Pete Zaitcev

In the words of Joe Arnold:

Last year, when we announced SwiftStack 7, we unveiled our focus on the SwiftStack Data Platform for AI, HPC, and accelerated computing. This included SwiftStack 1space as a valuable piece of the puzzle, enabling data acceleration in the core, at the edge, and in the cloud.

To our existing customers — we will continue to maintain, enhance, and support 1space, ProxyFS, Swift, and the Controller. SwiftStack’s technology is already a key part of NVIDIA’s GPU-powered AI infrastructure, and this acquisition will strengthen what we do for you.

Building AI supercomputers is exciting to the entire SwiftStack team. We couldn’t be more thrilled [...]

Highlighting 1space as the centerpiece of the acquisition seems strange. All I knew about it was a cloud-to-cloud data pumping service. Hardly any HPC stuff. I could see how Nvidia might want ProxyFS to replace Hadoop, but not this.

The core Swift continues unchanged for now.

From CKS:

The first useful property Python has is that you can't misplace the source code for your deployed Python programs.

A little while ago I been to a talk by Michael Verhulst of Terminal Labs. He made a career of descending into Devops disaster zones and righting things up, and shared some observations. One of his aphorisms was:

Nobody Is Google — Not Even Google

If I understood him right, he meant to say that scalability costs money and businesses flounder on buying more scalability than they need. Or, people think they are Google, but they are not. Even inside Google, only a small fraction of services operate at Google scale (aka planetary scale).

Apparently this sort of thing happens quite often.

I selected Lulzbot Mini as my 3D printer in large part because of the strong connection between the true open source and the company. It came with some baggage: not the cheapest, stuck in the world of 3mm filament, Cura generates mediocre support. But I could tolerate all that.

However, some things happened.

One, the maker of the printer, Alef Objects collapsed and sold itself to FAME 3D.

Two, Fedora shipped a completely, utterly busted Cura twice: both Fedora 30 and Fedora 31 came out with the package that just cannot be used.

I am getting a tiny bit concerned for the support for my Lulzbot going forward. Since printers expend things like cleaning strips, availability of parts is a big problem. And I cannot live with software being unusable. Last time it happened, Spot fixed the bug pretty quickly, in a matter of days. So, only a tiny bit concerned.

But that bit is enough to consider alternatives. Again, FLOSS-friendly is paramount. The rest is not that important, but I need it to work.

I was at this topic since NetWinder was a thing, but yet again I started looking at having an ARM box in the house. Arnd provided me with the following tips, when I asked about CuBox:

2GB of RAM [in the best CuBox] is not great, but doesn't stop you from building kerrnels. In this case, the CPU is going to be the real bottleneck.

Of course it's not SBSA, since this is an embedded 32 bit SoC. Almost no 64 bit machines are SBSA either (most big server chips claim compliance but are lacking somewhat), but generally nobody actually cares.

HoneyComb LX2K is probably what you want if you can spare the change and wait for the last missing bug fixes.

The RK3399 chip is probably a good compromise between performance and cost, there are various boards with 4GB of RAM and an m.2 slot for storage, around $100.

Why does have to be like this? All I wanted was to make usbmon work on ARM.

The assertion that nobody cares about SBSA is rather interesting. Obviously, nobody in the embedded area does. They just fork Linux, clone a bootloader, flash it and ship, and then your refrigerator sends spam and your TV is used to attack your printer, while they move on the next IoT product. But I do care. I want to download Fedora and run it, like I can on x86. Is that too much to ask?

The HoneyComb LX2K is made by the same company as CuBox, but the naked board costs $750.

Greg threw a blog post that contains a number of interesting animations of his terminal sessions. Fascinating!

I do not use mutt because I often need to copy-paste, and I hate dealing with line breaks that the terminal inevitably hoists upon me. So, many years ago I migrated to Sylpheed, and from there to Claws (because of the support of anti-aliased fonts).

Greg's approach differs in that it avoids the copy-paste problem by manipulating the bodies of messages programmatically. So, the patches travel between messages, files, and git without being printed to a terminal.

Linode made their Object Storage product generally available. They dropped the Swift API that they offered in the beta, and only rolled with S3.

They are careful not to mention what implementation underpins it, but I suspect it's Ceph RGW. They already provide Ceph block storage as public service. Although, I don't know for sure.

An acquaintance of mine was laid off from Samsung. He was a rank-and-file ASIC designer and worked on FPU unit for Samsung's new CPU. Another acquaintance, a project manager in the silicon field, relayed that supposedly ARM developed a new CPUs that are so great, that all competitors gave up and folded their CPU development, resulting in the layoffs. The online sources have details.

In the same time they gave up on in-house cores, Samsung announced Exynos 990, a standalone version of the 980, based on the successors of the Cortex family, developed by ARM, of course.

As someone said on Glassdoor, "great place to work until you're laid off".

As some of you might have noticed, Facebook started adding a tracking token to all URLs as a query string "?fbclid=XXXXXXXXX". I don't know how it works, exactly. Perhaps it rattles to FB when people re-inject these links into FB after they cycle through other social media. Either way, today I found a website that innocently fails to work when shared on FB: Whomp. If one tries to share a comic strip, such as "It's Training Men", FB appends its token, and makes the URL invalid.

A job at LinkedIn in my area includes the following instruction statement:

Don't apply if you can't really write code and don't have a github profile. This is a job for an expert level coder.

I remember the simpler times when LWN authors fretted about the SourceForge monopoly capturing all FLOSS projects.

P.S. For the record, I do have a profile at Github. It is required in order to contribute to RDO, because it is the only way to login in their Gerrit and submit patches for review. Ironically, Fedora offers a single sign-on with FAS and RDO is a Red Hat sponsored project, but nope — it's easier to force contributors into Github.