LCA2005 - Tridge Keynote

Funny as ever, yet deeply informative.

Valgrind is good. “You’re idiots!” (general laughter) to audience members who confessed with raised hand to not using valgrind.

Samba4 looked at threads, multiple processes or a single nonblocking state machine. Threads are evil, processes are ugly and state machines will drive you mad... so Samba4 offers all three, determinable at runtime. You can be evil, ugly or mad.

Using an IDL compiler called pidl, Samba4 can &ldquol;natively” communicate in any endian order (in CIFS, the receiver sorts out byte order on a per-structure-element basis, ie, very slowly) in its native endianness. Another side-effect is that each connection context drops from a couple of hundred kB to a few kB. Samba4 can (has) run a domain controller on a LinkSys router.

Tridge waxed lyrical about talloc, including “the good parts” of C++ like destructors but without the C++ which he called (general laughter) “a big plus... C-big-plus”. It also avoids the need to zero out memory for security reasons.

Talloc is being used in baz with a 25% reduction in code size an in “a certain source code control system” (more laughter).

Also spoke on STFS (Storage Tank File System) “a filesystem for high decibel storage systems”. “Error deleting /proc/kcore” when shaving Unicode character 0x12F down to 8 bits (== 0x2F == '/').

Also spoke on the mystery BitKeeper client. “Completely trivial and crazy.” when you see “bk://thunk.org:5000/"e; you think...? (many in audience said) “protocol, host, port”, so “telnet thunk.org 5000” and type “help” – who was this help for? “echo clone | nc thunk.org 5000 > file” gets raw SCCS. Tahdaah. Storm in a teacup.

Comments

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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