Usually I do not watch TV, but I traveled and saw a few of them in public food intake places and such. What caught my attention were ads for robotics companies, aimed at business customers. IIRC, the companies were called generic names like "Universal Robotics" and "Reach Robotics". Or so I recall, but on second thought, Reach Robotics is a thing, but it focises on gaming, not traditional robotics. But the ads depicted robots doing some unspecified stuff: moving objects from place to place. Not dueling bots. Anyway, what's up with this? Is there some sort of revolution going on? What was the enabler? Don't tell me, it's all the money released by end of the Moore's Law, seeking random fields of application.

P.S. I know about the "Pentagon's Evil Mechanical Dogs" by Boston Dynamics. These were different, manipulating objects in the environment.

A couple Fedora releases back, I noticed that my laptop stopped using IPv6 to access dual-hosted services. I gave RFC-6724 a read, but it was much too involved for my small mind. Fortunately, it contained a simplified explanation:

Another effect of the default policy table is to prefer communication using IPv6 addresses to communication using IPv4 addresses, if matching source addresses are available.

My IPv6 is NAT-ed, so the laptop sees an RFC-4193 address fc00::/7. This does not match the globally assigned address of the external service. Therefore, a matching source address is not available, and things develop from there.

For now, I forced RFC-3484 with gai.conf. Basically, reverted to Fedora 26 behavior.

Butenko was simply the most capable programmer that I've ever worked with. He was also very accomplished. I'm sure everyone has an idea what UNIX v7 was. Although BSD, sockets, and VFS were still in the future, it was a sophisticated OS for its time. Butenko wrote his own OS that was about a peer for the v7 in features (including vi). He also wrote a Fortran 77 compiler with IDE, an SQL database, and a myriad other things. Applications, too: games, communications, industrial control.

I still remember one of our first meetings in the late 1983. I wanted someone to explain me the instruction set of Mitra-15, a French 16-bit mini. Documentation was practically impossible to get back then, especially for undergrads. Someone referred me, and I received a lecture at a smoking area near an elevator, which founded my understanding of computer architecture.

The only time I ever got one up, was when I wrote a utility to monitor processes (years later, top(1) does the same thing). Apparently the concept never occurred to Butenko, who was perfectly capable to analyzing the system with a debugger and profiler. Seeing just my UI, he knocked out a clone in a couple of days. Of course, it was superior in every respect.

Butenko worked a lot. The combination of genius and workaholic was unstoppable. Or maybe they were sides of the same coin.

Unfortunately, Butenko was not in with the open source. He used to post to Usenet, lampooning and dismissing Linux. I suspect once you can code your own Linux any time you want, your perspective changes a bit. This was a part of the way we drifted apart later on. I was plugging on my little corner of Linux, while Butenko was somewhere out in the larger world, revolutionizing computer-intermediated communications.

He died suddenly, from a heart failure. Way too early, I think.

Wait, wasn't this supposed to be our future?

The abridged history, as I recall was as follows. Mike Burton started the work to port Swift to Go in early 2016, inside the Swift tree. As such, it was a community effort. There was even a discussion at OpenStack Technical Committee about allowing development in Go (the TC disallowed it, but later posted some conditions). At the end of the year, I managed to write an object with MIME and collapsed the stock Swift auditor (the one in Python). That was an impetus for PUT+POST, BTW. But in 2017, the RAX cabal - creiht, redbo, and later gholt - weren't very happy with trying to supplicate to the TC, as well as the massive overhead of developing in the established community, and went their own way. In addition to the TC shenagians, the upstream Swift at SwiftStack and Red Hat needed a migration path. A Hummingbird without a support for Erasure Coding was a non-starter, and the RAX group wasn't interested in accomodating that. By the end of 2017, they were completely on their own, and started going off at the deep end by adding database servers and such. They managed to throw off some good ideas about what the next-generation replication ought to look like. But by cutting themselves off Swift they committed to re-capturng the lightning in the bottle anew, and they just could not pull it off.

On reflection, I suspect their chances would be better if they were serious about interoperating with Swift. The performance gains that they demonstrated were quite impressive. But their paymasters at RAX weren't into this community development and open-source toys (not that RAX went through the change of ownership while Hummingbird was going on).

I think a port of Swift to Go is still on the agenda, but it's unknown at this point if it's going to happen.

Saw today at a respectable news site, which does not even nag about adblock:

451

We recognise you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore cannot grant you access at this time. For any issues, e-mail us at xxxxxxxx@xxxxxx.com or call us at xxx-xxx-4000.

What a way to brighten one's day. The phone without a country code is a cherry on top.

P.S. The only fly in this ointment is, I wasn't accessing it from the GDPR area. It was a geolocation failure.

See a mailing list message:

I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. // I am not going to appoint a successor.

Regarding the Huston missive, two quotes jumped at me the most. The first is just beautiful:

It may be slightly more disconcerting to realise that your electronic wallet is on a device that is using a massive compilation of open source software of largely unknown origin [...]

Yeah, baby. This moldy canard is still operational.

The second is from the narrative of the smartphone revolution:

Apple’s iPhone, released in 2007, was a revolutionary device. [...] Apple’s early lead was rapidly emulated by Windows and Nokia with their own offerings. Google’s position was more as an active disruptor, using an open licensing framework for the Android platform [...]

Again, it's not like he's actually lying. He merely implies heavily that Nokia came next. I don't think the Nokia blunder even deserve a footnote, but to Huston, Google was too open. Google, Carl!

Got Slasti 2.1 released today, the main feature being a support for Python 3. Some of the changes were somewhat... horrifying maybe? I tried to adhere to a general plan, where the whole of the application operates in unicode, and the UTF-8 data is encoded/decoded at the boundary. Unfortunately, in practice the boundary was rather leaky, so in several places I had to resort to isinstance(). I expected to always assign a type to all variables and fields, and then rigidly convert as needed. But WSGI had its own ideas.

Overall, the biggest source of issues was not the py3 model, but trying to make the code compatible. I'm not going to do that again if I can help it: either py2 or py3, but not both.

UPDATE: Looks like CKS agrees that compatible code is usually too hard. I'm glad the recommendation to avoid Python 3 entirely is no longer operational.

Finally updated my laptop to F28 and ssh connections started hanging. They hang for 15-20 seconds, then unstuck for a few seconds, then hang, and so on, cycling. I thought it was a WiFi problem at first. But eventually I narrowed it down to IPv6 ND being busted.

A packet trace on the laptop shows that traffic flows until the laptop issues a neighbor solicitation. The router replies with an advertisement, which I presume is getting dropped. Traffic stops — although what's strange, tcpdump still captures outgoing packets that the laptop sends. In a few seconds, the router sends a neighbor solicitation, but the laptop never replies. Presumably, dropped as well. This continues until a router advertisement resets the cycle.

Stopping firewalld lets solicitations in and the traffic resumes, so obviously a rule is busted somewhere. The IPv6 ICMP appears allowed, but the ip6tables rules generated by Firewalld are fairly opaque, I cannot be sure. Ended filing bug 1591867 for the time being and forcing ssh -4.

UPDATE: Looks like the problem is a "reverse path filter". Setting IPv6_rpfilter=no in /etc/firewalld/firewalld.conf fixes the the issue (thanks to Victor for the tip). Here's an associated comment in the configuration file:

# Performs a reverse path filter test on a packet for IPv6. If a reply to the
# packet would be sent via the same interface that the packet arrived on, the
# packet will match and be accepted, otherwise dropped.
# The rp_filter for IPv4 is controlled using sysctl.

Indeed there's no such sysctl for v6. Obviously the problem is that packets with the source of fe80::/16 are mistakenly assumed to be martians and dropped. That's easy enough to fix, I hope. But it's fascinating that we have an alternative configuration method nowadays, only exposed by certain specialist tools. If I don't have firewalld installed, and want this setting changed, what then?

Remarkably, the problem was reported first in March (it's June now). This tells me that most likely the erroneous check itself is in the kernel somewhere, and firewalld is not at fault, which is why Erik isn't fixing it. He should've reassigned the bug to kernel, if so, but...

The commit cede24d1b21d68d84ac5a36c44f7d37daadcc258 looks like the fix. Unfortunately, it just missed the 4.17.

Colleagues working in space technologies discussed recently if fundamental education were necessary for a programmer, so just for a reference, here's a list of fundamental-ish areas I had trouble with in practice over a 30 year career.

Statistics. This should be obvious. Although in theory I'm educated in the topic, I always had difficulty with it, and barely passed my tests, decades ago.

Error correction. To be entirely honest, I blew this. Every time I had to do it, I ended either using Phil Karn's library, or relying on Kevin Greenan's erasure coding package. I think the only time I implemented something that worked was the UAT.

The DSP on Inphase/Quadrature data. This one is really vexing. I ended with some ridiculous ad-hoc code, even though it's very interesting. In my excuse, there were some difficult performance constraints, so even if I knew the underlying math, there would be no way to apply it.

Other than the above, I don't feel like I was held back by any kind of fundamental background, most of all not in CS. About the only time it mattered was when an interviewer asked me to implement an R-B tree.

The domain now redirects to Wayback Machine. The last captured post is the official farewell message from June 22.

Personally, I would prefer people hack upon trust metrics than blockchain. But they did not agree, and personally I've done nothing to advance the field, so I don't have room to complain. And now the flagship open-source implementation is no more (well, of course Google still exists and so the trust metrics stay with us; possibly even get developed further).

As seen at a blog about cars:

Every software shop from Hyderabad to Cleveland now faithfully, and idiotically, replicates a cargo-cult version of the “standups” and “kanban methods” that were designed to work on a factory floor.

The “standups” are particularly miserable: Toyota’s version was best understood as a five-minute meeting where any potential issues in a given assembly-line department would be sorted out before the shift began, but under the corrupting influence of IBM, Accenture, and other “body shops,” the concept has degenerated into a 45-minute hellscape of offshore “engineers” mumbling a list of their miniature accomplishments out of a speakerphone while everybody else shifts from leg to leg and attempts not to fall asleep.

Shit, man. If even a pro racer turned autojourno can tell, we in software are past the point of ridiculous. That said, morning assembly is nothing new - it was a thing in the 1950s, long before Toyota. It even had native names: in Russia it was called "lineyka", in Japan it was "cho~rei".

Not being a native speaker, I get amusing results sometimes when searching on Amazon. For example, "floor scoop" brings up mostly fancy dresses. Apparently, a scoop is a type of dress, which can be floor-length, and so. The correct request is actually "dust pan". Today though, searching for "Peliton termite" ended with a bunch of bicycle saddles. Apparently, Amazon force-replaced it with "peloton", and I know of no syntax to force my spelling. I suspect that Peliton may have trouble selling their products at Amazon. This sort of thing is making me wary of Alexa. I don't see myself ever winning an argument with a robot who knows better, and is implemented in proprietary software that I cannot adjust.

UPDATE: The "plus prefix" works, e.g. "+peliton" (thanks to elisteran).

Today, I want to build a satellite that receives ADS-B signals from airplanes over the open ocean, far away from land. With a decent receiver and a simple antenna, it should be possible on a gravity-stabilized cubesat. I know about terrestrial receivers picking signals 200..300 km out, surely with care one can do better. But I highly doubt that it's possible to finance such a toy — unless someone has already done that. I know that people somehow manage to finance AIS receivers, which are basically the same thing, only for ships. How do they do that?

UPDATE: Reportedly, hosted payloads by Aireon on Iridium NEXT satellites do ADS-B. The working altitude of the previous generation of Iridium was 780 km, the NEXT is probably the same.

Oh Microsoft, you card:

[Azure Sphere OS] combines security innovations pioneered in Windows, a security monitor, and a custom Linux kernel [...]</p>

Kinda like Oracle shipping "Unbreakable Linux". Still in the "embrace" phase.

Liferea irritated me for many years with a strange behavior when dragging a subscription. You mouse down on the feed, it becomes selected — so far so good. Then you drag it somewhere — possibly far off screen, making the view scroll — then drop it. Drops fine, updates the DB, model, and the view fine. But! The selection then jumps to a completely random feed somewhere.

Well, it's not actually random. What happens instead, the GtkTreeView implements DnD by removing a row, then re-inserting it. When a selected row is removed, obviously the selection has to disappear, but instead it's set to the next row after the removed one. I suppose I may be uniquely vulnerable to this because I have 300+ feeds and I drag them around all the time. If Liferea weren't kind enough to remember the preferred order, this would not matter so much.

I meant to fix this for a long time, but somehow a wrong information got stuck in my head: I thought that Liferea was written in C++, so it took years to gather the motivation. Imagine my surprise when I found plain old C. I spent a good chunk of Sunday figuring out GTK's tree view thingie, but in the end it was quite simple.

Recently it became common to see a mocking of startup founders that add "blockchain" to something, then sell it to gullible VCs and reap the green harvest. Apparently it has become quite a thing. But now they went a step further.

The other day I was watching some anime at Crunchyroll, when a commercial came up. It pitched a fantasy sports site "with blockchain technology" and smart contracts. The remarkable part about it is, it wasn't aimed at investors. It was a consumer advertisement. Its creators apparently expect members of the public — who play fantasy sports, no less — to know that blockchain exists and think about it in positive terms.

Remarks of our CEO, as captured in an interview by TechCrunch:

The other major open-source project Red Hat is betting on is OpenStack . That may come as a bit of a surprise, given that popular opinion in the last year or so has shifted against the massive project that wants to give enterprises an open source on-premise alternative to AWS and other cloud providers. “There was a sense among big enterprise tech companies that OpenStack was going to be their savior from Amazon,” Whitehurst said. “But even OpenStack, flawlessly executed, put you where Amazon was five years ago. If you’re Cisco or HP or any of those big OEMs, you’ll say that OpenStack was a disappointment. But from our view as a software company, we are seeing good traction.”

He's over-simplifying things for the constraints of an interview: the last sencence needs unpacking. Why do you think that "traction" happens? Because OpenStack gives its users something that Amazon does not. For example, Swift isn't trying to match features of S3. Attempting to do that would cause the exact lag he's referring. Instead, Swift works to solve the problem of people who want to own their own data in general. So, it's mostly about the implementation: how to make it scalable, inexpensive, etc. And, of course, keeing it open source, preserving user's freedom to modify. This is why often you see people installing a truncated OpenStack that only has Swift. I'm sure this applies to other parts of OpenStack, in particular the SDN/NFV.

I decided to build Liferea over the weekend, and the build crashes at the introspection phase.

Apparently, GTK+ programs are set up to introspect themselves: basically the binary can look at its own types or whatnot, then output the result. I'm not quite clear what the purpose of that is, the online docs imply that it's for API documentation mostly. Anyhow, the build runs the liferea binary itself, with arguments that make it run the introspection, then this happens:

(gdb) where
#0  0x00007fa90a2a93b0 in wl_list_insert_list ()
    at /lib64/libwayland-server.so.0
#1  0x00007fa90a2a4e6f in wl_priv_signal_emit ()
    at /lib64/libwayland-server.so.0
#2  0x00007fa90a2a5477 in wl_display_destroy ()
    at /lib64/libwayland-server.so.0
#3  0x00007fa916d163d9 in \
  WebCore::PlatformDisplayWayland::~PlatformDisplayWayland() () at \
  /lib64/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37
#4  0x00007fa916d163e9 in \
  WebCore::PlatformDisplayWayland::~PlatformDisplayWayland() () at \
  /lib64/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37
#5  0x00007fa91100cb58 in __run_exit_handlers () at /lib64/libc.so.6
#6  0x00007fa91100cbaa in  () at /lib64/libc.so.6
#7  0x00007fa911e9d367 in  () at /lib64/libgirepository-1.0.so.1
#8  0x00007fa91197d188 in parse_arg.isra () at /lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
#9  0x00007fa91197d8ca in parse_long_option () at /lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
#10 0x00007fa91197f2d6 in g_option_context_parse () at \
  /lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
#11 0x00007fa91197fd84 in g_option_context_parse_strv ()
    at /lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
#12 0x00007fa912164558 in g_application_real_local_command_line ()
    at /lib64/libgio-2.0.so.0
#13 0x00007fa912164bf6 in g_application_run () at /lib64/libgio-2.0.so.0
#14 0x000000000041b9ff in main (argc=2, argv=0x7fff2e1203d8) at main.c:77

As much as I can tell, despite being asked only to do the introspection, Liferea (unknowingly, through GTK+) pokes Wayland, which sets exit handlers. However, Wayland is never used (introspection, duh), and not initialized completely, so when its exit handlers run, it crashes.

Well, now what?

I supplse the cleanest approach might be to modify Glib so it avoids provoking Wayland when merely introspecting. But honestly I have no clue about desktop apps and do not know where to even start looking.

UPDATE: Much thanks to Branko Grubic, who pointed me to a bug in WebKit. Currently building with this as a workaround:

--- a/src/Makefile.am
+++ b/src/Makefile.am
@@ -82,6 +82,7 @@ INTROSPECTION_GIRS = Liferea-3.0.gir
 
 Liferea-3.0.gir: liferea$(EXEEXT)
 INTROSPECTION_SCANNER_ARGS = -I$(top_srcdir)/src --warn-all -......
+INTROSPECTION_SCANNER_ENV = WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1
 Liferea_3_0_gir_NAMESPACE = Liferea
 Liferea_3_0_gir_VERSION = 3.0
 Liferea_3_0_gir_PROGRAM = $(builddir)/liferea$(EXEEXT)

Seen at the webpage for RancherOS:

Everything in RancherOS is a Docker container. We accomplish this by launching two instances of Docker. One is what we call System Docker, the first process on the system. All other system services, like ntpd, syslog, and console, are running in Docker containers. System Docker replaces traditional init systems like systemd, and can be used to launch additional system services.