● 07.29.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 29/07/2023: All Software is Made for the First Time, Disk Failure

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• My wife led three female-centric-themed songs, I led a couple Beatles, and then the host said, “Y’all got one more in you?” The right song came immediately to mind. Given we were the final performers, I felt that although we’d only played it only once together, that one time was just a few hours before at the senior living facility. So I said, “As a matter of fact, we do!”, and got us going on KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight”.

Politics and World Events

• He correctly realizes that it’s worthwhile to discuss the philosophy of Socrates without getting bogged down in the historicity of the guy.

• Yet when it comes to the lilies parable in Matthew 6 a few centuries later (which is the verse he quotes), he gets hung up on census data and specific time and date.

Science

• We need to recognize that for the past three hundred years we’ve headed down a dangerous path—the fossil-driven economy—that’s dangerous to stay on and difficult to get off of.

• There’s nothing in recorded human history and scripture, in the past ten thousand years or so, that can prepare us for this situation.

• Clinging to old commandments like being fruitful and multiplying is something we need to think twice about.

• The United States is, per capita, one of the worst greenhouse emitters on the planet and part of the reason for that is, of course, conservatism. A short-sighted and cruel ideology that aims to gilt the prison bars. From Buckley’s racist “don’t immanentize the Eschaton” to today’s senate-floor snowball-throwers, it’s the politics of molasses, of getting stuck in the quicksand as the tide is coming in. They’ll have the least immanentized Eschaton on the cinder.

Technology and Free Software

• The other day I started poking at the old code I had for drawing stuff on the screen my keyboard has built into it. I’d had a basic, control the pixel with some buttons and it’ll leave a trail, but I’d left it with a bug preventing sleeps less than a second. Which made it really annoying to fiddle with. I figured that out and promptly threw most of it out anyway. Then I wanted to be able to use the screen as a tiny display that could do terminal stuff. Using some of the code from #g15stats and #hackvr_term I was able to get a program, which I named #g15term, that let me pipe stuff from stdin to the screen. Which works good enough for me. (While writing this, I found that menelkir wrote their own thing named g15term. I should probably pick a different name.)

• One of the things I like about working as a developer is that all of the problems are being solved for the first time. Outside of the realm of writing software for educational purposes, very rarely is a piece of software written to do exactly the same job as an existing program; the client will just go download the existing one instead. The marginal cost of distributing software is so small that it doesn’t even come close to even a few hours of dev time. This means that the majority of devs are working on interesting, novel problems; very little development work is grunt work. It makes everything more interesting for sure.

• There are some downsides, though. Most pressingly, it is very difficult to know how long any given task will take. It is very often the case that it is impossible to say whether a bug can be fixed in just a couple of hours or will take a few weeks or more. This is inevitabling creates some friction between the developer team and the rest of the org who, somewhat rightfully, demand more concrete timelines.

• This week I had ran into a proper disk failure, which was an interesting experience. This was actually the first time I’ve had to deal with a failing disk in a RAID1 array and I don’t recall encountering other disk failures with BTRFS before this one either.

• But yeah, I keep a RAID1 array of 2 hard drives for storing my livestream VODs. It started out as my general video production array back when I was still doing YouTube, but these days it pretty much just stores livestreams I’ve done over the years.

• This machine is almost 30 years old (and it’s still working!), yet it runs a current version of OpenBSD, even software that I wrote for my usual workstation. I like this a lot. Judging by the performance of this old machine, I might not need to replace my current workstation (which is already over a decade old) for another 10 or maybe 20 years … ? Crazy.

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