Friday Feedback

Mar 7, 2025

—

What’s a few electrons between friends?

We had a power hit Thursday morning. Almost everything recovered fine. Two machines needed to be kicked in the pants and one needed a BIOS configuration change.

All in all, a good test of stability and reliability.

Just how slow is that box?

I’m embarrassed to say.

I’ve been using AMD chipsets since the days of the Pentium. When they found the divide error and Intel refused to acknowledge the bug, requiring OS modifications to resolve, I switched to AMD.

I do not regret it.

I recently moved into the Intel chipsets and bluntly, I didn’t get it.

What is Core-i3? How is that different from Core-i5 and Core-i7? Which of the Core families is older?

Well, it turns out that i3 means “small”, i5 is “medium” and i7 is “large.” They just took a lesson from Starbucks, just how big is a vente?

Instead, they have “generations. The higher the generation, the higher the speed. A 4th gen i7 will be slower than a 12th gen i3. Nice to know.

They also have CPU sockets that have different names, but I’m not sure if they are compatible. An LGA1150, LGA1151, and an LGA1155 all seem to be compatible. So far, I’ve been lucky.

There is one server that is older than the rest. I benchmarked it. There is a 25x difference between it and my workhorses. It was already slated to be retired. It is just happening sooner.

I actually have 2 machines that must be retired and one machine that should be retired. 2 more machines that can be upgraded.

The world moves forward.

Networks

Well, I finally found the small switch I was looking for. 4 10Gbit SFP+ ports and less than $60. I’m waiting for it to arrive from China.

Constitutional Crisis!

I’ve looked at a number of the cases filed to stop Trump’s policies. So far, Trump is winning.

In the case of “You can’t fire me!” the circuit court said, “Well, for the moment you are fired.” and the plaintiff folded. Win for The People.

In the case of the inferior district court ordering the government to payout nearly $2billion, The People won again.

The Supreme Court stayed the TRO. The TRO expired. The Supreme Court said, “Well, it is moot now. Inferior court, don’t do dumb things.”

The DoJ is suing New York. Nothing is going to happen there because they are slow walking it.

The State of New York is suing President Trump.

The big takeaway from these cases is that this is not going well for the enemy. These are not cases that are being tied up in court for months and months. These things are moving rapidly.

In the normal course of a court case, I can check on the case once or twice a week and see nothing happening. In these cases, once or twice an hour might not be often enough.

Is that a Mermaid you have?

xychart-beta
    title "Sales Revenue"
    x-axis [jan, feb, mar, apr, may, jun, jul, aug, sep, oct, nov, dec]
    y-axis "Revenue (in $)" 4000 --> 11000
    bar [5000, 6000, 7500, 8200, 9500, 10500, 11000, 10200, 9200, 8500, 7000, 6000]
    line [5000, 6000, 7500, 8200, 9500, 10500, 11000, 10200, 9200, 8500, 7000, 6000]

This is a five line Mermaid diagram. For me, it is more useful for things like state diagrams and other computer stuff. But it is neat to have graph capabilities here and in my git documentation.

Why is it so big? It doesn’t fit!

Most people use GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab for hosting their projects. These are nice, but some features require monthly payments. GitLab has a community version that can be self-hosted. It is a monster. It is a massive resource hog. I hated using it, but it gave me what I needed. With all of its features, it felt bloated. On the new infrastructure, it just would not run. This was causing significant stress. I tried using Emacs org-mode for tracking bugs, but that wasn’t working. So I installed Bugzilla. Nice, free, Perl. And it was too big for what I required, and I still required my “GitHub” like tool. Enter Gitea, “Git with a cup of tea.” It is lightweight, comes with issue tracking. Simplified port access. All in all, a good replacement.

Teaching Classes

I have been having fun teaching English as a second language. I wrote a program that integrates a text reader with a dictionary and the ability to play pronunciations. It has been fun. What has been more fun is teaching Use Cases. With some of my students we’ve moved from reading books to having developer conversations or having them do presentations. With one of them, we’ve been discussing Use Cases. I’ve never forgotten how useful they are. They are so useful I’ve started using them for own projects.

Question of the Week

For you, what was the best part of Trump’s address to congress?

Comments

3 responses to “Friday Feedback”

pkoning

2025-03-07

To me, the thing that made me doubt Intel once again was their treatment of the famous security bug caused by wrong pipeline design (missing security in speculative execution). They tried to pretend it was a general feature of pipelined designs shared by competitors, rather than an Intel-specific design error which it actually was.

Then again, I’ve never thought of Intel as an engineering powerhouse, not since the 1980s when I spent a while fighting the crazy API of the 82586 Ethernet NIC chip. Queues with race conditions designed in…

Reply
1. awa
  
  2025-03-07
  
  Race conditions. Oh my.
  
  Years ago, when I was at University, we had Ontel terminals. These connected via 4800baud serial to the frontend to our CDC 750 or CDC 6500. One of my other employers gave me a DEC Rainbow for development work.
  
  The issue I had was I only had that one, 4800 baud link. My answer was to put the Rainbow between the two and to code a simple interrupt-driven routine to forward every character to the Ontel.
  
  We were big on circular I/O Buffers, so that is what I did. When a character was sent, an interrupt was generated. When a character was received, an interrupt was generated.
  
  Cool. Except that if I was viewing a long output, more than a 1000 or so characters, every couple of lines I would lose a character.
  
  With investigation, I found that it was every 256 characters. Exactly the size of my circular I/O buffer.
  
  After a few days of staring at code, I found the bug. The bug was a 1 cycle instruction that was not semaphore protected. I had the get semaphore in the wrong place by one instruction.
  
  I could not imagine why that one cycle was so consistently hit. Until I realized that almost all of my interrupts were happening at nearly the same time. It was the extra instruction to zero the offset instead of add one to the offset that made the difference.
  
  I’ve never trusted “it’s unlikely to happen at exactly the wrong time.” since. I always assume it will happen at the worst time.
  
  Reply
ABC123

2025-03-08

I want to go back to Biden’s speeches to the Congress and see what Republicans did. I bet they did not hold up ping pong paddles with rude comments, I bet they did not act disrespectfully to the sitting president. I bet they did not troll and badger Biden.
There were a lot of great points to Trump’s speech, but since I think a lot with my emotions, I loved the stories of the people. I loved the real examples of how this young woman was killed because of the open border, and the story of the boy with cancer and his cowboy hat. How the left didn’t applaud or stand up for those brave individuals is beyond me.

Reply