Pete Zaitcev

I'm looking for a name for a new WiFi area.

The current one is called "Tokyo-Jupiter". It turns out hard to top, it meets all the requirements. It's a geographic area. It's weeb, but from old enough times: not Naruto Shippuuden, Attack On Titan, or Kimetsu no Yaiba. Classy and unique enough.

"Konoha" is too new, too washed-up, and too short.

"Kodena" and "Yokosuka" add a patriotic American tint nicely, but also too short.

"Minas-Tirith" is a place and outstanding in its reference, but not weeb.

"Big-Sight" is an opposite of the above: too much. I'm a weeb, not otaku.

Any ideas are appreciated.

UPDATE 2025-01-11: The provisional candidate is "Nishi-Teppelin". Don't google it, it's not canon. I remain open to better ideas.

UPDATE 2025-02-20: Ended with "Ostrov-Krym" after all.

We all know how it's possible for a guest VM to access various host functions by accessing a PCI device, right? When KVM traps an access to this fake PCI, QEMU emulates the device, which allows packets sent, console updated, or whatever. This is called "virtio".

NVIDIA took it a step further: they have a real PCI device that emuilates QEMU. No joke. And, they have a firmware bug! The following patch works around it:

diff --git a/drivers/virtio/virtio_pci_modern.c b/drivers/virtio/virtio_pci_modern.c
index 9193c30d640a..6bbb34f9b088 100644
--- a/drivers/virtio/virtio_pci_modern.c
+++ b/drivers/virtio/virtio_pci_modern.c
@@ -438,6 +438,7 @@ static void vp_reset(struct virtio_device *vdev)
 {
 	struct virtio_pci_device *vp_dev = to_vp_device(vdev);
 	struct virtio_pci_modern_device *mdev = &vp_dev->mdev;
+	int i;
 
 	/* 0 status means a reset. */
 	vp_modern_set_status(mdev, 0);
@@ -446,8 +447,16 @@ static void vp_reset(struct virtio_device *vdev)
 	 * This will flush out the status write, and flush in device writes,
 	 * including MSI-X interrupts, if any.
 	 */
-	while (vp_modern_get_status(mdev))
+	i = 0;
+	while (vp_modern_get_status(mdev)) {
+		if (++i >= 10000) {
+			printk(KERN_INFO
+			       "virtio reset ignoring status 0x%02x\n",
+			       vp_modern_get_status(mdev));
+			break;
+		}
 		msleep(1);
+	}
 
 	vp_modern_avq_cleanup(vdev);
 

I'm not dumping on NVIDIA here at all, I think it's awesome for this devious hardware to exist. And bugs are just a way of life.

They pushed the "You're one of a few experts invited to answer" notifications for a long time - maybe a year, I don't remember. When I had enough and started to capture them with the intent of mockery, they stopped. So sad. Here's what I got:

"You're facing pushback from vendors on cloud integration. How can you convince them to collaborate?"

"You're focused on cutting costs in cloud computing. How do you ensure security protocols aren't compromised?"

"You're overseeing a code review process. How do you ensure feedback boosts developer morale?"

What a dystopia. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, so I'm not suprised someone in a giant corporation thought this sort of nonsense was a good idea. But still, the future is stupid, and all that.

P.S. The notification inserts were non-persistent — inserted on the fly. That was just fraud w.r.t. the idea of notification ticker.

P.P.S. Does anyone else think that this sort of thing would cause self-selection? They made their AI trained by the most vain and also least bright members of their user population. I'm not an expert in any of these fields.

UPDATE 2024-10-31: Spoke too soon! They hit me with the notificantion insert: "Here's how you can craft a personalized learning plan for advancing in Cloud Computing." That is not even a formed question. Getting lazy, are we?

UPDATE 2024-11-02: "You're facing budget disputes over cloud solutions. How can you align IT and non-technical teams effectively?" They are not stopping.

Meanwhile, how about another perspective: I saw an update that Hubbert Smith contributed an answer to: "You're facing a ransomware attack crisis. How do you convey the severity to a non-technical executive?" Instead of answering what LinkedIn AI asked, he answered a question of how to deal with ransomware ("Ransomware is fixable with snapshots of sensitive data."). Unless he is an AI himself, he may be thinking that he's dealing with a LinkedIn equivalent of Quora.

I'm trying to ask him what happened.

Because FreeCAD was such a disaster for me, I started looking at crazy solutions, like exporting STEP from OpenSCAD. I even stooped to looking at proprietary alternatives. First on the runway was SolidWorks. If it's good for Mark Serbu, surely it's good for me, right?

The first thing I found, you cannot tap your card and download. You have to contact a partner representative — never a good sign. The representative quoted me for untold thousands. I'm not going to post the amount, I'm sure they vary it every time, like small shop owners who vary prices according to the race of the shopper.

In addition, they spam like you would not believe. First you have to unsubscribe from the partner, next from community.3ds.com, next from draftsight.3ds.com, and so on. Eventually, you'll get absolutely random spam, you try to unsubscribe, and they just continue and spam. Fortunately, I used a one-time address, and I killed it. Phew.

The other day I was watching a video by Rich Jones about Fedora on RISC-V. In it, he mentions off-hand that CentOS Stream 10 inherits from Fedora 40.

I don't know how that happened anymore, but previously someone made me think that 1. there will be no more numbered releases of CentOS, which is why it is called "CentOS Stream" now, and 2. CentOS Stream is now the upstream of RHEL, replacing Fedora. I really was concerned for the future of Fedora, that was superfluous in that arrangement, you know!

But apparently, Fedora is still the trunk upstream, and CenOS Stream is only named like that. Nothing changes except CentOS is no longer a clone of RHEL, but instead RHEL is a clone of CentOS. What was all the panic for?

I made a VM at Kamatera a few months ago, and they didn't even have Fedora among images. I ended using Rocky.

The only way to obtain STEP from OpenSCAD that I know is an external tool that someone made. It's pretty crazy actually: it parses OpenSCAD's native export, CSG, and issues commands to OpenCASCADE's CLI, OCC-CSG. The biggest issue for me here is that his approach cannot handle transformations that the CLI does not support. I use hull all over the place and a tool that does not support hull is of no use for me.

So I came up with a mad lad idea: just add a native export of STEP to OpenSCAD. The language itself is constructive, and an export to CSG exists. I just need to duplicate whatever it does, and then at each node, transform it into something that can be expressed in STEP.

As it turned out, STEP does not have any operations. It only has manifolds assembled from faces, which are assembled from planes and lines, which are assembled from cartesian points and vectors. Thus, I need to walk the CSG, compile it into a STEP representation, and only then write it out. Operations like union, difference, or hull have to be computed by my code. The plan is to borrow from OpenSCAD's compiler that builds the mesh, only build with larger pieces - possibly square or round.

Not sure if this is sane and can be made to work, but it's pretty fun at least.

What do you think this does:

class A(object):
 def aa(self):
 return 'A1'
class A(object):
 def aa(self):
 return 'A2'
a = A()
print("%s" % a.aa())

It prints "A2".

But before you think "what's the big deal, the __dict__ of A is getting updated", how about this:

class A(object):
 def aa(self):
 return 'A1'
class A(object):
 def bb(self):
 return 'A2'
a = A()
print("%s" % a.aa())

This fails with "AttributeError: 'A' object has no attribute 'aa'".

Apparently, the latter definition replaces the former completely. This is darkly amusing.

Python 3.12.2

Problem:
When copying from tmux in gnome-terminal, the text is full of whitespace. How do I delete it in gvim?

Solution:
/ \+$

Obviously.

This is an area where tmux is a big regression from screen. Too bad.

Problem: After an update to F39, a system continues to boot F38 kernels

The /bin/kernel-install generates entries in /boot/efi/loader/entries instead of /boot/loader/entries. Also, they are in BLS Type 1 format, and not in the legacy GRUB format. So I cannot copy them over.

Solution:
[root@chihiro zaitcev]# dnf install ostree
[root@chihiro zaitcev]# rm -rf /boot/efi/$(cat /etc/machine-id) /boot/efi/loader/

I've read a bunch of docs and the man page for kernel-install(8), but they are incomprehensible. Still the key insight was that all that Systemd stuff loves to autodetect by finding this directory or that.

The way to test is:
[root@chihiro zaitcev]# /bin/kernel-install -v add 6.8.5-201.fc39.x86_64 /lib/modules/6.8.5-201.fc39.x86_64/vmlinuz

postfix-3.8.1-5.fc39.x86_64
opendkim-2.11.0-0.35.fc39.x86_64

Following generic guides (e.g. at Akamai Linode) almost got it all working with ease. There were a few minor problems with permissions.

Problem:
Feb 28 11:45:17 takane postfix/smtpd[1137214]: warning: connect to Milter service local:/run/opendkim/opendkim.sock: Permission denied
Solution:
add postfix to opendkim group; no change to Umask etc.

Problem:
Feb 28 13:36:39 takane opendkim[1136756]: 5F1F4DB81: no signing table match for 'zaitcev@kotori.zaitcev.us'
Solution:
change SigningTable from refile: to a normal file

Problem:
Feb 28 13:52:05 takane opendkim[1138782]: can't load key from /etc/opendkim/keys/dkim001.private: Permission denied
Feb 28 13:52:05 takane opendkim[1138782]: 93FE7D0E3: error loading key 'dkim001._domainkey.kotori.zaitcev.us'
Solution:
[root@takane postfix]# chmod 400 /etc/opendkim/keys/dkim001.private
[root@takane postfix]# chown opendkim /etc/opendkim/keys/dkim001.private