becomes more important. As a (non-Bitcoin-core) developer I can’t think of a worse hell myself, nor do we want to attract developers who want to be influenced!
    • Miner activation is actually brilliant. It’s easy for everyone to count, and majority miner enforcement is sufficient to rely on the new rules. But its real genius is that miners are most directly vulnerable to the economic majority of users: in a fork they have to pick sides continuously knowing that if they are wrong, they will immediately suffer economically through missed opportunity cost.
    • Of course, economic users are ultimately in control. Any system which doesn’t explicitly encode that is fragile; nobody would argue that fair elections are unnecessary because if people were really dissatisfied they could always overthrow the government themselves! We should make it as easy for them to exercise this power as possible: this means not requiring them to run unvetted or home-brew modifications which will place them at more risk, so developers need to supply this option (setting it should also change the default User-Agent string, for signalling purposes). It shouldn’t be an upgrade either (which inevitably comes with other changes). Such a default-off option provides both a simple method, and a Schelling point for the lockinontimeout parameters. It also means much less chance of this power being required: “Si vis pacem, para bellum“.

    This triumverate model may seem familiar, being widely used in various different governance systems. It seems the most robust to me, and is very close to what we have evolved into already. Formalizing it reduces uncertainty for any future changes, as well.

    ,

    Dave Hall — Parameter Store vs Secrets Manager

    Which AWS managed service is best for storing and managing your secrets?

    ,

    Rusty Russell — Bitcoin Consensus and Solidarity

    Bitcoin’s consensus rules define what is valid, but this isn’t helpful when we’re looking at changing the rules themselves. The trend in Bitcoin has been to make such changes in an increasingly inclusive and conservative manner, but we are still feeling our way through this, and appreciating more nuance each time we do so.

    To use Bitcoin, you need to remain in the supermajority of consensus on what the rules are. But you can never truly know if you are. Everyone can signal, but everyone can lie. You can’t know what software other nodes or miners are running: even expensive testing of miners by creating an invalid block only tests one possible difference, may still give a false negative, and doesn’t mean they can’t change a moment later.

    This risk of being left out is heightened greatly when the rules change. This is why we need to rely on multiple mechanisms to reassure ourselves that consensus will be maintained:

    1. Developers assure themselves that the change is technically valid, positive and has broad support. The main tools for this are open communication, and time. Developers signal support by implementing the change.
    2. Users signal their support by upgrading their nodes.
    3. Miners signal their support by actually tagging their blocks.

    We need actual consensus, not simply the appearance of consensus. Thus it is vital that all groups know they can express their approval or rejection, in a way they know will be heard by others. In the end, the economic supermajority of Bitcoin users can set the rules, but no other group or subgroup should have inordinate influence, nor should they appear to have such control.

    The Goodwill Dividend

    A Bitcoin community which has consensus and knows it is not only safest from a technical perspective: the goodwill and confidence gives us all assurance that we can make (or resist!) changes in future.

    It will also help us defend against the inevitable attacks and challenges we are going to face, which may be a more important effect than any particular soft-fork feature.

    ,

    Dave Hall — A Lost Parcel Results in a New Website

    When Australia Post lost a parcel, we found a lot of problems with one of their websites.

    ,

    Dave Hall — We Have a New Website (Finally)

    After 15 years we rebuilt our website. Learn more about the new site.

    ,

    Jan Schmidt — Rift CV1 – Testing SteamVR

    Update:

    This post documented an older method of building SteamVR-OpenHMD. I moved them to a page here. That version will be kept up to date for any future changes, so go there.

    I’ve had a few people ask how to test my OpenHMD development branch of Rift CV1 positional tracking in SteamVR. Here’s what I do:

    • Make sure Steam + SteamVR are already installed.
    • Clone the SteamVR-OpenHMD repository:
    git clone --recursive https://github.com/ChristophHaag/SteamVR-OpenHMD.git
    • Switch the internal copy of OpenHMD to the right branch:
    cd subprojects/openhmd
git remote add thaytan-github https://github.com/thaytan/OpenHMD.git
git fetch thaytan-github
git checkout -b rift-kalman-filter thaytan-github/rift-kalman-filter
cd ../../
    • Use meson to build and register the SteamVR-OpenHMD binaries. You may need to install meson first (see below):
    meson -Dbuildtype=release build
ninja -C build
./install_files_to_build.sh
./register.sh
    • It is important to configure in release mode, as the kalman filtering code is generally too slow for real-time in debug mode (it has to run 2000 times per second)
    • Make sure your USB devices are accessible to your user account by configuring udev. See the OpenHMD guide here: https://github.com/OpenHMD/OpenHMD/wiki/Udev-rules-list
    • Please note – only Rift sensors on USB 3.0 ports will work right now. Supporting cameras on USB 2.0 requires someone implementing JPEG format streaming and decoding.
    • It can be helpful to test OpenHMD is working by running the simple example. Check that it’s finding camera sensors at startup, and that the position seems to change when you move the headset:
    ./build/subprojects/openhmd/openhmd_simple_example
    • Calibrate your expectations for how well tracking is working right now! Hint: It’s very experimental 🙂
    • Start SteamVR. Hopefully it should detect your headset and the light(s) on your Rift Sensor(s) should power on.

    Meson

    I prefer the Meson build system here. There’s also a cmake build for SteamVR-OpenHMD you can use instead, but I haven’t tested it in a while and it sometimes breaks as I work on my development branch.

    If you need to install meson, there are instructions here – https://mesonbuild.com/Getting-meson.html summarising the various methods.

    I use a copy in my home directory, but you need to make sure ~/.local/bin is in your PATH

    pip3 install --user meson

    ,

    Jan Schmidt — Rift CV1 – Pose rejection

    I spent some time this weekend implementing a couple of my ideas for improving the way the tracking code in OpenHMD filters and rejects (or accepts) possible poses when trying to match visible LEDs to the 3D models for each device.

    In general, the tracking proceeds in several steps (in parallel for each of the 3 devices being tracked):

    1. Do a brute-force search to match LEDs to 3D models, then (if matched)
      1. Assign labels to each LED blob in the video frame saying what LED they are.
      2. Send an update to the fusion filter about the position / orientation of the device
    2. Then, as each video frame arrives:
      1. Use motion flow between video frames to track the movement of each visible LED
      2. Use the IMU + vision fusion filter to predict the position/orientation (pose) of each device, and calculate which LEDs are expected to be visible and where.
    3. Try and match up and refine the poses using the predicted pose prior and labelled LEDs. In the best case, the LEDs are exactly where the fusion predicts they’ll be. More often, the orientation is mostly correct, but the position has drifted and needs correcting. In the worst case, we send the frame back to step 1 and do a brute-force search to reacquire an object.

    The goal is to always assign the correct LEDs to the correct device (so you don’t end up with the right controller in your left hand), and to avoid going back to the expensive brute-force search to re-acquire devices as much as possible

    What I’ve been working on this week is steps 1 and 3 – initial acquisition of correct poses, and fast validation / refinement of the pose in each video frame, and I’ve implemented two new strategies for that.

    Gravity Vector matching

    The first new strategy is to reject candidate poses that don’t closely match the known direction of gravity for each device. I had a previous implementation of that idea which turned out to be wrong, so I’ve re-worked it and it helps a lot with device acquisition.

    The IMU accelerometer and gyro can usually tell us which way up the device is (roll and pitch) but not which way they are facing (yaw). The measure for ‘known gravity’ comes from the fusion Kalman filter covariance matrix – how certain the filter is about the orientation of the device. If that variance is small this new strategy is used to reject possible poses that don’t have the same idea of gravity (while permitting rotations around the Y axis), with the filter variance as a tolerance.

    Partial tracking matches

    The 2nd strategy is based around tracking with fewer LED correspondences once a tracking lock is acquired. Initial acquisition of the device pose relies on some heuristics for how many LEDs must match the 3D model. The general heuristic threshold I settled on for now is that 2/3rds of the expected LEDs must be visible to acquire a cold lock.

    With the new strategy, if the pose prior has a good idea where the device is and which way it’s facing, it allows matching on far fewer LED correspondences. The idea is to keep tracking a device even down to just a couple of LEDs, and hope that more become visible soon.

    While this definitely seems to help, I think the approach can use more work.

    Status

    With these two new approaches, tracking is improved but still quite erratic. Tracking of the headset itself is quite good now and for me rarely loses tracking lock. The controllers are better, but have a tendency to “fly off my hands” unexpectedly, especially after fast motions.

    I have ideas for more tracking heuristics to implement, and I expect a continuous cycle of refinement on the existing strategies and new ones for some time to come.

    For now, here’s a video of me playing Beat Saber using tonight’s code. The video shows the debug stream that OpenHMD can generate via Pipewire, showing the camera feed plus overlays of device predictions, LED device assignments and tracked device positions. Red is the headset, Green is the right controller, Blue is the left controller.

    Initial tracking is completely wrong – I see some things to fix there. When the controllers go offline due to inactivity, the code keeps trying to match LEDs to them for example, and then there are some things wrong with how it’s relabelling LEDs when they get incorrect assignments.

    After that, there are periods of good tracking with random tracking losses on the controllers – those show the problem cases to concentrate on.

    ,

    Colin Charles — Life with Rona 2.0 – Days 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9

    These lack of updates are also likely because I’ve been quite caught up with stuff.

    Monday I had a steak from Bay Leaf Steakhouse for dinner. It was kind of weird eating it from packs, but then I’m reminded you could do this in economy class. Tuesday I wanted to attempt to go vegetarian and by the time I was done with a workout, the only place was a chap fan shop (Leong Heng) where I had a mixture of Chinese and Indian chap fan. The Indian stall is run by an ex-Hyatt staff member who immediately recognised me! Wednesday, Alice came to visit, so we got to Hanks, got some alcohol, and managed a smorgasbord of food from Pickers/Sate Zul/Lila Wadi. Night ended very late, and on Thursday, visited Hai Tian for their famous salted egg squid and prawns in a coconut shell. Friday was back to being normal, so I grabbed a pizza from Mint Pizza (this time I tried their Aussie variant). Saturday, today, I hit up Rasa Sayang for some matcha latte, but grabbed food from Classic Pilot Cafe, which Faeeza owns! It was the famous salted egg chicken, double portion, half rice.

    As for workouts, I did sign up for Mantas but found it pretty hard to do, timezone wise. I did spend a lot of time jogging on the beach (this has been almost a daily affair). Monday I also did 2 MD workouts, Tuesday 1 MD workout, Wednesday half a MD workout, Thursday I did a Ping workout at Pwrhouse (so good!), Friday 1 MD workout, and Saturday an Audrey workout at Pwrhouse and 1 MD workout.

    Wednesday I also found out that Rasmus passed away. Frankly, there are no words.

    Thursday, my Raspberry Pi 400 arrived. I set it up in under ten minutes, connecting it to the TV here. It “just works”. I made a video, which I should probably figure out how to upload to YouTube after I stitch it together. I have to work on using it a lot more.

    COVID-19 cases are through the roof in Malaysia. This weekend we’ve seen two days of case breaking records, with today being 5,728 (yesterday was something close). Nutty. Singapore suspended the reciprocal green lane (RGL) agreement with Malaysia for the next 3 months.

    I’ve managed to finish Bridgerton. I like the score. Finding something on Netflix is proving to be more difficult, regardless of having a VPN. Honestly, this is why Cable TV wins… linear programming that you’re just fed.

    Stock market wise, I’ve been following the GameStop short squeeze, and even funnier is the Top Glove one, that they’re trying to repeat in Malaysia. Bitcoin seems to be doing “reasonably well” and I have to say, I think people are starting to realise decentralised services have a future. How do we get there?

    What an interesting week, I look forward to more productive time. I’m still writing in my Hobonichi Techo, so at least that’s where most personal stuff ends up, I guess?

    The post Life with Rona 2.0 – Days 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

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    Jan Schmidt — Hitting a milestone – Beat Saber!

    I hit an important OpenHMD milestone tonight – I completed a Beat Saber level using my Oculus Rift CV1!

    I’ve been continuing to work on integrating Kalman filtering into OpenHMD, and on improving the computer vision that matches and tracks device LEDs. While I suspect noone will be completing Expert levels just yet, it’s working well enough that I was able to play through a complete level of Beat Saber. For a long time this has been my mental benchmark for tracking performance, and I’m really happy 🙂

    Check it out:

    I should admit at this point that completing this level took me multiple attempts. The tracking still has quite a tendency to lose track of controllers, or to get them confused and swap hands suddenly.

    I have a list of more things to work on. See you at the next update!

    ,

    Colin Charles — Life with Rona 2.0 – Day 3

    What an unplanned day. I woke up in time to do an MD workout, despite feeling a little sore. So maybe I was about 10 minutes late and I missed the first set, but his workouts are so long, and I think there were seven sets anyway. Had a good brunch shortly thereafter.

    Did a bit of reading, and then I decided to do a beach boardwalk walk… turns out they were policing the place, and you can’t hit the boardwalk. But the beach is fair game? So I went back to the hotel, dropped off my slippers, and went for a beach jog. Pretty nutty.

    Came back to read a little more and figured I might as well do another MD workout. Then I headed out for dinner, trying out a new place — Mint Pizza. Opened 20.12.2020, and they’re empty, and their pizza is actually pretty good. Lamb and BBQ chicken, they did half-and-half.

    Twitter was discussing Raspberry Pi’s, and all I could see is a lot of misinformation, which is truly shocking. The irony is that open source has been running the Internet for so long, and progressive web apps have come such a long way…

    Back in the day when I did OpenOffice.org or Linux training even, we always did say you should learn concepts and not tools. From the time we ran Linux installfests in the late-90s in Sunway Pyramid (back then, yes, Linux was hard, and you had winmodems), but I had forgotten that I even did stuff for school teachers and NGOs back in 2002… I won’t forget PC Gemilang either…

    Anyway, I placed an order again for another Raspberry Pi 400. I am certain that most people talk so much crap, without realising that Malaysia isn’t a developed nation and most people can’t afford a Mac let alone a PC. Laptops aren’t cheap. And there are so many other issues…. Saying Windows is still required in 2021 is the nuttiest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Easy to tweet, much harder to think about TCO, and realise where in the journey Malaysia is.

    Maybe the best thing was that Malaysian Twitter learned about technology. I doubt many realised the difference between a Pi board vs the 400, but hey, the fact that they talked about tech is still a win (misinformed, but a win).

    The post Life with Rona 2.0 – Day 3 first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

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    Colin Charles — Life with Rona 2.0 – Days 1 & 2

    Today is the first day that in the state of Pahang, we have to encounter what many Malaysians are referring to as the Movement Control Order 2.0 (MCO 2.0). I think everyone finally agrees with the terminology that this is a lockdown now, because I remember back in the day when I was calling it that, I’d definitely offend a handful of journalists.

    This is one interesting change for me compared to when I last wrote Life with Rona — Day 56 of being indoors and not even leaving my household, in Kuala Lumpur. I am now not in the state, I am living in a hotel, and I am obviously moving around a little more since we have access to the beach.

    KL/Selangor and several other states have already been under the MCO 2.0 since January 13 2021, and while it was supposed to end on January 26, it seems like they’ve extended and harmonised the dates for Peninsular Malaysia to end on February 4 2021. I guess everyone got the “good news” yesterday. The Prime Minister announced some kind of aid last week, but it is still mostly a joke.

    Today was the 2nd day I woke up at around 2.30pm because I went to bed at around 8am. First day I had a 23.5 hour uptime, and the today was less brutal, but working from 1-8am with the PST timezone is pretty brutal. Consequently, I barely got too much done, and had one meal, vegetarian, two packs that included rice. I did get to walk by the beach (between Teluk Cempedak and Teluk Cempedak 2), did quite a bit of exercise there and I think even the monkeys are getting hungry… lots of stray cats and monkeys. Starbucks closes at 7pm, and I rocked up at 7.10pm (this was just like yesterday, when I arrived at 9.55pm and was told they wouldn’t grant me a coffee!).

    While writing this entry, I did manage to get into a long video call with some friends and I guess it was good catching up with people in various states. It also is what prevented me from publishing this entry!

    Day 2

    I did wake up reasonable early today because I had pre-ordered room service to arrive at 9am. There is a fixed menu at the hotel for various cuisines (RM48/pax, thankfully gratis for me) and I told them I prefer not having to waste, so just give me what I want which is off menu items anyway. Roti telur double telur (yes, I know it is a roti jantan) with some banjir dhal and sambal and a bit of fruit on the side with two teh tariks. They delivered as requested. I did forget to ask for a jar of honey but that is OK, there is always tomorrow.

    I spent most of the day vacillating, and wouldn’t consider it productive by any measure. Just chit chats and napping. It did rain today after a long time, so the day seemed fairly dreary.

    When I finally did awaken from my nap, I went for a run on the beach. I did it barefoot. I have no idea if this is how it is supposed to be done, or if you are to run nearer the water or further up above, but I did move around between the two quite often. The beach is still pretty dead, but it is expected since no one is allowed to go unless you’re a hotel guest.

    The hotel has closed 3/4 of their villages (blocks) and moved everyone to the village I’m staying in (for long stay guests…). I’m thankful I have a pretty large suite, it is a little over 980sqft, and the ample space, while smaller than my home, is still welcome.

    Post beach run, I did a workout with MD via Instagram. It was strength/HIIT based, and I burnt a tonne, because he gave us one of his signature 1.5h classes. It was longer than the 80 minute class he normally charges RM50 for (I still think this is undervaluing his service, but he really does care and does it for the love of seeing his students grow!).

    Post-workout I decided to head downtown to find some dinner. Everything at the Teluk Cemepdak block of shops was closed, so they’re not even bothered with doing takeaway. Sg. Lembing steakhouse seemed to have cars parked, Vanggey was empty (Crocodile Rock was open, can’t say if there was a crowd, because the shared parking lot was empty), there was a modest queue at Sate Zul, and further down, Lena was closed, Pickers was open for takeaway but looked pretty closed, Tjantek was open surprisingly, and then I thought I’d give Nusantara a try again, this time for food, but their chef had just gone home at about 8pm. Oops. So I drove to LAN burger, initially ordering just one chicken double special; however they looked like they could use the business so I added on a beef double special. They now accept Boost payments so have joined the e-wallet era. One less place to use cash, which is also why I really like Kuantan. On the drive back, Classic Pilot Cafe was also open and I guess I’ll be heading there too during this lockdown.

    Came back to the room to finish both burgers in probably under 15 minutes. While watching the first episode of Bridgerton on Netflix. I’m not sure what really captivates, but I will continue on (I still haven’t finished the first episode). I need to figure out how to use the 2 TVs that I have in this room — HDMI cable? Apple TV? Not normally using a TV, all this is clearly more complex than I care to admit.

    I soaked longer than expected, ended up a prune, but I’m sure it will give me good rest!

    One thought to leave with:

    “Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future.” — Earl Nightingale

    The post Life with Rona 2.0 – Days 1 & 2 first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

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    Sam Watkins — Developing CZ, a dialect of C that looks like Python

    In my experience, the C programming language is still hard to beat, even 50 years after it was first developed (and I feel the same way about UNIX). When it comes to general-purpose utility, low-level systems programming, performance, and portability (even to tiny embedded systems), I would choose C over most modern or fashionable alternatives. In some cases, it is almost the only choice.

    Many developers believe that it is difficult to write secure and reliable software in C, due to its free pointers, the lack of enforced memory integrity, and the lack of automatic memory management; however in my opinion it is possible to overcome these risks with discipline and a more secure system of libraries constructed on top of C and libc. Daniel J. Bernstein and Wietse Venema are two developers who have been able to write highly secure, stable, reliable software in C.

    My other favourite language is Python. Although Python has numerous desirable features, my favourite is the light-weight syntax: in Python, block structure is indicated by indentation, and braces and semicolons are not required. Apart from the pleasure and relief of reading and writing such light and clear code, which almost appears to be executable pseudo-code, there are many other benefits. In C or JavaScript, if you omit a trailing brace somewhere in the code, or insert an extra brace somewhere, the compiler may tell you that there is a syntax error at the end of the file. These errors can be annoying to track down, and cannot occur in Python. Python not only looks better, the clear syntax helps to avoid errors.

    The obvious disadvantage of Python, and other dynamic interpreted languages, is that most programs run extremely slower than C programs. This limits the scope and generality of Python. No AAA or performance-oriented video game engines are programmed in Python. The language is not suitable for low-level systems programming, such as operating system development, device drivers, filesystems, performance-critical networking servers, or real-time systems.

    C is a great all-purpose language, but the code is uglier than Python code. Once upon a time, when I was experimenting with the Plan 9 operating system (which is built on C, but lacks Python), I missed Python’s syntax, so I decided to do something about it and write a little preprocessor for C. This converts from a “Pythonesque” indented syntax to regular C with the braces and semicolons. Having forked a little dialect of my own, I continued from there adding other modules and features (which might have been a mistake, but it has been fun and rewarding).

    At first I called this translator Brace, because it added in the braces for me. I now call the language CZ. It sounds like “C-easy”. Ease-of-use for developers (DX) is the primary goal. CZ has all of the features of C, and translates cleanly into C, which is then compiled to machine code as normal (using any C compiler; I didn’t write one); and so CZ has the same features and performance as C, but enjoys a more pleasing syntax.

    CZ is now self-hosted, in that the translator is written in the language CZ. I confess that originally I wrote most of it in Perl; I’m proficient at Perl, but I consider it to be a fairly ugly language, and overly complicated.

    I intend for CZ’s new syntax to be “optional”, ideally a developer will be able to choose to use the normal C syntax when editing CZ, if they prefer it. For this, I need a tool to convert C back to CZ, which I have not fully implemented yet. I am aware that, in addition to traditionalists, some vision-impaired developers prefer to use braces and semicolons, as screen readers might not clearly indicate indentation. A C to CZ translator would of course also be valuable when porting an existing C program to CZ.

    CZ has a number of useful features that are not found in standard C, but I did not go so far as C++, which language has been described as “an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog”. I do not consider C to be a dog, at least not in a negative sense; but I think that C++ is not an improvement over plain C. I am creating CZ because I think that it is possible to improve on C, without losing any of its advantages or making it too complex.

    One of the most interesting features I added is a simple syntax for fast, light coroutines. I based this on Simon Tatham’s approach to Coroutines in C, which may seem hacky at first glance, but is very efficient and can work very well in practice. I implemented a very fast web server with very clean code using these coroutines. The cost of switching coroutines with this method is little more than the cost of a function call.

    CZ has hygienic macros. The regular cpp (C preprocessor) macros are not hygenic and many people consider them hacky and unsafe to use. My CZ macros are safe, and somewhat more powerful than standard C macros. They can be used to neatly add new program control structures. I have plans to further develop the macro system in interesting ways.

    I added automatic prototype and header generation, as I do not like having to repeat myself when copying prototypes to separate header files. I added support for the UNIX #! scripting syntax, and for cached executables, which means that CZ can be used like a scripting language without having to use a separate compile or make command, but the programs are only recompiled when something has been changed.

    For CZ, I invented a neat approach to portability without conditional compilation directives. Platform-specific library fragments are automatically included from directories having the name of that platform or platform-category. This can work very well in practice, and helps to avoid the nightmare of conditional compilation, feature detection, and Autotools. Using this method, I was able easily to implement portable interfaces to features such as asynchronous IO multiplexing (aka select / poll).

    The CZ library includes flexible error handling wrappers, inspired by W. Richard Stevens’ wrappers in his books on Unix Network Programming. If these wrappers are used, there is no need to check return values for error codes, and this makes the code much safer, as an error cannot accidentally be ignored.

    CZ has several major faults, which I intend to correct at some point. Some of the syntax is poorly thought out, and I need to revisit it. I developed a fairly rich library to go with the language, including safer data structures, IO, networking, graphics, and sound. There are many nice features, but my CZ library is more prototype than a finished product, there are major omissions, and some features are misconceived or poorly implemented. The misfeatures should be weeded out for the time-being, or moved to an experimental section of the library.

    I think that a good software library should come in two parts, the essential low-level APIs with the minimum necessary functionality, and a rich set of high-level convenience functions built on top of the minimal API. I need to clearly separate these two parts in order to avoid polluting the namespaces with all sorts of nonsense!

    CZ is lacking a good modern system of symbol namespaces. I can look to Python for a great example. I need to maintain compatibility with C, and avoid ugly symbol encodings. I think I can come up with something that will alleviate the need to type anything like gtk_window_set_default_size, and yet maintain compatibility with the library in question. I want all the power of C, but it should be easy to use, even for children. It should be as easy as BASIC or Processing, a child should be able to write short graphical demos and the like, without stumbling over tricky syntax or obscure compile errors.

    Here is an example of a simple CZ program which plots the Mandelbrot set fractal. I think that the program is fairly clear and easy to understand, although there is still some potential to improve and clarify the code.

    #!/usr/local/bin/cz --
use b
use ccomplex

Main:
	num outside = 16, ox = -0.5, oy = 0, r = 1.5
	long i, max_i = 50, rb_i = 30
	space()
	uint32_t *px = pixel()  # CONFIGURE!
	num d = 2*r/h, x0 = ox-d*w_2, y0 = oy+d*h_2
	for(y, 0, h):
		cmplx c = x0 + (y0-d*y)*I
		repeat(w):
			cmplx w = c
			for i=0; i < max_i && cabs(w) < outside; ++i
				w = w*w + c
			*px++ = i < max_i ? rainbow(i*359 / rb_i % 360) : black
			c += d

    I wrote a more elaborate variant of this program, which generates images like the one shown below. There are a few tricks used: continuous colouring, rainbow colours, and plotting the logarithm of the iteration count, which makes the plot appear less busy close to the black fractal proper. I sell some T-shirts and other products with these fractal designs online.

    An image from the Mandelbrot set, generated by a fairly simple CZ program.

    I am interested in graph programming, and have been for three decades since I was a teenager. By graph programming, I mean programming and modelling based on mathematical graphs or diagrams. I avoid the term visual programming, because there is no necessary reason that vision impaired folks could not use a graph programming language; a graph or diagram may be perceived, understood, and manipulated without having to see it.

    Mathematics is something that naturally exists, outside time and independent of our universe. We humans discover mathematics, we do not invent or create it. One of my main ideas for graph programming is to represent a mathematical (or software) model in the simplest and most natural way, using relational operators. Elementary mathematics can be reduced to just a few such operators:

    +add, subtract, disjoint union, zero
    ×multiply, divide, cartesian product, one
    ^power, root, logarithm
    ◢sin, cos, sin-1, cos-1, hypot, atan2
    δdifferential, integral
    a set of minimal relational operators for elementary math

    I think that a language and notation based on these few operators (and similar) can be considerably simpler and more expressive than conventional math or programming languages.

    CZ is for me a stepping-stone toward this goal of an expressive relational graph language. It is more pleasant for me to develop software tools in CZ than in C or another language.

    Thanks for reading. I wrote this article during the process of applying to join Toptal, which appears to be a freelancing portal for top developers; and in response to this article on toptal: After All These Years, the World is Still Powered by C Programming.

    My CZ project has been stalled for quite some time. I foolishly became discouraged after receiving some negative feedback. I now know that honest negative feedback should be valued as an opportunity to improve, and I intend to continue the project until it lacks glaring faults, and is useful for other people. If this project or this article interests you, please contact me and let me know. It is much more enjoyable to work on a project when other people are actively interested in it!

    Gary Pendergast — WordPress Importers: Free (as in Speech)

    Back at the start of this series, I listed four problems within the scope of the WordPress Importers that we needed to address. Three of them are largely technical problems, which I covered in previous posts. In wrapping up this series, I want to focus exclusively on the fourth problem, which has a philosophical side as well as a technical one — but that does not mean we cannot tackle it!

    Problem Number 4

    Some services work against their customers, and actively prevent site owners from controlling their own content.

    Some services are merely inconvenient: they provide exports, but it often involves downloading a bunch of different files. Your CMS content is in one export, your store products are in another, your orders are in another, and your mailing list is in yet another. It’s not ideal, but they at least let you get a copy of your data.

    However, there’s another class of services that actively work against their customers. It’s these services I want to focus on: the services that don’t provide any ability to export your content — effectively locking people in to using their platform. We could offer these folks an escape! The aim isn’t to necessarily make them use WordPress, it’s to give them a way out, if they want it. Whether they choose to use WordPress or not after that is immaterial (though I certainly hope they would, of course). The important part is freedom of choice.

    It’s worth acknowledging that this is a different approach to how WordPress has historically operated in relation to other CMSes. We provide importers for many CMSes, but we previously haven’t written exporters. However, I don’t think this is a particularly large step: for CMSes that already provide exports, we’d continue to use those export files. This is focussed on the few services that try to lock their customers in.

    Why Should WordPress Take This On?

    There are several aspects to why we should focus on this.

    First of all, it’s the the WordPress mission. Underpinning every part of WordPress is the simplest of statements:

    Democratise Publishing

    The freedom to build. The freedom to change. The freedom to share.

    These freedoms are the pillars of a Free and Open Web, but they’re not invulnerable: at times, they need to be defended, and that needs people with the time and resources to offer a defence.

    Which brings me to my second point: WordPress has the people who can offer that defence! The WordPress project has so many individuals working on it, from such a wide variety of backgrounds, we’re able to take on a vast array of projects that a smaller CMS just wouldn’t have the bandwidth for. That’s not to say that we can do everything, but when there’s a need to defend the entire ecosystem, we’re able to devote people to the cause.

    Finally, it’s important to remember that WordPress doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we’re part of a broad ecosystem which can only exist through the web remaining open and free. By encouraging all CMSes to provide proper exports, and implementing them for those that don’t, we help keep our ecosystem healthy.

    We have the ability to take on these challenges, but we have a responsibility that goes alongside. We can’t do it solely to benefit WordPress, we need to make that benefit available to the entire ecosystem. This is why it’s important to define a WordPress export schema, so that any CMS can make use of the export we produce, not just WordPress. If you’ll excuse the imagery for a moment, we can be the knight in shining armour that frees people — then gives them the choice of what they do with that freedom, without obligation.

    How Can We Do It?

    Moving on to the technical side of this problem, I can give you some good news: the answer is definitely not screen scraping. 😄 Scraping a site is fragile, impossible to transform into the full content, and provides an incomplete export of the site: anything that’s only available in the site dashboard can’t be obtained through scraping.

    I’ve recently been experimenting with an alternative approach to solving this problem. Rather than trying to create something resembling a traditional exporter, it turns out that modern CMSes provide the tools we need, in the form of REST APIs. All we need to do is call the appropriate APIs, and collate the results. The fun part is that we can authenticate with these APIs as the site owner, by calling them from a browser extension! So, that’s what I’ve been experimenting with, and it’s showing a lot of promise.

    If you’re interested in playing around with it, the experimental code is living in this repository. It’s a simple proof of concept, capable of exporting the text content of a blog on a Wix site, showing that we can make a smooth, comprehensive, easy-to-use exporter for any Wix site owner.

    Screenshot of the "Free (as in Speech)" browser extension UI.

    Clicking the export button starts a background script, which calls Wix’s REST APIs as the site owner, to get the original copy of the content. It then packages it up, and presents it as a WXR file to download.

    Screenshot of a Firefox download dialog, showing a Wix site packaged up as a WXR file.

    I’m really excited about how promising this experiment is. It can ultimately provide a full export of any Wix site, and we can add support for other CMS services that choose to artificially lock their customers in.

    Where Can I Help?

    If you’re a designer or developer who’s excited about working on something new, head on over to the repository and check out the open issues: if there’s something that isn’t already covered, feel free to open a new issue.

    Since this is new ground for a WordPress project, both technically and philosophically, I’d love to hear more points of view. It’s being discussed in the WordPress Core Dev Chat this week, and you can also let me know what you think in the comments!

    This post is part of a series, talking about the WordPress Importers, their history, where they are now, and where they could go in the future.

    ,

    Gary Pendergast — WordPress Importers: Defining a Schema

    While schemata are usually implemented using language-specific tools (eg, XML uses XML Schema, JSON uses JSON Schema), they largely use the same concepts when talking about data. This is rather helpful, we don’t need to make a decision on data formats before we can start thinking about how the data should be arranged.

    Note: Since these concepts apply equally to all data formats, I’m using “WXR” in this post as shorthand for “the structured data section of whichever file format we ultimately use”, rather than specifically referring to the existing WXR format. 🙂

    Why is a Schema Important?

    It’s fair to ask why, if the WordPress Importers have survived this entire time without a formal schema, why would we need one now?

    There are two major reasons why we haven’t needed one in the past:

    • WXR has remained largely unchanged in the last 10 years: there have been small additions or tweaks, but nothing significant. There’s been no need to keep track of changes.
    • WXR is currently very simple, with just a handful of basic elements. In a recent experiment, I was able to implement a JavaScript-based WXR generator in just a few days, entirely by referencing the Core implementation.

    These reasons are also why it would help to implement a schema for the future:

    • As work on WXR proceeds, there will likely need to be substantial changes to what data is included: adding new fields, modifying existing fields, and removing redundant fields. Tracking these changes helps ensure any WXR implementations can stay in sync.
    • These changes will result in a more complex schema: relying on the source to re-implement it will become increasingly difficult and error-prone. Following Gutenberg’s lead, it’s likely that we’d want to provide official libraries in both PHP and JavaScript: keeping them in sync is best done from a source schema, rather than having one implementation copy the other.

    Taking the time to plan out a schema now gives us a solid base to work from, and it allows for future changes to happen in a reliable fashion.

    WXR for all of WordPress

    With a well defined schema, we can start to expand what data will be included in a WXR file.

    Media

    Interestingly, many of the challenges around media files are less to do with WXR, and more to do with importer capabilities. The biggest headache is retrieving the actual files, which the importer currently handles by trying to retrieve the file from the remote server, as defined in the wp:attachment_url node. In context, this behaviour is understandable: 10+ years ago, personal internet connections were too slow to be moving media around, it was better to have the servers talk to each other. It’s a useful mechanism that we should keep as a fallback, but the more reliable solution is to include the media file with the export.

    Plugins and Themes

    There are two parts to plugins and themes: the code, and the content. Modern WordPress sites require plugins to function, and most are customised to suit their particular theme.

    For exporting the code, I wonder if a tiered solution could be applied:

    • Anything from WordPress.org would just need their slug, since they can be re-downloaded during import. Particularly as WordPress continues to move towards an auto-updated future, modified versions of plugins and themes are explicitly not supported.
    • Third party plugins and themes would be given a filter to use, where they can provide a download URL that can be included in the export file.
    • Third party plugins/themes that don’t provide a download URL would either need to be skipped, or zipped up and included in the export file.

    For exporting the content, WXR already includes custom post types, but doesn’t include custom settings, or custom tables. The former should be included automatically, and the latter would likely be handled by an appropriate action for the plugin to hook into.

    Settings

    There are a currently handful of special settings that are exported, but (as I just noted, particularly with plugins and themes being exported) this would likely need to be expanded to included most items in wp_options.

    Users

    Currently, the bare minimum information about users who’ve authored a post is included in the export. This would need to be expanded to include more user information, as well as users who aren’t post authors.

    WXR for parts of WordPress

    The modern use case for importers isn’t just to handle a full site, but to handle keeping sites in sync. For example, most news organisations will have a staging site (or even several layers of staging!) which is synchronised to production.

    While it’s well outside the scope of this project to directly handle every one of these use cases, we should be able to provide the framework for organisations to build reliable platforms on. Exports should be repeatable, objects in the export should have unique identifiers, and the importer should be able to handle any subset of WXR.

    WXR Beyond WordPress

    Up until this point, we’ve really been talking about WordPress→WordPress migrations, but I think WXR is a useful format beyond that. Instead of just containing direct exports of the data from particular plugins, we could also allow it to contain “types” of data. This turns WXR into an intermediary language, exports can be created from any source, and imported into WordPress.

    Let’s consider an example. Say we create a tool that can export a Shopify, Wix, or GoDaddy site to WXR, how would we represent an online store in the WXR file? We don’t want to export in the format that any particular plugin would use, since a WordPress Core tool shouldn’t be advantaging one plugin over others.

    Instead, it would be better if we could format the data in a platform-agnostic way, which plugins could then implement support for. As luck would have it, Schema.org provides exactly the kind of data structure we could use here. It’s been actively maintained for nearly nine years, it supports a wide variety of data types, and is intentionally platform-agnostic.

    Gazing into my crystal ball for a moment, I can certainly imagine a future where plugins could implement and declare support for importing certain data types. When handling such an import (assuming one of those plugins wasn’t already installed), the WordPress Importer could offer them as options during the import process. This kind of seamless integration allows WordPress to show that it offers the same kind of fully-featured site building experience that modern CMS services do.

    Of course, reality is never quite as simple as crystal balls and magic wands make them out to be. We have to contend with services that provide incomplete or fragmented exports, and there are even services that deliberately don’t provide exports at all. In the next post, I’ll be writing about why we should address this problem, and how we might be able to go about it.

    This post is part of a series, talking about the WordPress Importers, their history, where they are now, and where they could go in the future.

    ,

    Gary Pendergast — WordPress Importers: Getting Our House in Order

    The previous post talked about the broad problems we need to tackle to bring our importers up to speed, making them available for everyone to use.

    In this post, I’m going to focus on what we could do with the existing technology, in order to give us the best possible framework going forward.

    A Reliable Base

    Importers are an interesting technical problem. Much like you’d expect from any backup/restore code, importers need to be extremely reliable. They need to comfortable handle all sorts of unusual data, and they need to keep it all safe. Particularly considering their age, the WordPress Importers do a remarkably good job of handling most content you can throw at it.

    However, modern development practices have evolved and improved since the importers were first written, and we should certainly be making use of such practices, when they fit with our requirements.

    For building reliable software that we expect to largely run by itself, a variety of comprehensive automated testing is critical. This ensures we can confidently take on the broader issues, safe in the knowledge that we have a reliable base to work from.

    Testing must be the first item on this list. A variety of automated testing gives us confidence that changes are safe, and that the code can continue to be maintained in the future.

    Data formats must be well defined. While this is useful for ensuring data can be handled in a predictable fashion, it’s also a very clear demonstration of our commitment to data freedom.

    APIs for creating or extending importers should be straightforward for hooking into.

    Performance Isn’t an Optional Extra

    With sites constantly growing in size (and with the export files potentially gaining a heap of extra data), we need to care about the performance of the importers.

    Luckily, there’s already been some substantial work done on this front:

    WordPress Importer Redux

    There are other groups in the WordPress world who’ve made performance improvements in their own tools: gathering all of that experience is a relatively quick way to bring in production-tested improvements.

    The WXR Format

    It’s worth talking about the WXR format itself, and determining whether it’s the best option for handling exports into the future. XML-based formats are largely viewed as a relic of days gone past, so (if we were to completely ignore backwards compatibility for a moment) is there a modern data format that would work better?

    The short answer… kind of. 🙂

    XML is actually well suited to this use case, and (particularly when looking at performance improvements) is the only data format for which PHP comes with a built-in streaming parser.

    That said, WXR is basically an extension of the RSS format: as we add more data to the file that clearly doesn’t belong in RSS, there is likely an argument for defining an entirely WordPress-focused schema.

    Alternative Formats

    It’s important to consider what the priorities are for our export format, which will help guide any decision we make. So, I’d like to suggest the following priorities (in approximate priority order):

    • PHP Support: The format should be natively supported in PHP, thought it is still workable if we need to ship an additional library.
    • Performant: Particularly when looking at very large exports, it should be processed as quickly as possible, using minimal RAM.
    • Supports Binary Files: The first comments on my previous post asked about media support, we clearly should be treating it as a first-class citizen.
    • Standards Based: Is the format based on a documented standard? (Another way to ask this: are there multiple different implementations of the format? Do those implementations all function the same?
    • Backward Compatible: Can the format be used by existing tools with no changes, or minimal changes?
    • Self Descriptive: Does the format include information about what data you’re currently looking at, or do you need to refer to a schema?
    • Human Readable: Can the file be opened and read in a text editor?

    Given these priorities, what are some options?

    WXR (XML-based)

    Either the RSS-based schema that we already use, or a custom-defined XML schema, the arguments for this format are pretty well known.

    One argument that hasn’t been well covered is how there’s a definite trade-off when it comes to supporting binary files. Currently, the importer tries to scrape the media file from the original source, which is not particularly reliable. So, if we were to look at including media files in the WXR file, the best option for storing them is to base64 encode them. Unfortunately, that would have a serious effect on performance, as well as readability: adding huge base64 strings would make even the smallest exports impossible to read.

    Either way, this option would be mostly backwards compatible, though some tools may require a bit of reworking if we were to substantial change the schema.

    WXR (ZIP-based)

    To address the issues with media files, an alternative option might be to follow the path that Microsoft Word and OpenOffice use: put the text content in an XML file, put the binary content into folders, and compress the whole thing.

    This addresses the performance and binary support problems, but is initially worse for readability: if you don’t know that it’s a ZIP file, you can’t read it in a text editor. Once you unzip it, however, it does become quite readable, and has the same level of backwards compatibility as the XML-based format.

    JSON

    JSON could work as a replacement for XML in both of the above formats, with one additional caveat: there is no streaming JSON parser built in to PHP. There are 3rd party libraries available, but given the documented differences between JSON parsers, I would be wary about using one library to produce the JSON, and another to parse it.

    This format largely wouldn’t be backwards compatible, though tools which rely on the export file being plain text (eg, command line tools to do broad search-and-replaces on the file) can be modified relatively easily.

    There are additional subjective arguments (both for and against) the readability of JSON vs XML, but I’m not sure there’s anything to them beyond personal preference.

    SQLite

    The SQLite team wrote an interesting (indirect) argument on this topic: OpenOffice uses a ZIP-based format for storing documents, the SQLite team argued that there would be benefits (particularly around performance and reliability) for OpenOffice to switch to SQLite.

    They key issues that I see are:

    • SQLite is included in PHP, but not enabled by default on Windows.
    • While the SQLite team have a strong commitment to providing long-term support, SQLite is not a standard, and the only implementation is the one provided by the SQLite team.
    • This option is not backwards compatible at all.

    FlatBuffers

    FlatBuffers is an interesting comparison, since it’s a data format focussed entirely on speed. The down side of this focus is that it requires a defined schema to read the data. Much like SQLite, the only standard for FlatBuffers is the implementation. Unlike SQLite, FlatBuffers has made no commitments to providing long-term support.

    WXR (XML-based)WXR (ZIP-based)JSONSQLiteFlatBuffers
    Works in PHP?✅✅⚠⚠⚠
    Performant?⚠✅⚠✅✅
    Supports Binary Files?⚠✅⚠✅✅
    Standards Based?✅✅✅⚠ / ��
    Backwards Compatible?⚠⚠���
    Self Descriptive?✅✅✅✅�
    Readable?✅⚠ / �✅��

    As with any decision, this is a matter of trade-offs. I’m certainly interested in hearing additional perspectives on these options, or thoughts on options that I haven’t considered.

    Regardless of which particular format we choose for storing WordPress exports, every format should have (or in the case of FlatBuffers, requires) a schema. We can talk about schemata without going into implementation details, so I’ll be writing about that in the next post.

    This post is part of a series, talking about the WordPress Importers, their history, where they are now, and where they could go in the future.

    Gary Pendergast — WordPress Importers: Stating the Problem

    It’s time to focus on the WordPress Importers.

    I’m not talking about tidying them up, or improve performance, or fixing some bugs, though these are certainly things that should happen. Instead, we need to consider their purpose, how they fit as a driver of WordPress’ commitment to Open Source, and how they can be a key element in helping to keep the Internet Open and Free.

    The History

    The WordPress Importers are arguably the key driver to WordPress’ early success. Before the importer plugins existed (before WordPress even supported plugins!) there were a handful of import-*.php scripts in the wp-admin directory that could be used to import blogs from other blogging platforms. When other platforms fell out of favour, WordPress already had an importer ready for people to move their site over. One of the most notable instances was in 2004, when Moveable Type changed their license and prices, suddenly requiring personal blog authors to pay for something that had previously been free. WordPress was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time: many of WordPress’ earliest users came from Moveable Type.

    As time went on, WordPress became well known in its own right. Growth relied less on people wanting to switch from another provider, and more on people choosing to start their site with WordPress. For practical reasons, the importers were moved out of WordPress Core, and into their own plugins. Since then, they’ve largely been in maintenance mode: bugs are fixed when they come up, but since export formats rarely change, they’ve just continued to work for all these years.

    An unfortunate side effect of this, however, is that new importers are rarely written. While a new breed of services have sprung up over the years, the WordPress importers haven’t kept up.

    The New Services

    There are many new CMS services that have cropped up in recent years, and we don’t have importers for any of them. WordPress.com has a few extra ones written, but they’ve been built on the WordPress.com infrastructure out of necessity.

    You see, we’ve always assumed that other CMSes will provide some sort of export file that we can use to import into WordPress. That isn’t always the case, however. Some services (notable, Wix and GoDaddy Website Builder) deliberately don’t allow you to export your own content. Other services provide incomplete or fragmented exports, needlessly forcing stress upon site owners who want to use their own content outside of that service.

    To work around this, WordPress.com has implemented importers that effectively scrape the site: while this has worked to some degree, it does require regular maintenance, and the importer has to do a lot of guessing about how the content should be transformed. This is clearly not a solution that would be maintainable as a plugin.

    Problem Number 4

    Some services work against their customers, and actively prevent site owners from controlling their own content.

    This strikes at the heart of the WordPress Bill of Rights. WordPress is built with fundamental freedoms in mind: all of those freedoms point to owning your content, and being able to make use of it in any form you like. When a CMS actively works against providing such freedom to their community, I would argue that we have an obligation to help that community out.

    A Variety of Content

    It’s worth discussing how, when starting a modern CMS service, the bar for success is very high. You can’t get away with just providing a basic CMS: you need to provide all the options. Blogs, eCommerce, mailing lists, forums, themes, polls, statistics, contact forms, integrations, embeds, the list goes on. The closest comparison to modern CMS services is… the entire WordPress ecosystem: built on WordPress core, but with the myriad of plugins and themes available, along with the variety of services offered by a huge array of companies.

    So, when we talk about the importers, we need to consider how they’ll be used.

    Problem Number 3

    To import from a modern CMS service into WordPress, your importer needs to map from service features to WordPress plugins.

    Getting Our Own House In Order

    Some of these problems don’t just apply to new services, however.

    Out of the box, WordPress exports to WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) files: an XML file that contains the content of the site. Back when WXR was first created, this was all you really needed, but much like the rest of the WordPress importers, it hasn’t kept up with the times. A modern WordPress site isn’t just the sum of its content: a WordPress site has plugins and themes. It has various options configured, it has huge quantities of media, it has masses of text content, far more than the first WordPress sites ever had.

    Problem Number 2

    WXR doesn’t contain a full export of a WordPress site.

    In my view, WXR is a solid format for handling exports. An XML-based system is quite capable of containing all forms of content, so it’s reasonable that we could expand the WXR format to contain the entire site.

    Built for the Future

    If there’s one thing we can learn from the history of the WordPress importers, it’s that maintenance will potentially be sporadic. Importers are unlikely to receive the same attention that the broader WordPress Core project does, owners may come and go. An importer will get attention if it breaks, of course, but it otherwise may go months or years without changing.

    Problem Number 1

    We can’t depend on regular importer maintenance in the future.

    It’s quite possible to build code that will be running in 10+ years: we see examples all across the WordPress ecosystem. Doing it in a reliable fashion needs to be a deliberate choice, however.

    What’s Next?

    Having worked our way down from the larger philosophical reasons for the importers, to some of the more technically-oriented implementation problems; I’d like to work our way back out again, focussing on each problem individually. In the following posts, I’ll start laying out how I think we can bring our importers up to speed, prepare them for the future, and make them available for everyone.

    This post is part of a series, talking about the WordPress Importers, their history, where they are now, and where they could go in the future.

    ,

    Dave Hall — Privacy Policy

    Skwashd Services Pty is committed to providing quality services to you and this policy outlines our ongoing obligations to you in respect of how we manage your Personal Information. We have adopted the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (the Privacy Act). The NPPs govern the way in which we collect, use, disclose, store, secure and dispose of your Personal Information. A copy of the Australian Privacy Principles may be obtained from the website of The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at www.

    ,

    Jan Schmidt — Rift CV1 – Adventures in Kalman filtering Part 2

    In the last post I had started implementing an Unscented Kalman Filter for position and orientation tracking in OpenHMD. Over the Christmas break, I continued that work.

    A Quick Recap

    When reading below, keep in mind that the goal of the filtering code I’m writing is to combine 2 sources of information for tracking the headset and controllers.

    The first piece of information is acceleration and rotation data from the IMU on each device, and the second is observations of the device position and orientation from 1 or more camera sensors.

    The IMU motion data drifts quickly (at least for position tracking) and can’t tell which way the device is facing (yaw, but can detect gravity and get pitch/roll).

    The camera observations can tell exactly where each device is, but arrive at a much lower rate (52Hz vs 500/1000Hz) and can take a long time to process (hundreds of milliseconds) to analyse to acquire or re-acquire a lock on the tracked device(s).

    The goal is to acquire tracking lock, then use the motion data to predict the motion closely enough that we always hit the ‘fast path’ of vision analysis. The key here is closely enough – the more closely the filter can track and predict the motion of devices between camera frames, the better.

    Integration in OpenHMD

    When I wrote the last post, I had the filter running as a standalone application, processing motion trace data collected by instrumenting a running OpenHMD app and moving my headset and controllers around. That’s a really good way to work, because it lets me run modifications on the same data set and see what changed.

    However, the motion traces were captured using the current fusion/prediction code, which frequently loses tracking lock when the devices move – leading to big gaps in the camera observations and more interpolation for the filter.

    By integrating the Kalman filter into OpenHMD, the predictions are improved leading to generally much better results. Here’s one trace of me moving the headset around reasonably vigourously with no tracking loss at all.

    Headset motion capture trace

    If it worked this well all the time, I’d be ecstatic! The predicted position matched the observed position closely enough for every frame for the computer vision to match poses and track perfectly. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen every time yet, and definitely not with the controllers – although I think the latter largely comes down to the current computer vision having more troubler matching controller poses. They have fewer LEDs to match against compared to the headset, and the LEDs are generally more side-on to a front-facing camera.

    Taking a closer look at a portion of that trace, the drift between camera frames when the position is interpolated using the IMU readings is clear.

    Headset motion capture – zoomed in view

    This is really good. Most of the time, the drift between frames is within 1-2mm. The computer vision can only match the pose of the devices to within a pixel or two – so the observed jitter can also come from the pose extraction, not the filtering.

    The worst tracking is again on the Z axis – distance from the camera in this case. Again, that makes sense – with a single camera matching LED blobs, distance is the most uncertain part of the extracted pose.

    Losing Track

    The trace above is good – the computer vision spots the headset and then the filtering + computer vision track it at all times. That isn’t always the case – the prediction goes wrong, or the computer vision fails to match (it’s definitely still far from perfect). When that happens, it needs to do a full pose search to reacquire the device, and there’s a big gap until the next pose report is available.

    That looks more like this

    Headset motion capture trace with tracking errors

    This trace has 2 kinds of errors – gaps in the observed position timeline during full pose searches and erroneous position reports where the computer vision matched things incorrectly.

    Fixing the errors in position reports will require improving the computer vision algorithm and would fix most of the plot above. Outlier rejection is one approach to investigate on that front.

    Latency Compensation

    There is inherent delay involved in processing of the camera observations. Every 19.2ms, the headset emits a radio signal that triggers each camera to capture a frame. At the same time, the headset and controller IR LEDS light up brightly to create the light constellation being tracked. After the frame is captured, it is delivered over USB over the next 18ms or so and then submitted for vision analysis. In the fast case where we’re already tracking the device the computer vision is complete in a millisecond or so. In the slow case, it’s much longer.

    Overall, that means that there’s at least a 20ms offset between when the devices are observed and when the position information is available for use. In the plot above, this delay is ignored and position reports are fed into the filter when they are available. In the worst case, that means the filter is being told where the headset was hundreds of milliseconds earlier.

    To compensate for that delay, I implemented a mechanism in the filter where it keeps extra position and orientation entries in the state that can be used to retroactively apply the position observations.

    The way that works is to make a prediction of the position and orientation of the device at the moment the camera frame is captured and copy that prediction into the extra state variable. After that, it continues integrating IMU data as it becomes available while keeping the auxilliary state constant.

    When a the camera frame analysis is complete, that delayed measurement is matched against the stored position and orientation prediction in the state and the error used to correct the overall filter. The cool thing is that in the intervening time, the filter covariance matrix has been building up the right correction terms to adjust the current position and orientation.

    Here’s a good example of the difference:

    Before: Position filtering with no latency compensation
    After: Latency-compensated position reports

    Notice how most of the disconnected segments have now slotted back into position in the timeline. The ones that haven’t can either be attributed to incorrect pose extraction in the compute vision, or to not having enough auxilliary state slots for all the concurrent frames.

    At any given moment, there can be a camera frame being analysed, one arriving over USB, and one awaiting “long term” analysis. The filter needs to track an auxilliary state variable for each frame that we expect to get pose information from later, so I implemented a slot allocation system and multiple slots.

    The downside is that each slot adds 6 variables (3 position and 3 orientation) to the covariance matrix on top of the 18 base variables. Because the covariance matrix is square, the size grows quadratically with new variables. 5 new slots means 30 new variables – leading to a 48 x 48 covariance matrix instead of 18 x 18. That is a 7-fold increase in the size of the matrix (48 x 48 = 2304 vs 18 x 18 = 324) and unfortunately about a 10x slow-down in the filter run-time.

    At that point, even after some optimisation and vectorisation on the matrix operations, the filter can only run about 3x real-time, which is too slow. Using fewer slots is quicker, but allows for fewer outstanding frames. With 3 slots, the slow-down is only about 2x.

    There are some other possible approaches to this problem:

    • Running the filtering delayed, only integrating IMU reports once the camera report is available. This has the disadvantage of not reporting the most up-to-date estimate of the user pose, which isn’t great for an interactive VR system.
    • Keeping around IMU reports and rewinding / replaying the filter for late camera observations. This limits the overall increase in filter CPU usage to double (since we at most replay every observation twice), but potentially with large bursts when hundreds of IMU readings need replaying.
    • It might be possible to only keep 2 “full” delayed measurement slots with both position and orientation, and to keep some position-only slots for others. The orientation of the headset tends to drift much more slowly than position does, so when there’s a big gap in the tracking it would be more important to be able to correct the position estimate. Orientation is likely to still be close to correct.
    • Further optimisation in the filter implementation. I was hoping to keep everything dependency-free, so the filter implementation uses my own naive 2D matrix code, which only implements the features needed for the filter. A more sophisticated matrix library might perform better – but it’s hard to say without doing some testing on that front.

    Controllers

    So far in this post, I’ve only talked about the headset tracking and not mentioned controllers. The controllers are considerably harder to track right now, but most of the blame for that is in the computer vision part. Each controller has fewer LEDs than the headset, fewer are visible at any given moment, and they often aren’t pointing at the camera front-on.

    Oculus Camera view of headset and left controller.

    This screenshot is a prime example. The controller is the cluster of lights at the top of the image, and the headset is lower left. The computer vision has gotten confused and thinks the controller is the ring of random blue crosses near the headset. It corrected itself a moment later, but those false readings make life very hard for the filtering.

    Position tracking of left controller with lots of tracking loss.

    Here’s a typical example of the controller tracking right now. There are some very promising portions of good tracking, but they are interspersed with bursts of tracking losses, and wild drifting from the computer vision giving wrong poses – leading to the filter predicting incorrect acceleration and hence cascaded tracking losses. Particularly (again) on the Z axis.

    Timing Improvements

    One of the problems I was looking at in my last post is variability in the arrival timing of the various USB streams (Headset reports, Controller reports, camera frames). I improved things in OpenHMD on that front, to use timestamps from the devices everywhere (removing USB timing jitter from the inter-sample time).

    There are still potential problems in when IMU reports from controllers get updated in the filters vs the camera frames. That can be on the order of 2-4ms jitter. Time will tell how big a problem that will be – after the other bigger tracking problems are resolved.

    Sponsorships

    All the work that I’m doing implementing this positional tracking is a combination of my free time, hours contributed by my employer Centricular and contributions from people via Github Sponsorships. If you’d like to help me spend more hours on this and fewer on other paying work, I appreciate any contributions immensely!

    Next Steps

    The next things on my todo list are:

    • Integrate the delayed-observation processing into OpenHMD (at the moment it is only in my standalone simulator).
    • Improve the filter code structure – this is my first kalman filter and there are some implementation decisions I’d like to revisit.
    • Publish the UKF branch for other people to try.
    • Circle back to the computer vision and look at ways to improve the pose extraction and better reject outlying / erroneous poses, especially for the controllers.
    • Think more about how to best handle / schedule analysis of frames from multiple cameras. At the moment each camera operates as a separate entity, capturing frames and analysing them in threads without considering what is happening in other cameras. That means any camera that can’t see a particular device starts doing full pose searches – which might be unnecessary if another camera still has a good view of the device. Coordinating those analyses across cameras could yield better CPU consumption, and let the filter retain fewer delayed observation slots.

    ,

    Tim Serong — Scope Creep

    On December 22, I decided to brew an oatmeal stout (5kg Gladfield ale malt, 250g dark chocolate malt, 250g light chocolate malt, 250g dark crystal malt, 500g rolled oats, 150g rice hulls to stop the mash sticking, 25g Pride of Ringwood hops, Safale US-05 yeast). This all takes a good few hours to do the mash and the boil and everything, so while that was underway I thought it’d be a good opportunity to remove a crappy old cupboard from the laundry, so I could put our nice Miele upright freezer in there, where it’d be closer to the kitchen (the freezer is presently in a room at the other end of the house).

    The cupboard was reasonably easy to rip out, but behind it was a mouldy and unexpectedly bright yellow wall with an ugly gap at the top where whoever installed it had removed the existing cornice.

    Underneath the bottom half of the cupboard, I discovered not the cork tiles which cover the rest of the floor, but a layer of horrific faux-tile linoleum. Plus, more mould. No way was I going to put the freezer on top of that.

    So, up came the floor covering, back to nice hardwood boards.

    Of course, the sink had to come out too, to remove the flooring from under its cabinet, and that meant pulling the splashback tiles (they had ugly screw holes in them anyway from a shelf that had been bracketed up on top of them previously).

    Removing the tiles meant replacing a couple of sections of wall.

    Also, we still needed to be able to use the washing machine through all this, so I knocked up a temporary sink support.

    New cornice went in.

    The rest of the plastering was completed and a ceiling fan installed.

    Waterproofing membrane was applied where new tiles will go around a new sink.

    I removed the hideous old aluminium backed weather stripping from around the exterior door and plastered up the exposed groove.

    We still need to paint everything, get the new sink installed, do the tiling work and install new taps.

    As for the oatmeal stout, I bottled that on January 2. From a sample taken at the time, it should be excellent, but right now still needs to carbonate and mature.

    Stewart Smith — Photos from Taiwan

    A few years ago we went to Taiwan. I managed to capture some random bits of the city on film (and also some shots on my then phone, a Google Pixel). I find the different style of art on the streets around the world to be fascinating, and Taiwan had some good examples.

    I’ve really enjoyed shooting Kodak E100VS film over the years, and some of my last rolls were shot in Taiwan. It’s a film that unfortunately is not made anymore, but at least we have a new Ektachrome to have fun with now.

    Street Art in Taipei. Shot on Kodak E100VS 35mm film.

    Painted staircase in Taipei. Shot on Kodak E100VS 35mm film
    Taipei Street Art. Shot with a Google Pixel.
    Words for our time: “Where there is democracy, equality and freedom can exist; without democracy, equality and freedom are merely empty words”.

    This is, of course, only a small number of the total photos I took there. I’d really recommend a trip to Taiwan, and I look forward to going back there some day.

    ,

    Colin Charles — Ciao, 2020

    Another year comes to a close, and this is the 4th year running I’m in Kuala Lumpur — 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020… Wow. Maybe the biggest difference is that I’ve been in Malaysia for 306 days, thanks to the novel coronavirus. I have never spent this much time in Malaysia, in my entire life… I want to say KL, but I’ve managed to zip my way around to Kuantan (a lot), Penang, and Malacca. I can’t believe I flew back on February 29 2020 from Tokyo, and never got on a plane again! What a grounded globalist I’ve become.

    My travel stats are of course, pretty dismal. 39 days out of the country. Apparently I did a total of 13 trips, 92 days of travel (I don’t know if all my local trips are counted frankly), 60,766km, 17 cities, and still 7 countries :) I don’t even want to compare to what it was like in 2019.

    I ended that by saying, “I welcome 2020 with arms wide open.”. I’m not so sure how I feel about 2020. There is life beyond travel. COVID and our reaction to it, really worries me.

    KL has some pretty good food. Kuantan has some pretty good people. While in KL, I visited a spin studio at least once per day. I did a total of 272 spin classes over 366 days! Not to forget there was 56 days of complete lockdown, and studios didn’t open till about maybe mid-June… Sure I did do some spin in London and Paris too, but the bulk of all this happened while I was here in KL.

    I became reasonably friendlier, I became vulnerable, and like every time you do that, you’re chances of happiness and getting hurt probably straddle 50:50. Madonna – The Power of Good-bye can be apt.

    This is not to say I didn’t enjoy 2020. Glass half full. I really did. Carpe diem. Simplicity is best. If you can follow KISS principles in engineering, why would you pour your entire thought process out and overwhelm the other party?

    Anyway, I still look forward to 2021, with wide open arms, and while I really do think the COVID mess isn’t going away and things are going to be worse for many, I will still be focused on the most positive aspects of 2021. And I’ll work on being my old self again ;-)

    I also ended the year with a haircut (number 1/0.5 on the sides) on Monday 28 December 2020. Somewhat of an experiment (does CoQ10 help speed up hair growth?) but also somewhat of a reaction to saying goodbye to December 2020.

    The post Ciao, 2020 first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

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    Tim Serong — I Have No Idea How To Debug This

    On my desktop system, I’m running XFCE on openSUSE Tumbleweed. When I leave my desk, I hit the “lock screen” button, the screen goes black, and the monitors go into standby. So far so good. When I come back and mash the keyboard, everything lights up again, the screens go white, and it says:

    blank: Shows nothing but a black screen
    Name: tserong@HOSTNAME
    Password:
    Enter password to unlock; select icon to lock

    So I type my password, hit ENTER, and I’m back in action. So far so good again. Except… Several times recently, when I’ve come back and mashed the keyboard, the white overlay is gone. I can see all my open windows, my mail client, web browser, terminals, everything, but the screen is still locked. If I type my password and hit ENTER, it unlocks and I can interact again, but this is where it gets really weird. All the windows have moved down a bit on the screen. For example, a terminal that was previously neatly positioned towards the bottom of the screen is now partially off the screen. So “something” crashed – whatever overlay the lock thingy put there is gone? And somehow this affected the position of all my application windows? What in the name of all that is good and holy is going on here?

    Update 2020-12-21: I’ve opened boo#1180241 to track this.

    ,

    Stewart Smith — Two Photos from Healseville Sanctuary

    If you’re near Melbourne, you should go to Healseville Sanctuary and enjoy the Australian native animals. I’ve been a number of times over the years, and here’s a couple of photos from a (relatively, as in, the last couple of years) trip.

    Leah trying to photograph a much too close bird
    Koalas seem to always look like they’ve just woken up. I’m pretty convinced this one just had.

    Stewart Smith — Photos from Adelaide

    Some shots on Kodak Portra 400 from Adelaide. These would have been shot with my Nikon F80 35mm body, I think all with the 50mm lens. These are all pre-pandemic, and I haven’t gone and looked up when exactly. I’m just catching up on scanning some negatives.

    ,

    Hamish Taylor — Wattlebird feeding

    While I hope to update this site again soon, here’s a photo I captured over the weekend in my back yard. The red flowering plant is attracting wattlebirds and honey-eaters. This wattlebird stayed still long enough for me to take this shot. After a little bit of editing, I think it has turned out rather well.

    Photo taken with: Canon 7D Mark II & Canon 55-250mm lens.

    Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop (to remove a sun glare spot off the eye).

    Wattlebird feeding

    Gary Pendergast — More than 280 characters

    It’s hard to be nuanced in 280 characters.

    The Twitter character limit is a major factor of what can make it so much fun to use: you can read, publish, and interact, in extremely short, digestible chunks. But, it doesn’t fit every topic, ever time. Sometimes you want to talk about complex topics, having honest, thoughtful discussions. In an environment that encourages hot takes, however, it’s often easier to just avoid having those discussions. I can’t blame people for doing that, either: I find myself taking extended breaks from Twitter, as it can easily become overwhelming.

    For me, the exception is Twitter threads.

    Twitter threads encourage nuance and creativity.

    Creative masterpieces like this Choose Your Own Adventure are not just possible, they rely on Twitter threads being the way they are.

    Publishing a short essay about your experiences in your job can bring attention to inequality.

    And Tumblr screenshot threads are always fun to read, even when they take a turn for the epic (over 4000 tweets in this thread, and it isn’t slowing down!)

    Everyone can think of threads that they’ve loved reading.

    My point is, threads are wildly underused on Twitter. I think I big part of that is the UI for writing threads: while it’s suited to writing a thread as a series of related tweet-sized chunks, it doesn’t lend itself to writing, revising, and editing anything more complex.

    To help make this easier, I’ve been working on a tool that will help you publish an entire post to Twitter from your WordPress site, as a thread. It takes care of transforming your post into Twitter-friendly content, you can just… write. 🙂

    It doesn’t just handle the tweet embeds from earlier in the thread: it handles handle uploading and attaching any images and videos you’ve included in your post.

    • A selfie of me feeding a giraffe.
    • A selfie of me on an iceberg south of the Antarctic circle.
    • A selfie of me with a fire breathing dragon at the Harry Potter themed amusement park in Orlando, Florida.
    • A panoramic view of sunset over Nairobi National Park.

    All sorts of embeds work, too. 😉

    It’ll be coming in Jetpack 9.0 (due out October 6), but you can try it now in the latest Jetpack Beta! Check it out and tell me what you think. 🙂

    This might not fix all of Twitter’s problems, but I hope it’ll help you enjoy reading and writing on Twitter a little more. 💖

    ,

    Chris Neugebauer — Talk Notes: Practicality Beats Purity: The Zen Of Python’s Escape Hatch?

    I gave the talk Practicality Beats Purity: The Zen of Python’s Escape Hatch as part of PyConline AU 2020, the very online replacement for PyCon AU this year. In that talk, I included a few interesting links code samples which you may be interested in:

    @apply

    def apply(transform):

    def __decorator__(using_this):
        return transform(using_this)

    return __decorator__


numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

@apply(lambda f: list(map(f, numbers)))
def squares(i):
  return i * i

print(list(squares))

# prints: [1, 4, 9, 16, 25]

    Init.java

    public class Init {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!")
  }
}

    @switch and @case

    __NOT_A_MATCHER__ = object()
__MATCHER_SORT_KEY__ = 0

def switch(cls):

    inst = cls()
    methods = []

    for attr in dir(inst):
        method = getattr(inst, attr)
        matcher = getattr(method, "__matcher__", __NOT_A_MATCHER__)

        if matcher == __NOT_A_MATCHER__:
            continue

        methods.append(method)

    methods.sort(key = lambda i: i.__matcher_sort_key__)

    for method in methods:
        matches = method.__matcher__()
        if matches:
            return method()

    raise ValueError(f"No matcher matches value {test_value}")

def case(matcher):

    def __decorator__(f):
        global __MATCHER_SORT_KEY__

        f.__matcher__ = matcher
        f.__matcher_sort_key__ = __MATCHER_SORT_KEY__
        __MATCHER_SORT_KEY__ += 1
        return f

    return __decorator__



if __name__ == "__main__":
    for i in range(100):

        @switch
        class FizzBuzz:

            @case(lambda: i % 15 == 0)
            def fizzbuzz(self):
                return "fizzbuzz"

            @case(lambda: i % 3 == 0)
            def fizz(self):
                return "fizz"

            @case(lambda: i % 5 == 0)
            def buzz(self):
                return "buzz"

            @case(lambda: True)
            def default(self):
                return "-"

        print(f"{i} {FizzBuzz}")

    ,

    Colin Charles — Links on Rona #2

    This was easily a late April 2020 roundup, stuck in BBEdit, which may still be vaguely relevant.

    The post Links on Rona #2 first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

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    Craig Sanders — Fuck Grey Text

    fuck grey text on white backgrounds
    fuck grey text on black backgrounds
    fuck thin, spindly fonts
    fuck 10px text
    fuck any size of anything in px
    fuck font-weight 300
    fuck unreadable web pages
    fuck themes that implement this unreadable idiocy
    fuck sites that don’t work without javascript
    fuck reactjs and everything like it

    thank fuck for Stylus. and uBlock Origin. and uMatrix.

    Fuck Grey Text is a post from: Errata

    ,

    Hamish Taylor — Blog: A new beginning

    Earlier today I launched this site. It is the result of a lot of work over the past few weeks. It began as an idea to publicise some of my photos, and morphed into the site you see now, including a store and blog that I’ve named “Photekgraddft”.

    In the weirdly named blog, I want to talk about photography, the stories behind some of my more interesting shots, the gear and software I use, my technology career, my recent ADHD diagnosis and many other things.

    This scares me quite a lot. I’ve never really put myself out onto the internet before. If you Google me, you’re not going to find anything much. Google Images has no photos of me. I’ve always liked it that way. Until now.

    ADHD’ers are sometimes known for “oversharing”, one of the side-effects of the inability to regulate emotions well. I’ve always been the opposite, hiding, because I knew I was different, but didn’t understand why.

    The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and my recent ADHD diagnosis have given me a different perspective. I now know why I hid. And now I want to engage, and be engaged, in the world.

    If I can be a force for positive change, around people’s knowledge and opinion of ADHD, then I will.

    If talking about Business Analysis (my day job), and sharing my ideas for optimising organisations helps anyone at all, then I will.

    If I can show my photos and brighten someone’s day by allowing them to enjoy a sunset, or a flying bird, then I will.

    And if anyone buys any of my photos, then I will be shocked!

    So welcome to my little vanity project. I hope it can be something positive, for me, if for noone else in this new, odd world in which we now find ourselves living together.

    ,

    Hamish Taylor — Photo: Rain on leaves

    Photo: Rain on leaves

    Photo: Rain on leaves

    ,

    Hamish Taylor — Video: A Foggy Autumn Morning

    Video: A Foggy Autumn Morning

    Hamish Taylor — Photo: Walking the dog on a cold Autumn morning

    Photo: Walking the dog on a cold Autumn morning

    Photo: Walking the dog on a cold Autumn morning

    ,

    Rusty Russell — 57 Varieties of Pyrite: Exchanges Are Now The Enemy of Bitcoin

    TL;DR: exchanges are casinos and don’t want to onboard anyone into bitcoin. Avoid.

    There’s a classic scam in the “crypto” space: advertize Bitcoin to get people in, then sell suckers something else entirely. Over the last few years, this bait-and-switch has become the core competency of “bitcoin” exchanges.

    I recently visited the homepage of Australian exchange btcmarkets.net: what a mess. There was a list of dozens of identical-looking “cryptos”, with bitcoin second after something called “XRP”; seems like it was sorted by volume?

    Incentives have driven exchanges to become casinos, and they’re doing exactly what you’d expect unregulated casinos to do. This is no place you ever want to send anyone.

    Incentives For Exchanges

    Exchanges make money on trading, not on buying and holding. Despite the fact that bitcoin is the only real attempt to create an open source money, scams with no future are given false equivalence, because more assets means more trading. Worse than that, they are paid directly to list new scams (the crappier, the more money they can charge!) and have recently taken the logical step of introducing and promoting their own crapcoins directly.

    It’s like a gold dealer who also sells 57 varieties of pyrite, which give more margin than selling actual gold.

    For a long time, I thought exchanges were merely incompetent. Most can’t even give out fresh addresses for deposits, batch their outgoing transactions, pay competent fee rates, perform RBF or use segwit.

    But I misunderstood: they don’t want to sell bitcoin. They use bitcoin to get you in the door, but they want you to gamble. This matters: you’ll find subtle and not-so-subtle blockers to simply buying bitcoin on an exchange. If you send a friend off to buy their first bitcoin, they’re likely to come back with something else. That’s no accident.

    Looking Deeper, It Gets Worse.

    Regrettably, looking harder at specific exchanges makes the picture even bleaker.

    Consider Binance: this mainland China backed exchange pretending to be a Hong Kong exchange appeared out of nowhere with fake volume and demonstrated the gullibility of the entire industry by being treated as if it were a respected member. They lost at least 40,000 bitcoin in a known hack, and they also lost all the personal information people sent them to KYC. They aggressively market their own coin. But basically, they’re just MtGox without Mark Karpales’ PHP skills or moral scruples and much better marketing.

    Coinbase is more interesting: an MBA-run “bitcoin” company which really dislikes bitcoin. They got where they are by spending big on regulations compliance in the US so they could operate in (almost?) every US state. (They don’t do much to dispel the wide belief that this regulation protects their users, when in practice it seems only USD deposits have any guarantee). Their natural interest is in increasing regulation to maintain that moat, and their biggest problem is Bitcoin.

    They have much more affinity for the centralized coins (Ethereum) where they can have influence and control. The anarchic nature of a genuine open source community (not to mention the developers’ oft-stated aim to improve privacy over time) is not culturally compatible with a top-down company run by the Big Dog. It’s a running joke that their CEO can’t say the word “Bitcoin”, but their recent “what will happen to cryptocurrencies in the 2020s” article is breathtaking in its boldness: innovation is mainly happening on altcoins, and they’re going to overtake bitcoin any day now. Those scaling problems which the Bitcoin developers say they don’t know how to solve? This non-technical CEO knows better.

    So, don’t send anyone to an exchange, especially not a “market leading” one. Find some service that actually wants to sell them bitcoin, like CashApp or Swan Bitcoin.

    ,

    Matt Palmer — Private Key Redaction: UR DOIN IT RONG

    Because posting private keys on the Internet is a bad idea, some people like to “redact” their private keys, so that it looks kinda-sorta like a private key, but it isn’t actually giving away anything secret. Unfortunately, due to the way that private keys are represented, it is easy to “redact” a key in such a way that it doesn’t actually redact anything at all. RSA private keys are particularly bad at this, but the problem can (potentially) apply to other keys as well.

    I’ll show you a bit of “Inside Baseball” with key formats, and then demonstrate the practical implications. Finally, we’ll go through a practical worked example from an actual not-really-redacted key I recently stumbled across in my travels.

    The Private Lives of Private Keys

    Here is what a typical private key looks like, when you come across it:

    -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MGICAQACEQCxjdTmecltJEz2PLMpS4BXAgMBAAECEDKtuwD17gpagnASq1zQTYEC
CQDVTYVsjjF7IQIJANUYZsIjRsR3AgkAkahDUXL0RSECCB78r2SnsJC9AghaOK3F
sKoELg==
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

    Obviously, there’s some hidden meaning in there – computers don’t encrypt things by shouting “BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY!”, after all. What is between the BEGIN/END lines above is, in fact, a base64-encoded DER format ASN.1 structure representing a PKCS#1 private key.

    In simple terms, it’s a list of numbers – very important numbers. The list of numbers is, in order:

    • A version number (0);
    • The “public modulus”, commonly referred to as “n”;
    • The “public exponent”, or “e” (which is almost always 65,537, for various unimportant reasons);
    • The “private exponent”, or “d”;
    • The two “private primes”, or “p” and “q”;
    • Two exponents, which are known as “dmp1” and “dmq1”; and
    • A coefficient, known as “iqmp”.

    Why Is This a Problem?

    The thing is, only three of those numbers are actually required in a private key. The rest, whilst useful to allow the RSA encryption and decryption to be more efficient, aren’t necessary. The three absolutely required values are e, p, and q.

    Of the other numbers, most of them are at least about the same size as each of p and q. So of the total data in an RSA key, less than a quarter of the data is required. Let me show you with the above “toy” key, by breaking it down piece by piece1:

    • MGI – DER for “this is a sequence”
    • CAQ – version (0)
    • CxjdTmecltJEz2PLMpS4BX – n
    • AgMBAA – e
    • ECEDKtuwD17gpagnASq1zQTY – d
    • ECCQDVTYVsjjF7IQ – p
    • IJANUYZsIjRsR3 – q
    • AgkAkahDUXL0RS – dmp1
    • ECCB78r2SnsJC9 – dmq1
    • AghaOK3FsKoELg== – iqmp

    Remember that in order to reconstruct all of these values, all I need are e, p, and q – and e is pretty much always 65,537. So I could “redact” almost all of this key, and still give all the important, private bits of this key. Let me show you:

    -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
..............................................................EC
CQDVTYVsjjF7IQIJANUYZsIjRsR3....................................
........
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

    Now, I doubt that anyone is going to redact a key precisely like this… but then again, this isn’t a “typical” RSA key. They usually look a lot more like this:

    -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----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-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

    People typically redact keys by deleting whole lines, and usually replacing them with [...] and the like. But only about 345 of those 1588 characters (excluding the header and footer) are required to construct the entire key. You can redact about 4/5ths of that giant blob of stuff, and your private parts (or at least, those of your key) are still left uncomfortably exposed.

    But Wait! There’s More!

    Remember how I said that everything in the key other than e, p, and q could be derived from those three numbers? Let’s talk about one of those numbers: n.

    This is known as the “public modulus” (because, along with e, it is also present in the public key). It is very easy to calculate: n = p * q. It is also very early in the key (the second number, in fact).

    Since n = p * q, it follows that q = n / p. Thus, as long as the key is intact up to p, you can derive q by simple division.

    Real World Redaction

    At this point, I’d like to introduce an acquaintance of mine: Mr. Johan Finn. He is the proud owner of the GitHub repo johanfinn/scripts. For a while, his repo contained a script that contained a poorly-redacted private key. He since deleted it, by making a new commit, but of course because git never really deletes anything, it’s still available.

    Of course, Mr. Finn may delete the repo, or force-push a new history without that commit, so here is the redacted private key, with a bit of the surrounding shell script, for our illustrative pleasure:

    #Add private key to .ssh folder
cd /home/johan/.ssh/
echo  "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅ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:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::.::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::.::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLlL
ÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖ
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
ÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅ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-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----" >> id_rsa

    Now, if you try to reconstruct this key by removing the “obvious” garbage lines (the ones that are all repeated characters, some of which aren’t even valid base64 characters), it still isn’t a key – at least, openssl pkey doesn’t want anything to do with it. The key is very much still in there, though, as we shall soon see.

    Using a gem I wrote and a quick bit of Ruby, we can extract a complete private key. The irb session looks something like this:

    >> require "derparse"
>> b64 = <<EOF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>> b64 += <<EOF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>> der = b64.unpack("m").first
>> c = DerParse.new(der).first_node.first_child
>> version = c.value
=> 0
>> c = c.next_node
>> n = c.value
=> 80071596234464993385068908004931... # (etc)
>> c = c.next_node
>> e = c.value
=> 65537
>> c = c.next_node
>> d = c.value
=> 58438813486895877116761996105770... # (etc)
>> c = c.next_node
>> p = c.value
=> 29635449580247160226960937109864... # (etc)
>> c = c.next_node
>> q = c.value
=> 27018856595256414771163410576410... # (etc)

    What I’ve done, in case you don’t speak Ruby, is take the two “chunks” of plausible-looking base64 data, chuck them together into a variable named b64, unbase64 it into a variable named der, pass that into a new DerParse instance, and then walk the DER value tree until I got all the values I need.

    Interestingly, the q value actually traverses the “split” in the two chunks, which means that there’s always the possibility that there are lines missing from the key. However, since p and q are supposed to be prime, we can “sanity check” them to see if corruption is likely to have occurred:

    >> require "openssl"
>> OpenSSL::BN.new(p).prime?
=> true
>> OpenSSL::BN.new(q).prime?
=> true

    Excellent! The chances of a corrupted file producing valid-but-incorrect prime numbers isn’t huge, so we can be fairly confident that we’ve got the “real” p and q. Now, with the help of another one of my creations we can use e, p, and q to create a fully-operational battle key:

    >> require "openssl/pkey/rsa"
>> k = OpenSSL::PKey::RSA.from_factors(p, q, e)
=> #<OpenSSL::PKey::RSA:0x0000559d5903cd38>
>> k.valid?
=> true
>> k.verify(OpenSSL::Digest::SHA256.new, k.sign(OpenSSL::Digest::SHA256.new, "bob"), "bob")
=> true

    … and there you have it. One fairly redacted-looking private key brought back to life by maths and far too much free time.

    Sorry Mr. Finn, I hope you’re not still using that key on anything Internet-facing.

    What About Other Key Types?

    EC keys are very different beasts, but they have much the same problems as RSA keys. A typical EC key contains both private and public data, and the public portion is twice the size – so only about 1/3 of the data in the key is private material. It is quite plausible that you can “redact” an EC key and leave all the actually private bits exposed.

    What Do We Do About It?

    In short: don’t ever try and redact real private keys. For documentation purposes, just put “KEY GOES HERE” in the appropriate spot, or something like that. Store your secrets somewhere that isn’t a public (or even private!) git repo.

    Generating a “dummy” private key and sticking it in there isn’t a great idea, for different reasons: people have this odd habit of reusing “demo” keys in real life. There’s no need to encourage that sort of thing.

    1. Technically the pieces aren’t 100% aligned with the underlying DER, because of how base64 works. I felt it was easier to understand if I stuck to chopping up the base64, rather than decoding into DER and then chopping up the DER. ↩

    ,

    Jonathan Adamczewski — f32, u32, and const

    Some time ago, I wrote “floats, bits, and constant expressions” about converting floating point number into its representative ones and zeros as a C++ constant expression – constructing the IEEE 754 representation without being able to examine the bits directly.

    I’ve been playing around with Rust recently, and rewrote that conversion code as a bit of a learning exercise for myself, with a thoroughly contrived set of constraints: using integer and single-precision floating point math, at compile time, without unsafe blocks, while using as few unstable features as possible.

    I’ve included the listing below, for your bemusement and/or head-shaking, and you can play with the code in the Rust Playground and rust.godbolt.org

    // Jonathan Adamczewski 2020-05-12
//
// Constructing the bit-representation of an IEEE 754 single precision floating 
// point number, using integer and single-precision floating point math, at 
// compile time, in rust, without unsafe blocks, while using as few unstable 
// features as I can.
//
// or "What if this silly C++ thing https://brnz.org/hbr/?p=1518 but in Rust?"


// Q. Why? What is this good for?
// A. To the best of my knowledge, this code serves no useful purpose. 
//    But I did learn a thing or two while writing it :)


// This is needed to be able to perform floating point operations in a const 
// function:
#![feature(const_fn)]


// bits_transmute(): Returns the bits representing a floating point value, by
//                   way of std::mem::transmute()
//
// For completeness (and validation), and to make it clear the fundamentally 
// unnecessary nature of the exercise :D - here's a short, straightforward, 
// library-based version. But it needs the const_transmute flag and an unsafe 
// block.
#![feature(const_transmute)]
const fn bits_transmute(f: f32) -> u32 {
  unsafe { std::mem::transmute::<f32, u32>(f) }
}



// get_if_u32(predicate:bool, if_true: u32, if_false: u32):
//   Returns if_true if predicate is true, else if_false
//
// If and match are not able to be used in const functions (at least, not 
// without #![feature(const_if_match)] - so here's a branch-free select function
// for u32s
const fn get_if_u32(predicate: bool, if_true: u32, if_false: u32) -> u32 {
  let pred_mask = (-1 * (predicate as i32)) as u32;
  let true_val = if_true & pred_mask;
  let false_val = if_false & !pred_mask;
  true_val | false_val
}

// get_if_f32(predicate, if_true, if_false):
//   Returns if_true if predicate is true, else if_false
//
// A branch-free select function for f32s.
// 
// If either is_true or is_false is NaN or an infinity, the result will be NaN,
// which is not ideal. I don't know of a better way to implement this function
// within the arbitrary limitations of this silly little side quest.
const fn get_if_f32(predicate: bool, if_true: f32, if_false: f32) -> f32 {
  // can't convert bool to f32 - but can convert bool to i32 to f32
  let pred_sel = (predicate as i32) as f32;
  let pred_not_sel = ((!predicate) as i32) as f32;
  let true_val = if_true * pred_sel;
  let false_val = if_false * pred_not_sel;
  true_val + false_val
}


// bits(): Returns the bits representing a floating point value.
const fn bits(f: f32) -> u32 {
  // the result value, initialized to a NaN value that will otherwise not be
  // produced by this function.
  let mut r = 0xffff_ffff;

  // These floation point operations (and others) cause the following error:
  //     only int, `bool` and `char` operations are stable in const fn
  // hence #![feature(const_fn)] at the top of the file
  
  // Identify special cases
  let is_zero    = f == 0_f32;
  let is_inf     = f == f32::INFINITY;
  let is_neg_inf = f == f32::NEG_INFINITY;
  let is_nan     = f != f;

  // Writing this as !(is_zero || is_inf || ...) cause the following error:
  //     Loops and conditional expressions are not stable in const fn
  // so instead write this as type coversions, and bitwise operations
  //
  // "normalish" here means that f is a normal or subnormal value
  let is_normalish = 0 == ((is_zero as u32) | (is_inf as u32) | 
                        (is_neg_inf as u32) | (is_nan as u32));

  // set the result value for each of the special cases
  r = get_if_u32(is_zero,    0,           r); // if (iz_zero)    { r = 0; }
  r = get_if_u32(is_inf,     0x7f80_0000, r); // if (is_inf)     { r = 0x7f80_0000; }
  r = get_if_u32(is_neg_inf, 0xff80_0000, r); // if (is_neg_inf) { r = 0xff80_0000; }
  r = get_if_u32(is_nan,     0x7fc0_0000, r); // if (is_nan)     { r = 0x7fc0_0000; }
 
  // It was tempting at this point to try setting f to a "normalish" placeholder 
  // value so that special cases do not have to be handled in the code that 
  // follows, like so:
  // f = get_if_f32(is_normal, f, 1_f32);
  //
  // Unfortunately, get_if_f32() returns NaN if either input is NaN or infinite.
  // Instead of switching the value, we work around the non-normalish cases 
  // later.
  //
  // (This whole function is branch-free, so all of it is executed regardless of 
  // the input value)

  // extract the sign bit
  let sign_bit  = get_if_u32(f < 0_f32,  1, 0);

  // compute the absolute value of f
  let mut abs_f = get_if_f32(f < 0_f32, -f, f);

  
  // This part is a little complicated. The algorithm is functionally the same 
  // as the C++ version linked from the top of the file.
  // 
  // Because of the various contrived constraints on thie problem, we compute 
  // the exponent and significand, rather than extract the bits directly.
  //
  // The idea is this:
  // Every finite single precision float point number can be represented as a
  // series of (at most) 24 significant digits as a 128.149 fixed point number 
  // (128: 126 exponent values >= 0, plus one for the implicit leading 1, plus 
  // one more so that the decimal point falls on a power-of-two boundary :)
  // 149: 126 negative exponent values, plus 23 for the bits of precision in the 
  // significand.)
  //
  // If we are able to scale the number such that all of the precision bits fall 
  // in the upper-most 64 bits of that fixed-point representation (while 
  // tracking our effective manipulation of the exponent), we can then 
  // predictably and simply scale that computed value back to a range than can 
  // be converted safely to a u64, count the leading zeros to determine the 
  // exact exponent, and then shift the result into position for the final u32 
  // representation.
  
  // Start with the largest possible exponent - subsequent steps will reduce 
  // this number as appropriate
  let mut exponent: u32 = 254;
  {
    // Hex float literals are really nice. I miss them.

    // The threshold is 2^87 (think: 64+23 bits) to ensure that the number will 
    // be large enough that, when scaled down by 2^64, all the precision will 
    // fit nicely in a u64
    const THRESHOLD: f32 = 154742504910672534362390528_f32; // 0x1p87f == 2^87

    // The scaling factor is 2^41 (think: 64-23 bits) to ensure that a number 
    // between 2^87 and 2^64 will not overflow in a single scaling step.
    const SCALE_UP: f32 = 2199023255552_f32; // 0x1p41f == 2^41

    // Because loops are not available (no #![feature(const_loops)], and 'if' is
    // not available (no #![feature(const_if_match)]), perform repeated branch-
    // free conditional multiplication of abs_f.

    // use a macro, because why not :D It's the most compact, simplest option I 
    // could find.
    macro_rules! maybe_scale {
      () => {{
        // care is needed: if abs_f is above the threshold, multiplying by 2^41 
        // will cause it to overflow (INFINITY) which will cause get_if_f32() to
        // return NaN, which will destroy the value in abs_f. So compute a safe 
        // scaling factor for each iteration.
        //
        // Roughly equivalent to :
        // if (abs_f < THRESHOLD) {
        //   exponent -= 41;
        //   abs_f += SCALE_UP;
        // }
        let scale = get_if_f32(abs_f < THRESHOLD, SCALE_UP,      1_f32);    
        exponent  = get_if_u32(abs_f < THRESHOLD, exponent - 41, exponent); 
        abs_f     = get_if_f32(abs_f < THRESHOLD, abs_f * scale, abs_f);
      }}
    }
    // 41 bits per iteration means up to 246 bits shifted.
    // Even the smallest subnormal value will end up in the desired range.
    maybe_scale!();  maybe_scale!();  maybe_scale!();
    maybe_scale!();  maybe_scale!();  maybe_scale!();
  }

  // Now that we know that abs_f is in the desired range (2^87 <= abs_f < 2^128)
  // scale it down to be in the range (2^23 <= _ < 2^64), and convert without 
  // loss of precision to u64.
  const INV_2_64: f32 = 5.42101086242752217003726400434970855712890625e-20_f32; // 0x1p-64f == 2^64
  let a = (abs_f * INV_2_64) as u64;

  // Count the leading zeros.
  // (C++ doesn't provide a compile-time constant function for this. It's nice 
  // that rust does :)
  let mut lz = a.leading_zeros();

  // if the number isn't normalish, lz is meaningless: we stomp it with 
  // something that will not cause problems in the computation that follows - 
  // the result of which is meaningless, and will be ignored in the end for 
  // non-normalish values.
  lz = get_if_u32(!is_normalish, 0, lz); // if (!is_normalish) { lz = 0; }

  {
    // This step accounts for subnormal numbers, where there are more leading 
    // zeros than can be accounted for in a valid exponent value, and leading 
    // zeros that must remain in the final significand.
    //
    // If lz < exponent, reduce exponent to its final correct value - lz will be
    // used to remove all of the leading zeros.
    //
    // Otherwise, clamp exponent to zero, and adjust lz to ensure that the 
    // correct number of bits will remain (after multiplying by 2^41 six times - 
    // 2^246 - there are 7 leading zeros ahead of the original subnormal's
    // computed significand of 0.sss...)
    // 
    // The following is roughly equivalent to:
    // if (lz < exponent) {
    //   exponent = exponent - lz;
    // } else {
    //   exponent = 0;
    //   lz = 7;
    // }

    // we're about to mess with lz and exponent - compute and store the relative 
    // value of the two
    let lz_is_less_than_exponent = lz < exponent;

    lz       = get_if_u32(!lz_is_less_than_exponent, 7,             lz);
    exponent = get_if_u32( lz_is_less_than_exponent, exponent - lz, 0);
  }

  // compute the final significand.
  // + 1 shifts away a leading 1-bit for normal, and 0-bit for subnormal values
  // Shifts are done in u64 (that leading bit is shifted into the void), then
  // the resulting bits are shifted back to their final resting place.
  let significand = ((a << (lz + 1)) >> (64 - 23)) as u32;

  // combine the bits
  let computed_bits = (sign_bit << 31) | (exponent << 23) | significand;

  // return the normalish result, or the non-normalish result, as appopriate
  get_if_u32(is_normalish, computed_bits, r)
}


// Compile-time validation - able to be examined in rust.godbolt.org output
pub static BITS_BIGNUM: u32 = bits(std::f32::MAX);
pub static TBITS_BIGNUM: u32 = bits_transmute(std::f32::MAX);
pub static BITS_LOWER_THAN_MIN: u32 = bits(7.0064923217e-46_f32);
pub static TBITS_LOWER_THAN_MIN: u32 = bits_transmute(7.0064923217e-46_f32);
pub static BITS_ZERO: u32 = bits(0.0f32);
pub static TBITS_ZERO: u32 = bits_transmute(0.0f32);
pub static BITS_ONE: u32 = bits(1.0f32);
pub static TBITS_ONE: u32 = bits_transmute(1.0f32);
pub static BITS_NEG_ONE: u32 = bits(-1.0f32);
pub static TBITS_NEG_ONE: u32 = bits_transmute(-1.0f32);
pub static BITS_INF: u32 = bits(std::f32::INFINITY);
pub static TBITS_INF: u32 = bits_transmute(std::f32::INFINITY);
pub static BITS_NEG_INF: u32 = bits(std::f32::NEG_INFINITY);
pub static TBITS_NEG_INF: u32 = bits_transmute(std::f32::NEG_INFINITY);
pub static BITS_NAN: u32 = bits(std::f32::NAN);
pub static TBITS_NAN: u32 = bits_transmute(std::f32::NAN);
pub static BITS_COMPUTED_NAN: u32 = bits(std::f32::INFINITY/std::f32::INFINITY);
pub static TBITS_COMPUTED_NAN: u32 = bits_transmute(std::f32::INFINITY/std::f32::INFINITY);


// Run-time validation of many more values
fn main() {
  let end: usize = 0xffff_ffff;
  let count = 9_876_543; // number of values to test
  let step = end / count;
  for u in (0..=end).step_by(step) {
      let v = u as u32;
      
      // reference
      let f = unsafe { std::mem::transmute::<u32, f32>(v) };
      
      // compute
      let c = bits(f);

      // validation
      if c != v && 
         !(f.is_nan() && c == 0x7fc0_0000) && // nans
         !(v == 0x8000_0000 && c == 0) { // negative 0
          println!("{:x?} {:x?}", v, c); 
      }
  }
}

    Colin Charles — Life with Rona – Day 56

    One of the busiest days I’ve had, largely due to unplanned/non-calendared events that I would consider happy events. I was scheduled to start work for a West Coast client at 6am, but for some reason I was up by 4am… All this done, I took a short nap (it maybe lasted 30 minutes) before the power went out and rudely awakened me. I was pleasantly surprised to see cake, a platter of cheese/cold cuts and more (olives, beetroot, hummus, and more) that Radiance, Lauren and Sal sent over. Shortly thereafter, more cheese that Sara sent over (promptly to the fridge). So lunch was unplanned but much fun, taking me back to days in Spain (or really, any tapas bar I could be at).

    Back to the grind, and I did a short workout with Zuleeka at Fly. It was of the boxing variant, and I’m finding it really tough to grasp boxing, in general. It just doesn’t seem like the workout for me. Anyway, showered, back to the grind, and was surprised at dinner to note that my mother and 2 aunts had cooked up a storm of my favourite dishes (Crabs, petai, tempeh, fried chicken, mutton, and salad), plus there was also a cake waiting later (butter cake with lovely icing). Socialised, extremely grateful, extremely appreciative, considering we are in a Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO) and all this was done. And then I went on to doing another call…

    Feel very lucky overall. It has been a while since I’ve celebrated my birthday in KL. Let alone in my home. Where I’ve been self-isolating for 56 days. I never thought it would be this fun! Uptime of some 20 hours… Thanks for all the wishes.

    Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Tuesday: 6,742 (+16) total cases, 5,223 (+110) recoveries, 109 dead. 16 in ICU beds, 3 on ventilators.

    Restaurants can restart in Selangor for dine-ins (yes!). We’ve also been told that just your name and telephone number needs to be left behind for contact tracing (so no identity card number — good). I see in Singapore, Terminal 4 in Changi (AirAsia, Cathay Pacific) is closing temporarily later this week… joining Terminal 2; makes me sad to note this is happening. When will travel recover?

    I am stepping out tomorrow to take a look at what is going on. I have some errands to run. I will be in a mask. I will likely be in gym clothings (I don’t have enough jeans or shorts to cycle on a daily basis anyway; I have way more Lululemons though). I wish I had more time to read today, but hey, something’s gotta give!

    The post Life with Rona – Day 56 first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

    ,

    Chris Neugebauer — Reflecting on 10 years of not having to update WordPress

    Over the weekend, the boredom of COVID-19 isolation motivated me to move my personal website from WordPress on a self-managed 10-year-old virtual private server to a generated static site on a static site hosting platform with a content delivery network.

    This decision was overdue. WordPress never fit my brain particularly well, and it was definitely getting to a point where I wasn’t updating my website at all (my last post was two weeks before I moved from Hobart; I’ve been living in Petaluma for more than three years now).

    Settling on which website framework wasn’t a terribly difficult choice (I chose Jekyll, everyone else seems to be using it), and I’ve had friends who’ve had success moving their blogs over. The difficulty I ended up facing was that the standard exporter that everyone to move from WordPress to Jekyll uses does not expect Debian’s package layout.

    Backing up a bit: I made a choice, 10 years ago, to deploy WordPress on a machine that I ran myself, using the Debian system wordpress package, a simple aptitude install wordpress away. That decision was not particularly consequential then, but it chewed up 3 hours of my time on Saturday.

    Why? The exporter plugin assumes that it will be able to find all of the standard WordPress files in the usual WordPress places, and when it didn’t find that, it broke in unexpected ways. And why couldn’t it find it?

    Debian makes packaging choices that prioritise all the software on a system living side-by-side with minimal difficulty. It sets strict permissions. It separates application code from configuration from user data (which in the case of WordPress, includes plugins), in a way that is consistent between applications. This choice makes it easy for Debian admins to understand how to find bits of an application. It also minimises the chance of one PHP application from clobbering another.

    10 years later, the install that I had set up was still working, having survived 3-4 Debian versions, and so 3-4 new WordPress versions. I don’t recall the last time I had to think about keeping my WordPress instance secure and updated. That’s quite a good run. I’ve had a working website despite not caring about keeping it updated for at least three years.

    The same decisions that meant I spent 3 hours on Saturday doing a simple WordPress export saved me a bunch of time that I didn’t incrementally spend over the course a decade. Am I even? I have no idea.

    Anyway, the least I can do is provide some help to people who might run into this same problem, so here’s a 5-step howto.

    How to migrate a Debian WordPress site to Jekyll

    Should you find the Jekyll exporter not working on your Debian WordPress install:

    1. Use the standard WordPress export to export an XML feel of your site.
    2. Spin up a new instance of WordPress (using WordPress.com, or on a new Virtual Private Server, whatever, really).
    3. Import the exported XML feed.
    4. Install the Jekyll exporter plugin.
    5. Follow the documentation and receive a Jekyll export of your site.

    Basically, the plugin works with a stock WordPress install. If you don’t have one of those, it’s easy to move it over.

    Colin Charles — Life with Rona – Days 51, 52, 53, 54, and 55

    Long batch between writing. The daily bit failed. Oops. But the work has accelerated. From a workout perspective, Ping finally started charging for some workouts and I did one on Sunday (it was great). Mother’s Day lunch was good too, and we got a little additional gift from the Prime Minister — CMCO till June 9th. Frankly, my interest in staying home fully (self-imposed exile) is wearing thin. I think I’ll be out by May 13.

    Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Thursday: 6,467 (+39) total cases, 4,776 (+74) recoveries, 107 dead. 19 in ICU beds, 9 on ventilators.

    Malaysia’a Covid-19 situation on Friday: 6,535 (+68) total cases, 4,864 (+88) recoveries, 107 dead.

    Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Saturday: 6,589 (+54) total cases, 4,929 (+65) recoveries, 108 (+1) dead.

    Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Sunday: 6,656 (+67) total cases, 5,025 (+96) recoveries, 108 dead.

    Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Monday: 6,726 (+70) total cases, 5,113 (+88) recoveries, 109 (+1) dead. 20 in ICU beds, 7 on ventilators.

    We never did manage to bring the numbers down to single digits, did we? As long as the healthcare system can cope, right? Which then brings the question of how we have been tearing up the economy. MCO ups unemployment to 34-year high, says stats dept is truly scary. And it will get worse after the Hari Raya holidays. Things like Jonker Walk in Malacca are in trouble. Truly sad, considering this is part of visiting Malacca.

    While I do agree that no place should refuse custom without a mask, the tone was rather ridiculous; encourage people to wear masks. Always. Malaysia is also finding more foreign worker clusters, and my gut feeling is that it will be worse than Singapore, long term (we don’t have foreign worker dormitories, they fend for themselves; and we also have a lot of illegal immigration). It is no surprise, crowded living quarters are to blame. Lots of flip flopping around the serving of liquor, and it seems the general idea is yes, as long as you’re a restaurant (not a pub).

    Travel resumption seems to be a little nuts: China, South Korea Move to Revive Business Travel Between Them, Coronavirus: Australia and New Zealand consider opening borders to create ‘Trans-Tasman bubble’, Taiwan keeps its borders shut despite virus success. Why the UK’s New 14-Day Quarantine Rule Is Particularly Troubling to Business Travel Managers. All this seems to be long-term unsustainable.

    Now for a little gag, Royal Selangor Club bars closed after MCO violations. The Club reopened last week, and on Friday a circular went out to members saying we could even bring one guest per member. It didn’t last long. This is why we can’t have nice things.

    The post Life with Rona – Days 51, 52, 53, 54, and 55 first appeared on Colin Charles Agenda.

    ,

    Gary Pendergast — Install the COVIDSafe app

    I can’t think of a more unequivocal title than that. 🙂

    The Australian government doesn’t have a good track record of either launching publicly visible software projects, or respecting privacy, so I’ve naturally been sceptical of the contact tracing app since it was announced. The good news is, while it has some relatively minor problems, it appears to be a solid first version.

    Privacy

    While the source code is yet to be released, the Android version has already been decompiled, and public analysis is showing that it only collects necessary information, and only uploads contact information to the government servers when you press the button to upload (you should only press that button if you actually get COVID-19, and are asked to upload it by your doctor).

    The legislation around the app is also clear that the data you upload can only be accessed by state health officials. Commonwealth departments have no access, neither do non-health departments (eg, law enforcement, intelligence).

    Technical

    It does what it’s supposed to do, and hasn’t been found to open you up to risks by installing it. There are a lot of people digging into it, so I would expect any significant issues to be found, reported, and fixed quite quickly.

    Some parts of it are a bit rushed, and the way it scans for contacts could be more battery efficient (that should hopefully be fixed in the coming weeks when Google and Apple release updates that these contact tracing apps can use).

    If it produces useful data, however, I’m willing to put up with some quirks. 🙂

    Usefulness

    I’m obviously not an epidemiologist, but those I’ve seen talk about it say that yes, the data this app produces will be useful for augmenting the existing contact tracing efforts. There were some concerns that it could produce a lot of junk data that wastes time, but I trust the expert contact tracing teams to filter and prioritise the data they get from it.

    Install it!

    The COVIDSafe site has links to the app in Apple’s App Store, as well as Google’s Play Store. Setting it up takes a few minutes, and then you’re done!

    ,

    Andrew Ruthven — Install Fedora CoreOS using FAI

    I've spent the last couple of days trying to deploy Fedora CoreOS to some physical hardware/bare metal for a colleague using the official PXE installer from Fedora CoreOS. It wasn't very pleasant, and just wouldn't work reliably.

    Maybe my expectations were to high, in that I thought I could use Ignition to prepare more of the system for me, as my colleague has been able to bare metal installs correctly. I just tried to use Ignition as documented.

    A few interesting aspects I encountered:

    1. The PXE installer for it has a 618MB initrd file. This takes quite a while to transfer via tftp!
    2. It can't build software RAID for the main install device (and the developers have no intention of adding this), and it seems very finicky to build other RAID sets for other partitions.
    3. And, well, I just kept having problems where the built systems would hang during boot for no obvious reason.
    4. The time to do an installation was incredibly long.
    5. The initrd image is really just running coreos-installer against the nominated device.

    During the night I got feed up with that process and wrote a Fully Automatic Installer (FAI) profile that'd install CoreOS instead. I can now use setup-storage from FAI using it's standard disk_config files. This allows me to build complicated disk configurations with software RAID and LVM easily.

    A big bonus is that a rebuild is a lot faster, timed from typing reboot to a fresh login prompt is 10 minutes - and this is on physical hardware so includes BIOS POST and RAID controller set up, twice each.

    I thought this might be of interest to other people, so the FAI profile I developed for this is located here: https://github.com/catalyst-cloud/fai-profile-fedora-coreos

    FAI was initially developed to deploy Debian systems, it has since been extended to be able to install a number of other operating systems, however I think this is a good example of how easy it is to deploy non-Debian derived operating systems using FAI without having to modify FAI itself.

    ,

    Gary Pendergast — Bebo, Betty, and Jaco

    Wait, wasn’t WordPress 5.4 just released?

    It absolutely was, and congratulations to everyone involved! Inspired by the fine work done to get another release out, I finally completed the last step of co-leading WordPress 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2 (Bebo, Betty, and Jaco, respectively).

    My study now has a bit more jazz in it. 🙂

    ,

    Robert Collins — Strength training from home

    For the last year I’ve been incrementally moving away from lifting static weights and towards body weight based exercises, or callisthenics. I’ve been doing this for a number of reasons, including better avoidance of injury (if I collapse, the entire stack is dynamic, if a bar held above my head drops on me, most of the weight is just dead weight – ouch), accessibility during travel – most hotel gyms are very poor, and functional relevance – I literally never need to put 100 kg on my back, but I do climb stairs, for instance.

    Covid-19 shutting down the gym where I train is a mild inconvenience for me as a result, because even though I don’t do it, I am able to do nearly all my workouts entirely from home. And I thought a post about this approach might be of interest to other folk newly separated from their training facilities.

    I’ve gotten most of my information from a few different youtube channels:

    There are many more channels out there, and I encourage you to go and look and read and find out what works for you. Those 5 are my greatest hits, if you will. I’ve bought the FitnessFAQs exercise programs to help me with my my training, and they are indeed very effective.

    While you don’t need a gymnasium, you do need some equipment, particularly if you can’t go and use a local park. Exactly what you need will depend on what you choose to do – for instance, doing dips on the edge of a chair can avoid needing any equipment, but doing them with some portable parallel bars can be much easier. Similarly, doing pull ups on the edge of a door frame is doable, but doing them with a pull-up bar is much nicer on your fingers.

    Depending on your existing strength you may not need bands, but I certainly did. Buying rings is optional – I love them, but they aren’t needed to have a good solid workout.

    I bought parallettes for working on the planche.undefined Parallel bars for dips and rows.undefined A pull-up bar for pull-ups and chin-ups, though with the rings you can add flys, rows, face-pulls, unstable push-ups and more. The rings. And a set of 3 bands that combine for 7 different support amounts.undefinedundefined

    In terms of routine, I do a upper/lower split, with 3 days on upper body, one day off, one day on lower, and the weekends off entirely. I was doing 2 days on lower body, but found I was over-training with Aikido later that same day.

    On upper body days I’ll do (roughly) chin ups or pull ups, push ups, rows, dips, hollow body and arch body holds, handstands and some grip work. Today, as I write this on Sunday evening, 2 days after my last training day on Friday, I can still feel my lats and biceps from training Friday afternoon. Zero issue keeping the intensity up.

    For lower body, I’ll do pistol squats, nordic drops, quad extensions, wall sits, single leg calf raises, bent leg calf raises. Again, zero issues hitting enough intensity to achieve growth / strength increases. The only issue at home is having a stable enough step to get a good heel drop for the calf raises.

    If you haven’t done bodyweight training at all before, when starting, don’t assume it will be easy – even if you’re a gym junkie, our bodies are surprisingly heavy, and there’s a lot of resistance just moving them around.

    Good luck, train well!

    OpenSTEM — Online Teaching

    The OpenSTEM® materials are ideally suited to online teaching. In these times of new challenges and requirements, there are a lot of technological possibilities. Schools and teachers are increasingly being asked to deliver material online to students. Our materials can assist with that process, especially for Humanities and Science subjects from Prep/Kindy/Foundation to Year 6. […]

    The post Online Teaching first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.

    Brendan Scott — Covid 19 Numbers – lag

    Recording some thoughts about Covid 19 numbers.

    Today’s figures

    The Government says:

    “As at 6.30am on 22 March 2020, there have been 1,098 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia”.

    The reference is https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers. However, that page is updated daily (ish), so don’t expect it to be the same if you check the reference.

    Estimating Lag

    If a person tests positive to the virus today, that means they were infected at some time in the past. So, what is the lag between infection and a positive test result?

    Incubation Lag – about 5 days

    When you are infected you don’t show symptoms immediately. Rather, there’s an incubation period before symptoms become apparent.  The time between being infected and developing symptoms varies from person to person, but most of the time a person shows symptoms after about 5 days (I recall seeing somewhere that 1 in a 1000 cases will develop symptoms after 14 days).

    Presentation Lag – about 2 days

    I think it’s fair to also assume that people are not presenting at testing immediately they become ill. It is probably taking them a couple of days from developing symptoms to actually get to the doctor – I read a story somewhere (have since lost the reference) about a young man who went to a party, then felt bad for days but didn’t go for a test until someone else from the party had returned a positive test.  Let’s assume there’s a mix of worried well and stoic types and call it 2 days from becoming symptomatic to seeking a test.

    Referral Lag – about a day

    Assuming that a GP is available straight away and recommends a test immediately, logistically there will still be most of a day taken up between deciding to see a doctor and having a test carried out.

    Testing lag – about 2 days

    The graph of infections “epi graph” today looks like this:

    200322_new-and-cumulative-covid-19-cases-in-australia-by-notification-date_1

    One thing you notice about the graph is that the new cases bars seem to increase for a couple of days, then decrease – so about 100 new cases in the last 24 hours, but almost 200 in the 24 hours before that. From the graph, the last 3 “dips” have been today (Sunday), last Thursday and last Sunday.  This seems to be happening every 3 to 4 days. I initially thought that the dips might mean fewer (or more) people presenting over weekends, but the period is inconsistent with that. I suspect, instead, that this actually means that testing is being batched.

    That would mean that neither the peaks nor troughs is representative of infection surges/retreats, but is simply reflecting when tests are being processed. This seems to be a 4 day cycle, so, on average it seems that it would be about 2 days between having the test conducted and receiving a result. So a confirmed case count published today is actually showing confirmed cases as at about 2 days earlier.

    Total lag

    From the date someone is infected to the time that they receive a positive confirmation is about:

    lag = time for symptoms to show+time to seek a test+referral time + time for the test to return a result

    So, the published figures on confirmed infections are probably lagging actual infections in the community by about 10 days (5+2+1+2).

    If there’s about a 10 day lag between infection and confirmation, then what a figure published today says is that about a week and a half ago there were about this many cases in the community.  So, the 22 March figure of 1098 infections is actually really a 12 March figure.

    What the lag means for Physical (ie Social) Distancing

    The main thing that the lag means is that if we were able to wave a magic wand today and stop all further infections, we would continue to record new infections for about 10 days (and the tail for longer). In practical terms, implementing physical distancing measures will not show any effect on new cases for about a week and a half. That’s because today there are infected people who are yet to be tested.

    The silver lining to that is that the physical distancing measures that have been gaining prominence since 15 March should start to show up in the daily case numbers from the middle of the coming week, possibly offset by overseas entrants rushing to make the 20 March entry deadline.

    Estimating Actual Infections as at Today

    How many people are infected, but unconfirmed as at today? To estimate actual infections you’d need to have some idea of the rate at which infections are increasing. For example, if infections increased by 10% per day for 10 days, then you’d multiply the most recent figure by 1.1 raised to the power of 10 (ie about 2.5).  Unfortunately, the daily rate of increase (see table on the wiki page) has varied a fair bit (from 20% to 27%) over the most recent 10 days of data (that is, over the 10 days prior to 12 March, since the 22 March figures roughly correspond to 12 March infections) and there’s no guarantee that since that time the daily increase in infections will have remained stable, particularly in light of the implementation of physical distancing measures. At 23.5% per day, the factor is about 8.

    There aren’t any reliable figures we can use to estimate the rate of infection during the current lag period (ie from 12 March to 22 March). This is because the vast majority of cases have not been from unexplained community transmission. Most of the cases are from people who have been overseas in the previous fortnight and they’re the cohort that has been most significantly impacted by recent physical distancing measures. From 15 March, they have been required to self isolate and from 20 March most of their entry into the country has stopped.  So I’d expect a surge in numbers up to about 30 March – ie reflecting infections in the cohort of people rushing to get into the country before the borders closed followed by a flattening. With the lag factor above, you’ll need to wait until 1 April or thereabouts to know for sure.

    Note:

    This post is just about accounting for the time lag between becoming infected and receiving a positive test result. It assumes, for example, that everyone who is infected seeks a test, and that everyone who is infected and seeks a test is, in fact, tested. As at today, neither of these things is true.

    ,

    Clinton Roy — lca2020 ReWatch 2020-02-02

    As I was an organiser of the conference this year, I didn’t get to see many talks, fortunately many of the talks were recorded, so i get to watch the conference well after the fact.

    Conference Opening

    That white balance on the lectern slides is indeed bad, I really should get around to adding this as a suggestion on the logos documentation. (With some help, I put up all the lectern covers, it was therapeutic and rush free).

    I actually think there was a lot of information in this introduction. Perhaps too much?

    OpenZFS and Linux

    A nice update on where zfs is these days.

    Dev/Ops relationships, status: It’s Complicated

    A bit of  a war story about production systems, leading to a moment of empathy.

    Samba 2020: Why are we still in the 1980s for authentication?

    There are a lot of old security standards that are showing there age, there are a lot of modern security standards, but which to choose?

    Tyranny of the Clock

    A very interesting problem solving adventure, with a few nuggets of interesting information about tools and techniques.

    Configuration Is (riskier than?) Code

    Because configuration files are parsed by a program, and the program changes how it runs depending on the contents of that configuration file, every program that parses configuration files is basically an interpreter, and thus every configuration file is basically a program. So, configuation is code, and we should be treating configuration like we do code, e.g. revision control, commenting, testing, review.

    Easy Geo-Redundant Handover + Failover with MARS + systemd

    Using a local process organiser to handle a cluster, interesting, not something I’d really promote. Not the best video cutting in this video, lots of time with the speaker pointing to his slides offscreen.

     

    ,

    Robert Collins — 2019 in the rearview

    2019 was a very busy year for us. I hadn’t realised how busy it was until I sat down to write this post. There’s also some moderately heavy stuff in here – if you have topics that trigger you, perhaps make sure you have spoons before reading.

    We had all the usual stuff. Movies – my top two were Alita and Abominable though the Laundromat and Ford v Ferrari were both excellent and moving pieces. I introduced Cynthia to Teppanyaki and she fell in love with having egg roll thrown at her face hole.

    When Cynthia started school we dropped gymnastics due to the time overload – we wanted some downtime for her to process after school, and with violin having started that year she was just looking so tired after a full day of school we felt it was best not to have anything on. Then last year we added in a specific learning tutor to help with the things that she approaches differently to the other kids in her class, giving 2 days a week of extra curricular activity after we moved swimming to the weekends.

    At the end of last year she was finally chipper and with it most days after school, and she had been begging to get into more stuff, so we all got together and negotiated drama class and Aikido.

    The drama school we picked, HSPA, is pretty amazing. Cynthia adored her first teacher there, and while upset at a change when they rearranged classes slightly, is again fully engaged and thrilled with her time there. Part of the class is putting on a full scale production – they did a version of the Happy Prince near the end of term 3 – and every student gets a part, with the ability for the older students to audition for more parts. On the other hand she tells me tonight that she wants to quit. So shrug, who knows :).

    I last did martial arts when I took Aikido with sensei Darren Friend at Aikido Yoshinkai NSW back in Sydney, in the late 2000’s. And there was quite a bit less of me then. Cynthia had been begging to take a martial art for about 4 years, and we’d said that when she was old enough, we’d sign her up, so this year we both signed up for Aikido at the Rangiora Aikido Dojo. The Rangiora dojo is part of the NZ organisation Aikido Shinryukan which is part of the larger Aikikai style, which is quite different, yet the same, as the Yoshinkai Aikido that I had been learning. There have been quite a few moments where I have had to go back to something core – such as my stance – and unlearn it, to learn the Aikikai technique. Cynthia has found the group learning dynamic a bit challenging – she finds the explanations – needed when there are twenty kids of a range of ages and a range of experience – from new intakes each term through to ones that have been doing it for 5 or so years – get boring, and I can see her just switch off. Then she misses the actual new bit of information she didn’t have previously :(. Which then frustrates her. But she absolutely loves doing it, and she’s made a couple of friends there (everyone is positive and friendly, but there are some girls that like to play with her after the kids lesson). I have gotten over the body disconnect and awkwardness and things are starting to flow, I’m starting to be able to reason about things without just freezing in overload all the time, so that’s not bad after a year. However, the extra weight is making my forward rolls super super awkward. I can backward roll easily, with moderately good form; forward rolls though my upper body strength is far from what’s needed to support my weight through the start of the roll – my arm just collapses – so I’m in a sort of limbo – if I get the moment just right I can just start the contact on the shoulder; but if I get the moment slightly wrong, it hurts quite badly. And since I don’t want large scale injuries, doing the higher rolls is very unnerving for me. I suspect its 90% psychological, but am not sure how to get from where I am to having confidence in my technique, other than rinse-and-repeat. My hip isn’t affecting training much, and sensei Chris seems to genuinely like training with Cynthia and I, which is very nice: we feel welcomed and included in the community.

    Speaking of my hip – earlier this year something ripped cartilage in my right hip – ended up having to have an MRI scan – and those machines sound exactly like a dot matrix printer – to diagnose it. Interestingly, having the MRI improved my symptoms, but we are sadly in hurry-up-and-wait mode. Before the MRI, I’d wake up at night with some soreness, and my right knee bent, foot on the bed, then sleepily let my leg collapse sideways to the right – and suddenly be awake in screaming agony as the joint opened up with every nerve at its disposal. When the MRI was done, they pumped the joint full of local anaesthetic for two purposes – one is to get a clean read on the joint, and the second is so that they can distinguish between referred surrounding pain, vs pain from the joint itself. It is to be expected with a joint issue that the local will make things feel better (duh), for up to a day or so while the local dissipates. The expression on the specialists face when I told him that I had had a permanent improvement trackable to the MRI date was priceless. Now, when I wake up with joint pain, and my leg sleepily falls back to the side, its only mildly uncomfortable, and I readjust without being brought to screaming awakeness. Similarly, early in Aikido training many activities would trigger pain, and now there’s only a couple of things that do. In another 12 or so months if the joint hasn’t fully healed, I’ll need to investigate options such as stem cells (which the specialist was negative about) or steroids (which he was more negative about) or surgery (which he was even more negative about). My theory about the improvement is that the cartilage that was ripped was sitting badly and the inflation for the MRI allowed it to settle back into the appropriate place (and perhaps start healing better). I’m told that reducing inflammation systematically is a good option. Turmeric time.

    Sadly Cynthia has had some issues at school – she doesn’t fit the average mould and while wide spread bullying doesn’t seem to be a thing, there is enough of it, and she receives enough of it that its impacted her happiness more than a little – this blows up in school and at home as well. We’ve been trying a few things to improve this – helping her understand why folk behave badly, what to do in the moment (e.g. this video), but also that anything that goes beyond speech is assault and she needs to report that to us or teachers no matter what.

    We’ve also had some remarkably awful interactions with another family at the school. We thought we had a friendly relationship, but I managed to trigger a complete meltdown of the relationship – not by doing anything objectively wrong, but because we had (unknown to me) different folkways, and some perfectly routine and normal behaviour turned out to be stressful and upsetting to them, and then they didn’t discuss it with us at all until it had brewed up in their heads into a big mess… and its still not resolved (and may not ever be: they are avoiding us both).

    I weighed in at 110kg this morning. Jan the 4th 2019 I was 130.7kg. Feb 1 2018 I was 115.2kg. This year I peaked at 135.4kg, and got down to 108.7kg before Christmas food set in. That’s pretty happy making all things considered. Last year I was diagnosed with Coitus headaches and though I didn’t know it the medicine I was put on has a known side effect of weight gain. And it did – I had put it down to ongoing failure to manage my diet properly, but once my weight loss doctor gave me an alternative prescription for the headaches, I was able to start losing weight immediately. Sadly, though the weight gain through 2018 was effortless, losing the weight through 2019 was not. Doable, but not effortless. I saw a neurologist for the headaches when they recurred in 2019, and got a much more informative readout on them, how to treat and so on – basically the headaches can be thought of as an instability in the system, and the medicines goal is to stabilise things, and once stable for a decent period, we can attempt to remove the crutch. Often that’s successful, sometimes not, sometimes its successful on a second or third time. Sometimes you’re stuck with it forever. I’ve been eating a keto / LCHF diet – not super strict keto, though Jonie would like me to be on that, I don’t have the will power most of the time – there’s a local truck stop that sells killer hotdogs. And I simply adore them.

    I started this year working for one of the largest companies on the planet – VMware. I left there in February and wrote a separate post about that. I followed that job with nearly the polar opposite – a startup working on a blockchain content distribution system. I wrote about that too. Changing jobs is hard in lots of ways – for instance I usually make friendships at my jobs, and those suffer some when you disappear to a new context – not everyone makes connections with you outside of the job context. Then there’s the somewhat non-rational emotional impact of not being in paid employment. The puritans have a lot to answer for. I’m there again, looking for work (and hey, if you’re going to be at Linux.conf.au (Gold Coast Australia January 13-17) I’ll be giving a presentation about some of the interesting things I got up to in the last job interregnum I had.

    My feet have been giving me trouble for a couple of years now. My podiatrist is reasonably happy with my progress – and I can certainly walk further than I could – I even did some running earlier in the year, until I got shin splints. However, I seem to have hyper sensitive soles, so she can’t correct my pro-nation until we fix that, which at least for now means a 5 minute session where I touch my feet, someone else does, then something smooth then something rough – called “sensory massage”.

    In 2017 and 2018 I injured myself at the gym, and in 2019 I wanted to avoid that, so I sought out ways to reduce injury. Moving away from machines was a big part of that; more focus on technique another part. But perhaps the largest part was moving from lifting dead weight to focusing on body weight exercises – callisthenics. This shifts from a dead weight to control when things go wrong, to an active weight, which can help deal with whatever has happened. So far at least, this has been pretty successful – although I’ve had minor issues – I managed to inflame the fatty pad the olecranon displaces when your elbow locks out – I’m nearly entirely transitioned to a weights-free program – hand stands, pistol squats, push ups, dead hangs and so on. My upper body strength needs to come along some before we can really go places though… and we’re probably going to max out the hamstring curl machine (at least for regular two-leg curls) before my core is strong enough to do a Nordic drop.

    Lynne has been worried about injuring herself with weight lifting at the gym for some time now, but recently saw my physio – Ben Cameron at Pegasus PhysioSouth – who is excellent, and he suggested that she could have less chronic back pain if she took weights back up again. She’s recently told me that I’m allowed one ‘told you so’ about this, since she found herself in a spot where previously she would have put herself in a poor lifting position, but the weight training gave her a better option and she intuitively used it, avoiding pain. So that’s a good thing – complicated because of her bodies complicated history, but an excellent trainer and physio team are making progress.

    Earlier this year she had a hell of a fright, with a regular eye checkup getting referred into a ‘you are going blind; maybe tomorrow, maybe within 10 years’ nightmare scenario. Fortunately a second opinion got a specialist who probably knows the same amount but was willing to communicate it with actual words… Lynne has a condition which diabetes (type I or II) can affect, and she has a vein that can alter state somewhat arbitrarily but will probably only degrade slowly, particularly if Lynne’s diet is managed as she has been doing.

    Diet wise, Lynne also has been losing some weight but this is complicated by her chronic idiopathic pancreatitis. That’s code for ‘it keeps happening and we don’t know why’ pancreatitis. We’ve consulted a specialist in the North Island who comes highly recommended by Lynne’s GP, who said that rapid weight loss is a little known but possible cause of pancreatitis – and that fits the timelines involved. So Lynne needs to lose weight to manage the onset of type II diabetes. But not to fast, to avoid pancreatitis, which will hasten the onset of type II diabetes. Aiee. Slow but steady – she’s working with the same doctor I am for that, and a similar diet, though lower on the fats as she has no gall… bladder.

    In April our kitchen waste pipe started chronically blocking, and investigation with a drain robot revealed a slump in the pipe. Ground penetrating radar reveal an anomaly under the garage… and this escalated. We’re going to have to move out of the house for a week while half the house’s carpets are lifted, grout is pumped into the foundations to tighten it all back up again – and hopefully they don’t over pump it – and then it all gets replaced. Oh, and it looks like the drive will be replaced again, to fix the slumped pipe permanently. It will be lovely when done but right now we’re facing a wall of disruption and argh.

    Around September I think, we managed to have a gas poisoning scare – our gas hob was left on and triggered a fireball which fortunately only scared Lynne rather than flambéing her face. We did however not know how much exposure we’d had to the LPG, nor to partially combusted gas – which produces toxic CO as a by-product, so there was a trip into the hospital for observation with Cynthia, with Lynne opting out. Lynne and Cynthia had had plenty of the basic symptoms – headaches, dizziness and so on at the the time, but after waiting for 2 hours in the ER queue that had faded. Le sigh. The hospital, bless their cotton socks don’t have the necessary equipment to diagnose CO poisoning without a pretty invasive blood test, but still took Cynthia’s vitals using methods (manual observation and a infra-red reader) that are confounded by the carboxyhemoglobin that forms from the CO that has been inhaled. Pretty unimpressed – our GP was livid. (This is one recommended protocol). Oh, and our gas hob when we got checked out – as we were not sure if we had left it on, or it had been misbehaving, turned out to have never been safe, got decertified and the pipe cut at the regulator. So we’re cooking on a portable induction hob for now.

    When we moved to Rangiora I was travelling a lot more, Christchurch itself had poorer air quality than Rangiora, and our financial base was a lot smaller. Now, Rangiora’s population has gone up nearly double (13k to 19k conservatively – and that’s ignoring the surrounds that use Rangiora as a base), we have more to work with, the air situation in Christchurch has improved massively, and even a busy years travel is less than I was doing before Cynthia came along. We’re looking at moving – we’re not sure where yet; maybe more country, maybe more city.

    One lovely bright spot over the last few years has been reconnecting with friends from school, largely on Facebook – some of whom I had forgotten that I knew back at school – I had a little clique but was not very aware of the wider school population in hindsight (this was more than a little embarrassing to me, as I didn’t want to blurt out “who are you?!”) – and others whom I had not :). Some of these reconnections are just light touch person-X exists and cares somewhat – and that’s cool. One in particular has grown into a deeper friendship than we had back as schoolkids, and I am happy and grateful that that has happened.

    Our cats are fat and happy. Well mostly. Baggy is fat and stressed and spraying his displeasure everywhere whenever the stress gets too much :(. Cynthia calls him Mr Widdlepants. The rest of the time he cuddles and purrs and is generally happy with life. Dibbler and Kitten-of-the-wild are relatively fine with everything.

    Cynthia’s violin is coming along well. She did a small performance for her classroom (with her teacher) and wowed them. I’ve been inspired to start practising trumpet again. After 27 years of decay my skills are decidedly rusty, but they are coming along. Finding arrangements for violin + trumpet is a bit challenging, and my sight-reading-with-transposition struggles to cope, but we make do. Lynne is muttering about getting a clarinet or drum-kit and joining in.

    So, 2019. Whew. I hope yours was less stressful and had as many or more bright points than ours. Onwards to 2020.

    ,

    BlueHackers — BlueHackers crowd-funding free psychology services at LCA and other conferences

    BlueHackers has in the past arranged for a free counsellor/psychologist at several conferences (LCA, OSDC). Given the popularity and great reception of this service, we want to make this a regular thing and try to get this service available at every conference possible – well, at least Australian open source and related events.

    Right now we’re trying to arrange for the service to be available at LCA2020 at the Gold Coast, we have excellent local psychologists already, and the LCA organisers are working on some of the logistical aspects.

    Meanwhile, we need to get the funds organised. Fortunately this has never been a problem with BlueHackers, people know this is important stuff. We can make a real difference.

    Unfortunately BlueHackers hasn’t yet completed its transition from OSDClub project to Linux Australia subcommittee, so this fundraiser is running in my personal name. Well, you know who I (Arjen) am, so I hope you’re ok all with that.

    We have a little over a week until LCA2020 starts, let’s make this happen! Thanks. You can donate via MyCause.

    The post BlueHackers crowd-funding free psychology services at LCA and other conferences first appeared on BlueHackers.org.

    ,

    Robert Collins — A Cachecash retrospective

    In June 2019 I started a new role as a software engineer at a startup called Cachecash. Today is probably the last day of payroll there, and as is my usual practice, I’m going to reflect back on my time there. Less commonly, I’m going to do so in public, as we’re about to open the code (yay), and its not a mega-corporation with everything shuttered up (also yay).

    Framing

    This is intended to be a blameless reflection on what has transpired. Blameless doesn’t mean inaccurate; but it means placing the focus on the process and system, not on the particular actor that happened to be wearing the hat at the time a particular event happened. Sometimes the system is defined by the actors, and in that case – well, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions if you encounter that case.

    A retrospective that we can’t learn from is useless. Worse than useless, because it takes time to write and time to read and that time is lost to us forever. So if a thing is a particular way, it is going to get said. Not to be mean, but because false niceness will waste everyone’s time. Mine and my ex-colleagues whose time I respect. And yours, if you are still reading this.

    What was Cachecash

    Cachecash was a startup – still is in a very technical sense, corporation law being what it is. But it is still a couple of code bases – and a nascent open source project (which will hopefully continue) – built to operationalise and productise this research paper that the Cachecash founders wrote.

    What it isn’t anymore is a company investing significant amounts of time and money in the form of engineering in making code, to make those code bases better.

    Cachecash was also a team of people. That obviously changed over time, but at the time I write this it is:

    • Ghada
    • Justin
    • Kevin
    • Marcus
    • Petar
    • Robert
    • Scott

    And we’re all pretty fantastic, if you ask me :).

    Technical overview

    The CAPNet paper that I linked above doesn’t describe a product. What it describes is a system that permits paying caches (think squid/varnish etc) for transmitting content to clients, while also detecting attempts by such caches to claim payment when they haven’t transmitted, or attempting to collude with a client to pretend to overtransmit and get paid that way. A classic incentives-aligned scheme.

    Note that there is no blockchain involved at this layer.

    The blockchain was added into this core system as a way to build a federated marketplace – the idea was that the blockchain provided a suitable substrate for negotiating the purchase and sale of contracts that would be audited using the CAPNet accounting system, the payments could be micropayments back onto the blockchain, and so on – we’d avoid the regular financial system, and we wouldn’t be building a fragile central system that would prevent other companies also participating.

    Miners would mine coins, publishers would buy coins then place them in escrow as a promise to pay caches to deliver content to clients, and a client would deliver proof of delivery back to the cache which would then claim payment from the publisher.

    Technical Challenges

    There were a few things that turned up as significant issues. In no particular order:

    The protocol

    The protocol itself adds additional round trips to multiple peers – in its ‘normal’ configuration the client ends up running (web- for browers) GRPC connections to 5 endpoints (with all the normal windowing concerns, but potentially over QUIC), and then gets chunks of content in batches (concurrently) from 4 of the peers, runs a small crypto brute force operation on the combined result, and then moves onto the next group of content. This should be sounding suspiciously like TCP – it is basically a window management problem, and it has exactly the same performance management problems – fast start, maximum window size, how far to reduce it when problems are suffered. But accentuated: those 4 cache peers can all suffer their own independent noise problems, or be hostile. But also, they can also suffer correlated problems: they might all be in the same datacentre, or be all run by a hostile actor, or the client might be on a hostile WiFi link, or the client’s OS/browser might be hostile. Lets just say that there is a long, rich road for optimising this new protocol to make it fast, robust, reliable. Much as we have taken many years to make HTTP into QUIC, drawing upon techniques like forward error correction rather than retries – similar techniques will need to be applied to give this protocol similar performance characteristics. And evolving the protocol while maintaining the security properties is a complicated task, with three actors involved, who may collude in various ways.

    An early performance analysis I did on the go code implementation showed that the brute forcing work was a bottleneck because while the time (once optimise) per second was entirely modest for any small amount of data, the delay added per window element acts as a brake on performance for high capacity low latency links. For a 1Gbps 25ms RTT link I estimated a need for 8 cores doing crypto brute forcing on the client.

    JS

    Cachecash is essentially implementing a new network protocol. There are some great hooks these days in browsers, and one can hook in and provide streams to things like video players to let them get one segment of video. However, for downloading an entire file – for instance, if one is downloading a full video, it is not so easy. This bug, open for 2 years now, is the standards based way to do it. Even so non-standards based way to do it involves buffering the entire content in memory, oh and reflecting everything through a static github service worker. (You of course host such a static page yourself, but then the whole idea of this federated distributed system breaks down a little).

    Our initial JS implementation was getting under 512KBps with all-local servers – part of that was the bandwidth delay product issue mentioned above. Moving to getting chunks of content from each cache concurrently using futures improved that up to 512KBps, but thats still shocking for a system we want to be able to compete with the likes of Youtube, Cloudflare and Akamai.

    One of the hot spots turned out to be calculating SHA-256 values – the CAPNet algorithm calculates thousands (it’s tunable, but 8k in the set I was analysing) of independent SHA’s per chunk of received data. This is a problem – in browser SHA routines, even the recent native hosted ones – are slow per SHA. They are not slow per byte. Most folk want to make a small number of SHA calculations. Maybe thousands in total. Not tens of thousands per MB of data received….. So we wrote an implementation of the core crypto routines in Rust WASM, which took our performance locally up to 2MBps in Firefox and 6MBps in Chromium.

    It is also possible we’d show up as crypto-JS at that point and be blacklisted as malware!

    Blockchain

    Having chosen to involve a block chain in the stack we had to deal with that complexity. We chose to take bitcoin’s good bits and run with those rather than either running a sidechain, trying to fit new transaction types into bitcoin itself, or trying to shoehorn our particular model into e.g. Ethereum. This turned out to be a fairly large amount of work : not the core chain itself – cloning the parts of bitcoin that we wanted was very quick. But then layering on the changes that we needed, to start dealing with escrows and negotiating parameters between components and so forth. And some of the operational challenges below turned up here as well even just in developer test setups (in particular endpoint discovery).

    Operational Challenges

    The operational model was pretty interesting. The basic idea was that eventually there would be this big distributed system, a bit-coin like set of miners etc, and we’d be one actor in that ecosystem running some subset of the components, but that until then we’d be running:

    • A centralised ledger
    • Centralised random number generation for the micropayment system
    • Centralised deployment and operations for the cache fleet
    • Software update / vetting for the publisher fleet
    • Software update / publishing for the JS library
    • Some number of seed caches
    • Demo publishers to show things worked
    • Metrics, traces, chain explorer, centralised logging

    We had most of this live and running in some fashion for most of the time I was there – we evolved it and improved it a number of times as we iterated on things. Where appropriate we chose open source components like Jaeger, Prometheus and Elasticsearch. We also added policy layers on top of them to provide rate limiting and anti-spoofing facilities. We deployed stuff in AWS, with EKS, and there were glitches and things to workaround but generally only a tiny amount of time went into that part of it. I think I spent a day on actual operations a month, or thereabouts.

    Other parties were then expected to bring along additional caches to expand the network, additional publishers to expand the content accessible via the network, and clients to use the network.

    Ensuring a process run by a third party is network reachable by a browser over HTTPS is a surprisingly non-simple problem. We partly simplified it by mandating that they run a docker container that we supplied, but there’s still the chance that they are running behind a firewall with asymmetric ingress. And after that we still need a domain name for their endpoint. You can give every cache a CNAME in a dedicated subdomain – say using their public key as the subdomain, so that only that cache can issue requests to update their endpoint information in DNS. It is all solvable, but doing it so that the amount of customer interaction and handholding is reduced to the bare minimum is important: a user with a fleet of 1000 machines doesn’t want to talk to us 1000 times, and we don’t want to talk to them either. But this was a another bit of this-isn’t-really-distributed-is-it grit in the distributed-ointment.

    Adoption Challenges

    ISPs with large fleets of machines are in principle happy to sell capacity on them in return for money – yay. But we have no revenue stream at the moment, so they aren’t really incentivised to put effort in, it becomes a matter of principle, not a fiscal “this is 10x better for my business” imperative. And right now, its 10x slower than HTTP. Or more.

    Content owners with large amounts of content being delivered without a CDN would like a radically cheaper CDN. Except – we’re not actually radically cheaper on a cost structure basis. Current CDN’s are expensive for their expensive 2nd and third generation products because no-one offers what they offer – seamless in-request edge computing. But that ISP that is contributing a cache to the fleet is going to want the cache paid for, and thats the same cost structure as existing CDNs – who often have a free entry tier. We might have been able to make our network cheaper eventually, but I’m just not sure about the radically cheaper bit.

    Content owners who would like a CDN marketplace where the CDN caches are competing with each other – driving costs down – rather than than the CDN operators competing – would absolutely love us. But I rather suspect that those owners want more sophisticated offerings. To be clear, I wasn’t on the customer development team, and didn’t get much in the way of customer development briefings. But things like edge computing workers, where completely custom code can run in the CDN network, adjacent to ones user, are much more powerful offerings than simple static content shipping offerings, and offered by all major CDN’s. These are trusted services – the CAPNet paper doesn’t solve the problem of running edge code and providing proof that it was run. Enarx might go some, or even a long way way to running such code in an untrusted context, but providing a proof that it was run – so that running it can become a mining or mining-like operation is a whole other question. Without such an answer, an edge computing network starts to depend on trusting the caches behaviour a lot more all over again – the network has no proof of execution to depend on.

    Rapid adjustment – load spikes – is another possible use case, but the use of the blockchain to negotiate escrows actually seemed to work against our ability to offer that. Akami define load spike in a time frame faster than many block chains can decide that a transaction has actually been accepted. Offchain transactions are of course a known thing in the block chain space but again that becomes additional engineering.

    Our use of a new network protocol – for all that it was layered on standard web technology – made it harder for potential content owners to adopt our technology. Rather than “we have 200 local proxies that will deliver content to your users, just generate a url of the form X.Y.Z”, our solution is “we do not trust the 200 local proxies that we have, so you need to run complicated JS in your browser/phone app etc” to verify that the proxies are actually doing their job. This is better in some ways – precisely because we don’t trust those proxies, but it also increases both the runtime cost of using the service, the integration cost adopting the service, and complexity of debugging issues receiving content via the service.

    What did we learn?

    It is said that “A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” What did we uncover in our search? What can we take away going forward?

    In principle we have a classic two sided market – people with excess capacity close to users want to sell it, and people with excess demand for their content want to buy delivery capacity.

    The baseline market is saturated. The market as a whole is on its third or perhaps fourth (depending on how you define things) major iteration of functionality.

    Content delivery purchasers are ok with trusting their suppliers : any supply chain fraud happening in this space at the moment is so small no-one is talking about it that I heard about.

    Some of the things we were doing don’t seem to have been important to the customers we talked to – I don’t have a great read on this, but in particular, the blockchain aspect seems to have been more important to our long term vision than to the 2-sided market place that we perceived. It would be fascinating to me to validate that somehow – would cache capacity suppliers be willing to trust us enough to sell capacity to us with just the auditing mechanism, without the blockchain? Would content providers be happy buying credit from us rather than from a neutral exchange?

    What did I learn?

    I think in hindsight my startup muscles were atrophied – it had been some years since Canonical and it took a few months to start really thinking lean-startup again on a personal basis. That’s ok, because I was hired to build systems. But its not great, because I can do better. So number one: think lean-startup and really step up to help with learning and validation.

    I levelled up my Go lang skills. That was really nice – Kevin has deep knowledge there, and though I’ve written Go before I didn’t have a good appreciation for style or aesthetics, or why. I do now. Where before I’d say ‘I’m happy to dive in but its not a language I feel I really know’, I am now happy to say that I know Go. More to learn – there always is – but in a good place.

    I did a similar thing to my JS skills, but not to the same degree. Having climbed fairly deeply into the JS client – which is written in Typescript, converted its bundling system to webpack to work better with Rust-WASM, and so on. Its still not my go-to place, but I’m much more comfortable there now.

    And of course playing with Rust-WASM was pure delight. Markus and I are both Rust afficionados, and having a genuine reason to write some Rust code for work was just delightful. Finding this bug was just a bonus :).

    It was also really really nice being back in a truely individual contributor role for a while. I really enjoyed being able to just fix bugs and get on with things while I got my bearings. I’ve ended up doing a bit more leadership – refining of requirements, translating between idea-and-specification and the like recently, but still about 80% of time has been able to be sit-down-and-code, and that really is a pleasant holiday.

    What am I going to change?

    I’m certainly going to get a new job :). If you’re hiring, hit me up. (If you don’t have my details already, linkedin is probably best).

    I’m think there the core thing I need to do is more alignment of the day to day work I’m doing with needs of customer development : I don’t want to take on or take over the customer development role – that will often be done best in person with a customer for startups, and I’m happy remote – but the more I can connect what I’m trying to achieve with what will get the customers to pay us, the more successful any business I’m working in will be. This may be a case for non-vanity metrics, or talking more with the customer-development team, or – well, I don’t know exactly what it will look like until I see the context I end up in, but I think more connection will be important.

    And I think the second major thing is to find a better balance between individual contribution and leadership. I love individual contribution, it is perhaps the least stressful and most Zen place to be. But it is also the least effective unless the project has exactly one team member. My most impactful and successful roles have been leadership roles, but the pure leadership role with no individual contribution slowly killed me inside. Pure individual contribution has been like I imagine crack to be, and perhaps just as toxic in the long term.

    ,

    Robert Collins — Rust and distributions

    Daniel wrote a lovely blog post about Rust’s ability to be included in distributions, both as a language that you can get via the distribution, and as the language that components of the distribution are being written in.

    I think this is a great goal to raise and I have just a few thoughts and quibbles. First I want to acknowledge and agree with him on the Rust community, its so very nice, and he is doing a great thing as rustup lead; I wish I had more time to put in, I have more things I want to contribute to rustup. I’ll try to get back to the meetings soon.

    On trust

    I completely agree about the need for the crates index improvement : without those we cannot have a mirror network, and thats a significant issue for offline users and slow-region users.

    On curlsh though

    It isn’t the worst possible thing, for all that its “untrusted bootstrapping”, the actual thing downloaded is https secured etc, and so is the rustup binary itself. Put another way, I think the horror is more perceptual than analyzed risk. Someone that trusts Verisign etc enough to download the Debian installer enough over it, has exactly the same risk as someone trusting Verisign enough to download rustup at that point in time.

    Cross signing curlsh that with per-distro keys or something seems pretty ridiculous to me, since the root of trust is still that first download; unless you’re wandering up to someone who has bootstrapped their compiler by hand (to avoid reflections-on-trust attacks), to get an installer, to build a system, to then do reproducible builds, to check that other systems are actually safe… aieeee.

    I think its easier to package the curl|sh shell script in Debian itself perhaps? apt install get-rustup; then if / when rustup becomes packaged the user instructions don’t change but the root of trust would, as get-rustup would be updated to not download rustup, but to trigger a different package install, and so forth.

    I don’t think its desirable though, to have distribution forks of the contents that rustup manages – Debian+Redhat+Suse+… builds of nightly rust with all the things failing or not, and so on – I don’t see who that would help. And if we don’t have that then the root of trust would still not be shifted under the GPG keychain – it would still be the HTTPS infrastructure for downloading rust toolchains + the integrity of the rustup toolchain builds themselves. Making rustup, which currently shares that trust, have a different trust root, seems pointless.

    On duplication of dependencies

    I think Debian needs to become more inclusive here, not Rustup. Debian has spent; pauses, counts, yes, DECADES, rejecting multiple entire ecosystems because of a prejuidiced view about what the Right Way to manage dependencies is. And they are not right in a universal sense. They were right in an engineering sense: given constraints (builds are expensive, bandwidth is expensive, disk is expensive), they are right. But those are not universal constraints, and seeking to impose those constraints on Java and Node – its been an unmitigated disaster. It hasn’t made those upstreams better, or more secure, or systematically fixed problems for users. I have another post on this so rather than repeating I’m going to stop here :).

    I think Rust has – like those languages – made the crucial, maintainer and engineering efficiency important choice to embrace enabling incremental change across libraries, with the consequence that dependencies don’t shift atomically, and sure, this is basically incompatible with Debian packaging world view which says that point and patch releases of libraries are not distinct packages, and thus the shared libs for these things all coexist in the same file on disk. Boom! Crash!

    I assert that it is entirely possible to come up with a reasonable design for managing a respository of software that doesn’t make this conflation, would allow actual point and patch releases of exist as they are for the languages that have this characteristic, and be amenable to automation, auditing and reporting for security issues. E.g. Modernise Debian to cope with this fundamentally different language design decision… which would make Java and Node and Rust work so very much better.

    Alternatively, if Debian doesn’t want to make it possible to natively support languages that have made this choice, Debian could:

    • ship static-but-for-system-libs builds
    • not include things written in rust
    • ask things written in rust to converge their dependencies again and again and again (and only update them when the transitive dependencies across the entire distro have converged)

    I have a horrible suspicion about which Debian will choose to do :(. The blinkers / echo chamber are so very strong in that community.

    For Windows

    We got to parity with Linux for IO for non-McAfee users, but I guess there are a lot of them out there; we probably need to keep pushing on tweaking it until it work better for them too; perhaps autodetect McAfee and switch to minimal? I agree that making Windows users – like I am these days – feel tier one, would be nice :). Maybe a survey of user experience would be a good starting point.

    Shared libraries

    Perhaps generating versioned symbols automatically and building many versions of the crate and then munging them together? But I’d also like to point here again that the whole focus on shared libraries is a bit of a distribution blind spot, and looking at the vast amount of distribution of software occuring in app stores and their model, suggests different ways of dealing with these things. See also the fairly specific suggestion I make about the packaging system in Debian that is the root of the problem in my entirely humble view.

    Bonus

    John Goerzen posted an entirely different thing recently, but in it he discusses programs that don’t properly honour terminfo. Sadly I happen to know that large chunks of the Rust ecosystem assume that everything is ANSI these days, and it certainly sounds like, at least for John, that isn’t true. So thats another way in which Rust could be more inclusive – use these things that have been built, rather than being modern and new age and reinventing the 95% match.

    ,

    Tim Serong — Network Maintenance

    To my intense amazement, it seems that NBN Co have finally done sufficient capacity expansion on our local fixed wireless tower to actually resolve the evening congestion issues we’ve been having for the past couple of years. Where previously we’d been getting 22-23Mbps during the day and more like 2-3Mbps (or worse) during the evenings, we’re now back to 22-23Mbps all the time, and the status lights on the NTD remain a pleasing green, rather than alternating between green and amber. This is how things were way back at the start, six years ago.

    We received an email from iiNet in early July advising us of the pending improvements. It said:

    Your NBN™ Wireless service offers maximum internet speeds of 25Mbps downland and 5Mbps upload.

    NBN Co have identified that your service is connected to a Wireless cell that is currently experiencing congestion, with estimated typical evening speeds of 3~6 Mbps. This congestion means that activities like browsing, streaming or gaming might have been and could continue to be slower than promised, especially when multiple people or devices are using the internet at the same time.

    NBN Co estimates that capacity upgrades to improve the speed congestion will be completed by Dec-19.

    At the time we were given the option of moving to a lower speed plan with a $10 refund because we weren’t getting the advertised speed, or to wait it out on our current plan. We chose the latter, because if we’d downgraded, that would have reduced our speed during the day, when everything was otherwise fine.

    We did not receive any notification from iiNet of exactly when works would commence, nor was I ever able to find any indication of planned maintenance on iiNet’s status page. Instead, I’ve come to rely on notifications from my neighbour, who’s with activ8me. He receives helpful emails like this:

    This is a courtesy email from Activ8me, Letting you know NBN will be performing Fixed Wireless Network capacity work in your area that might affect your connectivity to the internet. This activity is critical to the maintenance and optimisation of the network. The approximate dates of this maintenance/upgrade work will be:

    Impacted location: Neika, TAS & Downstream Sites & Upstream Sites
    NBN estimates interruption 1 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 24/09/19 7:00AM End: 24/09/19 8:00PM
    NBN estimates interruption 2 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 25/09/19 7:00AM End: 25/09/19 8:00PM
    NBN estimates interruption 3 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 01/10/19 7:00AM End: 01/10/19 8:00PM
    NBN estimates interruption 4 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 02/10/19 7:00AM End: 02/10/19 8:00PM
    NBN estimates interruption 5 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 03/10/19 7:00AM End: 03/10/19 8:00PM
    NBN estimates interruption 6 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 04/10/19 7:00AM End: 04/10/19 8:00PM
    NBN estimates interruption 7 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 05/10/19 7:00AM End: 05/10/19 8:00PM
    NBN estimates interruption 8 (Listed Below) will occur between:
    Start: 06/10/19 7:00AM End: 06/10/19 8:00PM

    Change start
    24/09/2019 07:00 Australian Eastern Standard Time

    Change end
    06/10/2019 20:00 Australian Eastern Daylight Time

    This is expected to improve your service with us however, occasional loss of internet connectivity may be experienced during the maintenance/upgrade work.
    Please note that the upgrades are performed by NBN Co and Activ8me has no control over them.
    Thank you for your understanding in this matter, and your patience for if it does affect your service. We appreciate it.

    The astute observer will note that this is pretty close to two weeks of scheduled maintenance. Sure enough, my neighbour and I (and presumably everyone else in the area) enjoyed major outages almost every weekday during that period, which is not ideal when you work from home. But, like I said at the start, they did finally get the job done.

    Interestingly, according to activ8me, there is yet more NBN maintenance scheduled from 21 October 07:00 ’til 27 October 21:00, then again from 28 October 07:00 ’til 3 November 21:00 (i.e. another two whole weeks). The only scheduled upgrade I could find listed on iiNet’s status page is CM-177373, starting “in 13 days” with a duration of 6 hours, so possibly not the same thing.

    Based on the above, I am convinced that there is some problem with iiNet’s status page not correctly reporting NBN incidents, but of course I have no idea whether this is NBN Co not telling iiNet, iiNet not listening to NBN Co, or if it’s just that the status web page is busted.

    ,

    Robert Collins — Want me to work with you?

    Reach out to me – I’m currently looking for something interesting to do. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbtcollins/ and https://twitter.com/rbtcollins are good ways to grab me if you don’t already have my details.

    Should you reach out to me? Maybe :). First, a little retrospective.

    Three years ago, I wrote the following when reflecting on what I wanted to be doing:

    Priorities (roughly ordered most to least important):

    • Keep living in Rangiora (family)
    • Up to moderate travel requirements – 4 trips a year + LCA/PyCon
    • Significant autonomy (not at the expense of doing the right thing for the company, just I work best with the illusion of free will 🙂 )
    • Be doing something that matters
      • -> Being open source is one way to this, but not the only one
    • Something cutting edge would be awesome
      • -> Rust / Haskell / High performance requirements / scale / ….
    • Salary

    How well did that work for me? Pretty good. I had a good satisfying job at VMware for 3 years, met some wonderful people, achieved some very cool things. And those priorities above were broadly achieved.
    The one niggle that stands out was this – Did the things we were doing matter? Certainly there was no social impact – VMware isn’t a non-profit, being right at the core of capitalism as it is. There was direct connection and impact with the team, the staff we worked with and the users of the products… but it is just a bit hard to feel really connected through that though: VMware is a very large company and there are many layers between users and developers.

    We were quite early adopters of Kubernetes, which allowed me to deepen my Go knowledge and experience some more fun with AWS scale operations. I had many interesting discussions about the relative strengths of Python Go and Rust and Java with colleagues there. (Hi Geoffrey).

    Company culture is very important to me, and VMware has a fantastically supportive culture. One of the most supportive companies I’ve been in, bar none. It isn’t a truely remote-organised company though: rather its a bunch of offices that talk to each other, which I think is sad. True remote-first offers so much more engagement.

    I enjoy building things to solve problems. I’ve either directly built, or shaped what is built, in all my most impactful and successful roles. Solving a problem once by hand is fine; solving it for years to come by creating a tool is far more powerful.

    I seem to veer into toolmaking very often: giving other people the ability to solve their problems takes the power of a tool and multiplies it even further.

    It should be no surprise then that I very much enjoy reading white papers like the original Dapper and Map-reduce ones, LinkedIn’s Kafka or for more recent fodder the Facebook Akkio paper. Excellent synthesis and toolmaking applied at industrial scale. I read those things and I want to be a part of the creation of those sorts of systems.

    I was fortunate enough to take some time to go back to university part-time, which though logistically challenging is something I want to see through.

    Thus I think my new roughly ordered (descending) list of priorities needs to be something like this:

    • Keep living in Rangiora (family)
    • Up to moderate travel requirements – 4 team-meeting trips a year + 2 conferences
    • Significant autonomy (not at the expense of doing the right thing for the company, just I work best with the illusion of free will 🙂 )
    • Be doing something that matters
      • Be working directly on a problem / system that has problems
    • Something cutting edge would be awesome
      • Rust / Haskell / High performance requirements / scale / ….
    • A generative (Westrum definition) + supportive company culture
    • Remote-first or at least very remote familiar environment
    • Support my part time study / self improvement initiative
    • Salary

    ,

    Clinton Roy — Restricted Sleep Regime

    Since moving down to Melbourne my poor sleep has started up again. It’s really hard to say what the main factor driving this is. My doctor down here has put me onto a drug free way of trying to improve my sleep, and I think I kind of like it, while it’s no silver bullet, it is something I can go back to if I’m having trouble with my sleep, without having to get a prescription.

    The basic idea is to maximise sleep efficiency. If you’re only getting n hours sleep a night, only spend n hours  a night in bed. This forces you to stay up and go to bed rather late for a few nights. Hopefully, being tired will help you sleep through the night in one large segment. Once you’ve successfully slept through the night a few times, relax your bed time by say fifteen minutes, and get used to that. Slowly over time, you increase the amount of sleep you’re getting, while keeping your efficiency high.

    ,

    OpenSTEM — Election Activity Bundle

    With the upcoming federal election, many teachers want to do some related activities in class – and we have the materials ready for you! To make selecting suitable resources a bit easier, we have an Election Activity Bundle containing everything you need, available for just $9.90. Did you know that the secret ballot is an Australian […]

    The post Election Activity Bundle first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.

    ,

    Jonathan Adamczewski — Navigation Mesh and Sunset Overdrive

    Navigation mesh encodes where in the game world an agent can stand, and where it can go. (here “agent” means bot, actor, enemy, NPC, etc)

    At runtime, the main thing navigation mesh is used for is to find paths between points using an algorithm like A*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

    In Insomniac’s engine, navigation mesh is made of triangles. Triangle edge midpoints define a connected graph for pathfinding purposes.

    In addition to triangles, we have off-mesh links (“Custom Nav Clues” in Insomniac parlance) that describe movement that isn’t across the ground. These are used to represent any kind of off-mesh connection – could be jumping over a car or railing, climbing up to a rooftop, climbing down a ladder, etc. Exactly what it means for a particular type of bot is handled by clue markup and game code.

    These links are placed by artists and designers in the game environment, and included in prefabs for commonly used bot-traversable objects in the world, like railings and cars.

    Navigation mesh makes a certain operations much, much simpler than it would be if done by trying to reason about render or physics geometry.

    Our game work is made up of a lot of small objects, which are each typically made from many triangles.

    Using render or physics geometry to answer the question “can this bot stand here” hundreds of times every frame is not scalable. (Sunset Overdrive had 33ms frames. That’s not a lot of time.)

    It’s much faster to ask: is there navigation mesh where this bot is

    Navigation mesh is relatively sparse and simple, so the question can be answered quickly. We pre-compute bounding volumes for navmesh, to make answering that question even faster, and if a bot was standing on navmesh last frame, it’s even less work to reason about where they are this frame.

    In addition to path-finding, navmesh can be useful to quickly and safely limit movement in a single direction. We sweep lines across navmesh to find boundaries to clamp bot movement. For example, a bot animating through a somersault will have its movement through the world clamped to the edge of navmesh, rather than rolling off into who-knows-what.

    (If you’re making a game where you want bots to be able to freely somersault in any direction, you can ignore the navmesh ðŸ˜�)

    Building navmesh requires a complete view of the static world. The generated mesh is only correct when it accounts for all objects: interactions between objects affect the generated mesh in ways that are not easy (or fast) to reason about independently.

    Intersecting objects can become obstructions to movement. Or they can form new surfaces that an agent can stand upon. You can’t really tell what it means to an agent until you mash it all together.

    To do as little work as possible at runtime, we required *all* of the static objects to be loaded at one time to pre-build mesh for Sunset City.

    We keep that pre-built navmesh loading during the game at all times. For the final version of the game (with both of the areas added via DLC) this required ~55MB memory.

    We use Recast https://github.com/recastnavigation/recastnavigation to generate the triangle mesh, and (mostly for historical reasons) repack this into our own custom format.

    Sunset Overdrive had two meshes: one for “normal” humanoid-sized bots (2m tall, 0.5m radius)

    and one for “large” bots (4.5m tall, 1.35m radius)

    Both meshes are generated as 16x16m tiles, and use a cell size of 0.125m when rasterizing collision geometry.

    There were a few tools used in Sunset Overdrive to add some sense of dynamism to the static environment:

    For pathfinding and bot-steering, we have runtime systems to control bot movement around dynamic obstacles.

    For custom nav clues, we keep track of whether they are in use, to make it less likely that multiple bots are jumping over the same thing at the same time. This can help fan-out groups of bots, forcing them to take distinctly different paths.

    Since Sunset Overdrive, we’ve added a dynamic obstruction system based on Detour https://github.com/recastnavigation/recastnavigation to temporarily cut holes in navmesh for larger impermanent obstacles like stopped cars or temporary structures.

    We also have a way to mark-up areas of navmesh so that they can be toggled in a controlled fashion from script. It’s less flexible than the dyanamic obstruction system – but it is very fast: toggling flags for tris rather than retriangulation.

    I spoke about Sunset Overdrive at the AI Summit a few years back – my slide deck is here:
    Sunset City Express: Improving the NavMesh Pipeline in Sunset Overdrive

    I can also highly recommend @AdamNoonchester‘s talk from GDC 2015:
    AI in the Awesomepocalypse – Creating the Enemies of Sunset Overdrive

    Here’s some navigation mesh, using the default in-engine debug draw (click for larger version)

    What are we looking at? This is a top-down orthographic view of a location in the middle of Sunset City.

    The different colors indicate different islands of navigation mesh – groups of triangles that are reachable from other islands via custom nav clues.
    Bright sections are where sections of navmesh overlap in the X-Z plane.

    There are multiple visualization modes for navmesh.

    Usually, this is displayed over some in-game geometry – it exists to debug/understand the data in game and editor. Depending on what the world looks like, some colors are easier to read than others. (click for larger versions)




    The second image shows the individual triangles – adjacent triangles do not reliably have different colors. And there is stable color selection as the camera moves, almost ðŸ˜�

    Also, if you squint, you can make out the 16x16m tile boundaries, so you can get a sense of scale.

    Here’s a map of the entirety of Sunset City:

    “The Mystery of the Mooil Rig” DLC area:

    “Dawn of the Rise of the Fallen Machine” DLC area:

    Referencing the comments from up-thread, these maps represent the places where agents can be. Additionally, there is connectivity information – we have visualization for that as well.

    This image has a few extra in-engine annotations, and some that I added:

    The purple lines represent custom nav clues – one line in each direction that is connected.

    Also marked are some railings with clues placed at regular intervals, a car with clues crisscrossing it, and moored boats with clues that allow enemies to chase the player.

    Also in this image are very faint lines on the mesh that show connectivity between triangles. When a bot is failing to navigate, it can be useful to visualize the connectivity that the mesh thinks it has :)

    The radio tower where the fight with Fizzie takes place:

    The roller coaster:

    The roller coaster tracks are one single, continuous and complete island of navmesh.

    Navigation mesh doesn’t line up neatly with collision geometry, or render geometry. To make it easier to see, we draw it offset +0.5m up in world-space, so that it’s likely to be above the geometry it has been generated for. (A while ago, I wrote a full-screen post effect that drew onto rendered geometry based on proximity to navmesh. I thought it was pretty cool, and it was nicely unambiguous & imho easier to read – but I never finished it, it bitrot, and I never got back to it alas.)

    Since shipping Sunset Overdrive, we added support for keeping smaller pieces of navmesh in memory – they’re now loaded in 128x128m parts, along with the rest of the open world.

    @despair‘s recent technical postmortem has a little more on how this works:
    ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man’: A Technical Postmortem

    Even so, we still load it all of an open world region to build the navmesh: the asset pipeline doesn’t provide information that is needed to generate navmesh for sub-regions efficiently & correctly, so it’s all-or-nothing. (I have ideas on how to improve this. One day…)

    Let me know if you have any questions – preferably via twitter @twoscomplement

     

    This post was originally a twitter thread:

    ,

    Tim Serong — Herringback

    It occurs to me that I never wrote up the end result of the support ticket I opened with iiNet after discovering significant evening packet loss on our fixed wireless NBN connection in August 2017.

    The whole saga took about a month. I was asked to run a battery of tests (ping, traceroute, file download and speedtest, from a laptop plugged directly into the NTD) three times a day for three days, then send all the results in so that a fault could be lodged. I did this, but somehow there was a delay in the results being communicated, so that by the time someone actually looked at them, they were considered stale, and I had to run the whole set of tests all over again. It’s a good thing I work from home, because otherwise there’s no way it would be possible to spend half an hour three times a day running tests like this. Having finally demonstrated significant evening slowdowns, a fault was lodged, and eventually NBN Co admitted that there was congestion in the evenings.

    We have investigated and the cell which this user is connected to experiences high utilisation during busy periods. This means that the speed of this service is likely to be reduced, particularly in the evening when more people are using the internet.

    nbn constantly monitors the fixed wireless network for sites which require capacity expansion and we aim to upgrade site capacity before congestion occurs, however sometimes demand exceeds expectations, resulting in a site becoming congested.

    This site is scheduled for capacity expansion in Quarter 4, 2017 which should result in improved performance for users on the site. While we endeavour to upgrade sites on their scheduled date, it is possible for the date to change.

    I wasn’t especially happy with that reply after a support experience that lasted for a month, but some time in October that year, the evening packet loss became less, and the window of time where we experienced congestion shrank. So I guess they did do some sort of capacity expansion.

    It’s been mostly the same since then, i.e. slower in the evenings than during the day, but, well, it could be worse than it is. There was one glitch in November or December 2018 (poor speed / connection issues again, but this time during the day) which resulted in iiNet sending out a new router, but I don’t have a record of this, because it was a couple of hours of phone support that for some reason never appeared in the list of tickets in the iiNet toolbox, and even if it had, once a ticket is closed, it’s impossible to click it to view the details of what actually happened. It’s just a subject line, status and last modified date.

    Fast forward to Monday March 25 2019 – a day with a severe weather warning for damaging winds – and I woke up to 34% packet loss, ping times all over the place (32-494ms), continual disconnections from IRC and a complete inability to use a VPN connection I need for work. I did the power-cycle-everything dance to no avail. I contemplated a phone call to support, then tethered my laptop to my phone instead in order to get a decent connection, and decided to wait it out, confident that the issue had already been reported by someone else after chatting to my neighbour.

    hideous-packet-loss-march-2019

    Tuesday morning it was still horribly broken, so I unplugged the router from the NTD, plugged a laptop straight in, and started running ping, traceroute and speed tests. Having done that I called support and went through the whole story (massive packet loss, unusable connection). They asked me to run speed tests again, almost all of which failed immediately with a latency error. The one that did complete showed about 8Mbps down, compared to the usual ~20Mbps during the day. So iiNet lodged a fault, and said there was an appointment available on Thursday for someone to come out. I said fine, thank you, and plugged the router back in to the NTD.

    Curiously, very shortly after this, everything suddenly went back to normal. If I was a deeply suspicious person, I’d imagine that because I’d just given the MAC address of my router to support, this enabled someone to reset something that was broken at the other end, and fix my connection. But nobody ever told me that anything like this happened; instead I received a phone call the next day to say that the “speed issue” I had reported was just regular congestion and that the tower was scheduled for an upgrade later in the year. I thanked them for the call, then pointed out that the symptoms of this particular issue were completely different to regular congestion and that I was sure that something had actually been broken, but I was left with the impression that this particular feedback would be summarily ignored.

    I’m still convinced something was broken, and got fixed. I’d be utterly unsurprised if there had been some problem with the tower on the Sunday night, given the strong winds, and it took ’til mid-Tuesday to get it sorted. But we’ll never know, because NBN Co don’t publish information about congestion, scheduled upgrades, faults and outages anywhere the general public can see it. I’m not even sure they make this information consistently available to retail ISPs. My neighbour, who’s with a different ISP, sent me a notice that says there’ll be maintenance/upgrades occurring on April 18, then again from April 23-25. There’s nothing about this on iiNet’s status page when I enter my address.

    There was one time in the past few years though, when there was an outage that impacted me, and it was listed on iiNet’s status page. It said “customers in the area of Herringback may be affected”. I initially didn’t realise that meant me, as I’d never heard for a suburb, region, or area called Herringback. Turns out it’s the name of the mountain our NBN tower is on.

    ,

    Robert Collins — Continuous Delivery and software distributors

    Back in 2010 the continuous delivery meme was just grabbing traction. Today its extremely well established… except in F/LOSS projects.

    I want that to change, so I’m going to try and really bring together a technical view on how that could work – which may require multiple blog posts – and if it gets traction I’ll put my fingers where my thoughts are and get into specifics with any project that wants to do this.

    This is however merely a worked model today: it may be possible to do things quite differently, and I welcome all discussion about the topic!

    tl;dr

    Pick a service discovery mechanism (e.g. environment variables), write two small APIs – one for flag delivery, with streaming updates, and one for telemetry, with an optional aggressive data hiding proxy, then use those to feed enough data to drive a true CI/CD cycle back to upstream open source projects.

    Who is in?

    Background

    (This assumes you know what C/D is – if you don’t, go read the link above, maybe wikipedia etc, then come back.)

    Consider a typical SaaS C/D pipeline:

    git -> build -> test -> deploy

    Here all stages are owned by the one organisation. Once deployed, the build is usable by users – its basically the simplest pipeline around.

    Now consider a typical on-premise C/D pipeline:

    git -> build -> test -> expose -> install

    Here the last stage, the install stage, takes place in the users context, but it may be under the control of the create, or it may be under the control of the user. For instance, Google play updates on an Android phone: when one selects ‘Update Now’, the install phase is triggered. Leaving the phone running with power and Wi-Fi will trigger it automatically, and security updates can be pushed anytime. Continuing the use of Google Play as an example, the expose step here is an API call to upload precompiled packages, so while there are three parties, the distributor – Google – isn’t performing any software development activities (they do gatekeep, but not develop).

    Where it gets awkward is when there are multiple parties doing development in the pipeline.

    Distributing and C/D

    Lets consider an OpenStack cloud underlay circa 2015: an operating system, OpenStack itself, some configuration management tool (or tools), a log egress tool, a metrics egress handler, hardware mgmt vendor binaries. And lets say we’re working on something reasonably standalone. Say horizon.

    OpenStack for most users is something obtained from a vendor. E.g. Cisco or Canonical or RedHat. And the model here is that the vendor is responsible for what the user receives; so security fixes – in particular embargoed security fixes – cannot be published publically and the slowly propogate. They must reach users very quickly. Often, ideally, before the public publication.

    Now we have something like this:

    upstream ends with distribution, then vendor does an on-prem pipeline


    Can we not just say ‘the end of the C/D pipeline is a .tar.gz of horizon at the distribute step? Then every organisation can make their own decisions?

    Maybe…

    Why C/D?

    • Lower risk upgrades (smaller changes that can be reasoned about better; incremental enablement of new implementations to limit blast radius, decoupling shipping and enablement of new features)
    • Faster delivery of new features (less time dealing with failed upgrades == more time available to work on new features; finished features spend less time in inventory before benefiting users).
    • Better code hygiene (the same disciplines needed to make C/D safe also make more aggressive refactoring and tidiness changes safer to do, so it gets done more often).

    1. If the upstream C/D pipeline stops at a tar.gz file, the lower-risk upgrade benefit is reduced or lost: the pipeline isn’t able to actually push all the to installation, and thus we cannot tell when a particular upgrade workaround is no longer needed.

    But Robert, that is the vendors problem!

    I wish it was: in OpenStack so many vendors had the same problem they created shared branches to work on it, then asked for shared time from the project to perform C/I on those branches. The benefit is only realise when the developer who is responsible for creating the issue can fix it, and can be sure that the fix has been delivered; this means either knowing that every install will install transiently every intermediary version, or that they will keep every workaround for every issue for some minimum time period; or that there will be a pipeline that can actually deliver the software.

    2. .tar.gz files are not installed and running systems. A key characteristic of a C/D pipeline is that is exercises the installation and execution of software; the ability to run a component up is quite tightly coupled to the component itself, for all the the ‘this is a process’ interface is very general, the specific ‘this is server X’ or ‘this is CLI utility Y’ interfaces are very concrete. Perhaps a container based approach, where a much narrower interface in many ways can be defined, could be used to mitigate this aspect. Then even if different vendors use different config tools to do last mile config, the dev cycle knows that configuration and execution works. We need to make sure that we don’t separate the teams and their products though: the pipeline upstream must only test code that is relevant to upstream – and downstream likewise. We may be able to find a balance here, but I think more work articulating what that looks like it needed.

    3. it will break the feedback cycle if the running metrics are not receive upstream; yes we need to be careful of privacy aspects, but basic telemetry: the upgrade worked, the upgrade failed, here is a crash dump – these are the tools for sifting through failure at scale, and a number of open source projects like firefox, Ubuntu and chromium have adopted them, with great success. Notably all three have direct delivery models: their preference is to own the relationship with the user and gather such telemetry directly.

    C/D and technical debt

    Sidebar: ignoring public APIs and external dependencies, because they form the contract that installations and end users interact with, which we can reasonably expect to be quite sticky, the rest of a system should be entirely up to the maintainers right? Refactor the DB; Switch frameworks, switch languages. Cleanup classes and so on. With microservices there is a grey area: APIs that other microservices use which are not publically supported.

    The grey area is crucial, because it is where development drag comes in: anything internal to the system can be refactored in a single commit, or in a series of small commits that is rolled up into one, or variations on this theme.

    But some aspect that another discrete component depends upon, with its own delivery cycle: that cannot be fixed, and unless it was built with the same care public APIs were, it may well have poor scaling or performance characteristics that making fixing it very important.

    Given two C/D’d components A and B, where A wants to remove some private API B uses, A cannot delete that API from its git repo until all B’s everywhere that receive A via C/D have been deployed with a version that does not use the private API.

    That is, old versions of B place technical debt on A across the interfaces of A that they use. And this actually applies to public interfaces too – even if they are more sticky, we can expect the components of an ecosystem to update to newer APIs that are cheaper to serve, and laggards hold performance back, keep stale code alive in the codebase for longer and so on.

    This places a secondary requirement on the telemetry: we need to be able to tell whether the fleet is upgraded or not.

    So what does a working model look like?

    I think we need a different diagram than the pipeline; the pipeline talks about the things most folk doing an API or some such project will have directly in hand, but its not actually the full story. The full story is rounded out with two additional features. Feature flags and telemetry. And since we want to protect our users, and distributors probably will simply refuse to provide insights onto actual users, lets assume a near-zero-trust model around both.

    Feature flags

    As I discussed in my previous blog post, feature flags can be used for fairly arbitrary purposes, but in this situation, where trust is limited, I think we need to identify the crucial C/D enabling use cases, and design for them.

    I think that those can be reduce to soft launches – decoupling activating new code paths from getting them shipped out onto machines, and kill switches – killing off flawed / faulty code paths when they start failing in advance of a massive cascade failure; which we can implement with essentially the same thing: some identifier for a code path and then a percentage of the deployed base to enable it on. If we define this API with efficient streaming updates and a consistent service discovery mechanism for the flag API, then this could be replicated by vendors and other distributors or even each user, and pull the feature API data downstream in near real time.

    Telemetry

    The difficulty with telemetry APIs is that they can egress anything. OTOH this is open source code, so malicious telemetry would be visible. But we can structure it to make it harder to violate privacy.

    What does the C/D cycle need from telemetry, and what privacy do we need to preserve?

    This very much needs discussion with stakeholders, but at a first approximation: the C/D cycle depends on knowing what versions are out there and whether they are working. It depends on known what feature flags have actually activated in the running versions. It doesn’t depend on absolute numbers of either feature flags or versions

    Using Google Play again as an example, there is prior art – https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317485 – but I want to think truely minimally, because the goal I have is to enable C/D in situations with vastly different trust levels than Google play has. However, perhaps this isn’t enough, perhaps we do need generic events and the ability to get deeper telemetry to enable confidence.

    That said, let us sketch what an API document for that might look like:

    project:
version:
health:
flags:
- name:
  value:

    If that was reported by every deployed instance of a project, once per hour, maybe with a dependencies version list added to deal with variation in builds, it would trivially reveal the cardinality of reporters. Many reporters won’t care (for instance QA testbeds). Many will.

    If we aggregate through a cardinality hiding proxy, then that vector is addressed – something like this:

    - project:
  version:
  weight:
  health:
  flags:
  - name:
    value:
- project: ...

    Because this data is really only best effort, such a proxy could be backed by memcache or even just an in-memory store, depending on what degree of ‘cloud-nativeness’ we want to offer. It would receive accurate data, then deduplicate to get relative weights, round those to (say) 5% as a minimum to avoid disclosing too much about long tail situations (and yes, the sum of 100 1% reports would exceed 100 :)), and then push that up.

    Open Questions

    • Should library projects report, or are they only used in the context of an application/service?
      • How can we help library projects answer questions like ‘has every user stopped using feature Y so that we can finally remove it’ ?
    • Would this be enough to get rid of the fixation on using stable branches everyone seems to have?
      • If not why not?
    • What have I forgotten?

    ,

    Matt Palmer — pwnedkeys: who has the keys to *your* kingdom?

    pwnedkeys.com logo

    I am extremely pleased to announce the public release of pwnedkeys.com – a database of compromised asymmetric encryption keys. I hope this will become the go-to resource for anyone interested in avoiding the re-use of known-insecure keys. If you have a need, or a desire, to check whether a key you’re using, or being asked to accept, is potentially in the hands of an adversary, I would encourage you to take a look.

    Pwnage... EVERYWHERE

    By now, most people in the IT industry are aware of the potential weaknesses of passwords, especially short or re-used passwords. Using a password which is too short (or, more technically, with “insufficient entropy”) leaves us open to brute force attacks, while re-using the same password on multiple sites invites a credential stuffing attack.

    It is rare, however, that anyone thinks about the “quality” of RSA or ECC keys that we use with the same degree of caution. There are so many possible keys, all of which are “high quality” (and thus not subject to “brute force”), that we don’t imagine that anyone could ever compromise a private key except by actually taking a copy of it off our hard drives.

    There is a unique risk with the use of asymmetric cryptography, though. Every time you want someone to encrypt something to you, or verify a signature you’ve created, you need to tell them your public key. While someone can’t calculate your private key from your public key, the public key does have enough information in it to be able to identify your private key, if someone ever comes across it.

    So what?

    smashed window

    The risk here is that, in many cases, a public key truly is public. Every time your browser connects to a HTTPS-protected website, the web server sends a copy of the site’s public key (embedded in the SSL certificate). Similarly, when you connect to an SSH server, you get the server’s public key as part of the connection process. Some services provide a way for anyone to query a user’s public keys.

    Once someone has your public key, it can act like an “index” into a database of private keys that they might already have. This is only a problem, of course, if someone happens to have your private key in their stash. The bad news is that there are a lot of private keys already out there, that have either been compromised by various means (accident or malice), or perhaps generated by a weak RNG.

    When you’re generating keys, you usually don’t have to worry. The chances of accidentally generating a key that someone else already has is as close to zero as makes no difference. Where you need to be worried is when you’re accepting public keys from other people. Unlike a “weak” password, you can’t tell a known-compromised key just by looking at it. Even if you saw the private key, it would look just as secure as any other key. You cannot know whether a public key you’re being asked to accept is associated with a known-compromised private key. Or you couldn’t, until pwnedkeys.com came along.

    The solution!

    The purpose of pwnedkeys.com is to try and collect every private key that’s ever gotten “out there” into the public, and warn people off using them ever again. Don’t think that people don’t re-use these compromised keys, either. One of the “Debian weak keys” was used in an SSL certificate that was issued in 2016, some eight years after the vulnerability was made public!

    My hope is that pwnedkeys.com will come to be seen as a worthwhile resource for anyone who accepts public keys, and wants to know that they’re not signing themselves up for a security breach in the future.

    ,

    Matt Palmer — Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Pagination

    The world needs it, so I may as well write it.

    • The number of items on a page is fixed for all time.
    • The number of items on a page is fixed for one user.
    • The number of items on a page is fixed for one result set.
    • The pages are only browsed in one direction.
    • No item will be added to the result set during retrieval.
    • No item will be removed from the result set during retrieval.
    • Item sort order is stable.
    • Only one page of results will be retrieved at one time.
    • Pages will be retrieved in order.
    • Pages will be retrieved in a timely manner.
    • No problem will result from two different users seeing different pagination of the same items at about the same time. (From @ronburk)

    ,

    OpenSTEM — School-wide Understanding Our World® implementations

    Are you considering implementing our integrated HASS+Science program, but getting a tad confused by the pricing?  Our subscription model didn’t not provide a So nowstraightforward calculation for a whole school or year-level.  However, it generally works out to $4.40 (inc.GST) per student.  So now we’re providing this as an option directly: implement our integrated HASS+Science program […]

    The post School-wide Understanding Our World® implementations first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.

    ,

    BlueHackers — Entrepreneurs’ Mental Health and Well-being Survey

    Jamie Pride has partnered with Swinburne University and Dr Bronwyn Eager to conduct the largest mental health and well-being survey of Australian entrepreneurs and founders. This survey will take approx 5 minutes to complete. Can you also please spread the word and share this via your networks!

    Getting current and relevant Australian data is extremely important! The findings of this study will contribute to the literature on mental health and well-being in entrepreneurs, and that this will potentially lead to future improvements in the prevention and treatment of psychological distress.

    Jamie is extremely passionate about this cause! Your help is greatly appreciated.

    The post Entrepreneurs’ Mental Health and Well-being Survey first appeared on BlueHackers.org.

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    Peter Lieverdink — Dark Doodad

    It's been a while since I did a blog, so after twiddling the way the front page of the site displays, it's time to post a new one. The attached photo is of my favourite dark nebula, "The Dark Doodad". What looks like a long thin nebula is apparently a sheet over 40 light years wide that we happen to be seeing edge-on. On the left you can see a few dark tendrils that are par of the coal sack nebula. The Dark Doodad This is one of the first images created from a stack of subs I took using AstroDSLR. Each exposure is 2 minutes and I stacked 20 of them. My polar alignment was pretty decent, I think!
    Tags: 
    doodad
    dark nebula
    astrophotography

    ,

    OpenSTEM — Children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. Here’s why | World Economic Forum

    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/singapore-has-abolished-school-exam-rankings-here-s-why The island nation is changing its educational focus to encourage school children to develop the life skills they will need when they enter the world of work.

    The post Children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. Here’s why | World Economic Forum first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.

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    OpenSTEM — Helping Migrants to Australia

    The end of the school year is fast approaching with the third term either over or about to end and the start of the fourth term looming ahead. There never seems to be enough time in the last term with making sure students have met all their learning outcomes for the year and with final […]

    The post Helping Migrants to Australia first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.

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    OpenSTEM — Our interwoven ancestry

    In 2008 a new group of human ancestors – the Denisovans, were defined on the basis of a single finger knuckle (phalanx) bone discovered in Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia. A molar tooth, found at Denisova cave earlier (in 2000) was determined to be of the same group. Since then extensive work […]

    The post Our interwoven ancestry first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.

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    Clinton Roy — Moving to Melbourne

    Now that the paperwork has finally all been dealt with, I can announce that I’ll be moving down to Melbourne to take up a position with the Australian Synchrotron, basically a super duper x-ray machine used for research of all types. My official position is a >in< Senior Scientific Software Engineer <out> I’ll be moving down to Melbourne shortly, staying with friends (you remember that offer you made, months ago?) until I find a rental near Monash Uni, Clayton.

    I will be leaving behind Humbug, the computer group that basically opened up my entire career, and The Edge, SLQ, my home-away-from-home study. I do hope to be able to find replacements for these down south.

    I’m looking at having a small farewell nearby soon.

    A shout out to Netbox Blue for supplying all my packing boxes. Allll of them.

    OpenSTEM — This Week in Australian History

    The end of August and beginning of September is traditionally linked to the beginning of Spring in Australia, although the change in seasons is experienced in different ways in different parts of the country and was marked in locally appropriate ways by Aboriginal people. As a uniquely Australian celebration of Spring, National Wattle Day, celebrated […]

    The post This Week in Australian History first appeared on OpenSTEM Pty Ltd.