🕧︎ - 2024-08-24
Today 40 years ago I bought my first computer - a Commodore 64.
I didn't have enough money to buy a new one, so I told my parents I wanted to buy a used one. They decided to add enough money to get a new one.
I hooked it up to our black and white television set and started typing commands and small BASIC programs from the manual.
In the evening I had to disconnect the computer so my parents could watch the news on TV.
Unfortunately this meant losing all I had typed!
(I'm not quite sure why the computer couldn't just keep the contents of memory when disconnected from the television, maybe I didn't understand that I could just keep it turned on, maybe something happened when it was disconnected.)
This quickly led to my parents giving me an early christmas gift: a tape deck for the computer, so I could save my work on cassette tapes. Phew!
I never got a floppy disk drive for the Commodore 64 - they were very expensive, and I didn't really have the need. Only when I bought my second computer, an Amiga 500 I got a (built-in) floppy disk drive.
My first harddisk was a 40 MB Tiny Tiger II which connected to the Amiga 500 through an interface for the parallel port, but that's a story for another time.
🕕︎ - 2024-08-21
Some strings to memorize:
b2sum ca6914d2e33b83f2b2c66e4e625bc1d08674fae605008a215165d3c3a997d7d92945905207a539a7327be0f2728fa9aee005da9641407e5f3e4ef55b446b470a -
cksum 3515105045 1
md5sum 68b329da9893e34099c7d8ad5cb9c940 -
sha1sum adc83b19e793491b1c6ea0fd8b46cd9f32e592fc -
sha224sum 48837a787f07673545d9c610bcbcd8d46a2691a71966d856c197e69e -
sha256sum 01ba4719c80b6fe911b091a7c05124b64eeece964e09c058ef8f9805daca546b -
sha384sum ec664e889ed6c1b2763cacf7899d95b7f347373eb982e523419feea3aa362d891b3bf025f292267a5854049091789c3e -
sha512sum be688838ca8686e5c90689bf2ab585cef1137c999b48c70b92f67a5c34dc15697b5d11c982ed6d71be1e1e7f7b4e0733884aa97c3f7a339a8ed03577cf74be09 -
shasum adc83b19e793491b1c6ea0fd8b46cd9f32e592fc -
Inspired by a recent fediverse
post by Simon Tatham.
🕤︎ - 2024-08-20
I recently stumbled over a video on Youtube about the visual effects
in one of the first movies that had a lot of computer generated
images, Flight of the Navigator.
I hadn't heard about the movie before, but the video went into much
detail about how many of the model shots were made. The channel was
called Captain Depression or Captain something or the other...
Disillusion! There it was: Flight of the Navigator | VFXcool.
Anyway, I watched the movie last night. It was mediocre.
It was fun to see the effects after having seen them explained, but
that was about it. The most jarring thing was that the space ship took
on a goofy silly voice after sucking too much information out of the
boy's head. It was much more fun when it was stern and distanced.
The film features Sarah Jessica Parker in one of her early, small
roles - and a fun gag as seen on the screenshot above, tipping the hat
to E.T. The NASA professor is called Louis Faraday(!)
The computer graphics were generated on a PDP-10 derived computer, the
Foonly F1, which
generated one image at a time, filling up a separate cabinet holding 3
MB of video buffer, which was then transfered to film, before the next
image overwrote the buffer. Also used for the original Tron movie.
🕛︎ - 2024-08-11
An interesting anecdote shared by Theodore Ts'o on The Unix Heritage Society mailing list:
Around 1994, MIT purchased a site license for a proprietary spreadsheet program for SCO
I told him that we were purchasing it intended to run it on Linux. He told me that this would be perfectly fine, because he had compiled the iBCS binary on Linux.
· Re: Other POSIX Candidates?
🕗︎ - 2024-08-03
This graph tells a story:
I have been experimenting with writing Haskell applications to run
websites for a while. So far I have a website for
Feedbase, a blog engine with
NNTP-interface, a small
wiki, and a (primarily
NNTP) ActivePub server.
Annoyingly the webservers have been leaking memory, to the tune of
gigabytes per week. And I haven't been able to figure out why.
I'm a Haskell novice (yes,
still) so I have been looking
at stuff like "do I use foldl" and switching to foldl' and stuff
like that I could find by searching for "Haskell" and "memory leak".
At one point I even extracted the pages from this websites' log and
redid all the requests locally on my laptop - but I was unable to
reproduce the memory usage ballooning that way.
At one point somebody figured out that the Spock Haskell web framework
has a leak, so I switched to
Twain. My
applications still leaking, though.
Earlier this week, while sitting on a long train ride, I realized that
one of the differences between my server setup and the local test
setup on the laptop was that the Haskell applications are proxied
behind Apache.
My code, especially in
Sixpence - the
wiki, is quite simple, so I was at a loss to figure out where the leak
was, but then I thought "How about those middleware modules I'm
using?" - and I tried turning all of them off in the wiki and half in
the blog-engine.
The result is what the graph shows!
My guess currently is that it's the Gzip and Brotli middleware plugins
I was using that caused the leaking when behind Apache. Furthermore,
testing with curl it turns out that they aren't necessary, as Apache
handles the compression.
So now I have removed the middleware modules - can't wait to check the
Munin graph in a couple of weeks!
🕛︎ - 2024-08-03
Sometimes xkcd-strips intersects nicely with my niche interests :-)
🕠︎ - 2024-07-15
It's been more than 5 years since I last upgraded my home server.
Today the kernel barfed out a lot of loglines which seemed to pertain to the five years and 11 weeks old nvme ssd it is running on:
pcieport 0000:00:01.3: AER: Corrected error message received from 0000:06:00.0
nvme 0000:06:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
nvme 0000:06:00.0: device [8086:f1a8] error status/mask=00000001/0000e000
nvme 0000:06:00.0: [ 0] RxErr (First)
Although these were all "Corrected", and although smart-log reads out:
available_spare : 100%
available_spare_threshold : 10%
percentage_used : 2%
it does also say:
power_on_hours : 45,474
and as the disk usage current is at:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p1 1.9T 1.3T 608G 68% /
I am taking the opportunity to upgrade the old 2TB Intel 660p NVMe SSD to a new 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD. This should also give a decent boost in performance, from 1800 Mbps read/write and 220K IOPS to 7450/6900 Mbps read/write and 1400/1550K IOPS.
Currently I have the new NVMe SSD connected via a Dezen USB-thing, and I am running rsync -varSHx --progress --stats --exclude /mnt / /mnt/ to transfer everything. When it has run through, I will boot the machine in single-user mode, run the rsync again, and then switch over after adjusting the fstab and running grub-install.
