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December 31, 2021

I've been holding off venting about the world since the goat burned. Fade is home, I left the stressful job, I have STUFF TO DO. But it does accumulate. I have literally hundreds of links I've saved to deal with later that... I don't have TIME to group them into topics and extract and write up the narrative threads they support. I'm busy. And there's a constant stream of fresh links that distract from the accumulated todo heap, in this as in so many things.

There is SOME good news, such as slowly fixing holes in Obamacare, and the covid vaccines being extremely effective at keeping the vaccinated out of hospitals when we all catch Omicron (the flu vaccine doesn't stop you from catching NEXT year's flu, nor does having caught the flu last year), or the continuing decline of religion in america. The Great Resignation (I.E. general strike) continues to set records. And as annoyed as I get at Google, Apple is worse. (I want Google to be better. I don't consider Apple, Facebook, or Amazon to be salvageable.)

But the fresh links don't stop coming. We've reached the point where Vox is quoting The Onion. Seems an appropriate way to close out 2021. (2020 was the year of hindsight. Then twenty twenty won. The coming year is twenty twenty too.)

The NYPD is profoundly useless. Notice that not only did the NOT deal with the assaults so the delivery workers had to set up their own possees patroling the bridges, later in the article it talks about "The NYPD set up checkpoints, fining riders $500, seizing their bikes, and posting photos of the busts on Twitter. The police would then return the bikes because, again, they were legal to own." Civil forfeiture by another name, for-profit policing.

Ignoring police shooting civilians, the most common cause of gun deaths is suicide. The second most common cause is gun owners killing their families, on purpose or by accident. Weird Al did a song about that back in the 1990s. The psychological corrosiveness of this issue is what did in Eric Raymond.

This article about Kansas turning into a desert, as people have spent MANY DECADES warning them it would if the white male racists who stole the land from the natives during "bloody kansas" exhaust the aquifers, says it's not true that "conservative rural farmers are solely to blame for this self-destructive loss" but that you also have to blame capitalism. Well duh. I'd love to see Sarah Taber unpick the transparent excuses and point out the real problems more clearly.

People who've moved to other countries and want to renounce their US citizenship can't do so (backlog of 30k people, and growing), which is especially annoying for countries like germany where you can't get a new citizenship without giving up your old one.


December 30, 2021

The problem with trying to do videos is the same problem as generally writing documentation: where do you start? At what point do you assume your audience already knows this stuff? Before I can explain this, first you have to know this, and so on.

I was originally thinking "I can do a video on the toybox cp implementation" except... there's one video on "using cp" and another on "how cp is implemented". So start with a simpler command line "true", except explaining every line of that means walking through the functional comment block at the top, and just explaining the NEWTOY() macro is quite a digression, and it's inside USE_COMMAND() which implies you already know how the config infrastructure works, and then it's pulling in lib/args.c plumbing, except "true" is a bad example because it ISN'T doing that (hasn't got a GLOBALS() block either) so it's just a SUBSET of the available infrastructure, so explaining this command can't be a proxy for explaining the infrastructure...

For years I've wanted to write a computer history book starting with The word "Electronics" came out of World War II...", explaining Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (the first modern computer that everything* else descends from, via Eniac and Univac), how Grace Hopper was his Ada Lovelace inventing the compiler, how the son of IBM's CEO (Thomas Watson Jr) was a World War II pilot where radio and radar were vital and the artillery tables the Mark I computed combined with electronic proximity fuses shot down his rivals' planes and he INSISTED that IBM let him manage a project to design and sell a computer when he got back (his dad was just so happy he was finally taking an interest in the family business, and thus the IBM 701 was created, with "computers" being the generic term IBM came up with to compete with "Univacs", which like Xerox or Kleenex was what people called the new machines. Previously "computer" had been a job like "accountant", it meant someone who did math for a living with a mechanical calculator that worked like those old mechanical cash registers that ring a bell and pops up a "no sale" tab...)

Ahem. WAAAAAAAY too much backstory for toybox videos, and I didn't even TRY to drag that paragraph out to the invention of unix in 1969. (I've written up a little of this history years ago, in two parts, but the problem I had with researching for the book is I had about 900 pages of material so I did research to narrow it down and wound up with about 2500 pages of material. Sigh.)

Anyway, mkroot tries to make a minimal self-hosting unix-ish system (conceptually 4 packages: kernel, C library, command line, C compiler), with toybox acting as the command line. I could easily do a whole video on how xv6 fits into there, or how C++ hijacked C (wrote up a three part rant on that already) and how the llvm C backend can help mitigate that by acting as a modern cfront... I should probably explain countering trusting trust.

Ahem: MORE TANGENT. Right. So assuming you know how/why to USE toybox when you download a prebuilt binary (a big if), then there's "how do I build it from source". There's the standard configure/make/install stuff which in this case is "make distclean defconfig toybox install", I need to explain menuconfig, and "make sed" and "make change", plus the rest of (and existence of) "make help".

Walking through the rest of the top level files, there's the actual toybox source (main.c and toys.h, plus the toys/ and lib/ directories). The documentation files are README, LICENSE, and the www/ directory. The menuconfig infrastructure is (mostly) Config.in and the kconfig/ directory. Building uses "configure" and "Makefile" but also scripts/{genconfig,make,install}.sh KINDA doing the configure/make/install thing, plus scripts/portability.sh and scripts/*.c. And then there's scripts/change.sh and scripts/single.sh... plus a bunch of misc stuff like bloatcheck, findglobals, showasm... and of course the test suite.

Sigh. I can handle it in groups, but it's a lot of groups. Making a lesson plan involves serializing circular dependencies and it's always buckets of work to look like there's a natural order you didn't have to do anything to find. I'm almost certainly going wind up redoing videos more than once. I want "jump straight in and learn useful stuff you can immediately use" videos so people don't get frustrated, but to actually understand you need hours of backstory that I can't entirely frontload or people will get bored and wander off. Hmmm...

* with a footnote explaining that Konrad Zuse contributed literally nothing, Hitler cut off his funding, all his work was destroyed by allied bombing, and nobody remembered he existed until his grandkids started a propaganda campaign on his behalf in the 1970s retroactively inserting him into a narrative that would have been completely unchanged if he'd never been born. The nazi technology the US computer industry looted went through Ampex and a bit of Von Braun's V2 rocket guys, and had nothing to do with Zuse's failed experiments. (The british did cool stuff during the war but between keeping Colossus top secret until it was profoundly obsolete and the british government murdering Alan Turing for being gay, all their lasting contributions went through public channels over to the USA and don't really need to be treated seperately except for talking about how Babage and Lovelace inspired Aiken's work, and sure Babbage was copying the Jaquard loom but I already mentioned the mechanical calculators. IBM's tabulators were basically database processing using punched card stacks as the physical records: stack of card goes into machine that sorts it into two piles with some programmed test, selected stack goes into another machine that adds up a result doing cumulative math on each card to give a total. The switch to programmable computers was easy, once Thomas Watson Sr. aged out of the productive flow.)


December 29, 2021

I'm trying to clean up my toybox tree before going back to work for Jeff on monday. Specificially, I have 8 gazillion half-finished changes to commands, not just in toybox/toybox but in toybox/clean and toybox/clean2 and up through clean7, plus clean.old...

A habit I got into years ago is having a top level directory for a project, and then a subdir under that containing the actual code. So I can have patches and notes files and so on in toybox/notes.txt instead of filling toybox/toybox with random stuff that isn't to be checked in. My tree gets dirty anyway, and when I need a new one I clone it to "clean", and sometimes THAT gets dirty so I clone a "clean2", and...

I've mentioned before that tabsplosion is a symptom of overwork. My todo list always runneth over (in that doing work spins off new todo items faster than I complete them) but those things are notes-to-self jotted down somewhere so I can get on with what I was doing. Finishing things, testing them, and checking them in is time consuming work requiring focus. Getting partway through and needing to resolve a design conflict and never getting back to it means I've got a bunch of open cans of worms littering my desk and I have to clear space to open the NEXT can.

So right now I'm running "git diff" against my toybox tree, finding the next file that's dirty, and reading the diff to figure out WHY: what was I trying to do, where did I leave off doing it, what was the issue I got stopped by at the time... Often I leave english notes to myself in the code about them (such as "murgle echo hello & needs implicit () for builtin, not just pipe" in clean6/toys/pending/sh.c) which act as build breaks. I have commented out "// TODO" lines for issues that I mean to come back to later (blkid.c has "TODO: special case NTFS $VOLUME_NAME here..." for example) but which won't stop me from checking it in. The build breaks usually start with a nonsense word I can grep for later: used to be "blork" which doesn't mean anything, these days it's "murgle" which according to my 10 year old self is the sound a wumpus makes drowning in molasses. (YOU use a childhood pet as a password, me I have D&D character names from 6th grade. One of my youtube playlists is named after a phrase from my sister's teenage conlang because that was easy for me to remember.)

The build breaks of course render the command unusable until fixed, so I "default n" the config, and when I notice I've rendered mkroot unusable because it hasn't got "cp" I fire up a "clean6" and do the next thing there, but shoveling OUT all this stuff means going through each directory, seeing what half-done work is there, finishing it, porting it to the main tree ("git format-patch" and "git am" are very useful for this, as is "git diff > blah.patch && git checkout -f && git pull --rebase && patch -p1 -i blah.patch").

So anyway, I got basic sort -h support checked in. I haven't run the conformance tests in that and don't really want to add all of them to tests/sort.test but possibly they should go in tests/demo_number.test instead? Mostly I just wanted cp to build again in the main tree. :)


December 28, 2021

I do NOT have time to organize science fiction conventions these days, but I note that the voice actress is Christine Woods if I were to comission a spot "Ask your doctor about Entrapta". As for which Doctor, there's a half-dozen to choose from but probably Jodie Whitaker.

Darn it, making "sort -u" apply to key matches is darn fiddly. If you drop matches DURING the sort there's no guarantee other matches will ever wind up adjacent, because you can't resize the array during the sort so the now-dead matches will get evaluated again and if you don't return what they WOULD have sorted as then the other thing you compare it with can wind up anywhere. You can't change your mind halfway through a sort and say "this now-dead entry goes at the end!" because if it's already been compared with something earlier it won't wind up AT the end, but somewhere in the middle....

$ make sort
$ echo -e 'zero 1\none 1\nfour 3\ntwo 1\nthree 2\nalso 1' | ./sort -k2,2n -u
two 1
three 2
zero 1
four 3

So I have to mark the entry unambiguously so it can be discarded later, because "unique within key match" isn't visible outside compare_keys()... Hmmm. But it's always returns the FIRST hit and discards the later ones, even if they would have sorted differently due to other keys and the fallback sort, so what I really need to do is have the "is this unique" test behave differently from the normal return the first key match. Let's see, tests...

Oh you bastard:

$ echo -e '2 2 4\n5 3 4\n1 2 3' | sort -k2,2n -k3,3n -u
1 2 3
2 2 4
5 3 4
landley@driftwood:~$ echo -e '2 2 4\n5 3 4\n1 2 3' | sort -k2,2n -u
2 2 4
5 3 4
landley@driftwood:~$ echo -e '2 2 4\n5 3 4\n1 2 3' | sort -k3,3n -u
1 2 3
2 2 4

THAT'S NOT WHAT IT'S DOING. It's just disabling the fallback sort. It's not that "unique within a key" is special, it's that -u implies -s. (Is this documented anywhere? Not spotting it in the man page although it's long enough I could easily miss something. Is it in posix...

Sigh. Yes, but easy to miss: "Except when the -u option is specified, lines that otherwise compare equal shall be ordered as if..." I.E. -u disables fallback sort.

This is why one of my 1.0-ish TODO tasks is to fill out the test suite via a pedantic scrupulous reading of the posix spec making a test for every weird little clause and statement that would change the meaning if it wasn't there. (Or adding a comment to the "deviations from posix" section in the .c file's header that we explicitly didn't do that, such as the various "they say %d and we use %lld because LP64 is a thing" parts.) I expect this to be an IMMENSE time sink, but it's not FINISHED otherwise. "Builds Android and LFS+BLFS" is the practical goal, that's the documentation goal. (Coming up with an actual useful complete system specification to replace what the Linux Standard Base was trying to do before the Linux Foundation chewed it up is a mkroot goal, not a toybox goal.)


December 27, 2021

The vet phoned in a prescription for lasix, and Zabina's diuretic is salix. Working to get that sorted. (At this point they just seem amazed the cat is still alive, but she perked up noticeably when Fade and Adverb got back. She's a people cat and likes having a bigger household, and even likes the dog.)

Oh, wow. I got a 400 euro patreon subscriber! Who has single-handedly put me up to the "do a weekly podcast" goal. (THANK YOU!)

Um. I've mentioned here that I've been poking at youtube video stuff, starting with a mkroot video that's kind of expanded to three mkroot videos. There's a certain amount of "the perfect is the enemy of the good" going on, plus I wanted to document how it SHOULD work rather than how it DOES work, but I got most of that worked through in the most recent toybox release work...

Ok, I need an "intro to mkroot" that tells you what it's for and how to use it. That's NOT the same video as the code walkthrough (I.E. explaining all ~270 lines of the bash script). Which isn't the same as a walkthrough of the resulting system. ("So you're sitting at a linux shell prompt: now what?") Probably a walkthrough of the init script, explaining system bringup and the old "BSD style" Linux From Scratch And I need one about adding the native compiler and building more packages under QEMU, which right now is problematic because you need a "make" binary from somewhere, and awk, and the shell's still missing pieces... And backing up to the host build, I need to explain about adding additional packages to the build (dropbear is there as an example but you can do many more, I've got a local busybox build one so I can compare command behavior in a virtual environment, haven't used it in a year but it's there and presumably still works...)

And those are just the mkroot ones, which I started doing because I tried to do a video on "true" thinking "this is the simplest command, I can use it to explain the command infrastructure" and... turns out there's rather a lot of that, and true doesn't exercise all of it. (No GLOBALS block for one thing.)

Ok, I need CATEGORIES for these videos. The patreon charge happens on the 1st, so I should have a video out the first week of January. (Monday? Friday? Hmmm... Given the hitchhiker's guide quote in every release notes since the relicense I suspect it HAS to be Thursdays...)

Right. I should also get the blog entries edited and updated. The website currently goes up through November 26th...


December 26, 2021

Darn it, I miscounted. Today is Sunday so the vet is closed. HEB and thus the HEB pharmacy is open, but Zabina's diuretics ran out and I need to get her prescription refilled so she can breathe. (She's in late stage heart failure which means her lungs fill with fluid so she chokes on nothing, and one of the four pills the vet put her on is a diuretic, and as her condition has deterioriated beyond where the vet thought she'd already be dead I've upped the dosage on the theory her kidneys aren't going to be what gives out first. She is now on "California Raisins" level of the things, as Elrond Hubbard predicted, which means we run through them faster.

The phramacy was nice enough to advance us one pill, which is her nominal dose for the day according to her original prescription. Cut it in half and give it to her every 12 hours... except she starts choking again at 6 hours so we've been pilling her 4x/day. Well, here's hoping she makes it until morning...

Advertising playing on the intercom at HEB. Every "start saving with" ad is the exact same logic as "lose weight by eating..."

And once again Android 12 showing something fullscreened horizontally ignored the "drag from edge" thing to give me the control buttons. In all 4 edges. I wound up using the physical power button to reboot the phone to get control back.

I'm still sad that Android 12 broke google translate. It used to show synonyms, and now it doesn't. For example, I watched some clips of an anime with one of those fashionably long-sentence english names starting "exiled from the hero's party...", but a youtube clip labeled it "Shin no Nakama ja Nai", and I'm going "Shin's family isn't?" Is "shin" the japanese word for hero? So I type "shin" into Google translate and it says "Heart". With no obvious way to get other meanings like it used to automatically show me before they broke it.

And to get even THAT much, I had to track down the tiny print that now thinks it's translating from esperanto to english (because the last japanese word I typed in wasn't recognized and it suggested esperanto: I didn't click but it decided to change type anyway; before it "upgraded" itself the languages it was translating from/to were prominent up the top and DID NOT SPONTANEOUSLY CHANGE). Sigh. I _started_ using this app because Jeff showed me how to download a japanese dictionary so it worked without contacting Google's servers at all. The new version is a strict downgrade, and it was un-asked-for. I did not get to stay on the old one, because I'm not the customer, I'm the product.

Also, I had to Google the japanese name for the thing to get the spelling right here because when I switched away from Youtube and back it discarded the old list of videos it had suggested, and permanently lost the link to the video. (As in there was a flash of the old one, and then it blanked and came up with a new list.) I didn't ask it to, but I couldn't stop it, and thus didn't get to watch the new clip because Youtube won't let me control my experience. Still not the customer, still the product.

Miffed at the youtube breakage so I switched to the Netflix app, and once again Android 12 showing a fullscreened video ignored the "drag from edge" thing to give me the control buttons. In all 4 edges. This time with a paused Netflix video. Wound up using the physical power button again to reboot the phone to get control back. I wonder if I can reinstall Android 11? (Oh, and returning to slack from a chrome pop-up when you hit a link sent to you in chat, you now have to hit the back button _three_ times. Up from two under Android 11. No, I have no idea why.)

Ok, the actual BUG seems to be that when you've told Android 12 "always display the control buttons" in the global gear config thingy, horizontal full-screen view still disables them, but there's no drag gesture to bring them back because you told it they should never NOT be there. So unless the app itself gives you a way to back out OTHER than the back button (something a paused netflix video does not do because it assumes the navigation buttons are available, it's an Android bug if they're not), then you only have the actual physical buttons to control the device. Volume control is not helpful here. When you suspend and resume with the power button, it goes back to the same modal full-screen app that won't let you exit rather than the desktop.

What you need to do to get back control from a paused Netflix video without rebooting is hit the power button to suspend the device, hit it againi to get the lock screen, pull down from the top to get the menu, hit the gear icon, navigate to apps, force kill the app in question, and THEN you get the desktop. (I guess the Android devs never noticed because in the default configuration the power button keeps randomly bringing up the camera to spy on you? The camera app at least lets you rotate back to vertical mode so the nav buttons reappear.)

What's really annoying is that because the "hotspot" pulldown no longer lets you enable USB tethering (both the HEB tables and the table at UT are too radio-noisy for wifi to work reliably), you have to navigate four levels deep in the pulldown menu to enable USB tethering, and THEN if you did it in portrait mode (because you were playing a fullscreened video that doesn't give you can't mini-view with the middle circle button because Android 12 does not reliably have nav controls) you have to physically lift up the phone to rotate the menu display to get the nav buttons back so you can hit "back" to get out of it, and when your USB cable isn't the newest this can jostle it and disable your connection.

Boxing day, HEB's table area is open again. Took my laptop and debugged host.c (I was feeding in the wrong buffer in the intial send so the query was all zeroes). Unfortunately, not only does the Android NDK not have res_send() like musl and glibc (and 4.3 BSD), it also hasn't got the new thread-contaminated res_nsend() version that drags along a large pointless state buffer you don't need when writing a normal non-threaded program, so I can't even convert it. (I built a pointless.c test program first to sizeof() the buffer and it's only a little over 500 bytes, I could feed it a chunk of toybuf as ballast easily enough. Although why it can't malloc/free internally, I honestly couldn't tell you. Or just put the existing static buffer in the https segment so you get one per thread.)

Glanced at musl's implementation, which is opening a socket. Our host.c is ALSO opening a socket in the "specify which server to query" path, which implies we don't need both codepaths. Except there isn't an obvious way to get your local nameservers, musl is using a ________get_resolv_conf() function to open /etc/resolv.conf which probably isn't where Android keeps its nameservers? And it includes optional timeout and attempts arguments that I'm not bothering to parse...

Actually, the host.c Rich submitted already has two codepaths: one for specified nameservers that opens its own socket to send/receive a packet, and one that calls the libc function to open a socket for you behind the scenes. I don't NEED both codepaths, I just need a "find default servers" function to feed into the do-it-yourself codepath. Which also solves the "bionic didn't implement this function" issue. (Said find-nameservers function might move into portability.c since the musl one is just opening /etc/resolv.conf and reading lines, and glibc's been a horror for years with a dlopen() of "name information system" nonsense I haven't seen used used since the Clinton administration which also means that DNS resolution always fails for statically linked glibc binaries. Bionic saving its nameserver information in the Windows Registry is sad, but alas not UNUSUALLY bad. No clue what MacOS X does, but I suppose someone will probably tell me eventually.)

Catching up on email I did a pass through the busybox list (which I read maybe twice a month?) and saw somebody wanted cmp -n, so I added that. (I can't use their code but I _can_ use their userbase's use case suggestions. Half the time they're just asking for stuff toybox already does before busybox, such as "timeout -k". And lots of things are busybox-specific bug reports such as printf not supporting 0 flag prefixes and sed ignoring the g modifier when a match starts with "^", just tested toybox, worked fine. But there's the occasional good feature suggestion in there...)

While I was at it I wired up SKIP1 and SKIP2 (it's in the usage: line but wasn't actually implemented), and now I'm squinting at it using loopfiles(), which I did to have it handle the "-" filename automatically, but I have xopenro() now in lib/ and COULD redo it to just have everything be inline in main, but is the churn worth it? There's a bunch of "when do warn but not exit, what sets what error return code" that I meticulously worked through the first time and don't really want to revisit right now. The test suite PROBABLY catches most of it, but I don't wanna re-audit THAT just now either...


December 25, 2021

Merry christmas. Mostly offline. (Well everything's closed, I'd have to compute from under a cat.)

Of course the new Core i7 outperformed the Apple M1 on random microbenchmark du jour. As I said, it's entirely manufacturing. Die size shrink allowing more transistors to run in parallel clocked faster is how Moore's Law has _always_ worked. The s-curve is bending down but it ain't flat yet. Apple's using financial leverage to negotiate with TSMC and Samsung for chip fab space during the pandemic shortage. (Steve Jobs had a dream of a factory where sand and oil went in one end, and finished computers came out the other. Apple has been trying to increase vertical integration ever since: money goes in but does not come out.)


December 24, 2021

Got host converted. It's not working, of course. And the functions it calls are completely opaque, so tracking down why is tedious...

Poking at implementing command editing history for toysh and you know how QEMU's emulated BIOS outputs "\e[?7h" (I.E. DECAWM, the DEC private mode wordwrap disable sequence from "man 4 console_codes")? Which it has NO BUSINESS doing, and leaves the terminal in a broken state when QEMU exits? Well it turns out, wordwrap is also disabled while QEMU is running. My qemu wrapper script outputs the undo sequence ("\e[?7l") but probably I should have my init script do it instead. (Or poke qemu to NOT DO THAT and then wait years for a fixed package to get released and propagate into everybody's systems... yeah, init script.)

Blah. My "toybox/toybox" directory is dirty enough (full of half-finished changes) I'm doing small side projects in toybox/clean, and then pulling the resulting commits into toybox/toybox. And I finally managed to get the two trees to diverge (commits in each from the last common base). The fix is to go into clean, "git diff > temp.patch && git checkout -f && git pull --rebase ../toybox && patch -p1 -i temp.patch && rm temp.patch".


December 23, 2021

I got pinged by a Google Recruiter again. I tried to summarize the past 5 months of "maybe" from Lars and Elliott, and suggested he go off and talk to them.

The vaccine booster isn't hitting me as hard as the first shot did, but there's a lot of "I feel fine until I try to DO anything" going on. I got winded lifting a cat.

I got the "how can I help" question a couple days back, which made me took another look at pending, and host.c seems like low hanging fruit so I'm cleaning that up.

I collapsed a large sparse array-of-struct (256 entries of which 10 were actually used) to a much smaller array with an extra field to indicate which entry it is. (So the lookup is no longer array[num] but a small for loop, but I consider it a net win.) The array ALSO has the classic problem of having an array-of-structure with a constant #defined for each entry so a switch statement can act on an entry once it's been looked up: the enum (or #define list) exists solely to marshall data from one context to another. On the one hand, this is why I created TAGGED_ARRAY(), to autogenerate that sort of thing from the first entry which is always a string in such arrays (true again here). On the other hand, infrastructure that exists to marshall data to OURSELVES is by definition unnecessary. We've already GOT it, just in the wrong format. Why not store it in the right format in the first place? The answer is generally "can't figure out how", but I squint a lot at these things because Single Point Of Truth says we should not have the same information maintained in two places if we can avoid it. In this case that extra entry I just added (which used to be position in sparse array) is ALREADY a unique number (the DNS record type), but I don't even want THAT to be in both the array and a case statment if I can help it.

I admit a mild dislike of C switch/case statements, because they're verbose (guaranteed extra break; statement), because the label: lives outside the block syntax (doing it for goto is bad enough, did you ever see the horror that was the original bunzip2 implementation, I'm sure I ranted about it on the busybox list back in the day...), and because if/else staircases usually produce smaller binaries and are just as fast for small numbers of entries, plus you can use them for string comparisons not just integers. I always feel guilt about rewriting them when someone submits one (it's mostly gratuitous churn), but as long as I'm redoing it ANYWAY... (In THEORY switch/case lets the compiler do an optimized lookup table with binary search for the values... a thing I could do myself if I really cared? Outside of tight inner loops fetching fewer cache lines across the DRAM bus and fitting more in L1 is generallly the win, and yeah these days we've got megabytes of L2 but we've also got branch prediction and... it's down in the noise either way.) Oh, the other thing about switch/case is NOBODY EVER KNOWS HOW TO INDENT THEM. (I don't either, but it's very much not consistent. Because labels: logcally go at the LEFT EDGE, since they completely ignore the block hierarchy. Except that case: labels do care about the case { } grouping, and look exactly like goto: labels which don't. Wheee...)


December 22, 2021

YES! $DAYJOB FINALLY let me off the hook! Their reason is, of course, that I have been "unresponsive" this week. (Yes, I am on vacation. Yes I got this vacation approved. Yes, it's unpaid time off since I only get paid for hours I worked. But I haven't been responding to messages on Google Teams during said unpaid time off, so they needed the recruiter I'm working through to contact me right before christmas so I _know_ that I don't work there anymore. Which is WHAT I'VE BEEN TRYING TO ARRANGE FOR A MONTH, thank the burning goat.)

Fade tried to associate our google fiber router with the google home app on her phone (which she used to control her chromecast back in minneapolis before she switched to tivo because no other device lets her see prime _and_ youtube videos), and although it found the router via bluetooth it wouldn't scan the QR code, and when she typed in the number by hand it couldn't find it, and then it couldn't find the router again. (As usual it was working fine until I walked up to ask how it was going and then never worked again: I break everything often by sheer proximity.)

A call to tech support later (which took half an hour while they reflashed the router) and the app could find the router, and THEN we found out that the only way to get a list of your connected devices (and thus assign a static IP and port forward) is to enable "cloud services" so Google can data harvest a list of everyone behind your router. You MUST sign up for data harvesting or a capability that Linksys offered back in 1998 is not available.)

So I need to buy a non-Google router that doesn't insist on data harvesting from me in exchange for basic capabilities DESPITE PAYING THEM OVER $70/MONTH. (You know that old saying "if you're not the customer, you're the product"? Apparently Google doesn't have the option of you NOT being the product. You pay AND get your data harvested. This is pretty much convincing me that when Waymo's self-driving cars do arrive, the experience will be unusable because it'll be constant ads blaring at you every time all the way to your destination, EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE PAYING FOR THE TRIP.)

Off to get my J&J booster shot. I'm really not happy about this.

That was a horrible experience. I did not enjoy that.

Broke down and temporarily gave the google spy box permission to flush its collected data to Google's ad servers. (On the solemn promise that permission can be rescinded again and if not I will smash it with a cinderblock and buy a new router at Best Buy.) Somehow it remembered EIGHT DIFFERENT machines connected to it despite having been reflashed a couple hours ago, because the MOST IMPORTANT thing it had to retain was whatever might possibly increase Google ad revenue, for a definition of "ad revenue" that means "we sold your personal information to a KGB front shell corporation". Grumble grumble, halfway assuming they already HAVE this info...

Anyway, got Tiny Machine set up so I can ssh into it, both from home and from a remote machine. It's still dangling off the television, I should move it later. (There's a lovely little power strip I remember seeing but can't currently find.) Now that Tiny Machine has built the toolchains, I told it to build all the mkroot targets (the kernel needs me to install flex, bison, and bc), and then I need to build qemu to test boot them and...

Sigh, qemu's build dependencies have metastasized horribly. So running ./configure complains it needs ninja, then once that's installed it complains that it needs glib and libgthread. Did you know that installing libglib2.0-dev installs python3-distutils? Because of course it does, it's gnu crap. Then once THAT'S done running, ./configure clones 7 git submodules. Because the logical time to download dependencies is as an automated side effect of running ./configure. And then once THAT'S done the next ./configure dies because dependency pixman-1 not found. (The resulting configure output with the red NO and gree YES results for things it probed has pixman with a green YES except IF IT ISN'T THERE THE BUILD BREAKS SO NO IS NOT AN OPTION.)

Grrr.


December 21, 2021

Today's Android 12 regression: the youtube description panel no longer lets you cut and paste from it, and containslinks that aren't clickable. I think it happens when the description generates links to video sections, those are clickable but everything before it _isn't_. Generating those navigation links disables interaction with the rest of the description in the Android app. This passed testing?

A google guy submitted a bug report against toybox cp while Elliott is on vacation, and I don't know what success looks like here, so I'm trying to read their test cases but the web view has had a robot crap political correctness all over it, ala "don't say 'man 7 xattr', use inclusive terms like they/them/person". NO REALLY! Multiple times. Not helping. What a piece of work is they/them/person. Short for "manual" in this case. And of course the issuetracker.google.com site is a login page, because viewing bugs without being logged in can't be allowed.

The earlier (still as yet unresolved) issue is PROBABLY a btrfs filesystem bug in the linux kernel, but despite fairly extensive effort I have not yet managed to reproduce it.

And somebody asked me if I have low hanging fruit on toybox they can help with, which I always feel guilty about but I gave it a shot. (I keep doing long writeups in private email. I should update the FAQ or something.)


December 20, 2021

Today's Android 12 regression: now that the power off button isn't bringing up the camera, it's bringing up the desktop. As in half the time when I try to turn off my phone, the app merely exits to the desktop and I notice halfway to my pocket that the phone screen's turned blue instead of switching off and I have to pull it up and hit the button again and make sure it's OFF so I don't butt dial slack or something. (Looks like they nerfed the power button debouncing code?)

Really annoying. I would like it to stop. Security patches should not cause multiple widespread UI changes on a regular basis.

Battery prices are getting hit by the same mineral/mining price increases turning catalytic converters into such a tempting theft target. (Although in this case it just means the prices are dropping more slowly than anticipated, not actually increasing. (This year batteries have come down to $97/kwh, or $118 in packs with battery management circuitry. That's 6% less than last year, but they were expected to drop 9%.)

Personally, I'm still most interested in iron/air batteries, which potentially makes Ambri's old "cargo container batteries" idea actually _work_. There's no shortage of iron, air, and table salt. The traditional problem with batteries made from those is charging them electrolyses the water (offgassing hydrogen) but you can presumably feed that back into a fuel cell and there's a company claiming to have put recyclers in there (they call them "kidneys") that fix it up in a sustainable way. Still waiting to see what problems emerge at scale.

Also, in this link they're talking about the "b7a boundary" where there's insufficient transmission infrastructure, and totally glossing over the fact that the _b6_ line on that map is the border of Scotland, which will almost certainly secede from the Tories' "united" kingdom over the coming decade. (Before or after northern ireland remains to be seen. The article also fails to promptly explain whether this congestion was electricity coming FROM scotland's wind farms down to Little England, or going from the south to the north. Maybe it's farther down but I made it a third of the way through and it just assumed you knew already.)

Ooh, interesting: Cotton/slavery was the previous fossil fuel/automobile industry, as in it powered the US economy for most of the 1800s and despite the enormous obvious evil of it was too lucrative to stop until society started to come apart at the seams because of it. (And modern agribusiness with oil-powered tractors and fertilizer and pesticides made from fossil fuels is a direct descendant of slaveholding plantations with smooth continuity down through generations of ownership by family fortunes built on slavery. There are academic papers on this. These days the plantation owners call ICE on the undocumented labor they hired rather than paying them.)


December 19, 2021

Actually slept. I am totally willing to say that the goat burning on the same day Fade flew home is a good omen, yes. (Speaking of which, the tagline for Good Omens Season 2 is "This time, it's Ineffable". So yeah, that explains why Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins couldn't see it coming until Amazon backed up a dump truck full of money on both families. I'll buy that explanation with my Motivated Reasoning Skills. Ok, technically Amazon bought that explanation with a dumptruck full of money.)

I'm still breaking everything I touch technology-wise, but that's been... pretty much my entire career. (It's why I wound up as an embedded developer, I debugged my way down to bare metal and then found thing wrong with the hardware.) I don't lose sleep over that, I just range from exasperated to deeply disappointed to Sam Vimes "want to arrest the gods for doing it wrong" deep and abiding anger.

Today's Android 12 regression: When I try to turn the phone off, the camera comes on instead. It did it to me FIVE TIMES IN A ROW this morning, while I was trying to use my phone screen as a weak flashlight but not wake Fade up. This is yet another random behavior change from allowing the phone to install a "security" update.

I wasted about half an hour figuring out what it was and how to make it stop. (That article is wrong, it's under system->gestures now). If Android's UI department made cars the emergency brake would just randomly move into the glove compartment one day, it'd be the driver's fault for not expecting that and figuring out how to disengage it because of COURSE moving it switched it on. How ELSE would you know the feature existed if you didn't have to hunt it down and kill it? (Advertising! It's what they do. The art of making you hate things weren't previously aware of.)

New Tiny Computer ran mcm-buildall.sh overnight, building cross and native toolchains for ~20 different targets. Not the snappiest computer I've ever had access to (my laptop may be slightly faster) and it got quite noticeably hot under sustained load (the power supply it comes with is 1 amp and a 100 watt bulb is 0.9 amps), but it chugged along and did the thing reasonably well. No complaints. I need to figure out how to give it a static IP I can ssh to so I can unplug it from the TV and set it up in the kitchen next to the router. (On a granite countertop, well ventilated, not in contact with anything else.)

Rock Sugar's first album remains quite replayable. Good programming music. I should buy their second album...


December 18, 2021

Went to Best Buy this morning and bought the USB splitter, and they had an 8 terabyte USB 3 external drive on sale for $160. (One terabyte for $50 or 8 for $160, kinda hard NOT to take the upsell there. My main worry about this little box -- other than overheating it because its 1 amp power supply may seem tiny by USB-C standards but a 100 watt light bulb uses 0.9 amps -- is wearing out the built-in flash drive. The box is adorable but not really serviceable. That's cell phone tech for you: highly integrated.)

Across the parking lot from the Best Buy is an ACTUALLY STAFFED Wells Fargo location with humans in it (really!) and I walked in (they let you!) and asked if I could get my near-dead card replaced 6 months early, since I have to scrub the chip contacts two or three times with my shirt before it works, and even the fall back to swipe strip works maybe half the time (it's got visible holes in it). The bank teller I was speaking to in person said I have to install their app on my phone and make a request through that. This is not a thing I intend to do. (I DO NOT DO BANKING THROUGH MY PHONE.) Sigh. I have a todo item to poke at the credit union behind Walgreen's that Fuzzy switched her account to, since the old IBM Employees Federal Credit Union renamed itself twice and closed every location within 8 miles of my house. I can presumably just start banking through them instead if Wells Fargo cannot manage to bank even when I am standing in front of an actual human.

Setting up new Tiny Computer. Devuan isn't quite identifying the resolution of the big TV in the living room correctly, in fullscreen text mode there are 4 characters off the left edge of the screen (measured it), about as many off the top of the screen, and WAY MORE off the bottom. (It's like it thinks the screen is square instead of cinemascope?) This is less of an issue when the desktop comes up (I can position a terminal window entirely within the viewable area), but the installer decided to create an account with the same name as the machine's hostname (um, why?) and when I renamed it to my preferred login in /etc/passwd and /etc/group (and /etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow and no I don't remember why that last one exists, and I moved the /home directory), the desktop didn't come back up on reboot because I hadn't changed it in /etc/spud.ini or whatever file that was (when I got back in I grepped for the old name in /etc and found it), and I couldn't FIX it from ctrl-alt-F2 because I hadn't moved the sudo group association from the old name to the new name, and apparently typoed the root password the same way twice during account creation. But you can edit the kernel command line in grub to add init=/bin/sh and then "mount -o remount,rw /" at the prompt (after hitting enter a few times and then spacing to the right so you can SEE WHAT YOU'RE TYPING)... piping commands through sed 's/^/ /' is also useful, and typing "reset" to get back to the top of the screen... Anyway, added myself to sudo, reset the root password, booted back up...

So I've got it basically running now. Next up, install an ssh server, figure out how to get the router to forward an outside world port to this box's static LAN IP (which involves waiting for Fuzzy to get home because the Google Fiber Router is magic and wants to be talked to through a phone app and that's on Fuzzy's old iPhone), write a trivial CGI on my website to save $REMOTE_ADDR to a second URL I can fetch it from, make a cron job to wget the "set" URL periodically... (Yes I theoreticallly could do dyndns but honestly can't be bothered?)

Fade did the phone tree and I have an appointment for wednesday to get J&J booster. Yay?


December 17, 2021

Google Drive is has joined the New Comstock act modern chastity crusade: if you send NSFW files through Google Docs, they'll lock them. Once again, Google doesn't even have the "but advertisers!" excuse Youtube uses, just "we (big company) are passing subjective judgement about what goes through our service, and 100% want to lose our Common Carrier exception by saying what content is and isn't allowed on an individual basis where 'I know it when I see it' is the literal critiera".

Fade gets home around 4pm, with This Dog. I'm trying hard to make it though my last day of work at $DAYJOB. (They won't let me quit, but they did acknowledge me taking 2 unpaid weeks off for christmas and new year's. I am trying hard to accomplish something, but I am completely out of executive function on this project. I want them to be successful, but I am not helping here, and I have told them as much repeatedly.)

The new tiny computer arrived! (It is ADORABLE, and WAY smaller than I expected. First server I've ever owned that would fit entirely in my mouth. At first I thought the box it came in was the size of the computer, but no, this sucker can easily be held between two fingers.) Alas it came with Windows, and although it USB booted the Devuan Creosote install stick, the installer needs a mouse _and_ keyboard and it only has two USB 3.0 ports. I could switch the keyboard and mouse, but I'm likely to dislodge the USB stick which is a bad thing to do to Linux's root filesystem. In theory I have a USB hub on a shelf, in practice the power adapter wandered off and the plug is merely labeled "DC". I should go buy a USB splitter (ahem, "unpowered hub") in the morning...

I got an email pointing me at what looks like another qemu-system-hexagon fork, which puts it ahead of the official Qualcomm one that Taylor says still isn't released? Except I can't find this one published yet either. (Application support's pretty much there, but it's not doing a comet board yet.)

Fade is home. Zabina survived to see Fade's return. And now that Fade's here, I need to schedule a covid booster shot. I've been waiting for handholding (I HATE needles) but the reported Omicron curve in the UK is about to artificially flatten out because they're hitting their testing capacity. (You can't report more than X new cases per day if you can only run X tests per day.) Which is concerning. I want another round of J&J, but will accept the Dolly Parton vaccine if I can't. ("When one of the Tzadikim Nistarim offers you medical treatment, you say YES." - Winston Zeddmore) In THEORY the HEB pharmacy right down the street has covid vaccinations. In practice it's had nothing but flu in the web tracker all week, and when I went in person they handed me a brochure about their website (with a fallback 1-800 number)...


December 16, 2021

I just found Rock Sugar, the mashup band fronted by the voice actor behind Wakko Warner. Their entire first album is available for free online because they're not allowed to sell it anymore, due to a lawsuit from Steve Perry who couldn't tell his own voice from an immitator and sued them for sampling him. Even though they could prove they HADN'T, the batty old judge threw the now 71 year old Perry (who has become quite litigous in his old age) a bone by saying it was "confusing". (This is why bands have labels with a zillion lawyers, this entire area is a minefield of capricious IP law based on a Boomer judge thinking things sound too similar. Good grief, when the Boomers were teenagers the most famous commedian in the country's entre act was Impersonating JFK. If Journey's ex-frontman HIMSELF thinks his voice is fungible... well, he IS a septuagenarian who spent decades standing in front of loudspeakers, build could also be right about being easily replaced.)

Circled back around to redoing toybox's tty infrastructure. The problem that actually started me down this rathole is microcom screwing up tabs, because the whole "set tty to known values without first querying it" approach does NOT work for serial ports. (Linux pty is a known entity, but alas...) I want to just use cfmakeraw() out of libc, but a quick glance at musl's says it doesn't set the "output UTF8" flag. Sigh. Nope.

In theory watch.c has the plumbing to implement both shell command line editing and screen (which would be nice to have on the new microserver and I've arbitrarily decided NOT to install an existing one to force me to add it). In practice, watch.c is built around a redraw loop with a start_redraw() function that queries (and requeries) the screen size, but also clears the screen and jumps to the upper left corner so you can redraw the entire display. Which is fine for watch and top and such (not IDEAL, there's a slight flicker from the clear-and-redraw that would go away if it blanked each line individually before writing it). But that doesn't work for anything that doesn't WANT to blank the screen, such as command line history/editing. So I need plumbing that can listen to SIGWINCH and respond to terminal window resize immediately, but isn't tied to a screen clear. And this means designing something new, and that's probably what screen's gonna need too...? I think? (It certainly doesn't have scheduled periodic redraws...)


December 15, 2021

Let's take stock as Boomers circle the drain. Over the past decade another 10% of the population has abandoned religion. The homeless epidemic is expanding because housing is becoming unaffordable. The Gerrymandering GOP has eliminated both gun permits and abortion after 6 weeks, both positions extremely unpopular. The south has never been red, it's only ever been suppressed. The hospital systems are collapsing nationwide. Boomer Media remains deeply incompetent.

The GOP purity brigades are hypocrites. Of course they literally made a powerpoint about their insurrection for the dodering old codger, and yes we've confirmed that the senile ex-president was driving it, and the Boomercrats are shrugging and moving on. Merrick Garland is worse than useless. Meanwhile, the GOP has gone beyond forbidding teachers from telling students the truth to explicitly requiring them to lie to kids.

The big quote over the deaths at the Illinois Amazon warehouse is "Amazon won't let us leave", and yet no guillotines have been deployed yet. Here's the story of how a billionaire named Phyllis Taylor got rich from the longest-running oil spill in US history.

It turns out Minecraft is a clone of an earlier game, so the answer to "how did a racist asshole create something so impactful" is by copying someone else's idea. (They say conservatism is the worship of dead radicals...)

The Hawaiian groundwater thing is wandering out from twitter into legacy news outlets telling us what the news used to be.


December 14, 2021

Darn it! I KNEW BETTER and I let Android 12 "update" itself anyway. Now when I press and hold on the "hotspot" pulldown, the menu that comes up no longer has the "USB tether" option. They changed the user interface again in the name of a security update, and took away one of the only GOOD things Android 12 had over 11. STOP CHANGING THE GUI OUT FROM UNDER ME. I DID NOT CONSENT TO THIS. (And I never seem to have a "downgrade" option to undo the regressions. This is why I've told it to never auto-update any Google apps.)

I can't use Google Maps anymore, it's turned into advertising. I can't disable or block the advertising, so I deleted the icon off my desktop (It won't let me actually uninstall google maps. I envy Fuzzy's Apple Maps on her iPhone. I wonder where I can buy current paper maps?) I installed mapquest, which is terrible but at least isn't trying to boil my frogs AND cramming endlessly INCREASING advertising down my throat for a phone I ALREADY PAY A MONTHLY FEE TO USE.

And fullscreened youtube has forgotten how to swipe up and get a "back" button, then gets stuck so tilt is ignored. I cleared the cache but the problem came back an hour later. I REALLY want to go back to the earlier version before they broke this.

I'm trying to get mkroot running on the turtle board, but the init script is failing. (The fundamental problem is that mknod dev/console requires root access, and the kernel boot opens /dev/console out of initramfs to get init's stdin/stdout/stderr, which means PID 1 starts with no filehandles so you can't see any output or error messages until the script gets rather a long way in (mounting devtmpfs and doing "exec > /dev/console 2>&1 < /dev/console" to open said filehandles via persistent redirection). If anything fails before then, you can't telll why.

The problem I'm having is that when I hack toysh to mount devtmpfs and open stdin/out/err before running the script... the failure doesn't happen and I get a shell prompt. It changes the behvior so the bug I'm trying to fix doesn't happen.

The compile/test cycle on the Turtle board could be worse, but it's still CROSS=sh2eb scripts/mkroot.sh in one directory, cursor-up and rebuild Linux: CROSS_COMPILE=~/toybox/clean/ccc/sh2eb-linux-muslfdpic-cross/bin/sh2eb-linux-muslfdpic- make ARCH=sh allnoconfig KCONFIG_ALLCONFIG=~/toybox/clean/root/sh2eb/miniconfig-sh2eb actually works in an external Linux directory because miniconfig-sh2eb has an absolute path to the fs directory to cpio.gz (eh, bit iffy to ship tarballs of, but *shrug*), and then you replace everything from allnoconfig to the end with -j $(nproc) to actually build, and after the first build it doesn't rebuild the whole kernel but just sucks in the new initramfs. Which means even with -j4 it does NOT persistently pull enough from the battery to make the laptop likely to spontaneously power off.

While it's doing that pop the sd card out of the turtle board, put it in the holder, and stick it in my laptop, then cursor up and sudo bash -c 'mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt && cp vmlinux /mnt && umount /mnt && sync' to copy the new kernel to the sd card, then pop the sdcard back OUT and stick it in the turtle board (ka-click), then cursor up three times to the sudo busybox microcom -s 115200 /dev/ttyACM0 (remind me to finish fixing toybox's raw tty plumbing so toybox microcom doesn't screw up tabs and such... did I already do that?) but DON'T hit enter yet: plug the turtle board in and hit enter about half a second later so it's had time to enumerate the serial device but ideally hasn't gone through the bootloader messages yet, then wait for the boot and see what new serial console output you get.

Not ideal. But it's not the compile/test cycle that's the annoying part, it's the heisenbug. The behavior is changing out from under me when I make fiddly little changes that SHOULDN'T impact what's changing, but does. Not an uninitialized variable. Maybe unaligned access? Why am I only seeing this on turtle and not qemu-system-sh4? Hmmm...

"Deleting twitter" is trending on twitter. I am reminded of the Judean People's Front from Holy Grail. (This calls for immediate discussion!)


December 13, 2021

Last week I asked for the last two weeks of the month off (christmas and new year's), and my team lead said to ask the Vice President. This morning I pinged the VP and he said yes, but asked me to carve out some time this week to bring a new hire up to speed. The team lead thought that was a bad use of my time (because it's HIS job to be seen as a knowledgeable authority figure, despite not really having brought _me_ up to speed), and talked to the VP, and said the VP had the misconception that I was "leaving soon".

Um, I _am_. Even if I could stomach the remaining two months of my contract (which is by no means guaranteed, I'm miserable, but also feel obligated to keep my promises; I asked to leave and they both tried hard to talk me out of it), it ends in February anyway. But all I _said_ in the ambush call I wasn't preparded for was I'd stay long enough to train my replacement, and now I'm _explicitly_ forbidden to do that.


December 12, 2021

Yesterday I asked Fade to order me a tiny computer, which started life as an indiegogo and apparently supports Linux. I've meant to get a raspberry pi running forever and never did, this is a 4x1.5 ghz celeron with 8 gigs ram, built-in HDMI, 2 USB 3.0 ports, sd card reader, and runs from a NORMAL (1 amp) usb-c power supply.

I pinged the Google guys again about funding, and they replied "I'm fairly confident in the funding coming through, but am concerned it won't be billable for you... until at least Feb." (I should ask if that's start of February or end of February, but doubt they know yet? As with Jeff awaiting "money is coming" to turn into actual money, that's just how life is under Late Stage Capitalism. The precariat: it's never enough and even when you think it IS health care or storm of the century or six figures of civil forfeiture will take it away anyway suddenly and without warning.)

I tried to explain to someone why $DAYJOB won't let me quit and the result involved the phrase "They threw me at the project and it turned out to have crumple zones." That probably requires context.

My current $DAYJOB is basically building a new dev team after Covid caused synchronized retirements, but I'm not interested in becoming permanent there so handing off to new people is already built in, so in THEORY the end date is flexible in both directions.

They brought me in to implement a design that didn't turn out to EXIST (I got the phrase "a goal is not a plan" from Leverage creator John Rogers, but he he credits Saints Row 4), so I spent the first 3 months helping them design the darn thing and in the process VASTLY SIMPLIFYING what they expected to do and basically eliminating the need for about half the work. The result no longer has an RTOS attached to Linux (fixed by adding a sample buffer in the data producer, a minor change to some atmel controller code) and what remains is mostly GUI work and stenography domain expertise. (The dev team does not have a GUI designer, nor anyone who has actually DONE stenography, and they've said no to adding either in favor of more programmers.)

So at the start of this month I was in this weird quantum state of "I have not accomplished anything tangible" and "only half the work you expected is left on the project", and I have NO IDEA how to fill out microsoft devops metrics for that. Also, the design simplification means the hardware they've chosen is now an order of magnitude more powerful/expensive than necessary, but that ship has sailed. Possibly that's WHY I get so much pushback on "just build core-image-minimal and get rid of 300 megabytes of ballast", or "we can use framebuffer for this, wayland is completely unnecessary". Why do I keep "wasting time" on that...


December 11, 2021

Having trouble sleeping due to stress, even though it's saturday.

The whole Mark vs Toei thing (covered in lots of places) is the combination of "youtube is disappearing up its own Content ID ass" and "Japanese IP law sucks and is contaminating USA IP law". (Did you know a creator can't block videos geographically unless they join a "channel" federator management service that takes a cut of the ad revenue? As with the "half dozen different categories of child-to-adult content" categorization all proving utterly useless, Youtube develops capabilities it CHOOSES not to deploy. Strategic incompetence. Or perhaps trying to restart antitrust enforcement in the USA and Europe by being gratuitously flagrant? Now with unnecessary middleman profit-skimming.)

Sarah Taber found good thread about how authoritarians destroy their local economies intentionally, so they can be big fish in small ponds that are small because they drained them. That's why they're always attacking government institutions that help people, if the downtrodden DON'T live in a food desert why would they owe their soul to the company store? They want the largest slice of the pie, and when they can't make their slice biggger they make everyone else's smaller. That's how they get slave labor and a harem of starving desperate people whose only alternative is death. Immortan Joe was a standard republican: by doing what he did he got to stand above everyone begging him for scraps, while he taunted them for being weak and needy. (Then combine this with the zero-sum thinking that honestly believes "your house burning down means I am better off" because they think the world has a constant amount of happiness in it and other people losing some means they've gained, BY DEFINITION.)

Boomer Media blames weather for the "mass casualty event" at an amazon warehouse, not the fact the bosses forced people to keep working through the storm (after bringing vehicles inside because they'd get damaged outside). And of course amazon executives emitted "thoughts and prayers".

The US military appears to have poisoned hawaii's groundwater.


December 10, 2021

Elliott pointed me at a uclampset tool in util-linux already, despite uclamp A) needing a new config symbol, B) needing a specific scheduler which C) can only be enabled on an SMP kernel. (Oh this is just FILLING me with confidence that this infrastructure is load bearing.)

To test it in mkroot, I had to do LINUX=~/linux/clean CROSS=x86_64 scripts/mkroot.sh PENDING=uclampset KEXTRA=SMP,CPU_FREQ,CPU_FREQ_GOV_SCHEDUTIL,UCLAMP_TASK and then run the resulting SMP kernel on my single processor qemu instance.

But once I did all that it did actually do... something. So, ok I guess? It's still incomprehensible and terribly documented, but the knobs appear to be wired up to something that remembers what position they're set to, so I can at least test that what gets set can be remembered and read back. Everything else is presumably the kernel's problem.


December 9, 2021

Elliott poked me about "uclamp", which I'd never heard of. He says there are google guys using a homebrewed tool but didn't point me at source code to it, and searching found a wiki page that also doesn't mention a command line tool. The tool in question adjusts two values: minimum and maximum "task utilization", but the wiki page talks about attaching ranges to containers, and also a third value for realtime tasks? (So it's realtime but pegged to a maximum CPU usage percentage?) What does "request" mean in this context? (Is uclamp doing the requesting or is it like ulimit where there's soft and hard limits?)

I'm trying to research it, and not really being enlightened by the terrible documentation available on this feature. I'm GUESSING CPU utilization is keeping this task within a certain percent of the available processing power? (Where "percent" isn't 1/100 but 1/1024, I.E. between 0 and 1023, although that wiki page says 0-1024 which can't be right.) Does "available" here mean SMP in a taskset cpu mask aware manner? (Is 100% or 1024/1024ths here all CPU time on all processors, or all on one processor, or just all the CPU time the task COULD grab given its taskset mask?) Why can I set it to 0 and what does doing so MEAN? (Starvation?) Does the "minimum" reserve a minimum amount of CPU utilization for this task, and if so what stops the system from having more tasks with minimums than the system has cycles? (Bunch of tasks adding up to more than 100%?)

I need better docs, and as on multiple previous occasions I have the sinking feeling I'm going to have to dig the information up the long way and then write the docs myself. Which I really dowanna. (Digging the info up means: read the kernel code. Read the git commit history. Chase down relevant mailing list posts from the time period. Find sideband stuff like that wiki page above. Email developers and ask what they were thinking. Run a zillion test programs to see what it actually DOES and try to figure out why. And finally, post errors and get corrected.)

I really don't want to go down this rathole right now? If Google was paying me to work on their stuff, sure, but the people who ARE currently paying me would rather I did other things, and I don't find this particular bit of janitorial work "fun".


December 8, 2021

Jeff has money again! Not a lot of money, but enough to fly me back to tokyo and pay me (slightly better than) the old starvation wage for a month or three while we actually make a physical chip we can sell. That would be good.

I'd have to arrive back to Tokyo by the 15th to keep my visa (and since Omicron's blocked tourists that's the ONLY way to get there until Covid blows over), which is awkward because Fade returns to Austin on the 17th, and there's 2 weeks of quarantine, so if I was going to spend maybe 3 days with Jeff after that (to actually ACCOMPLISH something there) and then fly back to hang out with Fade I wouldn't get back until approximately new year's. Fade's here for a month so I'd still get to see her for a couple weeks, and then presumably fly back to Tokyo in January or February (and quarrantine for ANOTHER two weeks), which seems actively silly but NOT doing it means losing the residence card and thus not being able to return to Japan... probably for the whole of 2022. (They can get me a new residence card, although going there for two weeks is probably the cheaper alternative, but only EXISTING residents can come during covid lockdowns. Getting a visa for a NEW residence card apparently involves a lottery system? Sigh...)

Meanwhile the Chicago gig I'm doing wants to extend the contract, and that's... technically a thing I could do? I've been less stressed about that job since I got the toybox release out (because I can basically ignore toybox and focus on $DAYJOB for a while; if I get this plate spun back up to speed maybe it'll be ok for a bit). Not that "less stressed" isn't still "very stressed"...

And the recruiter who got me the JCI job in 2018 just pinged me that he has a 2 year contract doing fully remote work (kernel drivers and such) at the same "pay off the house fast" hourly rate. I admit I'm tempted.

Haven't heard from the Google guys in a couple months, I should ping them and see if they still think they might have a budget for me to work fulltime on toybox in Q1 2022.

Of those four options, the j-core stuff and the toybox stuff are the ones I really want to do. The current chicago gig still has me struggling against burnout to get anything done, and the "temptingly lucrative" one is walking away from the mountain.

As for the last two... it's a toss-up? Toybox is ALMOST to 1.0, for a definition of almost that's feasible either relative to the 15 years I've been working on it or the 9 years I've had the goal of making Android self-hosting. But I've also been working on J-core stuff since 2014 and it would be great to get it manufactured into an actual chip and sold to customers. The j-core stuff pays terribly and isn't reliably full time, but it could take off if we succeed and it's currently the bird in the hand: I could start as soon as current $DAYJOB lets me go. Google's budget approval process continues slowly and opaquely and won't be money before February and that's IF nothing derails it.

Speaking of toybox, I saw that somebody contributed find -samefile to busybox and went "huh, there's demand?" and started poking at toybox find to add it... and the result involved a lot more than just adding -samefile, but that's in now.

And I'm still annoyed that devtmpfs doesn't provide a /dev/root symlink to the block device containing your root filesystem (when you're not on initramfs), so I came up with this shell snippet:

X=$(toybox stat -c '%d' /) Y=$((X&255)) X=$((X>>8))
while read A B C D; do
  [ "$X" == "$A" -a "$Y" == "$B" ] && ln -s $D /dev/root && break
done < /proc/partitions

Which toysh can't run yet because I haven't added & or bit shifts to the $((math)) plumbing yet. (It's on the todo list...) Not that mkroot actually needs it, since that uses initramfs as its root filesystem (which hasn't got a corresponding /dev node because it's not a block backed filesystem).


December 7, 2021

Amazon recruiter email du jour. I sent back the current top 6 search hits under "amazon employee" which were of course all about union busting and high rates of injuries and wage theft and so on.

Arakawa-san has optimized the j-core GPS correlators so we can track 4 sattelites on the Turtle board's FPGA, which makes it actually able to function as a GPS. (GPS needs to simultaneously calculate your X, Y, Z, and Time coordinates to get a fix. It's the old standard algebra problem of solving X equations with X unknowns: you need 4 inputs to unambigously determine all 4 outputs. Being able to track FEWER satellites than that didn't get us a fix.)

Our GPS stuff was developed in a Kintex FPGA, which clocks faster than Spartan 6. Kintex could track 7 satellites at once, which gave it spare slots to search for and lock on new satellites as existing ones were orbiting out of range. (And you can get increased accuracy by tracking more satellites, for reasons involving "newton" and "leibnitz" in the explanation.) But that's a multi-hundred-dollar FPGA and Turtle is using something more like a $20 FPGA. And we'd IDEALLY like to get it to work on a $3 FPGA (ala ICE 40), or ASIC versions made on cheap fab processes.


December 6, 2021

I asked my team lead at $DAYJOB about wrapping up my involvement with the project, and he ADDED THE VICE PRESIDENT TO THE PHONE CALL to try to dissuade me. I was unprepared for this, and did not manage to coherently explain to Sudden Executive WHY I wanted to leave. In hindsight, I should have said something like:

Half the contract's over before we start writing code so there isn't enough time left to debug anything I'd write, or even to finish useful chunks that connect together to perform a real task. So the first time real-world data from actual users flows through any of this would be after I'd left, since I don't plan to extend this contract. Handing off code that has never been tested and leaving people who didn't write it to reverse engineer how to debug it is malpractice and I don't want to do that, which is why I've gotten stressed to the point of writer's block, which is not an easy situation to solve once you've gotten into it.

But I didn't say that, instead I got talked into staying for another week or two. They have a new engineer starting soon and I'll happily infodump at him to get him up to speed faster than I did. THAT is a useful thing I can do on this project. Writing code I won't be around to test (to a design that can still change!) is not.

Why is modern linux man page infrastructure so stupid? When I "man accept" devuan pulls up cupsaccept(8) instead of accept(2). Why would it do that? Under what circumstances would you want to produce A) a substring match when there is an exact match, B) an answer from section 8 when there's an answer in section 2? Seriously, debian, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

I poked Rich Felker two days ago for a current j-core patch stack to test mkroot on top of: the 5.15 kernel boot spits out a hundred stack traces as it fails to set up every single interrupt; Rich says it continues to a shell prompt if you let it but the result just hung for me, possibly something timed out waiting on all that serial port output.

Alas Rich has yet to post said patch stack because it wasn't perfect (I don't-ask-questions-post-errors all the time, doesn't seem to be his style), and when he was trying to test current -git it never produces any output (even with earlycon) which I bisected to this commit and he went off to figure out why. I asked him on saturday night if he could just post the patch stack with that commit reversed so I had SOMETHING to test, but I haven't heard back since.


December 5, 2021

Women have always been hugely successful until actively suppressed by insecure men. For example, just after world war 1 women's football (soccer) matches got so popular matches attracted 50,000 spectators, and in response the FA banned women's football for 50 years. (A bit like the woman who struck out Babe Ruth getting her contract voided and misogynistic "no she didn't REALLY do what she did" articles being written about her many decades later by men who hadn't even been born yet.)

DNS over HTTPS exists to nerf ad blockers, so of course firefox deployed it first...

Fascists marched on washington yesterday. I'm surprised that video is still up because twitter is now taking down even threads criticizing its new "ban people for posting anything taken in public" policy. The charlottesville nazis are coordinating mass reporting of their critics. All this can happen because a Republican Mega-donor bought twitter and had @jack ousted. And of course they're phishing verified accounts....

Of course the bulk of the fascists are plutocrats. It's the silver spoon failsons who REALLY hate "them". If you have ACTUAL oppression, such as struggling with poverty, you don't have to imagine victimization. Rich people scapegoat to justify hating their life (I.E. not enjoying spending time with themselves), so there has to be a "them" at fault, no an enormous conspiracy of thems to explain why such immense systematic advantage produced such a sad little man... Of course rich failsons don't care if what they're doing works, they're protected by piles of ablative cash and privilige insulating them from consequences. Nobody starts that way, they have empathy beaten out of them.

The USA decoupling from china has reached the point where the SEC is ready to mass-delist chinese companies, which are moving to the Hong Kong exchange instead. Some companies are already leaving ahead of the enforcement action.

The problem with censorship is private entities self-censor, such as Disney+ removing the simpsons episode critical of china. We have reached the point where everyone, everywhere needs a VPN. AT&T and Verizon spy on their customers to monetize the data. Intellectual property law needs to die with the Boomers. I'm still waiting for Microsoft to expire.

The happy meal is older than Evangelical views on abortion: Real medieval views on abortion were supportive of it. Now that the religious reich has broken abortion access, they're targeting contraceptives next.

If crypto was functional money porn would use it. Instead, analysis finds mostly the same people trading back and forth to keep the price up. (And, of course, perpetual theft.)

An article about academic researchers tracking state sponsored trolls on reddit. Not that capitalism is any less trollish.

The onion continues to merely document a reality they can't humorously exaggerate. I mean they try but there's not much headroom.


December 4, 2021

I poked the posix mailing list about cut -DF and there's ALREADY going to be so much bikeshedding I deleted this PS:

P.S. -O exists because the output delimiter should NOT be the raw regex -F is using, and trying to pass through the matched input text as the output delimiter is a bad idea design-wise. Doing so would produce inconsistent output spacing when the input spacing is inconsistent, and when you -F 3,1 what do you put between them? There's no delimiter matched before 1 and might not be a match after 3. Having tried to implement that: no, just have -O be a seperate delimiter defaulting to a single space for " ", with -d defaulting to "[[:space:]][[:space:]]*" for the -F case.


December 3, 2021

When my stress levels fill up random injustices that don't personally affect me cause me to literally lose sleep. I vent about them in my blog since I lost access to twitter. I feel bad about inflicting that on people, and have done an even/odd day thing where I DON'T talk about it on even numbered days. (There are also tags that I should teach the RSS feed generator about, it's on my todo list...)

Did you know that the reason every portrayal of lesbians between 1953 and y2k ended with them dying was because of federal censorship enforced by the United States Post Office, using a law that had originally been passed to outlaw contraception back in 1873, and which turned into a mass censorship of all US mail. This is also what gave us the "Comics Code Authority".

While these materials weren't necessarily "obscene," according to the courts' shifting definition of the term, the Post Office considered any discussion of homosexuality a "threat to the public" because it was thought to "encourage" people to be gay. And in addition to simply confiscating homosexual mail, officials began to go after publishers with obscenity lawsuits. While the Post Office would typically lose these suits in higher courts, they almost always won in lower courts, and effectively bankrupted several publishers in the process.

This hurts real people, so yes I still 100% lose sleep over Youtube's DOZEN different stupid ways of kicking "NSFW" content off its platform. Remember when they created "for kids" designations that gratuitously disable the miniplayer and prevent you from adding stuff to a playlist? (Back when the feds dinged them for tracking minors in violation of the law and they basically threw a tantrum?) They also have settings->general->restricted mode where adults can tell the app not to show them anything that might alarm them. (There is an entirely separate "kids" app.) So we've already got THREE categories viewers can select, and then they add more. Youtube delists videos for "adult content" because a woman walks around a pool wearing a bikini (one which she 3D-printed herself and half the video is her talking about the 3D printer). They have gratuitous "are you sure you want to watch this video" pop-ups on SOME cartoons (no sex, shown entirely from the side, and IT IS A DRAWING) but not others that are pretty much the same thing with less metaphor (although metaphor by itself is apparently fine). They delete entire channels for violating vague "advertiser friendliness" clauses in the ever-shifting terms of service. They cannot clearly state what is and is not "NSFW", it's random, arbitrary, capricious, unpredictable, changes retroactively, and being exported around the world. Something can be up for years and then taken down because the wind shifted.

And it's not just Youtube: Google blocks NSFW content in the Android Play Store as well (without the "but advertisers!" excuse), and randomly polices what people have in their drive accounts as well. What stops Google from expanding mandatory censorship to basic search, which given their dominance de-facto means they're censoring the internet? (Delisting 8-chan was great, but it should have been the government ordering that with due process of law, public debate, and organizations like the ACLU and EFF able to participate in the process. Google doing it unilaterally was probably necessary at the time but deeply problematic and sets a spreading precedent and has not been fixed since because Boomers are still mucking up the works.)

Google's prudishness is on the wrong side of something that's been killing people for many, many years. People are still murdered for being gay. If we treated sexually transmitted diseases the same way we treat foodborne illness we'd have eliminated most of them by now. Those two threads coming together meant the USA spent the 1980s blaming AIDS on its victims.

This new Comstock act Boomer prudishness is why access to abortion and birth control is under threat again. While the Evangelical-packed supreme court works its way up to outlawing abortion nationally, Texas is reinventing the Magdalene Laundry, because pregnancy is a punishment for women who have sex. Anti-abortion zealots are even managing to screw up adoption: what they say and what they do are unrelated, the cruelty is the point.

There is definitely a "first they came for" divide and conquer element in not standing up for sex workers. Women have control over their own bodies, and sex work is work. The biggest sex trafficing problem in the past CENTURY has been the Catholic Church diddling the choirboys (and yes that's still an ongoing problem), and the NEXT biggest source in the USA is white republican farmers raping their undocumented field labor (who get handed over to ICE if they resist or tell anyone). And of COURSE the purity brigades never bother Facebook when they could go after Patreon and Onlyfans where women post pictures of _themselves_...

White men having power over others IS THE PROBLEM. Paying women directly removes that power; they can then afford to say no, and leave, and take their kids with them. That's why the powerful white men can't stand it. What "conservatives" are actually outraged about is stable work from home self-employment that pays women more than men, which scales to many thousands of participants while still earning enough to retire early or work one's way through college. Such a thing being allowed to succeed undermines patriarchy, so they lobby like hell to stop it. They couldn't outlaw it (despite generations of trying), so they're using financial leverage, and big corporations are always happy to corner a new market.

I try to console myself that prohibition didn't work because "bathtub gin" was too easy to make. This is no different: VHS won out over Betamax because Sony woudn't let Beta be used for porn, and VHS would. The Boomers are profound hypocrites as always and pushing hard to strangle the culture just like they strangle everything else. "The internet is for porn" won a Tony Award in 2004. The Watergate whistleblower (eventually revealed to be second in command at the FBI) named himself "Deep Throat" after a porn film... are we no longer allowed to mention that? (I mean they don't want schoolteachers to admit slavery ever existed...)

The senile lead-poisoned Boomers have ossified into prudes. Like the witch-burning misogynist Puritans, and the Cathars and Shakers who literally died out because they believed nobody should ever have sex under any circumstances, the Boomers will eventually all die. It's just not gonna be fun waiting them out, and then we have to clean up their mess, but the list of major issues that's true for is WELL into triple digits at least.

I'm still a (largely non-practicing) nudist who thinks that being comfortable with your own body is important and everything from anorexia to cutting to deciding you need surgery to be your true self to an awful lot of the depression and anxiety out there are symptoms of a sick culture. And there are dozens of other REALLY BAD side effects from this pathology beyond the obvious second order stuff like censoring sex ed.

With Google and Apple and Amazon on the wrong side, who can push back against the credit card companies controlling what things people are allowed to spend money on? These days cash gets siezed by police as "civil forfeiture" without even PRETENDING a crime was commited, and electronic funds transfers are a monopsony that's already delisting big recipients and charging the others a large pay-to-play fee. Oh, you draw imagined nudity and sell the drawings? That's an extra $750/year fee up front to the credit card companies. (Explained in handy webcomic form). What are your customers going to do, mail you cash that gets siezed in transit as contraband? (And yes, the drive to eliminate cash is yet another attack on the homeless, or the merely unbanked poor. You do not have permission to receive money in this society.)

So here's something that's legal, which a monopsony of payment processors are driving out of business, helped by police literally stealing cash, and companies like Google and Apple cooperating. What stops ICE from turning this against brown people? What stops the next Republican presidential administration from siezing this infrastructure to drive Rachel Maddow off the air?

Book burning is literally back now. Recently the cops pearl-clutching boomers put in schools arrested a 10 year old girl for drawing a picture. That's ALREADY happening. Do not give justifications and easy excuses for this crap, push BACK THE OTHER WAY. Punching Nazis is a "yelling THEATER in a crowded firehouse" sort of thing, it does not mean torching the first amendment, which tracking and vetoing every dollar spent through a privately owned computer network definitely does.

Another thing I'm losing sleep about: Twitter's new policy is to ban people who post any videos taken in public, such as of police abuse or Boomers brandishing guns at peaceful protestors. It's already being used by stalkers to force their victims to delete evidence, and to silence journalists and activists, and of course the right wing loons are all over it.

The GOP continues to suck at "existential threat" levels. Propped up of course by Boomer Media which is 100% part-of-the-problem. The boomers advocate literal economic slavery while calling it "liberty". Here's the best description of libertarians I've seen so far, although my go-to reference to point people at so they actually understand the mindset remains If Libertarians Were Housepets. White male mostly Boomer failsons insulated from consequences by privilege (and usually piles of ablative cash) yelling about how the world SHOULD be and forcing their social underlings to pretend in the face of all evidence.

My opinion about Boomers continues to be "If you're not part of the solution you're part of the precipitate" and I'm waiting for them to inevitably fall out. I am not REMOTELY alone in this: Boomers are starting to notice everyone younger than them cutting racist grandpa out of their life, and writing articles lamenting it. Meanwhile people die, the planet cooks, and culture moves back towards McCarthyism, Nazism, the Comstock Act, and all the pearl-clutching mysoginistic racism "conservatives" were always known for. Boomers gonna Boom until we pry control back from their cold dead hands.

So yeah, stressed and losing sleep.


December 2, 2021

Curled into a ball due to $DAYJOB stress. Spent a surprising amount of the day sleeping. Did not go out to the table to get real work done.

Yesterday's release did not include dropbear in the mkroot targets because I think I want those binary tarballs to be "simple" and easily explained more than useful? It's not really having dropbear in the target that's complex, it's mostly the extra qemu command line invocation stuff to do port forwarding that I really don't want to explain in the first video. (Heck, _I_ got it wrong and removed $QEMU_MORE after being away for a few months and forgetting who was setting that.)

Except to be honest, what I've been thinking of as "first video" is four or five videos when I sit down to script it. So much backstory...


December 1, 2021

I got the toybox release notes finished and built the mkroot targets.

It works fine in a chroot. (Even on the other targets via qemu application emulation, which apparently works even in a chroot thanks to Linux's binfmt_misc apparently straddling chroot contexts! Who knew? It finds the qemu binary in the root context, and then runs it within the chroot process. Huh.) But running the actual init script goes "boing" (because the failure is in the if PID 1 part, not the chroot else part), and the unhappy line is for i in $(ls -1 /etc/rc 2>/dev/null | sort); do . "$i"; done, and if I replace the "source" with "echo" it's not unhappy...

Duh. It's because ls /etc/rc isn't prepending the path the way echo /etc/rc/* was. I swapped it because the echo version A) doesn't pipe to sort usefully without being washed through tr ' ' '\n', B) doesn't resolve to an empty list when the directory is empty so I had to check if the result exists. Fix: prepend the path in the user. (Yeah then it's in the script twice, but at least they're both on the same line. I could not find an ls option to show path when listing a directory...) Also, the $QEMU_MORE I removed was being used by the dropbear build to have the host qemu forward port 2222 on host's loopback into port 22 on the VM's loopback, so you could ssh into the virtual machine. So I need to put THAT back...

Uploaded.


November 30, 2021

Fade gave me permission to quit $DAYJOB. Now I need to figure out how to gracefully disentangle.

It was a 6 month contract. We're 3 months into it and I JUST TODAY saw a todo spreadsheet from which a design could feasibly be assembled... and I can't MAKE myself shift modes into implementing said spreadsheet. Any domain expertise I build at this point gets immediately handed off instead of being useful for ANY amount of time. I won't be around long enough to see my contributions nontrivially tested, you do NOT want code seeing real word data for the first time after the people who wrote it leave. They mentioned a new engineer who might be starting soon, and I'm happy to spend time bringing that guy up to speed. But my actual contributions to the project aren't likely to make a huge difference at this point? Even if I performed BRILLIANTLY, I would be a net negative by implementing stuff somebody ELSE has to debug for the first time. (We haven't even started coming UP with tests yet. We now have a feasible idea of what success looks like but have no idea if we're RIGHT.)


November 29, 2021

I was too stressed to go back to work today, so I just told them "I'm not back yet. Tomorrow." No idea what I'll do tomorrow.

After being suspended-to-ram overnight in my backpack, my laptop spent its first hour plugged in THINKING it was charging but stuck at "76%" with the charging time growing endlessly until I thumped and wiggled the battery a bit, at which point the number started actually going up. I'm guessing it's the same reason it powered off in my laptop, almost certainly cat hair in the connector. (Two cats, no waiting! Although Zabina has a congenital heart condition the vet was sure would have killed her by now, and she's on five pills a day to defer that. She's not expected to make it until Fade gets back to Austin on December 17th, but then she wasn't expected to last this long? She's still enjoying herself, that's the important part.)

Today's Android 12 bug: receiving a call unblanked my phone screen in my pocket, and fishing it out of my pocket hung up the call and started playing a random youtube video. Possibly it's the Line app at fault? (That's Japan's version of... I want to say twitter? My problem is I only use it to talk to j-core devs and have no other social media friends to add from Japan and STILL don't speak the language, so have very little experience with actually using it as anything other than yet another chat-and-voip app that's better than Signal at handling dropouts. Signal leaves gaps in the audio, line plays back the missing pieces after the gap slightly faster until it's caught up; generally far more useful for understanding the other person. Dunno what Google Hangouts does with marginal connections, I uninstall Microsoft Skype after every time someone insists I talk to them through that, I installed the Discord app but never made an account so can't actually use it, and I think the Slack's voip support is a paid feature? So many parallel workarounds for legacy phone dinosaurs still wanting to charge extra for voice calls...)

The other Android bug du jour is Youtube stopped autorotating yet again (wandering slowly through the "smack the side of the phone multiple times to get it to notice" stage to the inevitable "jupiter's gravity wouldn't be enough for it to change orientation"). But luckily the longstanding fix for THAT bug still works. (Although now you have to switch "autoplay" back off in settings after clearing the cache, and AND disable "playback in feeds", because although it remembers MOST of your preferences it conveniently forgets the ones that increase Google's ad revenue. A coincidence I'm sure.)

The weird part is Android 12 added an EXTRA layer of breakage to youtube's traditional auto-rotate degredation, where when you hit the cross icon in the bottom right to force it to rotate... it does something OTHER than rotating? Going small-to-large puts the small unrotated version in the middle of a black screen with the word "rotate" at the bottom that you have to touch to actually rotate it. (WHY DOES THAT MODE EXIST?) And then it can also be in wide mode but with the video still shrunk to just the left part of the screen, with a column of something else along the right side of the screen that you have to press "X" at the top to dismiss and ACTUALLY get it fullscreened.

(I boggle when people put in EFFORT to break stuff. They wrote extra code to prevent it from just doing the obvious thing. Presumably capitalism's "squeezing blood from a stone" stage, trying to force "growth" past the peak in the name of "profit number go up". Who cares about sustaining a viable business model in a stable way over time, that's not interesting. Burn out in a blaze of glory and golden parachute base jump off the burning wreckage at the last minute before collapse...)

Sigh, Android really IS Linux under the covers, isn't it? You can beat the GUI behavior you want out of it, but the defaults are nuts and avoiding regressions requires constant vigilance.


November 28, 2021

Laptop spontaneously powered down while nominally suspended. (Booted back up to battery at 99%, so that wasn't it.) Lost my open windows again. I'd tweaked tunderbird's preferences so it has "drafts" versions of most of the half-composed emails (although it lost a bunch of material on the most recent one), but for some reason thunderbird "outbox" has forgotten everything I sent yesterday and today?

Anyway, trying to get a toybox release out. Testing the newest Android NDK toolchain ala LDFLAGS=--static CROSS_COMPILE=~/android-ndk-r24-beta1/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/x86_64-linux-android- make root and it built a root filesystem that still segfaults. (Elliott says he fixed that upstream, but who knows when it'll filter down to something I can test.)

Hmmm, mkroot simplifies the NDK toolchain prefix of x86_64-linux-android- down to x86_64 which is correct for the kernel build (not that vanilla linux was entirely happy building with the NDK's llvm+bionic combo last time I checked), but that means mkroot doesn't distinguish it from the musl one, and thus tries to put the result in the same output directory. Possibly I should stick a check for "android" in there somewhere? Eh, next time.

Yay, wikipedia got fixed! Back in September, apparently. I've been a bit distracted. Thanks whoever that was.


November 27, 2021

Lay awake this morning, stressed about Japanese intellectual property law. (Yes of course it's a proxy for stress at $DAYJOB being about to resume, but when my stress capacity is full "bad things happening to other people far away" doesn't roll off me the way it usually does off a white male with reasonably lucrative marketable skills living in a fragment of the old british empire. I have no spare stress processing bandwidth for anything ranging from "other people are hurting and I can't help" to "first they fscking came for, so kill it with fire NOW".)

Multiple people in Japan just got arrested and sentenced to years in jail because they posted a movie review on youtube that included stills from the movie, because Japan has no legal concept of "fair use". This is why cosplay was more or less outlawed shortly before the pandemic (although they're walking that one back recently). Meanwhile I'm going "US corporations would LOVE to figure out how to expand that over here, just like they'd love to extend UK libel law to the USA". (Trump LITERALLY TRIED THAT.) IP law is an artifact of late stage capitalism that needs to die with the Boomers. Having advertising fund the internet was a mistake.

Oddly enough, the new Omicron Theta variant does NOT stress me out this way, because lots of other people are dealing with it. It's not a festering tumor that gets worse and metastasizes over multiple years until people realize too late that they should have cared _before_ the last Boomer died. This is all over the news and there are teams at work on the problem. Yes there are outright antivax cults on the other side, but it's not a lack of awareness, so I have no need to shout "soylent consulting: it's people!" at passers-by on this particular topic. (Not that I really _DO_, but then it's my fault that I didn't?)


November 26, 2021

Friday of my week off. I'm both getting proper traction on shoveling out my todo heap, and starting to dread the resumption of Real Life where I no longer get to do real work.

I hate how things get complicated and automated in a way that makes them less useful. For example, qemu's build requires ninja and python 3 now, which means when I "make install" it pops up a GUI sudo request box instead of trying and failing to install at the intended location. Meaning I USED to be able to "make install" without sudo to see where it was going to TRY to install it (is it /usr/local/bin or is it gonna crap into /usr/bin) and now I have to go digging through the source for 15 minutes to find the same info because it's trying to automate stuff for me in a way that reduces my options and makes its behavior less obvious. Unix always handed you tools and let you keep the pieces. Systemd is a giant black box of nested complexity you can't easily pry apart to see what it's actually doing.

I posted to the list about fixing up strace, and running grep+sed against the headers to automatically extract the available ioctl and syscall arguments for decoding. The available ioctls seem to be grep '[ \t]*_IO[WR]*[(]' /usr/include -r except if you then run all those through gcc -E on Devuan Botulism two fail to preprocess:

libdrm/via_drm.h:40:10: fatal error: via_drmclient.h: No such file or directory
#include "via_drmclient.h"
linux/kfd_ioctl.h:26:10: fatal error: drm/drm.h: No such file or directory
#include <drm/drm.h>

The first is debian's libdrm-dev package being borked, the second is... odd? Linux has a uapi/drm/drm.h, it's getting installed in the musl-cross-make headers but not in Devuan's /usr/include? Sigh, I guess I need to upgrade to Devuan Cantaloupe before figuring out where to send bug reports.

(So Devuan A was 2.0, B is 3.0, C is 4.0, 5.0 has already been announced to be D.. but 1.0 was J. As the old saying goes: the two really hard problems in computer science are naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.)

My header sanitization effort made it as far as for i in $(grep '[ \t]*_IO[WR]*[(]' -rl linux | egrep -v '(via_drm|kfd_ioctl).h'); do gcc -E $i 2>/dev/null ; done | sed '/^[ \t]*#/d;/^[ \t]*$/d;s/__attribute__[ \t]*[(].*[)][ \t;]//g;s/__extension__//g;s/__signed__//g' | wc -l before definitely punting strace to NEXT release.


November 25, 2021

Defund the police and end the carceral state and abolish ICE (Of COURSE that hit-and-run cop's fellow police lied to cover for him.) And as always, guillotine the billionaires.

GOP loons are openly organizing book burning events on Faceboot. The GOP is irredeemably evil.

Today in "Categories that shouldn't exist"...

I'm still amazed that people voluntarily upload their data to companies that openly lobby against privacy protection. Honestly, there are investigative deep dives into this stuff, it's NOT SECRET.

Look, "Critical Race Theory" just means "teaching about racism". That's what they're objecting to. As with "partial birth abortion" it's a phrase they MADE UP because objecting to the real thing as it exists didn't get any traction. Racists hate when we teach about racism. That's why the KKK wore those hoods. Teaching about who's under the hood and what they did while wearing those hoods profoundly embarasses them.


November 24, 2021

The Rust language's moderation team just resigned en masse in protest of the core team. They directed all discussion to a reddit thread, which was then locked so no comments could be added. (They noted that this isn't related to the PREVIOUS blow-up about corporate control, which I hadn't even heard about? This smells strongly of "this space is sprayed down with NDAs and we're THIS close to getting sued, but WOW it's bad behind the scenes".) Eh, it spun out of Mozilla, it's likely to be constructed entirely out of drama.)

I should do a proper writeup on why I want android to beat iphone. It's not that Google is good, it's that Apple is bad. Yes, I know it's a monoposony like visa/mastercard are, but Android seems salvageable in a way iPhone isn't. The lesser of two weasels, and all that. For one thing, Google doesn't make and sell its own hardware so the Android ecosystem structurally CAN'T be locked down as tightly as iPhone.

Speaking of which, the Android 12 regression du jour is that when you swipe sideways on the "notification of missed call from spam likely" to dismiss it, it pops up again as soon as you press the button to turn off the display (I've set it to vibrate for notifications), so you have to dismiss it twice every time.

(Also my battery is draining twice as fast since I upgraded, but having been through a bunch of Android upgrades I kinda expected that. I'd blame my ADHD fidget spinner clicky game du jour (currently Aventure Communist), but the usage stats say that's just 6% of battery in the past 24 hours. Youtube is 30%, powering the screen is 25%, and for some reason the Signal app has used 20% of my battery in the past 24 hours? Which seems odd for a text chat app? It's what Jeff wanted to use for the team -- he moved us there from Line, which is Japan's twitter. Slack is at 1% and I use that more because it's my household's chat...)

Looking at an arch/sh linux bug report and that is truly _impressively_ unfriendly diagnostic output from gcc. In a bug about sh4a, which is renesas-only (not hitachi or j-core), and the actual error at the end is in linux-next which would take an hour to download via phone tether. But I can probably fix up the warnings. Let's see, setup-shx3.c line 309 is actually:

static DECLARE_INTC_DESC(intc_desc, "shx3", vectors, groups,
                         mask_registers, prio_registers, NULL);
#define _INTC_ARRAY(a) a, __same_type(a, NULL) ? 0 : sizeof(a)/sizeof(*a)

So is __same_type(a, NULL) not triggering when a is NULL, or is gcc 11 warning about code that's trimmed by dead code elimination? Where is same_type...

tools/include/linux/compiler.h:
# define __same_type(a, b) __builtin_types_compatible_p(typeof(a), typeof(b))

I'd think "redefinition of NULL" would throw its own warning? So it had BETTER be the same type as NULL if they're feeding it NULL via the same macro...

The warning spew from the email seems to be complaining about sense_regs, so let's collate the macros:

static DECLARE_INTC_DESC(intc_desc, "shx3", vectors, groups,
                         mask_registers, prio_registers, NULL);

#define DECLARE_INTC_DESC(symbol, chipname, vectors, groups,            \
        mask_regs, prio_regs, sense_regs)                               \
struct intc_desc symbol __initdata = {                                  \
        .name = chipname,                                               \
        .hw = INTC_HW_DESC(vectors, groups, mask_regs,                  \
                           prio_regs, sense_regs, NULL),                \
}

#define INTC_HW_DESC(vectors, groups, mask_regs,        \
                     prio_regs, sense_regs, ack_regs)   \
{                                                       \
        _INTC_ARRAY(vectors), _INTC_ARRAY(groups),      \
        _INTC_ARRAY(mask_regs), _INTC_ARRAY(prio_regs), \
        _INTC_ARRAY(sense_regs), _INTC_ARRAY(ack_regs), \
}

#define _INTC_ARRAY(a) a, __same_type(a, NULL) ? 0 : sizeof(a)/sizeof(*a)

Yup, DECLARE_INTC_DESC() is passing NULL for sense_regs, which is propagated down to _INTC_ARRAY(a), which is warning about a branch that __same_type(a, NULL) prevents from being taken.

Thank you, gcc warning generation. There is no test I can add here to avoid this, IT'S ALREADY GOT ONE. The proper fix here is to add sh support to llvm and leave GCC to die.


November 23, 2021

Most tweets in support of the racist murderer who just got off because of a 75 year old judge are coming from Russian and Chinese bot farms, which is the new normal for GOP causes. Most of the local school board protests horrified that a teacher might mention that Rosa Parks existed are funded by billionaires. Meanwhile, the GOP black hole has reached the explicitly defending fascism stage.

Police do not solve crime. There isn't really debate about this, it's easily measurable.


November 22, 2021

I wonder if there's some way to tell devuan that when I plug in USB headphones, they become the primary audio device? I can click the checkbox in pavucontrol to switch, but I have to pull up that tool and navigate to tab 3 and scroll down to find it. I want it to happen automatically. Oh well, Linux on the Desktop: smell the usability. (Oh hey, if you click on the volume adjustment icon so it gives you the mouse slider, it ignores the volume up/down buttons on the keyboard until you close at again. Bravo. I suppose I should email... the xfce guys I guess? Emailed.)

Alright, where did I leave off on toysh. There's a bug where $((0)) and $(()) aren't parsing right... because word parsing increments after $(( instead of decrements. Oops. (It does a strstart to find $(( which advances the cursor to the next character, but the end of the loop increments again so it'll skip that character before we look at it. Hence the decrement. With the double increment we're skipping 2 chars in the middle, so neither $(()) nor $((0)) notice the closing )) properly.)

Second problem: $(()) is a math error rather than 0, because it's not calling calculate() but instead calling recalculate() directly, which doesn't handle an empty string. (For the same reason echo $((0+)) barfs: an empty string is not a number.)

Darn it, multiplication doesn't work either. I flipped the meaning of "lvl" more than once (does it increment or does it decrement as the recursive calls happen: incrementing from zero lets me add more levels without redefining the existing ones, decrementing from a specific number ties me to having at most that many priorities). And apparently I got the comparisons out of sync on one of the flips, and did not immediately notice because I didn't have a full set of tests and it wasn't passing them all yet anyway.

While I'm at it, recalculate() should handle the empty "" string itself. Looks like it already skips, but I have a dozen more operators to implement. It currently just does addition substraction multiplication and division, no bit shifts or postincrements. And it doesn't handle environment variables. And of course "PLUS=+; echo $(1$PLUS2)" needs to resolve to 3...

Hmmm. I was thinking most of this is post-release work (can of worms), but I just did a couple of them. :)

I'm also fixing up Elliott's strace, that would be good to promote. I want to make it work on superh/j-core, and while I'm at it I REALLY need to add superh support to nolibc.h, and I just added two syscalls to arch/sh because otherwise they produce #warnings which the kernel is slowly edging towards always -Werror-ing on now...

Why does strace echo hello 2> >(grep 'write(1, "hello\n", 6)') hang with bash? It doesn't with toysh, but for some reason bash itself leaves grep waiting around, and the echo doesn't exit until the grep does? Which is really weird because echo hello > >(sleep 10) returns immediately. Ah, I see, it's an strace thing: it's waiting for the other child PID to exit, but the child PID's stdin isn't explictly closed, it gets closed by the parent process exiting.


November 21, 2021

Does anybody remember how REALLY GOOD John Rogers' proposed 2024 presidental platform is?

Faceboot not only amplifies hate speech, it funds it. (Here's a big washington post article on their racist algorithms.)

Defund the police.


November 20, 2021

I am taking the whole week of thanksgiving off from $DAYJOB. I really need some recovery time, and maybe this will finally let me get a toybox release out. (Who knows?)

Got the bulk of the mkroot and record-commands changes checked in, but there's still some polishing bits. Having two different log types (record-commands and build output) in the same directory seems cluttered, and the *-tmp directories aren't getting deleted for some reason.

Rich's patch stack finally made it in, but it did NOT fix the j-core build, I'm still getting the build break in current -git.


November 19, 2021

How racist is the USA? The longest-held political prisoner in the USA is a native american activist. The prosecutor who put him in prison in the 1970s just admitted they never had any proof he committed a crime.

The judge who let the racist murderer go free is 75 years old. The Boomers are not dying fast enough.

Of course it's GOP doing the fraud. It's always GOP doing the fraud and accusing their opponents of their own crimes which is fascist playbook 101. GOP snowflakes, every accusation a confession.

Defund the police.

Eliza Dushku testifies about the use of forced arbitration to hide sexual assault at CBS.

Of course Boomercrat Biden just nominated a republican to the postal oversight board that's keeping DeJoy in charge. Republicans try to actively destroy the post office (including sabotaging the equipment), so Biden preemptively unilaterally compromises, doing the "good people on both sides" thing. "Nazis broke it, only nazis can fix it" is NOT a sound argument you senile old geezer.

The switch from coal and oil to "natural" gas may actually be speeding up global warming, due to how much of it leaks. Sure it's got a half life of 7 years in the atmosphere before oxidizing to CO2 (or 8.6, or 9.1 depending on who you ask), but it's hundreds of times more insulating until then.


November 18, 2021

Still trying to simplify mkroot to the point I feel comfortable doing an explainer video about it. This is hard because I've ALREADY done a lot of simplifying passes on it, which got it down to 250 lines of bash at one point. But in terms of EXPLAINING it, there's a lot of thrashing and sidequests, and that whole cross compiler selection and airlock build step is hard to explain while not being easy to gloss over. Except it really does actually need to do all this stuff (or else I'd have removed it). Hmmm...

In theory, this sucker has three major sections: 1) setup, 2) root filesystem build, 3) kernel build and packaging.

The setup is the tricky bit I'm wrestling with right now:

Needs collating and refactoring, but HOW to untangle it into a coherent sequence of events that doesn't conceptually jump around and backtrack. (Wanna snapshot $PWD before anything has the chance to cd, but other paths depend on $CROSS which can't be used until that's worked out, so I CAN'T collate them...)

Huh. A dell power supply will BEEP if the output cord going to the laptop develops an internal short I.E. hot spot. Luckily I've bought something like 4 of this laptop from cheap remainder sites (my spare got handed off to Fuzzy, then its replacement spare got handed off to Fade, both of whom have since returned them but not until I'd bought another spare) so I have replacement power supplies. It would be nice to fix this one (it's 2 prong and the one I'm using now is 3 prong), but not really my area of expertise. (This IS my version of restoring hardware from a backup...)


November 17, 2021

I have a failure mode working this $DAYJOB where I'm up too late and get 2-3 hours of sleep in the morning, caffeinate heavily to try to work until my 2pm engineering call but accomplish little because I'm exhausted, nap a couple hours in the afternoon, go out to the table bringing both laptops (in hopes of forcing myself to do more dayjob work), not get much work done in open source OR work context because what I should do is looming over me preventing me from working on what I want to do, I stay too late at the table, get to bed shortly before sunrise, rinse repeat.

I mostly get stuff done on weekends, when I can sleep late in the morning without the "I Should Be Working!!!" part.


November 16, 2021

The Android user interface regression du jour is that if you tell the youtube app to play a playlist, the playlist display keeps randomly jumping back to the top. So if you're trying to skip through, you have to keep scrolling down and finding your place again. It didn't used to do this, but it "upgraded" itself. *shrug* That's the one I noticed today. I expect I'll notice another one tomorrow. (Yes, this is the same youtube app that announced explicit plans to annoy people into subscribing, so I honestly can't tell if this is incompetence or malice.)

Today Fade tweeted a link to a pamphlet on barriers to eel migration, right after tweeting a link to the peruvian guinea pig festival, which strikes me as the sort of thing the internet SHOULD be for.


November 15, 2021

I have walked at least 20,000 steps per day for the past 3 days. That's something like 8 miles per day. I feel a little less stressed, but that's burning it off rather than dealing with the source.

Did you know that when a church acts like a Political Action Committee explicitly lobbying for a candidate, there's a form you can fill out to report them to the IRS? (The recent infrastructure bill just renewed their enforcement funding.)

Ooh, here's a useful trick: if an insurance company denies a "prior authorization" for a test or medication your doctor recommends, ask the insurance company for the credentials of the person who denied the request. They'll generally approve it rather than admit they had an intern robo-signing stuff and practicing medicine without a license.

Nazi scientists should have been a clue that STEM does not help anyone be better people, that's what the humanities are for. Sexism and racism go together even among the highly educated.

Russia is intentionally trying to create a kessler event. Even tiny specks of debris are extremely dangerous in orbit because of how fast they travel.

The GOP has now gerrymandered three different census redistrictings, which has gone unopposed by Boomercrats and (billionaire owned) Boomer Media. (Deep breath. The Boomers will die, it's just a question of what they destroy on their way down.)

Guillotine the billionaires.

A good strategy for defunding the police.


November 14, 2021

I'm trying to clean up mkroot so I can do a video about it. This isn't exactly the same as making it _work_ better, it's making it more intelligible to people reading the code. Sadly, this is increasing the line count. It was nice to be able to say I had a 250 line script that built a bootable linux for a dozen architectures, but a 270 line script I can EXPLAIN is better.

Part of the expansion is I'm trying to add record-commands plumbing, which doesn't neatly drop into the stuff I've got and requires refactoring. It's hard to untangle because setting up the cross compiler and building the airlock step is just plain a lot to get right, let alone explain. (I worked out how and why to do that stuff back in aboriginal linux, but that's 10 years of backstory. Hmmm...)

Still making trouble on the linux kernel mailing list. They don't want to hear it, but there are obvious rough edges that could be fixed and I feel I should at least MENTION them...


November 13, 2021

Faceboot is now creating accounts for people and logging them in based on Apple or Windows logins. If you're part of the Apple or Windows ecosystem, you can't NOT have a faceboot account. People who've avoided creating one for 15 years now are being ASSIGNED them, thanks to collusion among big tech players harvesting All The Personal Information and selling it to each other. You are not the customer, you are the product.

Guillotine the billionaires.


November 12, 2021

Sat down to finish fixing up mkroot.sh, and Jeff called. An hour later, I was out of brain and didn't get anything done on it.

Android's toybox repository contains a merge commit (with multiple parents) that renamed a file, meaning "git log --follow" on that file doesn't work.


November 11, 2021

Oh hey, a new book shopping list.

Google Chrome just implemented a way to block the "view source" option because badly implemented online tests have the answers in the source, and school districts are asking Homeland Security to monitor students social media feeds. (Warantless surveilance via school board, because minors have no rights to conservatives.)

The ignorant GOP snowflakes are no longer even pretending to respect democracy (or anything else: they're both banning and burning books).

Disney continues to insist that it bought publication rights without the obligation to pay those authors royalties, as stipulated in the contracts of the publishers it purchased. This is like saying you subleased an apartment and can put it on AirBNB without being obligated to pay the rent. Disney is saying this because it has a large legal department and the authors it's stepping on do not, so it can brute force intimidate them without a legal leg to stand on in the name of increasing its profits.

This story demostrates the age-old truths that if you don't punch the first nazi you wind up with a nazi bar (like most insect infestations). And and of course as always the police need defunding.

Fade pointed me at a good thread explaining how NFTs are just a digital rebranding of an age old pump-and-dump scam (which gave us the phrase "pig in a poke"), and how the IRS's new reporting requirements stop the scam cold (as it did with previous generations of the same scam): selling something back and forth to a friend (or sock puppet) five times to pump up the price, and then finding a patsy to buy it from you at a "discount", is a lot less appealing when A) the transactions are all traceable so the dumpee can later prove they got scamed and sue, B) you get taxed on the nominal "profit" of each "pump" sale as well as the final "dump". (Cory Doctorow has his own thread on the subject. And here's a lovely analysis post examining what cryptocurrency actually IS: "The intellectual incoherence of cryptoassets".)

Boomer Media and useless flaccid Boomercrats can never climb down, they can only die off, and then we undo the damage the Boomers both caused and allowed. Boomers never fix anything. Instead they let late stage capitalism and intellectual property law spill out of control.

It turns out guillotining the billionaires is good policy.


November 10, 2021

FINALLY got the toysh nommu fixes checked in yesterday. Which means if Rich ever gets the build break fixed, mkroot could actually build a working j-core image for the Turtle board again. That would be nice.

Aaaaaand I need another toysh test:

$ false
$ "$@"
$ echo $?
0
$ false
$ echo $?
1

Sigh. I'm closing metaphorical tabs to try to get a toybox release out, and one of the half-finished things in my tree is teaching mkroot to use scripts/record-commands to do the old command logging wrapper trick where every command called out of the $PATH has its full command line appended to a log file.


November 9, 2021

I knew "managing what you measure" sucks, but today I learned about Goodhart's Law: every metric which becomes a target breaks. Managing what you measure gets WORSE with time, because it distorts the system in a way that has compounding negative returns. There is some actual scholarship on this.

TSMC is building a new 28 nanometer fab in Japan. (Having seen what happened to Hong Kong, Taiwan is diversifying away from China, the money people preparing somewhere to flee to just in case.) Various clueless yokels are pearl-clutching that it's not a cutting edge 5nm fab, but THE CHIP SHORTAGE IS NOT ABOUT FIVE NANOMETER CHIPS. They're not what's backorderd. The chip shortage is the older processes, like the one TSMC is proposing to build in Japan.

It costs $10 million to make a 5 nanometer mask, so there's no POINT doing it for a production run of less than a million chips (which would STILL add $10 each to the chip's price just for their fraction of the mask cost, let alone paying off the billions of mortgage on the fab and whatever it actually costs to print and cut and package the wafers). But making a 28 nanometer mask is under a million dollars, and making a 150 nanometer mask is more like $50k, and a 30 year old fab has already long since paid off its construction cost (and didn't cost nearly as much to build in the first place). Which one would you rather do a production run of 100k chips through? The central idea of open hardware is to have MORE customization, which means smaller production runs. If you belt out a billion identical chips and then everything unique about them is in software, what exactly is the point of open processor designs?

Plus a 5 nanometer chip uses a fraction of a volt for I/O signalling so it has to talk to the outside world through another (more rugged) chip. You don't hook up USB or serial pins directly to 5 nanometer I/O pins, it'll melt. A 350 nanometer chip can be reasonably close to a lightning strike and not care, and drive a lot of I/O devices (LEDs, speakers, even some small electrical motors) directly from its I/O signals or through a simple transistor. Doing anything analog at a fraction of a volt means radio signals will out-buzz what you're listening to and amplifying it just amplifies the noise.

The older fab processes actually have advantages over the newer ones. Heck, there are 3 cent processors out in the wild. There's a REASON there's a shortage of capacity in old fabs, because there's demand for them that the new ones can't fill.


November 8, 2021

Once again so burned out it takes 90% of my energy to force myself to sit down at the $DAYJOB project, which tends to happen half an hour before the daily status meeting, and then any actual coding I do is interrupted by said meeting. Plus the bad sleep schedule, where I stay up late at the table, get a couple hours sleep before start of day, get nothing done during the day (exhausted), nap after the meeting, take the work laptop to the table at night, and can't always force myself to _open_ it because I really really really dowanna. Which means I never feel like I've done enough, so poke at it on weekends too...

Oddly, the reason for the writer's block isn't the Microsoft Everything infrastructure, it's that we still haven't got a design beyond "re-implement the last generation of product on the new hardware". Except I have been explicitly forbidden from implementing a skeleton of the old menu layout because my team lead (who is acting as project architect; he's only been there 6 months longer than I have, the people who started this project left during the pandemic and he inherited meeting notes) doesn't like the user interface of the old thing and thinks we can do better. I agree the old menu layout is klunky and that if I implement the old menu layout, that's probably what will ship. The problem is, none of the three engineers working on the new thing actually knows how to USE this product (which takes training and most of the users have a decade or more of experience with it; I've read the manual which is NOT the same as being able to use it), and this menu-driven interface smells to me a bit like a qwerty keyboard to the userbase: it's exactly what they expect, if we come up with an "improved" dvorak version nobody will use it. And we haven't got a UI designer on the team anyway. In the meantime, the team lead seems to want us to create intentionally disjoint pieces of infrastructure that do NOT connect up, and then negotiate with management to hire a UI designer to redo the GUI later? I think?

This is my third month on this project and so far all my actual accomplishments (other than "finish reading the previous version's user manual, taking notes as if it was a technical specification") are convincing them that large lumps of planned infrastructure are actually unnecessary, and pointing out a simpler way to do it. The RTOS is gone because the input module can be reprogrammed to buffer up to a full second of data for batch fetching instead of needing attention every 2 milliseconds. Using a 3D engine via wayland to update 800x600 pixels of text and GUI buttons with the occasional bar graph is way overkill and will shorten your battery life; the graphics library we're using can bind to the framebuffer just fine. Also, we're not USING anything out of the 300 megabyte yocto build they were doing that isn't in the 9 megs of core-image-minimal; the application we're writing is pretty much standalone except for the graphics library. But none of that's exactly an accomplishment? I have not added code to the project. In a way, I have contributed NEGATIVE amounts of code.

What I should be doing is being a good code monkey, writing code as assigned and checking it in, to marshall data from point A to point B and buffer it for later fetching by unknown consumers who MIGHT need arbitrary historical amounts of it. Towards what end, I couldn't say. I keep trying to establish traction but... we have no tests to pass? I don't know what success looks like. This thing is a specialized word processor with a chording keyboard, and my board hasn't got that keyboard. (That piece of new hardware for this generation is still in development.) It's got a touch screen, but I'm not supposed to implement menus. In fact, I'm not assigned to work on the GUI part at all, that was assigned to the third engineer.

Many years ago, I had a button that said "you guys start writing code and I'll go find out what they want". I didn't realize people actually do that. I find this way of working IMMENSELY stressful. And the longer writer's block persists, the deeper the ruts from spinning my wheels...

The fundamental problem here is I know how to implement "the same as the old one", but I do not have the domain expertise to do BETTER than the old one because I am not a user of the old one. I am not part of this product's target audience, and we haven't got an architect who IS giving us a design. And the new version is supposed to be "better", with the guy who signs my timecards and runs the daily meetings identifying too much "same" as being a threat to "better", but without that "same" it doesn't DO anything. I am expected to make infrastructure in search of a user, and am having a hard time sitting down to do it.

I wouldn't mind so much if part of the daily meetings wasn't about coming up with a design. (Hence me reading the previous version's manual cover to cover.) My opinion is solicited enough that I can be held responsible for the results, but I don't feel I have any good options to choose from? And my suggestion "let's start by replicating the old one because then I know what that looks like and we can get it to work to the point we can test stuff and it gives us a frame of reference to diverge from" is shot down every time.

Sigh. Fade has ADHD medication. I should jump through the hoops to try to get prescribed some. I should be better at doing busy work I don't enjoy and can't see the point of. They're paying me to obey. Lots of design decisions were made before I arrived, and it's not my role to make most of the rest.


November 7, 2021

Android 12 isn't showing me the title bar on the desktop. No time of day, no battery percentage, no nothing. It's showing it on the LOCK screen, but not on the DESKTOP. Pulling down shows me an estimate of when the battery will run out (assuming power consumption stays constant, which it never does). It can't be trying to save space because the icons haven't moved up, and it's wasting 20% of the desktop to show a google search bar I never use and can't remove anyway. (I've written that off is Google branding. A constant advertisement. If I want to search for something, I use the browser.)

And rebooting the phone brought it back. (After half an hour of going through settings menus and googling for stuff.) Sigh. Yet another random Android 12 bug...


November 6, 2021

Saturday! Slept until 1pm. It's good to catch up on sleep.

Fiddling with ftp because Eric Molitor's patches fix real problems but I dowanna do the strrchr() prototype thing, so I started looking at why he needed it and... this command never got properly cleaned up. It got the minimum to fish it out of pending when I was in a hurry, but did not get thought through.

I keep thinking I've documented stuff in this blog and then can't find it again. (It could also be in the toybox mailing list, or my old twitter account, but it should be SOMEWHERE.)

In this case, it's "how did I make a static git mirror you can 'git clone https://landley.net/toybox/git' from? The answer is:

You'll probably also want an index.html file in newdir on the server so it doesn't show the raw backend files, I have:

$ cat index.html 
Not browseable: <b>git clone https://landley.net/toybox/git</b>

If you clone via https, you can't push, but the same repo can also be available via ssh, albeit at a different path. (Mine's "ssh://landley.net/~/landley.net/toybox/git" because that's where dreamhost keeps stuff.)

Your local repo's .git/config can have multiple "url =" lines in its [remote "origin"] section, and when you "git push" it'll send to them in sequence.

Note, if you ever want to push to a server your local checkout doesn't know about, you can "git push URL LOCAL:REMOTE" where LOCAL is anything you could check out (branch names, tags, hashes, the magic HEAD name indicating what's currently checked out...)i and REMOTE is a branch name. So "git push URL master:master" pushes to a remote branch the current repo doesn't consider its origin. You can even make up a new REMOTE branch name and it will create that branch in the remote server. You can "git push --delete URL REMOTE" to delete that branch again if you typo it, or just want to get rid of a remote branch. Yes, this works with github.

(Note: Microsoft Github's policy is to rename "master" to "dominatrix" to ensure it's clear the relationship is consensual. Don't ask me what they're renaming the college degree between bachelor's and doctorate, the brand of lock, the website Paul Krugman and Neil Gaiman teach at, the Augusta National golf tournament with the green jackets, the main alternative to Visa credit cards, zen masters...)


November 5, 2021

Twitter found a new way to be bad at being twitter, which is simultaneously amazing and unsurprising. Twitter sucks at being twitter, but at least it's not Faceboot.

If the purity brigades actually cared about human trafficing or violence against women, target #1 would be facebook. It turns out I'm not the only one who would rather flip burgers than work at Facebook. Recently Faceboot decided it needed some reputation laundering so it's changing its name to "Meta", the same way Blackwater became Academi and Philip Morris became Altria. Except it turns out there already is a company called "Meta" and Facebook has been bullying them relentlessly to steal the name. (This kind of collision is not unusual: the current mozilla fork was called "Phoenix" until Phoenix technologies objected, then was "Firebird" until the Firebird database objected, and then became "Firefox". what Firefox DIDN'T do was harass the original owners of each name.)

The Boomercrats retain the filibuster because nothing can be fixed before they die. The GOP are using it to protect their gerrymandering and voter suppression without which their party ceases to exist. Meanwhile, the Boomercrats are desperately trying to ignore racism while the GOP insist that condemining the KKK is itself racist (anti-white).

Boomers never fix anything, they just shuffle problems around. Boomer Media is bad enough, but we really need a list of old-school news outlets purchased by right-wing loons and hollowed out to become propaganda sock puppets. (We're all just waiting for the Boomers to die.)

Rentiers do not produce value, they destroy it.


November 4, 2021

Blah. For a couple days now I've gotten to the table and then... not done any programming. I haven't got the energy, work took it. (And the hour long call from Jeff each night just as I'm settling in to program.)

I REALLY need to do more writeups on 0BSD stuff because the armchair admirals are trying very hard to make GPLv2 as toxic as GPLv3 and thus destroy the entire idea of copyleft.

The toybox "env" command isn't handling -i right: the $PATH from the old environment needs to be used to find the binary to run. Before I figured that out I commited a test change... which was wrong, "env -i ls" needs to work even when ls isn't a builtin.

In theory, the obvious way to do this is to A) assemble a new environment array in the -i case, B) use execvpe() to search the path out of the curent environment. But unfortunately, that's not a standard function. You need to #define GNU_GNU_FTAGHN_STALLMAN_FOREVER_IA_IA to get the prototype, meaning it's not in posix, meaning "nuts to your white mice". (Even if I prototyped it myself I dunno if it's in macos, nor am I guessing what combination of "bool const restrict __attribute__(squamous)" their prototype du jour would use if it leaked out of the header in future.) It's a pity posix is so far behind the times. Oddly, posix has fexecve() to use a file descriptor instead of cwd, but no exec variant combining p and e?

So, second attempt: getenv("PATH") before xclearenv() and look the exe up myself with find_in_path()? Seems non-ideal. Hmmm...


November 3, 2021

Wow did Android 12 break youtube. Now if you run picture-in-picture via the "jump to desktop" button at the bottom, and then dismiss it (drag the overlay window down to the bottom to "trash" it), and then select youtube again via the icon, youtube shows a mostly black screen except for a little rectangle in the upper left. It doesn't notice that it's fullscreened now and clips the display to the old picture-in-picture size, with everything of interest off the bottom and right of that rectangle so there are NO CONTROLS. Only way I've found to fix that is to kill and restart the youtube app.

The youtube "shorts" are even buggier. Sometimes they seem dead (no response to being tapped) and then randomly start playing 5 minutes later (replacing whatever I was watching). And if you tap them five times to try to get it to notice you, it'll eventually play (and need to be backed out of) five times. And as I type this, I'm currently watching a "short" that's picture-in-pictured itself OVER THE YOUTUBE APP. (How did it...? How? That shouldn't be an option.)

And earlier today a youtube video reached the end, paused for a moment, and then started playing again from the beginning with the "recycle" arrow and cards from the stopped video still displayed over it.

I got poked about the pthreads leak in glibc/gcc_eh.a again and I _think_ I've fixed it? It builds for me under an ubuntu 20.04 livecd with "sudo apt-get build-essential git-core" installed, clone toybox and run scripts/mkroot.sh with no arguments gave me a "sudo chroot root/host/fs /init" shell prompt.


November 2, 2021

My laptop rebooted, for the first time since... february I think. Lost a LOOOOOOT of open windows with todo/todoc items in them. (To do and to document, and/or add to the test suite.)

Oh well, my fault. I was doing kernel compiles on battery (because the powerpc64 kernel build uses grep -F -w and toybox's option string was forbidding that combination for some reason: not sure why, it seems to work fine), and when the battery hit about 30% the laptop blacked out. Lithium battery output voltage gradually goes down as the battery depletes: in theory the battery management system is supposed to compensate, in practice the CPU didn't get throttled fast enough and something went undervolt and tripped a failsafe. (Some circuitry can be damaged by running it undervolt.)

I voted against Proposition A and it was defeated almost 70/30. We haven't yet defunded the police, but at least we prevented their budget from massively expanding at the expense of everything else the city spends money on.


November 1, 2021

Faceboot is now Altria. Because changing your name is a thing you do when you're well-liked.

The great resignation is looking more and more like a general strike. Author Kurt Eichenwald explains that the great resignation is a logical reaction to people giving up on the "american dream", capitalism, the idea of having a family... it's basically America's version of China's "lying flat" or people in the 1980s Soviet Union "going limp", due to a loss of "credibility of the official idology" holding the system together. Late stage capitalism is never going to deliver a better life for anyone who isn't already rich, so we all just wait for the Boomers to die (and take their misoginistyic victorian prudishness with them).

If you're wondering why nobody's having kids anymore, here's the story of a doctoral student living in a tent in the park because she can't afford rent.

Billionaires are useless, every time.


October 31, 2021

This is Halloween.

I checked in the build workaround for gcc 9.3 leaking pthreads calls from libgcc_eh.a, but I also need a fix to mkroot.sh which was calling make defconfig without LDFLAGS and thus the compile time probe didn't notice the breakage when making .config. And the problem is, the mkroot.sh in my tree has PILES OF CHANGES relating to me trying to get the command line logging wrapper working and kind of spinning off from there.

I really want to do a youtube video walking people through it, but I'd like syntax highlighting and devuan's default vi install isn't built with syntax highlighting support, and when I google for alternatives there don't really appear to be a lot? Seriously, the closest I'm finding is a package written in node.js which can't possibly be a good idea.

Possibly I need to teach toysh to read shell code and then spit it back out with syntax highlighting. I've already got it recognizing keywords and such...

Walked to the table early tonight, got there before sunset and... it's pretty packed here when there's light. Both the table with the outlet and the table at the other end of the 50 foot extension cord I plugged into the outlet were packed. Using my laptop on battery at a different table. Usually the place is deserted when I get here because the timer for the overhead lights has drifted over the years so it turns on at midnight and turns off at 6am, meaning there's ~5 hours of darkness before the lights come up. If instead the lights came on at a reasonable time, the place would probably be packed until 3am, because university.

I should poke people in the geology building and see if I can get it fixed. (I've emailed facilities more than once, but although they eventually fixed the burned out lights and dangling wires, they've never reset the timer to more sane hours. Maybe somebody inside the building has a key to a closet with a dial in it or something? I should ask, but I'm never here during normal weekday business hours. Yes I'm aware it would INCREASE the percentage of time I can't get an outlet, but this is a lovely study/work area, and it's a shame for it to remain underutilized.)


October 30, 2021

Sigh, this is not what I wanted to do today. Alright, the glibc in Ubuntu 20.02 calls thread crap from libgcc_eh.a, so if the wrong bits of libgcc get pulled in you can't link without -lpthread. That's just SAD. (And glibc has lost the ability to read /etc/passwd and /etc/group without dlopen()ing a library at runtime, but that's not a build break like the thread thing. That's merely stupid.)

Downloaded the xubuntu 20.04 iso, fired it up and installed build-essential and git, cloned the repo, and... yes, building defconfig fails because it's trying to use thread functions. But building a hello world program works. Building allnoconfig works. Right... loop through .config with sed switching on individual commands and logging which ones fail... And it's timeout.c.

So timemout.c calls timer_create() and timer_settime(), both of which are linux syscalls in manual page section 2. BUT for some insane reason, calling them requires pulling in -lrt, and statically linking against that pulls in libgcc_eh.a, and in gcc 9.3 libgcc_eh.a unconditionally links against a half-dozen pthread functions. So a static build with -lrt build breaks without -lpthread, which I'm not gonna add because toybox is not a threaded program.

The actual bug is gcc leaking references to libpthread from libgcc*.a files (but ONLY in the static versions, the dynamic version still builds fine without -lpthread), but the trigger is glibc inexplicably needing -lrt to make linux system calls, and what I want to do is just wrap the system calls myself... but I don't know how that would affect a macos build? In THEORY these are posix timers. In practice, glibc and gcc conspired to break their implementation so I want to use the unbroken Linux version directly.

I want to stick the wrapping in lib/portability.c with a compile time probe, but the probe would have to statically link, and back when Red Hat was paying Ulrich DrPepper's salary he removed the *.a files and made them into a separate package you have to install, so static linking fails on Fedora system default installs. So the static link failing doesn't mean you've hit THIS issue...

Ah, I just have to test compile using the existing LDFLAGS, and I don't care WHY it fails. Wrap it if it didn't work. Ok...


October 29, 2021

Wanted to call in sick to work again, but wound up working a half day. Got a little done, I suppose, but... really hard to force myself to focus on it.

In the evening I packed up to go to the table but walked down to 6th street first. It was too early for people to really be there (instead there was an annoying street preacher with an amplifier), so I headed back to UT and got some work in on the toybox roadmap, checking in an updated mkroot that generates a noticeably improved status page.

Sigh, early voting ended at 7pm today. Now I have to go during the tuesday slot, to an address that... claims to be a drafthose location where I'm pretty sure there isn't a drafthouse? Sigh. They make voting harder every time, just like sabotaging the post office...

My phone updated itself to Android 12. Gratuitous gui changes include the wifi button in the pulldown being replaced with "internet" which is always highlighted when it has cell service. (This does not provide any information, please put the old one back.) It still has both "focus mode" and "do not disturb" which... one fo them actually usefully blocks pop-ups crapping over the video I'm watching or the VOIP call I'm in, the other is basically useless (it blocks old school phone calls using a phone number) but times out. What I WANT is "block interruptions for 30 minutes", and Android's GUI has two halves of that which don't meet. (Focus can specify which services are "distracting". I could ADD old school phone calls to it, I think? But I can't get it to time out, let alone be contextual to "I exited the video I was watching, NOW show me the pending pop-ups"...)


October 28, 2021

Called out sick from work today due to stress and lack of sleep.

I regret that after I inherited the old BusyBox "hall of shame" and ran the experiment to see if legal enforcement would actually help busybox development (it didn't), I couldn't actually STOP the self-funding legal machine this had set in motion. Ok, technically the Software Freedom Law Center stood down, but Bradley forked off the Software Freedom Conservancy to continue to chase the lawsuit gravy train in service of his True Belief in the greatness of Richard Stallman, or some such.

Which means they keep finding new ways to turn the GPL into a toxic minefield. I'd love to put more effort into explaining and promoting 0BSD, but... no time/energy. I should be banging on Yocto for my day job instead. (Lack of concentration/traction is no excuse.)


October 27, 2021

Couldn't sleep last night. Stressed by too many things. Loss of traction at work (they've forked variscite's fork of imx's fork of yocto and configured it to use systemd, and are using wayland to update an 800x600 display for what's basically a word processor) has filled up my stress capacity, which admittedly isn't all THAT deep these days, leaving me tossing and turning because of various injustices in the world that I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT while trying to sleep.

I kept repeating the mantra "the Boomers will die, the Boomers will die" and it WAS a bit soothing. The problem is that everything the Boomers fought for in "the sixties", all the free love and hippie communes and police-as-pigs and anti-war activism and rock and roll not being the devil's music, they're now fighting AGAINST very effectively.

The lawyer who got a multi-billion dollar judgement against Chevron in Equador, and has been under house arrest for 800 days because of it, is now going to prison (and yes Amnesty international is objecting). Meanwhile the Tennessee Judge jailing black ten year olds for witnessing OTHER kids fight on the playground (with no injuries) is still on the bench, facing some lawsuits but the same article notes a previous class action suit in 2017 that apparently accomplished nothing.

Here in Austin Proposition A is trying to vastly increase the police budget by diverting money spent on parks and libraries and such to hiring more police. And of course they're widening I-35 which is the opposite of helpful (and takes out the bat colony at the 41st street underpass).

The boomers are still raising the price of real estate so nobody can afford RENT let alone home ownership. Student loans undischargeable in bankruptcy are creating a virtual slave class that can't afford NOT to work BS jobs they hate.

Speaking of eliminating financial independence, the same pornhub that was filling potholes and plowing roads a few years back had all service to it cancelled by Mastercard and Visa, the private companies that own the US dollar. Not via any sort of legal channels with an official investigation, but because accusation is proof and you don't get to FIX any problems found. Of course the largest offender here is facebook, but they don't even face consequences for hosting nazi sites or coordinating an attack on the government, because the forces of Boomer prudishness haven't deemed them "icky". Textile manufacturing was a big source of human trafficing back in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire days, and the obvious solution was of course to outlaw clothing.

Part of my interest here is that years ago I was a nudist, and although it's one of the many hobbies that fell by the wayside due to lack of time (it's probably been 10 years since I visited a nudist resort), I still think being ashamed of your own body is actively stupid, and when a woman films HERSELF at a party walking around a pool in a bikini testing out a walkie-talkie and youtube makes the video age restricted... she's not doing anything sexual, she's not even naked, but youtube age restricted the video because how dare a woman have a body? Disney's streaming service photoshopping hair all over Daryl Hannah's backside in splash is as much "han shot first" and "the police in ET had guns" creepy as it is prudish, but this is also the same Disney that released an NC-17 film back when the Boomers were 25 years younger.

Let's review Youtube's INSANITY: they added "for kids" categorization of videos which basically demonetizes them, blocks the miniplayer, prevents you from adding them to lists... generally something to be avoided at all costs if you want anyone to see it. AND they added "age restricted" videos that don't show up in searches or get recommended. AND they added explicit blocking of videos perceived as sexual because a screenshot from a broadcast cartoon from the 1990s is doing yoga in a leotard holding a beach ball between her legs. And creators self-censor words and text in videos all the time because there's a long list of things you're not allowed to write or say or you'll trigger the censor-bots. (Apparently you can say "meth" but not "drugs"?) I can only imagine what the rest of Google is doing to web searches.

One of the big names behind the return to victorian puritanism that nearly took down onlyfans (how dare women make money independently instead of staying under the glass ceiling; camgirls were working from home as independent contrators 5 years ago and that COULD NOT BE ALLOWED) is Ralph Yarrow, a Utah mormon anti-feminist campaigner and the driving force behind the SCO lawsuits against Linux 15 years ago. As I explained at the time, when Novell founder Ray Noorda got altzheimers his financial empire was hijacked by people who used corporate shell games to harvest the monetary awards Caldera got from suing places like Microsoft so they went directly to the investors rather than the company, meaning the same litigous sliminess I fought against back then is helping turn "The internet is for porn" into The Handmaids Tale today.

The internet fought down SOPA and PIPA, but under Trump FOSTA and SESTA passed with standard right wing family values "think of the children" hand wringing. We got distracted by ICE putting those kids in cages, but this is why Tumblr has its stupid female presenting nipples policy with broken AI triggering on pictures of bread, and why youtube got crazy squeamish and block-happy (yes, that is a DRAWING of a clothed aerobics instructor CARTOON violating their policy by holding a BEACH BALL), and of course twitch having long blog posts about the hairs it's trying to split. We went from "sex work is work" through the end of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to exporting censorship to Anime in Japan in the space of 5 years. The suicide girls twitter is behind a warning screen despite everyone on it being clothed.

Websites (and hosting providers) are facing the threat of "if you don't comply, no company you work at for the rest of your life will ever be able to take mastercard or visa, or even have a bank account", and that is DISTURBING, and a lot harder to challenge in court than last time. And of course they're trying to eliminate the use of cash, with police outright confiscating it if they catch you with nontrivial amounts of it. (Which is its own problem. And as the global reserve currency, we're exporting this victorian prudishness to the ENTIRE PLANET, with the dollar owned by a monoposony of three private corporations.)

The Boomers will die, the Boomers will die... Not that long now. Global warming and plutocracy get worse every day until then, but... the Boomers will die. The damage they've done to the healthcare system and the anti-mask anti-vax lunacy from the party they OVERWHELMINGLY VOTE FOR speeds that along a lot...

So yeah, when my stress levels fill up things like this cause me to cause me to literally lose sleep. I vent about them in my blog since I lost access to twitter. I feel bad about inflicting that on people, and have done an even/odd day thing where I DON'T talk about it on even numbered days. (There are also <span> tags that I should teach the RSS feed generator about, it's on my todo list...)


October 26, 2021

Fiddling with the toybox roadmap and status pages, which means updating scripts/mkstatus.py. Hmmm. The problem with switching from die.net to man7.org for the manual page links is the commands aren't all in section one: arp and arping are in section 8. No obvious place to PUT that.

Eh, leave it as a TODO for now.


October 25, 2021

Today I learned about the "Al Capone theory of sexual harassment": he was arrested because he didn't commit just ONE kind of crime, he committed lots of different types one of which was easier to prove and prosecute. The new theory is that people who feel entitled to other people's bodies generally feel entitled to other people's money, credit for other people's accomplishments, and so on. Which means sexual harassers tend to commit all sorts of other crimes too, from plagiarism to financial fraud, and sexual harassment is a canary in the coal mine to look at all their other behavior.

When it came out that rape-friendly Liberty University punishes students for reporting rapes, the world's largest Christian (evangelical) college fired their vice president of communications for acknowledging the problem.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, refusing to speak on all-male panels is becoming standard practice.

The confederacy controlled the south not because it was ever popular there, but because of gerrymandering and voter suppression of the type Boomercrats are allowing to be installed nationally. (Boomers never fix or maintain anything.)

Senator Manchin (the not-democrat who makes his money from coal companies that Biden inexplicably still considers a democrat) is blocking drug reform because his daughter is the pharma-bro executive who raised the price of Epipens 800%.

A good thread/article about mistaking privilege for merit, and thus reinforcing the rich getting richer.

The "reshoring" thing continues full speed, and europe is out of paper until the new year.


October 24, 2021

Greg KH does not remember our interactions. I suppose that's not surprising, I didn't actuall expect him to remember who I am at all.

But I don't really want to dig up all the links to walk him through "here's where sysfs changes broke the prototype code that became mdev _twice_ while I was developing it, here's where I met him and kay sievers at ottawa linuxfest to get their approved API for doing this and then here's where THAT broke a couple years later, here's where I tried to write hotplug documentation to clarify what IS allowed which they categorically rejected and instead wrote a document starting "you can't do anything that's not listed here" followed by a bunch of "don't do this" stanzas without saying what you WERE allowed to do, and when I complained about THAT got 'I will not reply further to this conversation'ed by both of them..." It's not useful. It's also like ten years ago, and I would think he'd changed if he wasn't also the git committer who created the "stable-api-nonsense.txt" file in Documentation (essentially the same policy I've been complaining about in userspace) and he wasn't also the guy who checked in the old "CodeOfConflict" file when people started asking about a code of conduct in 2015. When presented with objections, that's three different "No, we'll do the OPPOSITE" documents. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. Maybe he's mellowed in the past few years since I largely stopped paying attention. I could try to find out, but I'd rather spend the energy on coding.

The response from kernel guys on breaking x86-64 is basically "yeah, we broke it intentionally, you're weird for wanting that and shouldn't want that". Which is the standard response embedded developers get talking to linux-kernel, which is why none of them DO anymore. Which was the point of that thread on the embedded list where Tim Bird and co were going "alas, there's nothing to be done, we surrender" now that Matt Mackall's retired and nobody's volunteered to step up to take over. (I was explaining why I personally would be a bad fit for that job, but that doesn't mean the job doesn't need doing. And that's what Greg responded to, the "I've never gotten along with that guy" part. On the bright side, today I learned the northern way to say "Bless your heart.")

Apparently the fix I need to try is chopping out HAVE_STACK_VALIDATION from arch/x86/Kconfig, and to be honest I can do that with sed in mkroot.sh if there's no obvious alternative. (I don't maintain a kernel patch stack in that project, but I can do one line fixes via regex if necessary. Don't wanna, but CAN...)

Speaking of, here's the second half of the response I did NOT send, because it wouldn't help:

>> > P.S. Why do you need a special library to parse elf anyway? It's a fairly simple
>> > file format, linux has include/linux.elf.h, the toolchain already has an objtool
>> > prefixed for the appropriate cross compiler...
>
> We didn't see the need to reinvent the wheel,

Linux already had elf.h and fs/binfmt_elf.c, the toolchain already had nm/ld/objcopy/objdump, so the way to avoid reinventing the wheel was to import a third implementation of elf plumbing.

Ok.

> and some of the ELF corner cases are tricky.

My frame of reference was that the toybox "file" command parses elf and the j-core boot ROM loads vmlinux without needing external libraries, but I'll take your word that stack validation is tricky.

> Objtool heavily relies on libelf for both reading and writing. The
> kernel needs objtool to be robust.

I was confused: between objcopy and objdump I thought "objtool" was part of the binutils or lld packages until this thread.

> Libelf has been solid.

And zlib is solid, yet despite using gzip compression internally Linux didn't require zlib as a build dependency. Sure it's a position you can disagree with, but my point is it's a _new_ position. A policy change, happening implicitly.


October 23, 2021

The general strike continues.

What is wrong with biden? Seriously, that dude is past is sell-by date. As always, Boomercrats solve nothing. They provide cover for fascists. Boomer media sucks. Boomers never learn, just endlessly reassert their priors. And Boomers continue to distort the culture via money.

In 1933, a constitutional amendment was attempted to limit personal wealth to $1 million (about $21 million today). These days we don't even have functional inheritance taxes. That's why we need to guillotine the billionaires. A billion dollars is an offensive amount of capital, and accumulating a billion dollars should be a federal capital offsense, yes that includes concentrated corporate ownership. IP law is also a property of late stage capitalism, and we need to defund the police.

Algorithmic selection consistently amplifies right-wing content (they have entire think tanks working to game it, SEO doesn't even scratch the surface), but Faceboot is so especially bad that whistleblowers are becoming a daily occurrence and the entire edifice appears to be a giant financial fraud. The Attourney General in DC has named Faceboot's founder in its Jan 6 insurrection lawsuit, and they're stacking it on top of their ongoing Cambridge Analytica investigation, so he may (most likely posthumously) spend a night in jail sometime in the 2060s. Meanwhile, silicon valley douchebros continue to reinvent the obvious.

Scared white people are the real problem. The GOP continuing to exist is a blight on the nation's history. In Texas, the GOP is passing laws prohibiting the teaching of academic theories. In michigan, they're firing all the election officials so the 2024 election can be completely fake. They're gerrymandering, doing even more voter suppression, trying to end public education, and reacting to the end of the war in afghanistan by expanding the military budget. Never underestimate the hypocrisy of anti-abortion loons.

To spoil the punchline of this video, "You've got nothing against immigrants, you're just racist".

Question: is this a case where wal-mart is terrible, homeopathy is terrible, deregulation is terrible, or outsourcing to the other side of the planet has consequences?


October 22, 2021

Oh goddess, the kernel guys broke the x86-64 build again: it wants "gelf.h" which requires me to install the Dark Crystal package and I dowanna add more build dependencies.

I got toysh compiling again with the "declare" command implemented, and tried to do a mkroot build to test it, and taskset failed to build. I did a largeish change to taskset adding -n and -b, both things I've wanted for a while. (-n lets you specify a decimal number of processors instead of a mask, it currently fills them in from zero because I haven't bothered to randomize them. -b lets the mask be binary, so instead of 1a you'd go 11010). Except I implemented -n and -b as normal options taking an argument, and taskset... doesn't work that way. "taskset -p 7 1" sets PID 1 to mask 7, not the other way around. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE OLD ONE DOES.

This is the "sh -c -- -potato" issue from the posix list all over again. (I dialed in to the posix monthly meeting yesterday and volunteered to poke Elliott and Rich about a potential change to how system() is implemented, initially off-list but Elliott had a concern I asked him for permission to forward to the list... and it turned into bikeshedding. I feel bad about that. That list is usually just bug tracker autoposts and invitations/minutes for the monthly phone meeting, and yet has MASSIVE untapped strategic bikeshedding reserves when fresh meat shows up...)


October 21, 2021

A surprising number of the high-profile loons in Reich-wing politics today are actually paid actors from a company called "Explore Talent". Their pages on the old eterntainment site are still up. They couldn't make it in show biz, so they got hired to act in politics instead. (Yes, the fundamental problem is concentration of wealth, hence guillotining the billionaires.)

The New York Times has gone beyond "Boomer Media" into full-on Murdoch-style copaganda territory. They ran an article (falsely) claiming that police prevent crime and criticism of police increased the murder rate, written by an ex-CIA agent who works for Peter Thiel's "Palantir" (think rebadged Cambridge Analytica).

The "great resignation" still smells a lot like a general strike, because trying to reform "from the inside" just makes you part of the problem.

It's not surprising aluminum manfacturing has been impacted by electricity shortages. Aluminum metal is basically stored electricity, that's why it's so profitable to recycle. Aluminum is found in nature as aluminum oxide, and it's REALLY plentiful, eight percent of the earth's crust, because it's lighter than most other elements so it floated to the surface of all the molten rock back in the day. To make metallic aluminum you dissolve the aluminum oxide in acid and run an electric current through the resulting slurry: oxygen bubbles out the solution and metallic aluminum precipiates out the other way. You can trivially get electricity back out by letting the metal oxidize again with wires hooked up to it (the principle behind both aluminum/air and iron/air batteries). A useful thing about aluminum is its oxide is impermeable to oxygen, so once a thin layer forms on top it protects the metal under it. (Iron oxide lets air right through to the metal underneath, so iron things tend to rust through over time when conductors like water and especially salt water come in contact with them and let the electricity out.)

Speaking of iron/air batteries, big container sized iron flow batteries are taking off. That MIT professor who wanted to make shipping container batteries back in 2012 went down a rathole of using exotic materials (molten metals that took power to stay hot and ate through the container they were in), and although he's still fundraising around his technology ten years later it seems like typical ivory tower academia. (The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is.) Meanwhile a battery made out of iron water and salt which works at room temperature, is less explosive than your average bathroom, and has an electrolyte you can DRINK, seems a lot more safe and scalable than "molten magnesium antimony".


October 20, 2021

It looks like David Graeber was working on a book when he died, and his co-author finished it.

$DAYJOB asked me to install spi tools on the board and that means I need to figure out what the standard Linux spi tools _are_. I'm slightly hampered by the fact I can never keep i2c and spi straight. There's a standalone i2c-tools package, and toybox has toys/other/i2ctools.c already... but this is spi. I thought the spi stuff would be in the mtd-utils package, but apparently not? Hmmm.

The first google hit is a spi-tools package that only dates back to 2014. The next hit is a stale fork of the kernel's spidev_test testing tool out of the kernel source.


October 19, 2021

There's a difference between "doxxing" (posting someone's home address to encourge vigilante attacks in the middle of the night) and outing fascists. And of course the plutocrat/fascists alliance uses IP law to shield themselves against criticism. (I very vaguely remember that during the 1992 election billionaire Ross Perot tried to copyright his own likeness to cease-and-desist people parodying him. This got shut down really fast for multiple reasons (you can't copyright something you didn't create, parody is fair use...) and I'm not finding anything on it when I google, but it was news item du jour for a week there 30 years ago.) Meanwhile, the online fascists want to doxx everyone everywhere preemptively: their positions are never coherent, they're just "I'm king, rules I make bind you but do not apply to me".

New studies have quantified the damage leaded gasoline did: a 4.25% drop in IQ. An important reason to guillotine the billionaires is that private equity is intentionally destroying the country's local news reporting apparatus so nobody can say bad things about them. A good explanation on the use of NFTs in money laundering. Google search summaries really need to stop trying to be overly clever. An excellent thread about levels of security. The profession of economics is completely rotten. Netflix doubles down on that whole "Dave Chapelle, celebrated TERF" thing. Republican Boomers who don't understand technology think they can threaten their way out of their mistakes. SimCity doesn't have parking lots because realistically depicting the amount of space devoted to cars made the game depressing.

The great resignation has a lot of pent up reasons for it. The whole "Just in Time" intentional fragility is combining absolutely terribly with the Great Resignation. (And didn't work to well outsourcing to china either.)

Nobody at my sister's workplace has been allowed to telecommute since vaccination became available because "that's a privilege reserved for C-level". I told her to re-up her certs and job hunt, but she's too exhausted by her commute, keeping the second car working, and already has to take time off from work to do anything like renew her driver's license that can only be done during weekday business hours.


October 18, 2021

Sarah Taber remains impressive.

Look, I know Apple's really proud of the M1 processor but there is NOTHING special about their design. TSMC is fabbing it on a 5 nanometer processes. It has 57 billion transistors implenting 10-way SMP. Of COURSE it's fast. That's not a "clever CPU design", that's clever fabrication putting MASSIVE amounts of hardware in such a tiny densely packed space a signal takes a fraction of a nanosecond to get down the wire to the next transistor so you can clock it at multiple gigahertz, using components so tiny they need a fraction of a watt to power them. Sure it's cool, but it's TSMC being cool (making good use of ASML's equipemnt, etc) and Apple merely having more money to bid for TSMC (and/or Samsung)'s services.

I thought an apt-get upgrade had broken glibc's regexec(REG_STARTEND) and thus toybox's ability to grep for matches past a null byte in a line. But it turns out glibc is so hilariously fragile that if you strip the .gnu.version symbol from the binary, it breaks regexec. I hadn't noticed because doing that still worked fine with the android NDK toolchain. It never worked with musl because Rich explicitly refused to support it, which has been causing problems ever since. (I just did an #ifndef #define 0 in portability.h so it builds on musl, but grep and sed under musl can't match after a NUL byte because Rich's library is uniquely deficient. I think even MacOS supports this, it's ONLY musl that doesn't.)

Then again, a static stripped x86-64 toybox built with bionic is 1113008 bytes, and built with musl it's 664208 bytes, so I can't complain THAT much. (A chunk of that is bionic being written in C++ these days and musl being C, but it's also... caring about that metric.)

Jeff called with good news. Nonzero chance I get to go back to Japan before my residence card expires (one year after I left, which was mid-December 2020). It would be really nice if all that work we did could connect up and actually get out into the world.


October 17, 2021

Onna plane. MSP->AUS.

FYI, this seems like a pretty good list.


October 16, 2021

I'm trying to track what China is doing because it's a big deal, especially if I wind up going back to japan. This atlantic article mostly agrees with Peter Zeihan's analysis, to wit:

  1. China's one child policy put their demographics in an even worse position than Japan, and they're reaching a point where elder care is tying up all their workers. Over the next 5 years their workforce shrinks to the point they can't even maintain their infrastructure. Their military can afford ZERO casualties because the political blowback is enormous: each death leaves two parents and four grandparents with nothing left to lose. (And the demographics turn out to be worse than they realized because local governments that get funding based on population lied on the census numbers.)

  2. China has been faking growth by lending MASSIVE amounts of money to BS job projects that create "employment" to keep people too busy to politically organize or rebel. This creates nominal growth with no corresponding assets or investment, just a bubble inflated by deficit financing. Most of the funding for it comes from government edicts and propaganda campaigns forcing chinese people's savings into specified channels. Ten years ago the target was the chinese stock market until that crashed, and then it was the real estate market but now THAT'S crashing. (Evergrande getting stuck in the suez canal is a SEPARATE problem from tofu dreg projects, which is a separate problem from ghost cities: there are LAYERS of bad here.)

  3. China's current economic model doesn't exist without the USA securing shipping lanes, acting as its largest customer, selling them food, and providing a global currency. They're an export-led economy that's pissed off all its trading partners with "wolf warrior" diplomacy, the destruction of Hong Kong, blaming other countries for Covid... (On top of Tianamen Square, the Great Firewall, Uighur genocide, suicide nets...)

That last part requires some backstory. Zeihan's position (explained in a bunch of talks and intervies over the years) is that the the USA got into the job of policing the world's supply chains as part of the cold war. We demonstrated capitalism's superiority to communism by pumping up international trade to historically unprecedented levels, anchored by an all-you-can-export buffet where the USA would buy anything you cared to sell us, a get-rich-quick scheme funded by massive deficit spending of the newly minted international reserve currency.

The USA paid for the peace the same way we paid for the war. It wasn't JUST the Marshall Plan rebuilding Germany and Japan with massive US funding, we bribed all our allies just as heavily, and we did it with "free trade". A Pax Americana where all roads led to the Federal Reserve, in a world that had fought dozens of trade wars for centuries.

The Bretton Woods system instituted at the end of World War II involved the USA spending more money on "defense" than the rest of the world combined, and what we were _defending_ was container ships and oil tankers, basically eliminating international piracy for the first time in world history. The reason we did this wasn't because it was profitable (we ran a trade deficit throughout and Zeihan points out international trade is less than 10% of the USA's economy), but because we were cultivating a bunch of economic vassal states to erode Russia's influence and economy until the Berlin Wall fell.

Doing this made sense when Russia was threatening World War III: the war in Korea (a real war dramatized in the TV show M*A*S*H) taught us beating Russia+China with tanks wouldn't be easy, and we didn't want to exchange Nukes, so we took over the world's economy, walled them out, and smothered them. There were various fronts (they took the high ground by orbiting Sputnik and proving they could drop an ICBM out of the sky we couldn't stop with radars and fighter planes, so we took even higher ground with a moon landing where we could technically build a base from which to rain down nukes upon any part of the globe if we really wanted to), but Nixon recruiting Deng Xiaoping's China into the Bretton Woods system was probably the decisive moment, turning half the communist world into our capitalist trading partner with an economy dependent on the shipping routes we maintained for food, energy, and income denominated in the US Dollar.

But the cold war ended 32 years ago, the USA no longer needs middle eastern oil (we're a net exporter now), and we're losing interest in being the world's police force. We've drawn down our forces from our overseas bases, pulled out of iraq and afghanistan, and this TERRIFIES china.

Ever since Nixon cozied up to them to peel them away from the Soviet Union, China's taken the USA for granted: Tianamen Square, claiming Tibet and Taiwan, the Great Firewall, Uighur concentration camps... they've made it very clear they're not our friend. They thought they'd made themselves indispensable to us, when they were actually a cold war chess piece that became a convenient way to unload ecological externalities of manufacturing and rare earth refining and such onto literally the other side of the planet. We're perfectly capable of doing all that stuff over here (or paying somebody like Mexico to do it with a cheap labor force that can ship containers by train or truck), and during the pandemic with china's hysterical "wolf warrior diplomacy" insecure posturing, we've let the supply chains from China go slack (hence the container processing backlog; allowing it to grow was a choice) and started onshoring everything from semiconductors to textiles again. We don't have to DO anything to screw over china, we just have to stop actively maintaining an elaborate and expensive support system they now benefit from more than we do.

The berlin wall fell in 1989, six months after the Tianamen Square massacre. At that point, Breton Woods had served its original purpose: Russia's global ambitions were done, and the attempt to seduce China out of fascism had demonstrably failed. We kept spending more "defense" dollars than ever to sustain the Bretton Woods system out of strategic inertia (we didn't have a BETTER global agenda), and because we'd become dependent on foreign oil imports that needed a military escort. (As long as we were policing one global hotspot might as well keep paying the rent on all the other worldwide military bases we'd already built...)

The president at the time, George Herbert Walker Norris Wainright Armoire Vestibule Pomegranite Bush talked about a "new world order", which sounded outright illuminati and freaked everybody out. He probably MEANT repurposing Bretton Woods to do something OTHER than fight a cold war that was now over, but he was absolutely terrible at communicating what specifically he meant by that. Also, our whole "police the world's trade routes" function meant we cared when a random middle eastern state invaded another random middle eastern state, resulting in the first gulf war where the "allies" we'd spent all those years bribing... largely declined to participate. We bribed them to fight the SOVIETS, Iraq and Kuwait weren't soviet, ergo not their problem.

George H.W. got kicked out of office for Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president, and Boomers fix nothing. As the cream of the Boomer crop in his physical prime (mid-40s at the time) he managed to use the tools at hand to handle short-term immediate problems: our police-the-world's-trade-routes function let him bribe up peace in Ireland and between Israel and Palestine. But as a Boomer he completely ignored long-term strategy issues because to Boomers, the world they inherited from the Greatest and Silent generations had always been like that, it was immutable and eternal and they were not capable of fucking it up, so they might as well sit back and strip-mine everything. So Clinton's international agenda was just "nobody fight, keep the oil and shipping containers flowing", meanwhile the REAL action was in the stateside dot-com boom...

Clinton was followed by Dick Cheney George Bush Jr (the man who put the "Duh" in W), an ex-alcoholic frat boy who neither knew nor cared about anything. This second Boomer was surrounded by his father's advisors, who had all started as interns under Nixon and were now in their 70s. These old dogs incapable of learning new tricks ran the show while Dubyah gave "Is our children learning" speeches, but when they weren't trying to fight a cold war that no longer existed, they were mostly interested in embezzling as much of the trillion dollar annual federal budget as they could. Since most of it was defense and healthcare spending, that's what they drained money from into their own pockets (via shell companies like Haliburton and Blackwater). Clowns like Rumsfeld had spent their lives threatening the Soviet Union and securing US oil supplies in the middle east, and "make sure Russia doesn't rise from the dead and we keep control of the oil" was about the level of thinking these septuagenarians were still reflexively capable of as they doddered off stage.

Under Cheney, the USA went from "last remaining superpower and ideal to which other countries aspire" to "abusive landlord". The rest of the world still needed us to maintain Bretton Woods, but an awful lot of them stopped LIKING us. And domestically, "Team America World Police" became a punchline: a thing we still did, but could no longer really explain WHY.

Cheney was followed by Obama, who didn't have an international strategy either. He was too busy trying to shovel out the damage from the W. administration's embezzlement (the 2008 mortgage crisis and the healthcare crisis were the culmination of an economic disaster that started with the dot-com crash and continued through Enron/Worldcom/Tyco/Global Crossing/Arthur Anderson...), plus the entire republican party going toxic as the Southern Strategy bore the invitable fruit Rockefeller had warned about in 1964 and became "the tea party of NO".

Obama was predictably followed by a dementia patient who appealed to senile lead-poisoned Boomers and other "conservatives" the same way Ronald Reagan's Altzheimers had: nothing's more confident than a rich white man who literally can't remember ever having been wrong about anything. He was physically incapable of having a strategy, wasn't even aware Bretton Woods existed and didn't read or attend his briefings, so the system more or less continued on inertia as it had for the past quarter century, except for the parts he dismantled out of racism against foreigners or knocked over with random dick-measuring tariff tantrums.

And now we've got an octagenarian warming the chair in the Oval Office. His agenda is of course thirty years out of date, but thirty years ago is when the cold war ended and a decision about ending or reporposing Bretton Woods was called for in the first place. The cold war is still long over, and fracking has made the USA a net EXPORTER of fossil fuels (we're Europe's largest natural gas supplier) with renewables growing exponentially. Russia's economy is the size of Italy and their most effective offensive strategy is literally internet trolling, we've mostly pulled out of the middle east already (MBS killing Kashogi gave us an excuse to sever ties with our largest "ally" in the region, our current troop deployment in Saudi Arabia is smaller than the high school I went to), and China's only an economic powerhouse because we buy their stuff, sell them food, and ensure their ships don't have to deal with piracy.

Biden is facing up to the challenges the USA experienced back in 1992, and unlike George H.W. his response is to dismantle Breton Woods. No more cold war, middle eastern oil is passe, we've lost interest in policing the world... so we're pulling out. Whether this will blow up in our face like the "America First" debacle leading up to World War II is an open question. But China isn't likely to expand in the vacuum we leave behind because they're a parasite needing a host. We had a symbiotic relationship for a while, but it soured.

Having watched several of Zeihan's videos, I disagree with a lot of what he has to say (he's a renewable energy pessimist, for example), but he raises a lot of interesting points. I'd really like to get him and Mark Blyth to talk to each other in front of a camera, maybe with Paul Krugman? (Clay Shirky actually went and lived in china for a few years, but he's gone mostly silent on social media. Still a crying shame David Graber's dead.)


October 15, 2021

Visiting the niecephews.

I packed up my suitcases and work environment, and my brother picked me up from Fade's in the early evening and drove me to my sister's new house. (My brother not living in Mom's basement, he's living in our sister's basement.)

It's... sort of gutted. She could afford it because it' a "fixer upper". (Previous owner died of untreated diabetes and didn't really maintain the place for over 10 years.) They removed the carpet and linoleum, took the 1980's "popcorn ceilings" off, ripped out most of the bathrooms, not a doorknob left in the place, there are construction materials in boxes everywhere... yup, definitely my father's kids.

Before moving to kwajalein we grew up in a house in Very Rural Florida that my parents built from scratch using time-life "how to" books. The person they sold it to burned it down with a meth lab, and when I visited years ago it was just the foundation and a few timbers left. (Checking Google Maps satellite view I think it MIGHT have been 304 Baxter Rd, Lake Helen? The dried-up lake bed looks right. The dirt road's grown in. Eh, I was 5 when we left.) Then we moved to Kwajalein, halfway between hawaii and australia. Between the two of them, I probably didn't breathe quite as much airborne lead as the average for my generational cohort... until we moved to Medford New Jersey when I was 10, where EVERYTHING SUCKED. (I _know_ New Jersey made me dumber, but didn't understand WHY for a long time. But I digress.)

After divorcing my mother (leaving her with the kids, of course) and remarrying, our father bought a house in Pennsylvania, gutted it, and rebuilt it over about a 10 year period. Long after college my brother crashed on _his_ couch for years and helped out with this process, picking up skills he now doesn't want to use: he complained to me that people are trying to charge $40k to redo a bathroom when it's only a couple thousand dollars of materials and about 3 days of work, and he could do it himself if he had a helper monkey to hold stuff. But he doesn't want to start doing that for other people (and making, by his own estimates, at least half a million dollars per year net profit) because he wants to get back into sales now that his unemployment benefits have run out. Ok. (Selling _what_ seems secondary?)

So yeah, living in a construction zone actually is quite the throwback to growing up. Probably gonna be a beautiful house someday, and right now it's... familiar.


October 14, 2021

Good news: the European Court of Justice just granted a right to repair petition.


October 13, 2021

One of the most insightful things I've ever read was the "Balance as Bias" paper, which helped me figure out what the GOP was up to back in 2013. People keep rephrasing the same basic insight that compromising between a scientist and a flat earther with "views on shape of the planet differ" is capitulation to lies. A dead parrot is not merely "pining", it has passed on, and meeting them halfway means they won: you are now lying too. Your lie is "smaller", but that just means their lie needs to become more extreme to triangulate the equivocators into accepting any position as the new status quo.

Intellectual property law exists to make the rich richer, and for no other reason. Yes, some of us get crumbs as an excuse not to deploy universal basic income. When billionaires aren't hiring people to astroturf, they're deflecting, ala that whole Plastic straws (<0.01% of plastic waste) vs fishing nets (about half) thing. (The widely acknowledged solution to this is Guillotines but we're discouraged from saying it out loud.) Why do Evangelicals get to avoid taxes? Twitter keeps finding new ways to be worse at being twitter. Browsers that don't show URLs are collaborating with phishing.


October 12, 2021

Work has assigned me "microsoft devops training" on microsoft linkedin, using the "pay microsoft linkedin to show you training videos" mechanism they added about the same time the Linux Foundation got big into training (taking business away from all the engineers who had been doing it before then as a sideline to pay for actual open source work). Work wanted me to attach their corporate access to this training material to "my" microsoft linkedin account, and were outright confused by me not having an active microsoft linkedin account (ever since microsoft bought it in 2016). I eventually managed to make a new account using my work email. (First name "Temporary", last name "Account". Probably get culled soon because I'm not adhering to Facebook's realname policies, but it just needs to last long enough to watch these non-public videos.)

Microsoft Devops is a tool for managers, not engineers, and the course they pointed me at isn't actually training, it's a long advertisement. It started by telling me about "the essence of the rebranding" (moving DevOps from a word in general circulation to a microsoft trademark), then a section on microsoft's payment plan, then a chapter on using the Microsoft Demo Generator to create a fake project (because to a manager code is a thing you press a button and poof there it is), then it described adding people to organizations and adding those same people to teams (I.E. managing people), then the next section started with (and I quote) "Azure boards is the hub for managing software projects with tools for planning, work assignment, and reports. Use azure boards to track work...". Uh-huh, is work assignment is a thing engineers are going to be performing, or receiving? Now it's going through the "scrum process" and "CMMI" (from the 1990s but still "commonly used in government contracts")... Now it's explaining that microsoft devops calls anything you haven't done yet a "backlog". (Because your todo list is LATE LATE LATE before you've even started, and thus the constant need to "sprint".)

I totally see why this appeals to managers, but trying to get engineers excited about it is like explaining to us how filling out our timecards in 15 minute increments throughout the day will help us complete our projects more efficiently by managing our time better. No, there is NOTHING IN THIS FOR US.

This "scrum" nonsense is because lots of finance guys and middle managers were high school sports jocks, back when that was how to get a crowd staring at you for ritualized praise and racking up nominal "wins" (not actual achievement, but "I defeated somebody else and they lost therefore I won" zero sum thinking with literal trophies). Geeks do not insert sports metaphors into our own workflow, they get imposed upon us.

Oh goddess. I accidentally typed "python" into the windows "command prompt" window instead of the linux terminal in my vm (I use the python "print" statement as a quick calculator a lot because echo $((blah)) doesn't do floating point), and it popped up a big blue "microsoft store" window which I at least closed before it managed to fill itself in. I had to step away from the keyboard for a bit.


October 11, 2021

Streisand effect, activate.

It turns out the "worker shortage" isn't real, it's a mirage created by late stage capitalism. (There are plenty of specific problems like the UK kicking out all the polish lorry drivers and then being unable to deliver its goods, and there's a whiff of "general strike", but an awful lot of the "great resignation" has been from BS jobs.)

After defunding the police, prosecute them and their bosses. Of course the 69 year old white Boomer judge at the center of arresting and jailing 8 year old girls for not stopping boys from fighting in the school playground (yes really) is highly religious, quote "I’m here on a mission. It’s not a job. It’s God’s mission".

Christianity has used racism as an excuse to turn the other cheek by the sword for its entire history. A jewish reform movement that managed to become antisemetic within decades. Constantine, the man who made christianity the state religion of Rome and called the first Council of Nicea, became emperor by murdering everyone who opposed his rule and while emperor he murdered his firstborn son Crispus and his wife Fausta. Pope Urban II ordered the first crusade to go murder brown people in their own homes in 1095, and these waves of invasion continued regularly for centuries, along the way sacking the very city the first crusade had used as an excuse to get going (and don't forget the children's crusade). Ferdinand and Isabella ran the spanish inquisition, then funded Christopher Columbus to commit genocide in america when they ran out of spaniards to murder. Today France just found YET ANOTHER 200,000 children raped by catholic priests on top of the worldwide epidemic of priestly pedophilia we already knew about. (The real question about the catholic "residential schools" in canada, or the magdelene laundries in ireland, is "why would you think the monasteries and nunneries of old were any better"? A nunnery was a place to send noncompliant women so you didn't have to see them die. (A popular christian alternative was to make a public spectacle out of their deaths, for such crimes as "witchcraft".)

And these days now their magical claims have been largely discredited (if they don't know where we came from, why would they know where we're going to?) their main remaining task is lecturing the rest of us about morality.


October 10, 2021

I'm implementing "nameref" variables in toysh (basically a symlink, the contents of this variable is the name of another variable that ACTUALLY gets assigned to when you assign to this one). I'm trying to figure out how it interacts with the other flags. For example, the -u flag (force to uppercase) can be on the nameref, or on the target variable:

bash -c 'declare -un x=florp; x=boing; declare -p'
bash -c 'declare -n x=florp; declare -u x; declare -p'

Also, bash -c 'declare -i x=potato' quietly fails (assignment didn't happen, rc 1) with no error message because "potato" is not an integer. However, bash -c 'potato=42; declare -i x=potato; echo $x' prints 42.


October 9, 2021

Guillotine the billionaires, and here's more daily reasons to defund the police. (Once again the Onion merely documents reality and cannot manage to exaggerate it). end the NRA End the NRA, and abolish for-profit prisons.

The GOP's cruelty is the point. Their zero-sum black and white thinking makes them believe that if they hurt other people they've helped themselves, and when other people benefit they lose.

AT&T is evil. Boomers fix nothing.


October 8, 2021

Still trying to understand what's going on with china.

The container ship processing backlog continues to increase, and the price of shipping one container has increased tenfold (from $2500 to $25,000 per container). Meanwhile, the US steel industry is onshoring again, building local manufacturing capacity to produce the steel they can't import from China.

This article's headline is about Intel diverting a $95 billion investment in a new chip plant from the UK to EU thanks to brexit, but it also mentions that TSMC is investing $100 billion and Samsung $205 billion in producing new chip fab capacity as far from China as they can physically get.

Japan's new prime minister (yes their third since the start of the pandemic) has retained the two biggest china hawks from his predecessor's cabinet, and has created a new minister of stopping chinese IP theft in more or less as many words.

Skyrocketing housing prices in the USA, Canada, and Australia have been traced back to the trillion dollars per year smuggled out of China (much of it via bitcoin). They're getting investor visas and plonking it all in real estate, and they don't care if they only get 1/4 back when they sell it because they get SOMETHING back, as opposed to Xi pulling a Jack Ma on them, throwing them in jail, and confiscating everything they own. (With London it was Russian money trying to avoid Putin pulling a Mikhail Khodorkovsky on them. As much as capitalists love fascism to shield them from democracy, they're first against the wall once the fascists are secure in their power and ready to loot.)

Part of the reason for the blackouts in China (other than the boycott the CCP launched against Australian coal after Australia asked for more info about the pandemic's origins, and the floods filling up coal mines) is that chinese power companies can only sell the electricity they generate to China State Grid, which buys power at a fixed rate and takes a healthy middleman profit. This is the mechanism by which the producers can't raise prices and MUST shut down when they're selling at a loss because the price of coal got bid up. They can't continue to operate at a loss even if they want to: Xi's "three red lines" credit tightning which destabilized Evergrande also applies to power producers, so they can't get loans to buy coal on credit in hopes of riding it out.

There's a theory that Xi's "three red lines" credit tightening is intentionally bankrupting chinese industries so he can nationalize them, undoing Deng Xaoping's pivot to capitalism after Nixon went to china and once again putting the entire chinese economy under direct state control. Of coure a major side effect of that is Chinese industry defaulting on trillions of dollars of foreign held debt, trashing China's credit rating pretty much permanently. (The USA would be fine, it's less bad debt than Obama bailed out via "Quantitative Easing" after 2008. We can literally just print the money. And everyone's supply chains are already weaning themselves off chinese manufacturing in preparation for this.)

Another contributing factor to China's real estate collapse is their communist flavored government insists all land belongs to the state and individual ownership is impossible, but in 1978 one of Deng's reforms was to offer 70 year leases on land so individuals could have it for life and would thus invest in improvements. A lot of the real estate properties having trouble being sold in the wake of Evergrande are 2/3 of the way through their leases, and Chinese citizens are convinced the corrupt terminally privileged officials will use the lease expiration to steal the land out from under them, to the point it's being treated as a hard demolition deadline on all these buildings. If that home you're "buying" is going to be reposessed in 25 years, maybe find one with a longer deadline.


October 7, 2021

On monday, half a meter of water fell on Italy in six hours. The first time my house flooded was due to just seven inches in a 4 hour period, that was TWICE THAT and it lasted longer. (859 milimeters over the 24 hour period.)

Firefox is now sticking advertisements into the address bar. Here's how to turn it off.

Oil has gone full on regulatory capture as its only remaining strategy.

Thead analyzing how britain's convervatives destroyed the british empire and are trying to do the same to the USA. (Of course tory britain is declining again, but then they're supported by a very small number of plutocrats so the decision making doesn't have to benefit anyone else.)

The recent facebook faceplant points out another reason even non-bitcoin use of blockchain is a bad idea. (But of course faceboot was always a bad idea.)


October 6, 2021

I can shave about 300 bytes off the toybox binary with a slightly more aggressive strip command (tell the toybox "configure" file STRIP="strip -s -R .note* -R .comment -R .gnu.version"). Whether or not it's worth doing is another matter, but... eh.

Fiddling with 24 bit terminal color: echo -e '\e[38;2;100;200;255mhello there' sets a nice blue foreground color, and \e[48;... would presumably do the same for background color. Querying for support is supposedly echo -e '\eP$qm\e\\'; read -t 1 x; echo "=$x=" to check the current color... but for some reason the input is bypassing the read and going straight to the console output? (Are stdin and stdout not pointing to the same place...? Huh.)

I'm still waiting for the new ISO standard based on SPDX to show up on ISO's publicly available standards page (which is only a subset of their standards, but they said this one would be there since it's already available from SPDX) so I can point to 0BSD being in "ISO-5962". I hope the template tweak made it in to that version.

Had that call with a sci-five engineer, who was hired away from Nvidia (after they bought ARM), and before that worked at Intel, and before that IBM. I told him honestly I wasn't excited about his project, and asked my "if it wasn't open source, why would anyone use it" question... which he sort of dodged? He kept talking about hand-crafted assembly, as if that's a thing people want to do a lot of.

When I asked him why HE was excited about it, he sent me a link to a talk he gave about what he considered a compelling thing he'd done... which is basically a thing Quallcom was happy the Hexagon did 11 years ago. Qualcomm's hexagon is a barrel processor with a VLIW instruction word, so each 32 bit instruction is actually 4 instructions packed together for 4 slightly different cores that advance in lockstep, and the last 2 execution units are SIMD capable of doing 4 multiplies at a time. So the chip could do 8 32-bit integer multiplies per clock. Back in 2010. I dunno about now, but at the time it was the "multimedia coprocessor" in android phones doing the mp3 recording/playback, youtube video decoding, and camera video compression, all in software.

Neither sci-five person I talked to ever once mentioned any sort of open source community. When I brought up open source, this enginner talked about standards, which would be a bit like me asking a Caldera engineer who used to work on Irix (and HP-UX and AIX before that) "what about open source" and him bringing up the Posix and IEEE committees Caldera was on. That has nothing to do with Linux or BSD (who tended to be excluded from participation in said committees), those standards bodies were an attempt to get the various closed source proprietary factions to fight less, and an excuse for large corporations to lock smaller players who couldn't afford certification out of FIPS 151-2 procurement contracts. "Standards" and "community" are not the same thing.

At the end of the call I _still_ wasn't excited about the project, and said so. I could have kept going to talk to the second person thursday evening, but... I think I've satisfied my curiosity. I don't need a third round to say this isn't to my taste. These guys want to be to Arm and Intel what RC Cola is to Coke and Pepsi, and view open source as a thing their competitors do.


October 5, 2021

You know how I keep calling the Linux Foundation PROFOUNDLY INCOMPETENT? Here's an example. Back in 2005, the Linux Assigned Names and Numbers Authority documented the full list of /dev nodes that linux could put in /dev. According to archive.org, that list was still on their website in october 2011, at which time the top level page that linked to it said it was maintained by Stew Benedict. Then during archive.org's next capture in 2012 the page said it was maintained by The Linux Foundation... and the link to the actual documentation was 404. The top level page still linked to the same URL, but document wasn't there anymore. Fast forward a full decade and the top level page is STILL THERE, still saying it's maintained by the linux foundation, but all the links to actual information are still 404. (It may seem like some of the other documents lasted a bit longer, but if you look at the date in the URL it's just archive.org linking to an older capture of the page back before the Linux Foundation deleted all the info. (Luckily, there was an old kernel.org mirror (last updated in 2008), but you'll never find that from lanana.org.)

What is the Linux Foundation for? Collecting money from corporations and inserting itself into productive hobbyist flows to chase the hobbyists out and replacing them with nothing. This is not a secret. It's why Microsoft was so happy to join.


October 4, 2021

In minneapolis, with Fade.

8 am this morning I got a text from the team lead: "Good Morning. I'm driving in to work today. Are you still in town?" I was there for FOUR WEEKS by myself, and the first day I'm NOT there, he is.

He's one of the three bosses I have at this job: the team lead signs my time card, the manager who started a week after I did and is still coming up to speed, and the vice president who gave me the tour of the building when I arrived and approves all new spending, but is three levels of management up and far too busy to directly supervise us. I mostly interact with the team lead and another coworker who is telecommuting in from Iowa; he's been assigned the RTOS side and I've been assigned the Linux side, the three of us have a daily VOIP call though a Microsoft app using Microsoft's servers. Once a week (monday mornings) the three of us have a VOIP session with the manager and the manager's manager. (Who is not said VP, it's another guy I never interact with otherwise.) Mostly it's about trying to convince us to to do extra work to enter the design document and todo list we're making into Microsoft DevOps in management-friendly chunks that they can then claim to have provided to us.

I'm listening to anti-phishing training (companywide mandate, everybody needs to take it, not asking why) while dev.azure.com is loading stuff from cdn.vsassets.io. I still havent' wrapped my head around "you want to be secure, and are keeping everything on microsoft servers"...

Had a talk with a sci-five recuiter today. I'm torn. I'm really not a fan of Risc-V's "open hardware is inevitable therefore Risc V is inevitable" just like 64 bits was inevitable therefore Itanium was inevitable. Being well funded and early to market is nice; so were AOL and Myspace. I remember when Linux on the Desktop was also inevitable.

Risc-V doesn't smell right to me. "If your chip wasn't open, would there be any reason to use it?" is a question I can answer for j-core. I've never even seen them TRY to address it. J-core smells like it has the POTENTIAL to get it right on the technology side: there's a path to go head to head with cortex-m and develop upmarket ala Hexagon and j64. J-core has smart people working on it, more than one of which I'd heard of before I got there. J-core COULD win against arm/x86, modulo this whole capitalism thing. But the business side has been in perpetual drought and Jeff won't prioritize building an actual open source community ("release late, release seldom, stay silent on the mailing list" DOES NOT WORK). J-core has been inching along on scraps for years.

Risc-V has the fundraising part nailed, all the marketing in the world, and can (presumably) execute fast... but I'm just not a fan of their technology.

Jeff was only ever able to afford less than half what I'm making at the Chicago gig, and I didn't get paid for 3-4 months at the end there. That's why I'm not in Japan right now: I have to work to backfill the financial hole (pay down the home equity loan, replace the Roth IRA, refill the savings account...) If Jeff could pay me what I'm making here I would TOTALLY be right there with him Doing The Thing. But he can't, and I have responsibilities to my household. Grrr.

Sigh, why am I talking to sci-five? Well, they approached me and I tend to give people from the community largeish chunks of my time; random two hour calls with a stranger enthused about linux are actually not unusual for me. But now they want more of a job interview thing, and... Hm. I wanna be in Japan with Jeff, can't afford it right now. In THEORY Google is trying to get budget for me to do toybox full time next year, no idea if that'll reify and if it does for how long (hasn't come up, could be a 6 month contract for all I know but I WANT TO DO IT). I took the 6 month Chicago contract until then, and it would be unprofessional not to see that through. (Although my team lead just said "I need to work on a project that will decide if this project continues or not, sort of important" so it's not exactly giving me warm fuzzies about job security either. We have no spec fo the project, and a month in they're still trying to justify the budget.)

It's hard not to put the chicago gig and the sci-five gig next to each other and go "if I was bridging for 6 months, which gig would be more fun to do". But that's not the position I'm currently in, and there are side effects.

One of Jeff's gripes is that he handed (what became) sci-five their business model by repeatedly pointing out stuff they'd missed or correcting them when they'd made mistakes, and he's intentionally STOPPED doing that now. (Jeff is NOT a US Citizen living in Silicon valley, which makes fundraising way harder for him than a US Citizen living within easy driving distance of Silicon Valley.) For all I know they just want to quiz me about Jeff's plans, which I've been trying not to mention on the phone. Instead I've pointed them at my 2013 and 2019 talk videos with MY grandiose plan, which ain't what they want me to do either.

(There's a lovely clip from 1776 where the delegate from Rhode Island comes back and breaks a tie with a speech about "In all my years I've never heard, seen, nor smelled a topic that was so dangerous it couldn't be TALKED about. Hell yeah I'm for debating anything, Rhode Island says yea." Alas, the closest clip I've found for the movie is the scene before that.)

So yeah, the sci-5 people want to talk to me again wednesday via zoom, and want me to screen share so they can see me try to perforatively code for them. I've only used zoom through my phone so far (way easier to do multimedia stuff on android than devuan), and I went "I could VNC from my laptop to the phone..." but probably shouldn't go there.

I eventually just did the straightforward less convoluted thing and installed the zoom dpkg for vanilla debian on my devuan laptop, which comes up and MIGHT be able to screencast? (We'll see I suppose.)


October 3, 2021

Onna plane, flying to minneapolis to visit Fade. Spent far too much of last night and this morning packing out my hotel room (it's a HOTEL ROOM, ok I've been here four weeks and received a number of boxes in the mail, but still).

The day before yesterday Southwest canceled my nonstop flight from Chicago to Minnepolis and rescheduled it as a nine hour trek with a 4 hour layover in Denver, but gave us one free reschedule to make us less mad about it. This illusion of control and faux generosity thing is presumably to make me less unhappy about the original flight being cancelled, or something? Or an implicit "coulda been worse, don't make waves" threat. But even after we used the reschedule it was still a day later, and no longer nonstop (changing planes in nashville instead).

Last night I walked to the train station and back (not quite half an hour each way) to make sure I could find it (and figure out which side of the tracks the train to chicago would pull in at; not immediately obvious from Google Maps or even being there in person). The schedule on the side of the (closed because covid, it says to buy a ticket on the train) terminal building did not remotely match Google Maps, but I'm assuming that schedule is a year and change out of date?

But this morning after three hours of sleep I did not feel up to dragging two suitcases and a backpack at 6am (only time the train and then bus lined up so it didn't take 2 hours to get there) and had Fade just call me a lyft. (Which was only $40 instead of $70 this time because the trains are running so they have competition... ahem, I mean because "surge pricing".)

I expected to pull out my laptop in the airport or on the plane and FINALLY finish the toysh += implementation (which has scooped up VAR_TOLOWER and such, and which was ALREADY a feature that jumped in front of filling in the rest of the calculate() operators, teaching it to write to variable names, and adding a variable resolution pass to $(()) so $((${x:2}+7)) works)... But alas, no. I got a little work done on the nashville to minneapolis leg, but it was merging a hexdump submission into pending with initial analysis and cleanup (looks ok but that makes FOUR hex display commands: od, xxd, hexedit, and now hexdump, which share zero code). So working on my todo list opened a new can of worms that didn't get finished either; fairly standard these days.

Mostly I tried to nap or watched phone videos I'd downloaded (not enough sleep), then collapsed when I got to Fade's.

Good news, that Consumper Federal Protection Bureau thing Elizabeth Warren created to push back against the out of control finance industry (the GOP fillibustering her appointment to run it is why she ran for Senate in the first place) just got somebody to run it properly since the first time it was created. (Kamala Harris came in to break the tie, every single republican was against it so you know it's a good thing. This is the second best alternative to quadrupling the funding of the IRS and tasking all the new guys with auditing millionaires and up.)

Alas, the Black Widow vs Disney lawsuit was quietly settled out of court with NDAs all around, so the theory she was doing it to fight for the little guy? Not so much, apparently. Disney coughed up so as NOT to set a precedent, and Scarlet Johansen had a price.


October 2, 2021

Sarah Taber gave a lovely zoom talk for her book patrons, I hope it goes up public somewhere. The downside is it was ALMOST THREE HOURS. She got a question about vertical farming in containers and mentioned how too-bright LED grow lights that put out just frequencies that don't burn the leaves can still give many types of plants photon poisoning (saturating the chlorophyl faster than the metabolic pathways can handle and flooding the leaf with free radicals; white spots at first and then the plant keels over), and I basically got photon poisoning from her talk. It was fascinating, and information dense, and ALMOST THREE HOURS.

Toysh: the problem finding a place to stick the += logic is lifetime rules. I've now implemented it in a THIRD place (added a new setvar_long() that setvar() calls), but the problem is when you += it allocates a new string, meaning it has to dispose of the old string, but the old string is SOMETIMES freeable and sometimes not. For the stored string we're replacing there's a VAR_NOFREE flag, but for the NEW string we don't know. (The code sets that flag after the call.) I.E. the lifetime info we have in that function is about the wrong string.

While I was at it I implemented VAR_TOUPPER and VAR_TOLOWER in the new setvar_long() because they have the same problem: they allocate a new string because unicode consortium. UTF8 is great, Unicode is exasperating. Namely, switching case can change UTF8 encoding size (the lowercase of lowercase of U+0130 (C4 B0) is U+0069 (69)) which means unicode aware string case conversion can expand a string, meaning you have to realloc it and won't know how long the new buffer IS until you've scanned the whole string, so MUST do two passes. Note that there are ONLY THREE utf8 size transitions in the ENTIRE UNICODE SET (because they artifically limited it to less than even the full 4 byte range, because Microsoft paid them not to inconvenience windows), so it's EITHER 127 bit ascii, 2 byte, 3 byte or 4 byte characters. Stuff converting to/from the inherited ascii set is excusable (although that's NEVER going to be symmetric because nothing in those 127 bytes converts OUT of that set), but I just swapped the guts of demo_utf8towc_main() in toys/examples with:

unsigned a, b, c, d;
char s[8];

for (a = 1; a<=0x10ffff; a++) {
  b = towupper(a);
  if ((c = wctoutf8(s, a)) != (d = wctoutf8(s, b)))
    printf("L%x[%d]->U%x[%d]\n", a, c, b, d);
  b = towlower(a);
  if ((c = wctoutf8(s, a)) != (d = wctoutf8(s, b)))
    printf("U%x[%d]->L%x[%d]\n", a, c, b, d);
}

And I got 54 conversions, and when we sort and collate them a bit we get these lower-to-upper size changes:

131[2]->49[1]   17f[2]->53[1]   1c80[3]->412[2] 1c81[3]->414[2] 1c82[3]->41e[2]
1c83[3]->421[2] 1c84[3]->422[2] 1c85[3]->422[2] 1c86[3]->42a[2] 1c87[3]->462[2]
1fbe[3]->399[2] 23f[2]->2c7e[3] 240[2]->2c7f[3] 250[2]->2c6f[3] 251[2]->2c6d[3]
252[2]->2c70[3] 25c[2]->a7ab[3] 261[2]->a7ac[3] 265[2]->a78d[3] 266[2]->a7aa[3]
26a[2]->a7ae[3] 26b[2]->2c62[3] 26c[2]->a7ad[3] 271[2]->2c6e[3] 27d[2]->2c64[3]
287[2]->a7b1[3] 29d[2]->a7b2[3] 29e[2]->a7b0[3] 2c65[3]->23a[2] 2c66[3]->23e[2]

And then these upper-to-lower size changes:

130[2]->69[1]   1e9e[3]->df[2]  2126[3]->3c9[2] 212a[3]->6b[1]  212b[3]->e5[2]
23a[2]->2c65[3] 23e[2]->2c66[3] 2c62[3]->26b[2] 2c64[3]->27d[2] 2c6d[3]->251[2]
2c6e[3]->271[2] 2c6f[3]->250[2] 2c70[3]->252[2] 2c7e[3]->23f[2] 2c7f[3]->240[2]
a78d[3]->265[2] a7aa[3]->266[2] a7ab[3]->25c[2] a7ac[3]->261[2] a7ad[3]->26c[2]
a7ae[3]->26a[2] a7b0[3]->29e[2] a7b1[3]->287[2] a7b2[3]->29d[2]

Both sides have conversions that expand (no "lowercase comes before uppercase" kind of rules anywhere), and only FOUR of the conversions are into or out of the inherited ascii character set (to uppercase I and S, and to lowercase i and k... NOT EVEN SYMMETRIC), all of which are of course LOSSY because the ascii character doesn't convert BACK. (There's LAYERS of stupid here.) The rest of the conversions were between characters defined BY the unicode standard, which thus could have been organized to NOT CROSS SIZE BOUNDARIES.

Sigh.

Anyway, I inherited that mess because Microsoft is on the Unicode committee, and have to deal with it, so += isn't the ONLY case that has to potentially expand the string, so setvar_long() needing to know the allocation status of the string passed into it (should it free it or not) is a thing that needs to percolate up into its callers.

Previously I already broke the local variable setting logic out from run_command() into do_pluseq(), but the logic reproduces most of setvar() and it makes sense to merge them. But this change is turning into another can of worms that needs 2-3 days of concentration and does not do well chopped into 90 minute increments over the course of multiple weeks.


October 1, 2021

Microsoft's Linkedin is proactively censoring profiles that might offend China's government. As the tweeter says, "Now a US company is paying its own employees to censor Americans." And that company is Microsoft.

Why did it take this long to figure out smokers are 80% more likely to die from covid? (Had nobody bothered to ask the obvious?)

Boomercrats continue to be useless "Good Cop" quislings, while billionaires dare us to guillotine them. (I hope that all the rich people moving to dubai have an absolutely terrible time, and hopefully get stranded there.)

Do we have enough reasons to defund the police yet? They keep coming... The carceral state is counterproductive and basically exists because prison labor, for-profit prisons, and racism.

The GOP lies while perpetually gerrymandering, court packing, voter suppressing, and outright theft. They are a fascist religion funded by the fossil fuel industry. A death cult owned by the intersection of facebook and russia.

Faceboot is now explicitly going after children (even younger than last time), and it somehow manages to be worse than you'd think. Meanwhile 19 of facebook's top 20 christian web pages were actually Russian troll farms. ("All we like sheep..." Russia really really likes people who define THEMSELVES as sheep in need of being led.)

Amazon isn't exactly great either, and Google and Apple recently caved to Putin.

The catholic church used to be fine with abortion. That entire movement is about controlling women.

Bitcoin sucks.

Isaac Asimov was a sex pest.

Biden has not ejected the postmaster general into the sun yet.


September 30, 2021

I really really REALLY look forward to Sarah Taber's book coming out.

Today somebody told me "My husband is a developer and he always says that he doesn't like to work with someone else's code, he prefers to write his own", and I gave my Usual Spiel On The Subject, which is that writing code is always easier than reading code because when you write code, what's on the screen trails your mental model of how it should work. When you read code, you're going through a choose-your-own-adventure novel trying to piece together the possibilities into a coherent plot.

The reply was "I just keap hearing my husband trying to make it 'short, concise and pretty'". This is generally called "elegance" and it's a fine goal. The guy who wrote the little prince (Antoine de st Expury) said "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". (Except he said it in French.)

That said, we generally have to 80/20 the bastard and then ship. There's another old saying, "the first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time." Except it's really just that 80/20 is recursive: it takes the same amount of effort to go from 0% to 80% as it does to go from 80% to 96%. At which point most people call it done because going from 2x effort to 3x effort to cover another 3% of your use cases is seldom worth it.

There's a bunch of morals from this, the big two being 1) a mature developer will suck it up and NOT unnecessarily change/rewrite existing code, and 2) recognize diminishing returns and that what you ship WILL be imperfect.

You can tell toybox is a hobby project because I indulge polishing things Xeno's paradox style. (Which still isn't PERFECT, but I try to do at least that third 80/20 polishing cycle. Often up front in the design phase, or while letting the dough rest in pending.) I TOTALLY should have called this project dorodango.


September 29, 2021

I miss the days of owning software. Here's somebody twitter inexplicably stopped working for, the way patreon stopped working for me. (And yes, patreon is still broken. The page displays fine until the javascript finishes loading, and then the javascript "I don't recognize your browser ident string!" error path blanks it to an empty white page. I am not using an Authorized Browser and OS combo, and therefore may not access Patreon. I should fire up a VM with RHell or something in it, but this is a Patreon self-own.)

Last week I emailed the Elliott's new boss, who is here in Chicago and had suggested meeting for lunch when I'd "settled in", to let him know that I fly out again October 2nd so this is as settled as I'm likely to get. He said he can drive by for lunch next Thursday, I.E. tomorrow at this point.

I, alas, could not suggest anywhere better than Culver's, because I haven't _been_ anywhere else except the McDonalds across the street and the Starbucks across from the grocery store a mile away. And I really don't trust Google Maps, which thinks that "Bryan's American Grille" down the street is an irish pub, a proposition totally unsupported by its name or website. But then Google Maps is also UTTERLY CONVINCED that the Fresh Thyme Market Support Office next door to work is a grocery store open to the public, when it is in fact an office building. (There are three year old reviews attempting to correct them, but Google has a common problem of there being no way to contact a human when its data is wrong, short of years of persistence involving giving literal ted talks about an issue.)

Yes, I'm aware of the irony of the juxtaposition of grumbling about being unable to contact Google while arranging to meet a fairly senior Google guy, but that's not his department.

Shortly after I wrote that, he emailed to apologize that he's buried in meetings tomorrow and can't make it. I'm not sure if this is more or less ironic than the previous situation. I think the irony just moved sideways.


September 28, 2021

Fade slipped on a wet floor and put her hand through glass, which required a trip to the hospital. I'm so glad she didn't have to STAY in a hospital, doing so is really not a good idea right now. The healthcare system is quietly imploding

Bash's SECONDS+=5 behavior is not doing what I thought it was doing:

$ SECONDS=0; sleep 10; SECONDS+=5; echo $SECONDS 5

You know how magic variables get cached when evaluated, and this is most easily visible with exported variables? Here's another place implementation details are leaking out.

I'm not doing that. Imma fetch the darn variable, do the math, and set it through the "set as a constant" path, and if that makes me incompatible with bash OK THEN.

Meanwhile, assignments to LINENO are ignored, whether it's = or +=, AND YET:

$ LINENO+=a@5 bash: a@5: syntax error: invalid arithmetic operator (error token is "@5")

So bash knows it's an integer variable, does the math, and then discards the result. Great.


September 27, 2021

So I added basic calculation support to toysh, and need to fill in another dozen or so operators (with appropriate priorities), and have been TRYING to circle back to that for a week but I keep hitting (and being emailed) other todo items that need doing first. And when I CAN get back to toysh specifically, I'm still trying to finish up += (which I noticed while reading the man page to find where the C operator stack and the bash operator stack differ).

I'm finally circling back around to += applying to variables with the integer attribute (which is calculation support, but in theory just using the part I've already implemented). I think I understand what += does when applied to $SECONDS:

$ echo $SECONDS
3
$ SECONDS+=30
$ echo $SECONDS
35

But haven't got a ClUE what it's doing to $RANDOM:

$ RANDOM=42; echo $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM
17766 11151 23481
$ RANDOM=42; echo $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM
17766 11151 23481
$ RANDOM=42; RANDOM+=7; echo $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM
6720 27601 2835
$ RANDOM=42; RANDOM+=7; echo $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM
22518 22767 26989

In theory assigning a value to RANDOM resets the PRNG to a repeatable state, but incrementing it right after assigning to it produces different results each time? Maybe it's initializing it from the time clock? Which would mean bash SPECIAL CASED += for the magic variable $RANDOM....

(Of course you KINDA have to do that anyway for the magics, because "SECONDS+=5" is actually TT.seconds -= 5000 although I doubt bash is using milliseconds. Hmmm...)


September 26, 2021

Elliott is adding code to bounds check values we're reading directly from the kernel (via /proc), which... eh, if it makes him more confortable?

One advantage of toybox is since I'm writing most of the code and closely reviewing _all_ of the code, I can avoid defensive programming. For example, I'm fiddling with some code that takes an "int local" argument and does "flags = VAR_NOFREE|(VAR_GLOBAL*local);" Which resolves to VAR_NOFREE when local is 0, and VAR_NOFREE|VAR_GLOBAL when local is 1 (without a branch prediction delay and pipeline bubble, not that it hugely matters). If I was programming defensively I'd do VAR_GLOBAL*!!local to force local to be 0 or 1, but since I'm making all the CALLS to this function, I can know that none of the callers will do that. Passing in anything other than that is pilot error, a bug in toybox that's contained entirely within toybox and I should have caught it. (And which hopefully shows up in the regression test suite.)

Test a value that I _sent_ makes the code bigger for no benefit. (Yes in this case we could also use the c99 bool type, but that's not actually a real type. The processor is doing "int" anyway under the covers because masking and shifting anything else is too expensive. C99 guarantees that all the comparison functions return an int with 1 or 0, which is also what the hardware expects.)

I generally also trust what we read directly from the kernel, because if an attacker can mess with that that we've already lost. Linus has explicit policies about backwards compatibility and binary compatibility and stable ABIs between the kernel and userspace. Washed through glibc, the gnu/dammit loons can break anything and everything, but read(2) from /proc doesn't give libc room to screw up.

Half the plumbing in C++ is about "private" and "friend" and such, and creating accessor functions for something you could just read and assign directly, because the fundamental assumption of C++ is that anybody programming in it is a dangerous idiot who needs constraints and checks and a thick layer of foam padding over everything. (And in support of that position is the fact those programmers chose to use C++ when they could have just used C.)

C meanwhile is very much a "less is more" environment that benefits from MINIMIZING abstraction. Ever since I discovered LP64 I've developed a tropism for the basic types when programming in C. I dislike ssize_t and friends because it's just hiding what the code is actually doing: the POINT of C is writing programs that directly tell the hardware what to do. If you want abstraction, there are languages that provide fully opaque ones; this isn't it. Yes I know that ssize_t exists because the __USE_FILE_OFFSET64 transition (supporting files >2 gigabytes on 32 bit systems) was long and painful, but it's also been over for about 15 years. EVERYTHING supports 64 bit file offsets meaning the type is "long long". (Neither musl nor bionic actually reads that macro; they hardwire in the 64 bit types always.)

The platonic ideal of defensive programming is the assert() macro. The majority of the time I've ever seen asserts trigger in the field, the proper fix was just to remove the assert. (It's like comments falling out of sync with the code, only this ships and breaks stuff at runtime.)

Of course the downside of NOT programming defensively is I'm leaving rakes around for zombies to step on. If somebody forks toybox and modifies it without understanding it, they'll break it and ship bugs. But no amount of defensive programming will prevent that from happening in C.

C programming is like cooking with knives and fire, yes you very much can hurt yourself, and/or poison your customers. The culinary world has food safety rules and training for good reason, and C programming needs similar scrutiny going into widepread deployment in anything processing data from the internet. But every attempt to take knives and fire out of cooking has historically resulted in an inferior product. (Which doesn't mean can openers and microwaves don't have their place; there are things they're quite good at. But there isn't a widepread movement to declare sharp edges and open flame obsolete. Knife users never had to deal with pushy swiss-army-knife salesmen insisting that if you use a steak knife instead of a 37-blade instrument with three types of screwdriver and a corkscrew attachment you're behind the times. How do you get mayonaise out of the hinges after spreading it with a swiss army knife? Well obviously it's your fault for using it like that, you should have focused less on the task you're performing and instead studied the intricacies of the tool you're using so you can understand how NOT to have a folding blade close on your finger, which is entirely your fault if it happens to you and not the knife's fault in any way. Yes, friend of mine needed stitches once because of that.)

That said, it's impolite to leave a hidden knife lying in a pile of papers. You just have to figure out what good practice is for you. I wound up adding a !! to the above example anyway, then redoing the code entirely so it didn't need either. Still, I had the OPTION of leaving it, and I what I did NOT do is add an if (condition I don't know how to handle) make_things_worse(); test AND untested error handling path for something that should never happen. A problem I see a lot out in the field. The correct answer to a sharp edge is usually to make the code SMALLER.


September 25, 2021

Weekend again! I can get real work done!

Those bash test regressions I noticed last weekend seem to have two causes: 1) the SHLVL thing, 2) ${!X} now errors if X isn't set (but "X=ABC; echo ${!X}" is still just fine showing nothing when ABC isn't set, so WHY IS THIS AN ERROR!??!?!? But it is now. Syntax error that prevents the rest of the line from being evaluated. A _data_dependent_ syntax error. Define "syntax", Chet. Ahem). Back when I went down this path I was thinking "toysh should be compatible with bash 2.05b circa y2k, that's more or less the bash everybody cares about..." I am not happy about bash being a MOVING TARGET.

Implemented the basic "x+=$POTATO" logic last night, but the man page says it also happens for assigning commands like export and declare. So possibly the infrastructure I added should be moved or pulled out into a function called from multiple places?

It can't go in setvar_found() because variable expansion needs to happen for the new data (but not the old data), and I'm trying to keep function prototypes to a minimum. The variable expansion logic calls setvar, so that has to go before the variable expansion logic, so it can't _call_ the variable expansion logic without a prototype. (Basically I want this source code to be tree structued without cycles where possible. I find it harder to reason about things like stack usage otherwise.)

HA! Roxette's Look Sharp just came on at Culvers. I learned C to this album. Programming bonus!

Dear bash:

$ export -n abc+=def
$ echo $abc
def

Supporting += syntax on UNEXPORT is probably cheating. (But then you already supported assignment there, so... Gotta add a test.)


September 24, 2021

My brain has some idiosyncrasies. I can't read "5.15-rc2" without going "doo-dah, doo-dah". (Works for both "dot" and "point", or for "one five" and "fifteen", but not if you pronounce the dash.)

Reading the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 3.0. It's kind of sad. It requires /opt and /srv (empty on debian). I have no idea why /run wasn't just /tmp/run (I blame systemd). It specifies csh but not bash, ed but not vi, has a "fasthalt" command...

Wait, where did man 2 ioctl_list go? It's not on the web page anymore... because it was deleted out of git. SIGH. If I still had upload access to kernel.org/doc I'd try to scrape together a current version there. Let's see...

$ egrep --include '*.[ch]' -r '[^A-Z]_IO(|C|W|R|WR)[(]' * | grep -v 'drivers/staging' | wc -l
3996

4000 entries, not intractable. Only 3286 if I exclude the arch directory. Ideally this is the sort of thing that "doxygen" nonsense in the kernel would get used for, but no...

Ok, list poked. Todo item onna heap. Moving on...


September 23, 2021

Apparently calling it a fine is more paltatable than calling it a tax.

There are reasons I spend cash instead of credit/debit cards wherever possible.

I'm annoyed at capitalism again: J&J and Astrazenica vaccines have both been sidelined in favor of funneling money to for-profit corporations using the pandmeic to flesh out their MRNA manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, which is a thing they wanted to do long before the pandemic. It's PR nonsense and outright sabotage because the pharma bro drug companies have spent money on regulartory capture, and Boomers can Be Bought.

I'm especially annoyed that J&J is being sabotaged, the only one dose vaccine's effectiveness actually increases over time.


September 22, 2021

Yay, I got permission to telecommute from the start of October. Flying to Minneapolis first, and probably back to Austin from there. (I mean I _could_ telecommute from Japan...)

The guy who put the linux-fullhist tree up on kernel.org also pushed it to github with instructions on how to get the grafts working:

$ git clone https://github.com/mpe/linux-fullhistory.git
$ cd linux-fullhistory
$ git fetch origin 'refs/replace/*:refs/replace/*'

Tried to get vlc to work according to my old instructions but it wanted to record the desktop audio (what was playing) and not the microphone audio. Didn't know what to replace alsa:// with, so I installed kazam! which recorded a file that vlc couldn't play, and online instructions to convert it with ffmpeg hit some missing plugin issue (didn't recognize the format).

So I installed simplescreenrecorder which works GREAT. Video and audio, no problem, and the microphone built into Logitech H390 headphones is quite good. It only knows how to record the whole screen, not a window (like kazam claimed to), but youtube can scale the video.

I can actually change my laptop's screen resolution to the 1280x720 recommended by youtube -- it's one of the HDTV resolutions -- but then all the text looks slightly fuzzy to me, and if it's going to look slightly fuzzy ANYWAY there's less downside ot having youtube scale it after the fact.

So now I need to figure out what to talk ABOUT, and I'm having the standard problem of "first I need to explain THIS, but to understand that you need the backstory..." where I wind up starting with "The word 'electronics' came out of World War II"... and explaining the Harvard Mark I and Grace Hopper inventing the compiler.

I was thinking "start with the toybox 'true' command" but that one doesn't have a GLOBALS() block, and doesn't actually need to #include toys.h... There's rather a lot of infrastructure needing to be explained, and "true" isn't necessarily the best context to explain it in because it doesn't EXERCISE half of it. Hmmm... This is why I made the hello and skeleton programs in toys/example, I suppose plumbing backstory logically attaches to them...


September 21, 2021

Missing White Woman du jour has been found dead, manhunt on for her boyfriend who's been preemptively hiding for days. Sadly unsurprising. The hour-long police bodycam video of her and her boyfriend from the traffic stop a week ago nearly resulted in the police charging _her_, while chumming around with the boyfriend. Also sadly unsurprising. The police didn't find her van (and thus her corpse), youtubers in the vanlife community did. Also unsurprising. The police were (as usual) 100% useless.

The lawyer behind the GOP's texas abortion law is trying to recriminalize gay sex. Wikipedia is sexist. Guillotine the billionaires. Abolish ICE.. Bitcoin's e-waste problem is averaging "two iphones per transaction". Coinbase has a contract with ICE to track crypto payments to noncitizens. The classic children's book The Little Prince has a lovely explanation of NFTs.


September 20, 2021

Sat down to poke at expanding recalculate() to do all the OTHER math bash does, especially $((x++)) and $((y*=z+4)), which also includes $(($x+3)) so it has to evaluate variables first, and yes it can expand to operators which are the evaluated:

$ Y=++
$ echo $((X$Y))
0
$ echo $X
1

Which the other code path can't do:

$ x=1; y=+; z=2; echo $((x y z))
bash: +: syntax error: operand expected (error token is "+")

And of course remember:

$ x=x; echo $((x))
bash: x: expression recursion level exceeded (error token is "x")

But while reading the man page to find the list of operators I stumbled upon the += operator for variable assignment!

X=2; X+=1; echo $X
21

Which turns out to be slightly fiddly to implement because the logic in run_command() (circa line 2400 or so) is expanding the entire assignment line (because the variable name can't have any escapes in it, and this conveniently gets us a new allocation to drop into the variable table). So I need to measure the variable name in the _resolved_ string (again) and skip the += when gluing it on to the previous string...


September 19, 2021

The Great Resignation is happening for good reason.

Boomers suck so hard the older Boomers screwed over even the younger boomers, to the point some sociologists are dividing it into the Boomers and the Joneses (as in "keeping up with the joneses"). The old midpoint of the baby boom (and dividing line between Boomers and Joneses) is 1955, and 2021-65 = 1956, meaning all the non-Jones Boomers are now 66 years old, which is the full social security retirement age.

I'm wondering how the pandemic is doing purging Boomers from the workforce. Unvaccinated people are dying in bulk and this is destabilizing the hospital system and reducing the availability of elder care (and that's on TOP of the previous health care death spiral in red states that refused the medicare expansion and thus turned down money they were previously getting that had been redirected through this new channel), but there's a lot of second and third derivative "the rate of the rate of change is changing" stuff going on...

Putin's election cheating is painfully obvious, but nobody's got the leverage to stop him until he dies of old age and the fossil fuel money runs out.

Oh hey, the NYT has noticed china's rampant financial corruption. They don't seem to have noticed that it was policy all along, for years, rather than a sudden new development.

Boomer Biden is trying to meet the racists halfway.


September 18, 2021

Six years ago Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity Payments, cut his million dollar salary to pay all his employees a minimum of $70k/year. Since then his company's revenue has tripled, he's opened a second campus, his people bought houses and have had 60 babies, he's personally a lot happier, and his employees banded together to help the company survive the pandemic. Once again, capitalism is wrong about everything.

The Hulu android app had a giant regression where it no longer remembers where you are within a program. If you're watching something that's interrupted by a VOIP call or something, when you return to hulu it will restart the program from the beginning. You have to advance it manually, guessing where you left off. It USED to remember this stuff, but it "upgraded" itself and lost the ability.

I miss the days when we owned software and it behaved consistently. I've told android not to update anything automatically and let me to brace myself for regressions, but the real problem is when something like this DOES happen, I can't get the old version BACK. The new bug is now the new normal, and you're stuck with it.

Weekend! I can poke at toybox again. I'm trying hard to open up android, but still have to fit that work into the crevices of my schedule.

The downside of doing double math in toysh is bash denotes math via the "integer" attribute, and current bash says "1" for $((3/2)), not 1.5. Compatibility says to be limited, which is sad. Oh well.

Hmmm, but the way I redid the plumbing it's returning NAN to indicate math error, and long long hasn't got an in-band signalling illegal value. Alright, go back to the return value saying success or failure and the argument being a pointer that gets modified. (Sigh.)

Ok, checked in first pass at the code, which doesn't handle variable assignments or half the operators yet. I MIGHTILY RESISTED having the checkin comment be "Do. do_math(). do_math nicht." (Well it's such a bouncy song.)

Hmmm... screwed up the error handling? $((1+2-)) should say it failed... ok, fixed. Running the tests I have an $(($X+1)) which is failing because I need to expand the variables in the contents of the $(( )) before parsing them. Which is slightly awkward because I want to call expand_one_arg() which calls expand_arg() which means it's _after_ expand_arg() to avoid prototyping, and it's the bog standard recursive call problem requiring gratuitous prototypes. Sigh.

GRRRRR. Upgrading from Devuan Albatross to Devuan Barnacle changed bash's behavior, so the default exports test is saying "SHLVL=0" when it used to say "SHLVL=1". I'm not sure HOW because I'm not reproducing that from the command line? But sh.test is behaving consistently; a regression in TEST_HOST because bash's behavior changed Moving target! No standard!


September 17, 2021

The Postmaster General Biden still hasn't replaced just added an extra fee for shipping anything near christmas.

The Boomer-packed supreme court delenda est. Boomercrats are protecting pharma bro. Defund the police.

Ok, guys, the "Republicans for Voldemort" t-shirt was a JOKE. Voldemort stans coming out of the closet is not funny.

A reminder that scammers intentionally give pathetic unbelievable pitches because they're filtering to find credulous marks. The republicans have spent decades filtering for credulous marks.

Upper class white people have ALWAYS been terrible. Sigmund Freud's original theory was that hysteria was caused by childhood sexual abuse, which meant he'd uncovered rampant childhood sex abuse among the rich white families of vienna and had to change his theory ("No, wait, they were all making it up!") to avoid the rich pedophiles coming after him.

Oh, and the whole "angry old testament god" thing vs the kind loving new testament one? It's just antisemitism motivating VERY selective readings.


September 16, 2021

Ford is expanding its production capacity to deal with the massive demand for its new electric F-150 truck, and even at the NEW rate its preorders already account for the first _three_years_ of production. The switch over to electric cars is basically happening as fast as the new production lines can ramp up (and make/buy the batteries).

But electric cars, and even self-driving cars, are a halfway solution at best. What's really needed are walkable cities that don't NEED cars to get around. Tokyo is walkable, most european cities are walkable, even New York City is walkable: the standard way to get around town is to walk to a subway, get off near your destination, and walk the rest of the way. They can do this because they all avoided the uniquely american push to redesign cities for cars at the expense of humans which started in 1923 because Standard Oil and General Motors wanted to make more money.

This is another problem that didn't exist before the Boomers because back then cars were not the center of american life. America had a railroad network long before Judge Doom paved over toontown or president Eisenhower funded the interstate highway system as part of the cold war. Back then there weren't municipally mandated parking minimums requiring every dwelling and office to bolt on tens of thousands of dollars more land which can't NOT be used as a parking space. A quarter of most urban real estate's cost is the attached parking, and both the density and affordability of cities like Austin is greatly reduced by it. And with lower density it's farther to get from place to place in a vicioius cycle: you need a car to get past all the parking spaces to the next actual human.

Suburban zoning is even worse: "single family residential" means you can't go anywhere without a car because there's nothing within walking distance but more houses: no stores, jobs, restaurants, schools, dentists, libraries... All that stuff is "mixed use" which makes it harder to exclude brown people. So in the name of racism, the USA built houses that are useless without cars, passed laws against once-ubiquitous front yard businesses, bulldozed entire neighborhoods and isolated what was left... most of this back in the days of leaded gas so people living nearby got poisoned by every car that passed by. The result is the modern suburban rows of garage with a house attached that say "a car lives here", and maybe somebody to drive that car but they're secondary.

Humans should not be an afterthought in cities humans created to live in. A lovely recent observation is that a big reason people remember the "college experience" so fondly is because it's the only time they've lived somewhere walkable.


September 15, 2021

Email from O'Reilley about their "Walter 'Radar' O'Reilley memorial conference" for fans of the old TV series M*A*S*H: someone from Microsoft will be one of their keynote speakers. Proof positive that I am not the target audience for this conference. (That's a hard pass, even virtual.)

Hands up anyone surprised that The Cloud is insecure.

The GOP has now officially become the party where Dan Quayle is the voice of reason (no really), and their strategy for riding down the demographic shift as they become an ever-smaller minority is to convince their base it's all voter fraud. That way they can cleanly transition from gerrymandered voter suppression (like the south) to an insurrectionist terrorist organization (ala the KKK).

Boomers continue to Boom. Boomer lead poisoning, Boomer selfishness, Boomer racism, Boomer sexism, Boomer capitalism, Boomers projecting, Boomers being systematically abusive...

Disabled people are buying fake wedding rings so doctors won't kill them quite as fast.

California proposes to stop oil companies from lying about what is and isn't recyclable.

New York City is trying to homeless-proof steam grates. Because "not freezing to death" is not a thing they allow anymore, and that waste airflow being vented out into the open is PRIVATE PROPERTY.

Defund the police.


September 14, 2021

Haven't been getting a lot of programming done (new $DAYJOB), so I walked to Starbucks this evening straight from work to try to get a couple focused hours in.

I've been adapting some juvenalia: code I wrote in 1998 (I'm old), in Java, which handles complex $((math)) strings. Doing floating point math, with support for trig functions and fractional exponentiation and all sorts of stuff. There's also function display code that takes a string and turns it into nested x over y with square roots and the exponents superscripted and so on. I never QUITE got the graphical equation _editor_ using the same code fully debugged (it works but there are corner cases)... *shrug* A previous life, back when I wrote my own AWT 1.1 GUI toolkit from scratch and was trying to squeeze extra frames per second out of animated displays on a 486 DX/33.

I vaguely recalled my old code using something like the shunting yard algorithm, doing the two-stack thing, and I dug up a precedence cheatsheet for C and everything... but the problem is, the way the algorithm's described you need one pass to determine precedence and a second pass to implement it, which means you have an array of operator+precedence for the first pass, then the second pass has to identify the operator AGAIN and figure out what to do with it. And the obvious way to have that information ALSO in the table is to have each operation be its own tiny function and use function pointers. The expr.c in pending uses a glue enum so the table entry can feed something other than "position in array" into a case statement, which means the data lives in THREE places (converted to an intermediate representation and back out again).

I knew my old code didn't do ANY of that, but I didn't remember HOW I'd made it work. So I dug through my old archives (bit of a digital pack rat) and took a look.

Younger me was very clever: It's a series of nested functions with case statements, checking the highest priority operations first and using the function call stack to store the operators and corresponding operands. This neatly avoids correlating the two passes, because it's just one (recursive) pass.

My younger self was also not very good at coding. READING my old code is PAINFUL. It's redundant, largely uncommented, the variable names are uninformative... (This is before I learned that wandering away from a project for a couple years meant I would forget the details. Back then it took me 5 years to forget what I can now forget in 18 months, but that's aging for you. For example, I just tried to look something up on Google, argued with my phone hotspot for 3 minutes getting it to connect -- I changed the password earlier and had to change it back-- and then once I had the window up couldn't remember what I was trying to look up. I was doing it on the laptop rather than the phone for a reason, probably wanted to cut and paste something? Oh well...)

SOME of the redundancy in the old code can be laid at the feet of Java. But it's been so long since I've authored anything nontrivial in Java I can't remember how _much_ is Java's fault and how much was me just being a lot greener at this.


September 13, 2021

The GOP is a theocratic christian cult. I'm seriously hoping this is an extinction burst as the Boomers die. (Yeah yeah, not all Boomers. But an awful lot of boomers.) Defunding the police is already happpening in some places. Guillotining the billionaires we're still waiting on.

China is getting too toxic to bother with. Lots of the people are nice, but their government is insane.


September 12, 2021

Good news out of France.

No, Samsung is not building a fab "Near Tesla", Samsung was here in Austin long before Tesla was, and they announced the expansion before Tesla decided to go build next to Dell in Round Rock and take advantage of the same giant tax giveaways Round Rock did all those years ago to lure Dell right outside the city limits.

Huh, so THAT'S why Marvel and DC did so many cartoon-based comic books in the 1980s. (Footnote 1.)

Sarah Taber published a chunk of her upcoming book as an EXCELLENT article about how modern "US agribusiness" got started shipping corn to the Jim Crow south when the plantation owners intentionally planted (market-flooding and thus money-losing) cotton everywhere to crowd out local food and force sharecroppers to buy food from their "company stores" at exorbitant prices or starve (which was the real profit center: the sharecroppers all had to work side hustles to afford food), and how this killed hundreds of thousands of people with malnutrition (pellagra, think niacin-based scurvy) and dominates US politics today. I highly look forward to the full book. (The line from this article that should be the book's title: "Hunger is good business".)

When I run "make test_sh" in toybox, the first failure is lack of $((math)) logic, so I have dug up the Java expression evaluator I wrote back in 1998 and I'm trying to puzzle out how it works. Young me did not compulsively document the way I do now.

The code takes a string and converts it into a double, which I was halfway planning on doing for toysh anyway. How much error handling do I need...

$ echo $((1/0))
bash: 1/0: division by 0 (error token is "0")

A bit.


September 11, 2021

It's the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks and The Dorito is saying that Osama Bin Laden "wasn't that bad".

The 9/11 attack killed 2,996 people, which the GOP used as a transparent excuse to transform society, greatly expanding the for-profit military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address, and giving young americans a lower standard of living than their parents for the first time in the history of the country (something Hunter S. Thompson immediately spotted and called out).

Meanwhile Covid killed more people just today than died on 9/11, and has already killed 659,000 people in the USA so far, so of course GOP loons are anti-mask and anti-vax. They stand for literally nothing but increasing their own power. GOP delenda est.

The GOP isn't just defeating democracy with gerrymandering and voter suppression (and bots and outright coup attempts), it's doing things like appointing unelected city managers to take power away from elected officials. (And on its way down the drain, the GOP is trying to destroy the supreme court.)

What can I say about defunding the police that hasn't already been said? Seriously, this man was taken alive, but unarmed twelve year olds get mowed down if they're black. End private prisons too. And in the meantime mock them relentlessly.

Boomer Biden's attempt at "fair and balanced" nominations tried to put a racist in charge of the ATF. His DOJ nominee still hasn't prosecuted trump for literally anything, and is slow-walking the January 6 insurrection investigations. The trump-appointed postmaster general is still actively trying to destroy the post office today. Boomercrats are not the answer.

Terrorism is a thing now mostly done primarily by white men. Entitled white people are the problem.

Libertarian coinbros continue to Dunning-Kruger on all cylinders. Bitcoin is not real: it's a tiny sideshow that doesn't scale to handle any serious load. Bartering beanie babies would literally SCALE BETTER than bitcoin does. And half the money pumped into bitcoin these days is via the tether scam, which ain't gonna end well.

Speaking of giant scams, one of the GOP's biggest supporters, Faceboot, is completely fraudlent.


September 10, 2021

SPDX v2.2.1 has just become ISO/IEC 5962:2021, with 0BSD in it. I really need to finish updating the 0BSD license page in toybox...

A big question I wouldn't have predicted asking five years ago: "Is (any part of) the Three Gorges Dam a tofu dreg project?"

Back before climate change started hitting quite so hard, China started building the south north water transfer project to pump water from southern china, which has lots, to northern china, which doesn't. The result doesn't actually work very well (it's like 1/4 the promised capacity), but that just raises the price of the water it sells. Reservoir opererators along the canals buy water from this project to top up their reservoirs (and have quotas of how much they're EXPECTED to buy to please party officials), so releasing water from their dams (nominally) costs them money. So when floods come in they release water A) at the very last possible minute before the dam's about to spill over anyway, B) all at once rather than gradually, C) preferably unannounced in the middle of the night when nobody can see them do it. This is why so many people downstream from these dams wind up having their houses and tunnels flooded at 3am.

One big source of the water this transfer project sells is the artificial lake behind the three gorges dam, which is the largest dam in the world, freshly built, and the city of Wuhan downstream from it is currently flooding because of the _other_ rivers flowing into it so the three gorges releasing any water right now would be... less than ideal.

Under Chairman Mao, China built a bunch of dams and reservoirs to "defeat nature". (Yeah, same dude behind the four pests campaign that drove so many pollinator species extinct chinese farmers have to pollinate by hand these days.) These days Emperor Xi of the Communist Dynasty is trying hard to be Mao 2.0, so of course he had to build the BIGGEST DAM, and that's three gorges.

The problem is, (well, one of the many easily forseeable problems is that) the chinese construction industry has rampant corruption, leading to what's called tofu dreg projects where the foundation doesn't go below ground level, the concrete powder is cut with dirt (when it's not entirely absent), the drain covers have no drains under them, the exterior is painted styrofoam, and so on. The money that gets paid for materials gets embezzled, and nobody notices for years because most of that construction is for empty "ghost cities" sold as investment properties, and people who try to live in the result are prevented from complaining by the government. (This is neither new nor secret, here's a news story on it from eight years ago.)

Hence the question: did the endemic corruption and materials fraud in the chinese construction industry (same reason the milk is full of melamine and microchips bought from china are mostly counterfeit these days; corruption trickles down from the "regulators", I.E. communist party officials, requiring bribes to do their jobs and arresting anyone who complains) impact the three gorges dam? Because if any part of THAT is made out of tofu... It's not little towns downstream, it's some of china's largest cities.


September 9, 2021

I'm still subscribed to the OSI mailing list (for the next time they screw up 0BSD, just wait), and that guy who wrote the article comparing putting code into the public domain to abandoning trash by the side of the highway back when he was OSI's executive director and general legal cousel (yes really, it's in his bio at the end of that article) is still at it.

So way back when he created some licenses that were widely ignored, and he stalked off in a huff. But there's old stuff that shipped under those licenses, and people asked why OSI didn't list them anymore. Larry went out of his way to be unhelpful, and here's the reply I refrained from sending:

On 9/8/21 2:55 PM, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>>> McCoy is correct. Versions of AFL and OSL **prior to version 3.0** 
>>> are no longer valid. Please remove those earlier versions. /Larry

"This license is no longer valid" sounds like material shipped under those licenses is now retroactively illegal and Amazon should delete them off people's kindles. (I.E. "please remove".)

Is that what you MEANT to say?

Rob

Larry then threw another bucket which managed to be even MORE unhelpful, and I did NOT reply:

> Vicky and others, 
> 
> Those earlier versions of AFL and OSL were approved by the OSI board
> at the time

Which implies they go in superceded, I.E. valid but not recommended for new use. You could very easily have said that, and somehow managed not to.

People are wondering if an old ISO image with existing material on it can continue to be distributed, or do we need to scrub them off of archive sites because the license is now "invalid"? You've gone out of your way to avoid answering this multiple times.

Maybe when he wrote that article implying authors releasing code into the public domain were doing something dangerous (maybe even commiting some sort of prosecutable legal offense, littering has large fines in places, without that warantee disclaimer would the software's author be SUED, could you be sued for just using it?), he was ALSO just being very bad with words? Not really a trait you want to see in a lawyer if you ask me...


September 8, 2021

Fade threw in a box of mac 'n cheese with my Target order of kitchen utensils for the new apartment. Alas, it's the Kraft brand, meaning the box has 30 grams of sugar in it. The US RDA is 25 grams. A "monster energy drink", the big size can, has 27. Kraft hides it, of course, by saying it's "10 grams per serving", with the box containing "3 servings". What they're really hiding is that the private equity firm that bought them and is famous for destroying companies to squeeze as much short-term cash out of them as possible sold their cheese business, so they're padding the product out with (cheap) sugar in place of (expensive) cheese.

The vanilla yocto 3.3 "core-image-minimal" build is 3,106 steps and took multiple hours to build. (Not quite sure HOW many because locking the screen apparently powers down a Windows 11 machine after a brief time, and then of course when I got back in and resumed it there was the 10am scheduled forced restart. Virtualbox saved its state ok both times, but still. Windows continues in the bedrock belief that what windows is doing is FAR more important than what mere users are doing with the computer. Yes, I was offered WSL 2 as my VM option, but went with a non-microsoft option.)

Viewing a repository in Microsoft github with the Microsoft Edgelord browser gives me the PHONE VIEW. As in it doesn't show me source files unless I find and click the tiny "show me the actual files" link, because why would anybody looking at github want to see a project's source code? That's crazy talk. (I think it might be showing phone view on the desktop?)

Today a coworker explained over Microsoft Teams how to log into a Microsoft website to request Microsoft Azure access so I can git clone our locally modified version of a vendor yocto fork. The process was interrupted by a forced/scheduled reboot of the Windows 11 laptop at 10am. Microsoft's bugzilla clone is called "devops". I don't remember what Microsoft's google docs clone is called but we're using that too.

Odd they made a big deal about the NDA when they're literally sending all their data to Microsoft. The source code is on microsoft servers, the design docs are on microsoft servers, the schedules are on microsoft servers, the bug/feature trackers are on microsoft servers, the email is on microsoft servers, the chat is through microsoft servers, the videoconferencing is through microsoft servers, we use microsoft's clone of google docs for live multiperson editing... (Heck, I mentioned a good sale at best buy and my coworker redirected me to microcenter.) I get daily unwanted emails from cortana@microsoft.com telling me about all my meetings for the day and with agendas and links to the relevant documentation and notes stored on microsoft websites. (I have "report as spam block sender"'d each one, and continue to get them because microsoft special cases itself EVERYWHERE.)

It's been 30 years since Bob Metcalfe (inventor of ethernet) compared Microsoft to a black widow spider (as in "eats its mates"). They were convicted in MULTIPLE antitrust trials (in 1995 and 1998). And yet today they've convinced "microsoft shops" to give them all their data, don't worry, we won't misuse it. Give us all your most precious IP and we'll keep it on our servers, you don't even have to retain a copy locally.

Oh well. Not my call. I'm here to implement their plan, not to participate in decision making.


September 7, 2021

I'm to report to work at 12:30 (because my manager has meetings all morning), so I have a little free time.

There is no recycling here. No aluminum, no cardboard, no nothing. Everything goes in the same trash. I've got a bunch of shipping boxes coming and they presumably get landfilled.

A few years back the old white men behind the Oscars added a "best animated feature" category so they didn't have to give Best Picture to one of THOSE movies (back before Pixar got sucked into the Disney black hole, Steve Jobs died, and John Lasseter got #metooed). Are the Oscars going to add a "Best Superhero Movie" to avoid giving Best Picture to Marvel? (Which the Disnopoly also bought, along with star wars, the muppets, 20th century Fox... But Kevin Feige's still there so far, although "endgame" sounded like a hint.) The Oscars lost a LOT of credibility after Black Panther lost to that terrible "Driving Miss Daisy" remake, far few people now care who a bunch of old white men give awards to now. I'm mostly just curious about the path by which the Boomers circle the drain and what they choose to leave behind vs drag into the grave with them.


September 6, 2021

In chicago. (Because this goes for open source programming too.) There is NO public transportation to where I need to go. Google maps implies the airport busses aren't running due to the holiday (giving me routes leaving tomorrow morning). It's $75 to get a taxi or $65 to get a lyft, a large chunk of which appears to be tolls.

Checked into the extended stay hotel. It's got a kitchenette in the room (fridge and two electric burners; I hae no pans or ingredients and the closest grocery store is over a mile away), but there's a Culver's across the parking lot. This is unlikely to bode well for my calorie intake.


September 5, 2021

Getting on a plane tomorrow morning. Bit late to accomplish much in town.

The USA's founding fathers mandated vaccines (against smallpox), and the supreme court allowed vaccine mandates and mocked anti-vax sentiments (which originated from racism) over a century ago. The GOP is (as always) against everything they claim to stand for.

Quote about the texas abortion disaster: "Do you understand how evil something has to be for rideshare companies to become righteous by comparison?"


September 4, 2021

Trying to cut a toybox release before getting on a plane monday, and it's hard. Lots of half-finished stuff, and stuff I didn't check in because I'm not sure about it? (I committed the "cal day month year" upgrade that lets you do 3 arguments so it highlights a day other than today. No other cal does that but nobody seems to have noticed my old one was calculating leap years wrong (it was doing & instead of % in the calculation) so I doubt anybody's gonna complain. (It's a posix command, it should be there and should work. The debian one has a julian calendar mode which I dowanna.)

Sigh, what things were I working on: lib/tty.c has significant changes (because microcom doesn't work), passwd.c has significant changes, xwrap.c has an xxlseek() which was going to be used where...? Several commands in pending have extensive cleanups that haven't been checked in...

Adding "swapon -a" seems obvious, except fstab has option arguments that trigger behavior I haven't implemented, and it turns out to be a can of worms. (Which is where I left off with it...)

I left toysh with something like FIVE DIFFERENT ACTIVE FORKS, and the most important one is "fix nommu" which I apparently last poked at in june. (I broke forking a subshell on nommu, which makes the init script fail.) And the REASON is it really wants to use "declare -p" to set the child variables, and I never implemented that, and I started implementing it but there's some infrastructure that needs to be shared with ${x@Q} and I need to figure out decent CHUNKS to do this stuff in. (There's a lot of pull this thread and unravel the sweater and knit a better one but there's no obvious stopping point in between. I have to do it in smaller granularity because I don't HAVE large chunks of time to devote to it anymore, but it means I come back to code I set down for a long time and start by reverse engineering where I left off rather than immediately coding more; with small enough chunks of time to work in and big enough gaps between them, this becomes swap thrashing.)


September 3, 2021

Yay, FINALLY got the call that the actual final decision makers have approved the NDA I signed for the recruiter is usable as _the_ NDA. (And they're adjusting their NDA's wording so you only have to hand copies of their NDA to "direct competitors" you work for in future.) Time to buy a plane ticket. (Well, ask Fade to buy a plane ticket for me.)

Ok, six months in Chicago. Let's do this.

I just deleted a long digression about selinux from what became this email, and I might as well put it here instead. :)

I do not have have sufficient existing expertise in selinux to feel confident saying things like "If the write() to /proc/self/attr/fscreate is going to fail, then the open() will always have already failed", and unlike sed/bzip/bash/awk I'm not planning on doing a multi-month deep dive to BUILD said expertise, because I still think NSA selinux was a terrible idea and cannot muster sufficient enthusiasm to do it justice.

Selinux tries to secure a system by making it MORE complicated. You don't get reliably "watertight" by plugging every hole in a strainer one at a time by hand. Unix historically hasn't even managed to make sane use of group IDs, and years ago lwn had a lovely diagram explaining how half the capability bits were effectively equivalent to root access. No human being can _administer_ an selinux system with tens of thousands of rules, you just trust that someone else set it up for you (and it was designed by the NSA, who WANTS to break into everybody's systems).

I used OS/2 extended attributes quite a lot back when I was doing OS/2. Linux didn't adopt them for a _reason_: on unix everything is a file, meaning a file descriptor reading from and writing to a simple unstructured array of bytes. That was the big ADVANCE in Unix: you didn't have to declare a "record structure" to talk to a file: the OS wasn't maintaining weird databases, it was letting the application figure out what the data MEANT.

There are three main types of unix file: normal files can expand and truncate, block devices are fixed length, and the rest (pipes, char devices, network sockets...) are nonseekable bytestreams of unknown length. (Occasionally caring about read granularity, but MOSTLY you can ignore that.)

The closest thing to a "database" that the filesystem maintains is the directory tree, tracking which files live where. (Without which it's hard to have files.) And they stuck everything in there: the device nodes live in /dev. (Bill Joy broke this adding network support, bash put it back with /dev/tcp/address/port.) Each directory entry has associated metadata (name, timestamp, ownership, permissions, and type of this file), but it's a fixed-length structure and the file itself only has one array-of-bytes contents. Even a symlink's target is basically just the file contents presented differently: this file contains the name of another file you jump to when you try to read it. (The "permissions" bitfield has two special bits: one says "interpret this file's contents as a directory of where more files live on disk", and one says "this is a symlink".) Unix was as simple as Ken and Dennis and Doug could make it.

But extended attributes (or access control lists, or "resource fork", or whatever you want to call it) adds a SECOND set of contents to the same file, which the operating system tries to interpret as a database! Fundamentally violating the CORE TENTET OF UNIX: everything is a file and file contents are JUST A SEQUENCE OF BYTES. (Sigh, I remember that either the first version of Macos or the Apple Lisa invented the "resource fork" to track where icons moved when you dragged them around in the GUI on a floppy disk. No really, that's where the concept originated, it was never meant to be load bearing, it was explicitly for information that wouldn't matter if it was dropped when the file got copied. Alas I can't find the page I read in my history mirror. I mean, you could trust Wikipedia's opinion saying Bruce Horn did it, but you know how they're always going [citation needed]? NOT ONE CITATION IN THAT ENTIRE SECTION. Sigh. And yes, the toybox page on wikipedia is still borked.)

I like containers because that just makes Linux nest. The Unix design attached access control to users (which is why Android made every app install/run as a unique user). Containers add a new context to groups of running processes, which you can collectively attach all sorts of stuff (IP addresses, mount tree, system clock...) to, so a chroot can act a lot more like a VM. Containers turn a lot of single instances inside the kernel into lists/arrays, but that's not new. Unix started life as a multi-user system back when DOS/OS2/Windows were single user. Linux went SMP and added multi-monitor X11 displays decades ago. We've done this sort of change a LOT over the years, it's old hat. Linux added a hotplug layer and process-local mount points years before it had "containers", containers build on a lot of work that's already been done and help organize infrastructure we've already got. (Meanwhile, despite repeated attempts to create "stackable linux security modules", selinux strongly assumes it's the only security policy module. Because it's terrible code.)

I'm aware that AOSP made a legacy decision to extensively use selinux before containers were available. (Android's public debut was around 2007 and I worked a contract for Parallels helping port/rewrite container infrastructure from OpenVZ into vanilla Linux in 2010, that's a 3 year gap in the wrong direction and more like 7-10 to be useful to both projects.) Now they're stuck with it and I'm going along with the group, but I can't get out and push when there's _any_ element of steering involved, because my technical judgement says "this is a bad idea which cannot be fixed". As with perl in the kernel build: I can come up to speed enough to help wean you OFF of it, but beyond that I'm just doing the minimum necessary to cope.


September 2, 2021

Talked to Jeff about strategy for making the new j-core ASIC he got funding to work on. It's exciting. I'd LIKE to be able to do that, but the pay hasn't improved and we spent several months spending savings he can't afford to backfill. If I sold the house so I wasn't paying $3k/month on it even when I'm not living there (not counting the random repair bills homeownership inevitably entails), the amount of money he can afford to pay would be plenty. (I made my dramatic open source plans while living at the condo, which with mortgage and condo association handling all repairs cost me a grand total of $660/month. Moved here in 2012, bit of a scramble to pay for it ever since.)

This isn't the time of year to sell anything though. Austin's real estate market is intensely seasonal, especially this close to UT. Spring break anything that's on sale goes FAST, and then sales slow down again as it gets too close to the start of the school year for people to close and move in before classes start. In theory the Chicago job runs through the end of February, that would be the time to pack and list the place. Assuming Arizona-style boycotts don't tank Austin's economy before then...


September 1, 2021

Today's text from the recruiter starts "manager said he hasn't heard from HR yet but he assures us..." and goes on for two paragraphs of assurances from someone who isn't the decision maker. So that's nice.

I did not walk to the table this morning because the gun laws changed, eliminating both gun licenses and gun permits in the state of Texas. This is approximately equivalent to eliminating driver's licenses and car registration/inspection, except cars have a function they can perform _other_ than hurting people. I know it'll take a while for those who want to "exercise" their new right to masturbate in public to procure the appropriate equiment and then really really want to demonstrate their newfound authority to make a mess, but I don't want to get this situation on me. Luckily I fly out of state monday anyway (to chicago or to Jeff's project, either way) giving this a few months to sort itself out. But to be honest I'm not entirely sure how much longer I want to stay in Texas? This is the Gish Gallop: the dozen horrific things Texas just imposed mean we're not talking about the GOP's faceplanting on the anti-mask mandates and the January 6 commission, now we're talking about the NEW problems they've caused. We can't scold them for crapping on the rug because they set fire to the curtains and we're too busy fighting the new fire while they laugh like The Joker and run to the kitchen for knives.

The Texas GOP is racist and sexist and christian. Their abortion bans go against the teachings of both judaism and islam: the evangelicals are going it alone here. They remain in power entirely via voter suppression (and adjacent tactics like court packing), which has been true of the entire south since civil war loser Nathan Bedford Forest founded the KKK. The dregs of the confederacy used to pump racism into the Democrats until LBJ signed the civil rights act and the parties switched polarity on racism, but it's the same ex-plantation-owner rich inbred failsons doing it.

Twitter remains bad at being twitter, but Instagram (owned by facebook) is somehow worse.

Once the Boomercrats die of old age: we need new federal laws to guillotine the billionaires, tax the churches, and end late stage capitalism. Plutocracy has run its course, it can stop now.

Current data suggests that 15% of children who get Covid wind up with long covid, suffering permanent organ damage such as kidney problems and diabetes. So of course we're reopening the schools before vaccinating the kids, because Capitalism doesn't mind people dying as long as employees have government funded day care to go back to making their owners richer.

At least the vaccines seem to be doing their job.

If you don't believe the police should be defunded, just read this one article about an incident with the Minneapolis PD.

The main reason hurricane Ida did less damage than Katrina is because we currently have a functioning government. Nobody did a "heckuva job", they did a competent job.


August 31, 2021

Phone call from recruiter saying he's "99% sure" that the employer will accept the NDA I've already signed. It would be nice if I could destress enough to sleep more than 4 hours. (Remember that part about providing closure? This isn't closure. I would like to be able to make plans again, thanks.)

The same topics keep coming back up. There should be a "things everybody should know" collection somewhere.

Hang on, Russia is about to evict all non-russians from the international space station, and Russia is saying the ISS is about to become irreprably damaged, and people are NOT considering these two things to be connected?

The pixel 3a screen resolution is 2220x1080. But youtube's maximum resolution is 1920x1080 (and then divides down to 1280x720, 854x480, and 640x360). I want the phone to capture the screen so the audio stays synced, but the resolution _ratio_ is wrong. (I can trim it, but it's an extra processing step, and an extra setup step to size the window right before recording every video.) And it's going to capture at the max resolution when I'm recording an 80x25 terminal that would probably be quite happy at... hmmm, 640x480 was the standard resolution back in the day (before we all went widescreen). 640x360 works out to... 8 pixels by 14. Probably fine? Hmmm...

I should probably get another USB microphone for my laptop. Amazon inexplicably hasn't got any of the cheap low-end ones I'm looking for (the first page is all $50 items), and googling outside of it brings up two very nice options at... walmart. (Grr, no ethical consumption under capitalism. And it's not like amazon's any LESS evil, they're just not as focused about it.)

Sigh, I am sadly inconsistent about "x == y" vs "x==y" spacing. I used to do the first and I've gradually migrated to the second to more visibly distinguish it from "x = y" to highlight assignment. It's a bit like the "if (x)" vs "func(x)" thing I picked up from Eric Anderson (ok, he badgered me about consistent busybox coding style back in the day, but I kept it up after I left). I don't want to do a gratuitous churn cleanup pass over the codebase, but I'm annoyed when I find instances of inconsistency IN THE SAME LINE. (There's one in tar. To quote the second doctor, "It's my fault, and I'm sorry.")


August 30, 2021

Last week I signed all the paperwork for the chicago job, which included an NDA and arbitration agreement. I have signed one of each for this job. We did that part already.

But today the recruiter sent me _another_ NDA three times as long as the one from last week, full of fresh unpleasant provisions the one I already signed for him didn't have. (Plus another much longer arbitration agreement.) I'm feeling somewhat bait-and-switched by this. Yes, he knows I turned down a job paying $10/hr more because of its NDA. Yes he waited a week to spring this on me, and asked if I'd bought the plane ticket and rented a place before bringing it up. (I have not, we WERE going to buy the flight this afternoon...)

I've asked him if the ones I already signed were good enough and he's gone away for the moment, but this did NOT stack well with my stress sleeping. I've been grinding my teeth hard enough they're really starting to hurt.

Today make went:

cc      -o .o
cc: fatal error: no input files

And after much staring at "make -d" output it seems it decided it got a " " argument from somewhere (?) which the builtin make rules misidentified that as ' .c' (which it... isn't?) and tried to compile in a way that made the space part drop out (?), leading it to try to compile nothing? (Shouldn't it have failed with "cc .c -o .o"? That would at least have given me a beter idea what was going ON...)

This is why I mostly use make as a thin wrapper around shell scripts, which don't mix declarative and imperative control flow in the same file, and don't fall back to broken implicit legacy rules.

I'm trying to get mkroot to call the command line logging wrapper, and of course when I 'ln -s logwrapper cmdname" toybox gets called with argv[0] set to cmdname and tries to run cmdname_main() instead of logwrapper_main(). How did I make this work when I checked it in? Ah, I built it standalone of course.

I went down this rathole because the "kill -0" commit Elliott sent broke sed in the mkroot Linux kernel build, and I wanted to see the sed command line being called (having been reminded of scripts/record-commands by the email thread with Marty about Aboriginal Linux), but the sequencing is tricky because mkroot builds an airlock and changes path to point to it so I can't just record-commands AROUND mkroot or it'll get undone by the root/airlock switch...

On the one hand, having mkroot be simple and minimal is a good goal, on the other this extra logging provides educational visibility into what the package builds do. (I could make a scripts/root/record-commands that calls scripts/record-commands but that's called between the toybox build and the kernel build, so it wouldn't show the commands run by the toybox build. There's also the question of "do I wrap the compiler invocations or just the other tools"...)

Anyway, I went down this rathole instead of FIXING the kill -0 regression, and today Elliott noticed said regression and I went "oops" and pushed the fix (literally one character fix, Elliott's patch taught list_signals() to skip the first entry but missed doing the same to xsignal_all_killers()).

It's pretty much the same failure mode as checking in the realpath tests and then not implementing them: my estimate of how much bandwidth I'd have to devote to toybox (and thus how fast I'd get a given chunk of work done) was vastly overestimated. I have NOT been getting much time in on this project recently...


August 29, 2021

I only have a few days left to go out to the table before gun licenses go away in Texas, which is a bit like only having a few more days to drive before driver's licenses go away. (Sure only 1% of drivers are serial offenders, but if you can't take them off the roads everyone else has a problem.) But I've been stress sleeping and haven't made it farther than HEB in days. I hung out at the tables in the HEB deli area for an hour or so, masked and vaccinated and still guilty about it because Austin is already out of ER beds and numbers are going to spike as schools reopen before vaccinations are approved for age 12 and under. (You can still get it, you can still pass it on, and it can still kill you.) As usual, the Onion merely documents reality.

Hurricane Ida hitting Louisiana right now is potentially worse than Katrina, and is the new normal. The next one will be bigger than that. (Of course the infrastructure it's HITTING is more hardened, or more accurately a bunch of stuff got destroyed and wasn't rebuilt so there's less left for the new one to destroy. I think?)

Good news, we're finally shipping J&J vaccine overseas. The one that does NOT need dry ice to store/transport but just normal refrigerators. Well, the US one, other countries are still creating their own. They may be 6 months behind us but we've sat on our ass doing nothing long enough for countries with less infrastructure and money to catch up. Again.

"My Little Crony" is an inspired name for a data visualization of Tory corruption in the UK. Here's an interview with its creator. (There's a video version but it's chopped into pieces for some reason.)

Remember: successful white guys cheat, although leveraging ego, connections, and a sense of entitlement is often referred to as "hustling". But often it's just outright lying.

San Diego's mayor asks for greater scrutiny on the police use of military weapons. (Or we could defund them and take away said military weapons?)

Covid is not going well.

Samsung has decided to eliminate the used television market. Late stage capitalism: you own nothing, you will eternally rent from us because you have no choice.

If you Google "when will baby boomers lose power" the first few hits are entertaining but not really informative. They went from 24% of the population in the 2010 census to 20% of the population in 2020, which is progress, but when does the "crazy 27%" plus lead-poisoned senility stop regularly electing fascists and septuagenarians?

A spinoff of The Daily Show did another one of those "right wing loon contradicts themselves" videos with Mike Pompeo in 2020 contradicting himself in 2021 about the taliban. Of course other people do these too because it's a target rich environment: white male hypocrites lying their way to power are basically fungible. But the Boomers don't care about contradictions. As long as ONE of the things said was what the Boomer wanted to hear, the rest sinks forgotten in the senile Boomer fog. And once any of it starts to resonate with Boomers the bots amplify it.

Disaster capitalism is a generic version of war profiteering, using each crisis as a profit center. The embezzlement isn't hidden, they just use regulatory capture to delay prosecution long enough that it becomes old news. (That's why #metoo movements dragging up 20 year old rapes they thought they got away with is an existential threat to serial offenders: once they've been prosecuted for ONE the intertia is broken.)

Just-in-time delivery continues to collapse. A supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and there's a bunch of missing links these days.


August 28, 2021

The current theory is I start the new job in Chicago on September 7th. (Because the 6th is labor day.) This leaves me a week and change to handle everything I need to do in Texas before then, and I'm not entirely sure what that list IS.

I'm stress sleeping: taking many very long naps. Probably a good thing, but it means I'm not getting out to the table much. And there's still too much of a Delta surge for me to feel comfortable out at a Wendy's booth or something during the day. (I can't work at home because Peejee MUST BE HELD when I sit in front of my laptop. She will incessantly pester to break my concentration. I wanted to have kids, I got cats. Oh well.)

Got notified that I need to renew my driver's license, and can't do so online because of the "Real ID" requirement. (It's Trump's national ID card nonsense, part of GOP voter suppression and citizen tracking.) Does this mean I need to get new glasses to pass a vision test? (The ones I got in Japan are basically reading glasses. I HAVE glasses with a newer prescription but one pair has a broken frame and the other pair I haven't seen in months, it could be anywhere.) Will they administer a driving test? (Kinda hard to pass that if I don't bring a car, and RENTING a car to go to Houston for the Japanese embassy thing last year was quite a production. Rental car places don't offer car insurance anymore, they've delegated that entirely to credit card companies which started offering insurance on services you buy through them as a "perk" like cash back and frequent flyer miles, so all the short term insurance services the car companies were offering/using got discontinued. Meaning you CAN'T rent a car with cash or "debit card with visa logo" anymore, and I haven't had a credit card since I cut up and paid off mine years ago.)

Not that I plan to drive any time soon, but a driver's license is ID to get on airplanes and open bank accounts and stuff. (I could get a non-driving version, but... I _can_ drive? Sigh. I can also just use my passport for everything, but when it's time to renew that you have to mail the old one in so I'd be without it for weeks...)


August 27, 2021

Here's a good thread on the way oil companies paid for the New York Times to obviously lie to you today. (This kind of weaseling is half of what "think tanks" like the Tobacco Institute, the Ethyl Institute, and all the climate change denial organizations that inherited their personnel do.)

The great resignation has increased from 40% expecting to leave their job to 55%. (Not just "want to", but actively planning it. Meanwhile back before the pandemic the #vanlife crowd was already having meetups bording on conventions, and they're circling back around to it.)

One of the links I bookmarked from Sarah Taber's website (but couldn't see because she was being brigaded by antis) was an excellent point: the religious reich is attacking professional adult performers (rather than the literally millions of instances of child abuse found on Facebook) because women having a viable alternative to waitressing is a threat to the evangelical worldview, and actual child abuse isn't. (In fact "Christianity and domestic violence" has its own wikipedia page, and there are rather a lot of articles and studies on the topic.)

A common pattern these days is right-wing loons hijacking impartial channels to sock-puppet their credibility. Examples include the Tories lobotomizing the BBC, Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal, and the 91 year old man who bought Newsweek. Forbes turned into a zombie after china bought it. Happens a lot.

I keep repeating myself here but things that were true last month continue to be true. Bitcoin is still insecure. The police need defunding. Most terrorism is done by white males. Western culture is racist and sexist. The Boomers are a problem and the Boomercrats are useless. Twitter is still bad at being twitter and Facebook is evil. "Conservative" is just a rebranding of "old fogey" who have been wrong about everything since forever, and their attacks on sex work are entirely about prudishness and control of women and NOT about trafficing. Being well-educated and successful actually makes people more vulnerable to Dunning-Kruger outside their existing areas of expertise. We can EASILY afford universal basic income and don't because it would deemphasize billionaires. The united states was founded by religious lunatics who weren't a "persecuted minority finding freedom" but were instead exiled for treason and murder, just like the convicts the same country sent to Australia when they figured out America wasn't far enough away. Both places had large native populations the new arrivals murdered: the USA is built on stolen land and it's not ancient history, we're still doing it today. Christians are still deluded self-serving misogynist hypocrites. Capitalism is now composed entirely of scams and is currently trying to corner the market on real estate (because people can't NOT live _somewhere_ and forcing them to pay YOU to do it by taking away all their other options is highly lucrative). What's left of the GOP is monsters actively trying to kill people including their own base.

And of course the Afghanistan withdrawl was sabotaged by the GOP and we did not evacuate enough people. (This is "irish potato famine" or "nazi final solution" level of refugees, and yes the USA famously faceplanted on both of those, but at least the first group got IN to face widespread discrimination which "conservatives" went on to deny ever happened. The people who DIDN'T get in died.)

The Afghan general who Afghanistan's president Ghani put in charge of defending Kabul as the Taliban were entering it (right after Ghani fled the country) wrote an article explaining what happened. Basically Trump screwed them in February 2020 (cut a deal between the Taliban and the US which did not include the Afghan government in any way), as a result of which the Afghan army immediately lost US air support and logistics (a year and a half ago). The money the USA spent on the war was a profit center for our military-industrial-complex, so all the equipment we sent over there can only be serviced by our contractors, requires consumables from the USA to function, is based on proprietary software with licenses that weren't renewed after February 2020, all of which took the taliban from "contained" to "aggressively metastasizing". By the time the Afghan army was "collapsing" they'd run out of ammunition for the proprietary weapons, been cut off from satellite recon, and didn't even have helicopters to resupply their mountain bases anymore.

The USA never even TRIED to train the taliban to be self-sufficient, it was a big pump-and-dump scheme where for-profit military contractors here in the states squeezed as much money as possible out of our semi-privatized military, making every step as dependent on them and as lucrative FOR them as possible. (The modern civilian "right to repair" fights are a rounding error in comparison.)

And then when Biden confirmed in April that he was implementing Trump's withdrawl plan (which made EXACTLY as much sense as implementing Trump's Covid vaccination plan: there was no actual PLAN part), Afghanistan's already-corrupt president Ghani responded by embezzling everything he could and preparing to flee. Which meant there was nobody left TO negotiate with the Taliban about managing any sort of transition.

I watched a video recently about (among other things) how the USA was part of actual coalitions in World War II where other countries did real work and made important decisions, but this stopped (probably as a result of cold war paranoia; trust no one) and ever since US-led "coalitions" have been about other countries agreeing not to object to what the USA unilateraly does. The participation of our "partners" boils down to letting us build airbases in and move our stuff through their territory, and since the first Gulf war we'd rather hire mercenaries like Blackwater than give other countries anything nontrivial to do. Worst of all, we ONLY listen to objections, not advice. Nobody else has any input into our decision making, our decision cycle (such as it is) boils down to: are our subjects ok with the soverign's plan, or do we come up with a different unilateral plan without any input from them? Rinse repeat until they shut up. Nixon and Kissenger micromanaged the Vietnam War from Washington DC and it sounds like we treated Afghanistan the exact same way, did everything unilaterally and their role was to eventually run out of objections. So of course when the USA left there was no ally to hand off to, not even a functioning domestic administration service handling mundane things like road maintenace and garbage collection. (Not when a US contractor could be paid 10 times as much to do it, half-assing the result and pocketing 95% of the money as profit.)

Biden seems to have given up and cut the gordian knot, not caring who got hurt over there, although it's not clear what other options he had.


August 26, 2021

I've signed the rest of the paperwork for the new job, found a reasonable "extended stay" hotel a 9 minute walk from work that's the same price as the efficiency apartments being advertised online, worked out airplane schedules, sent them contact info for my previous two managers (Jeff and Andrew at JCI)... Looks like it's happening?

Out at the table looking at cutting a toybox release before I have to get on a plane, and... of course I'm going down a different rathole. Someone named "Marty" has been emailing me about Aboriginal Linux for the past few days, and while I'm tempted to point him(?) at mkroot I admit the native toolchain is not wired up for immediate use. Aboriginal built Linux From Scratch, mkroot... hasn't yet.

So I built current i686 mkroot, copied the i686-linux-musl-native directory contents (created by scripts/mcm-buildall.sh) into root/i686/fs/usr, grabbed busybox ash for the shell, grabbed the "make" binary out of my last aboriginal linux release (it's statically linked but I had to loopback mount toolchain.sqf in the system-image tarball to get it), threw a clean git checkout of the toybox source into home/lfs, and... there's no cc symlink to gcc. Ok, fix THAT and... it can't find /usr/include? Really? Ah right, THAT'S what the extra "ln -s . /usr/usr" was for. And the build died because there's no /bin/bash symlink, so rebuild busybox letting it know bash should redirect to ash... (I could also grab the bash out of that squashfs, but really I want to stick toysh in here when I can cycle back to it, and I'm not testing that yet because I KNOW it's unfinished. I want to see how the REST of the system is working...)

scripts/genconfig.sh: source: line 3: configure: not found

Ok, busybox ash is NOT a reasonable substitue for bash, which I can't say surprises me. (Line 3 is a COMMENT you... the word "configure" does not appear in that file! This is not a helpful error message!) So grab the ancient bash 2.05b static binary from that squashfs, throw THAT into bin, and...

scripts/genconfig.sh: line 1: tr: command not found

Progress! Yes, that is indeed a command that's not in toybox defconfig. Um, if I'm gonna rebuild toybox and add it I need to make my previous steps more easily reproducible. And more systematically documented than a blog entry. But the sun's coming up, time to pack up and head home...

I'm exasperated that J&J hasn't even applied for full approval of its Jaansen vaccine yet. Pfizer and Moderna are using the pandemic as an excuse to build out MRNA product manufacturing and distribution infrastructure (all that dry ice temperature storage and transport for incredibly fragile compounds), and I'm guessing somebody cut a deal to avoid competing with them. But if we want to stop being flooded by endless new variants causing breakthrough infections, we need to vaccinate the REST of the world and a one dose vaccine that can be stored in a normal refrigerator seems like a no-brainer compared with "two doses a month apart that need to be transported via palanquin with a procession of nuns". Meanwhile, India's developing its own vaccine and Mexico's working on one that can be administered as a nasal spray, so all this capitalist BS is doing is sidelining the USA into irrelevance.

Battery technology marches on: we've put electric currents through ship hulls to prevent rust for over a century, and now somebody is finally seriously developing an iron/air battery for municipal grid use. Meanwhile other people are getting serious about turning rooftop solar into full off-grid systems. The trick is modern inverters that can be linked together, so capacity is easy to double or even triple from what one unit can do.


August 25, 2021

Woke up to an email from Amazon recruiter du jour asking if I wanted to interview with them. No. No I do not. Yes I am actively hunting for a job, but not at Amazon, or Microsoft, or Facebook. Not what I want to do with my life, thanks.

Yesterday Jeff said he has a... more concrete promise of money that isn't actually in his account yet? He got another signoff, anyway. I'm all for it, let me know when it can pay my mortgage and I'm happy to fly back to Japan...

Woah: that phone interview from monday? Just turned into a job offer. Six months in Illinois (suburb of Chicago), porting an embedded system to new arm hardware running linux on part of it and an RTOS on another. Round trip flights to visit Fade on the weekends from there would be $88 plus airport taxes.

Ha! And Onlyfans backpedaled on the porn ban. In the face of incoming blowtorches, presumably. Plus it was a PROFOUNDLY stupid business decision. As much as I hate twitter's "little moments" this collection is a good summary. So far it is a day of good news. Here's a domain expert doing a deep dive, and of course a request that Last Week Tonight do a piece on it. (Also, Sarah Taber has decloaked with a kickstarter to finish her book.)

The paperwork for the new position has an arbitration clause, which says "THE PARTIES UNDERSTAND AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THIS AGREEMENT IS NOT A CONDITION OF EMPLOYMENT." So I asked whether I needed to sign the Employee Abitration Agreement or whether it was optional, and that's the first question I've asked that has NOT been promptly answered. (An hour so far.) On the one hand, this smells underhanded, but on the other hand I've never sued an employer and live in a "Right to Work" state anyway (which is the GOP's way of saying nobody has a right to work and either side can walk away for no reason anyway; nobody even has to give 2 weeks notice) and all this paperwork says it's bound by Texas law (the recruiter is an Austin company). I don't PLAN to sue anybody, I'm just bemused that the paperwork I'm being asked to sign says I don't really need to sign it? (So do I or don't I? This is at the recruiter level, not the actual employer level, by the way. Signing paperwork to become an employee of the recruiter who contracts me out ot the employer, taking a generous cut of the hourly wage and having multiple pages devoted to not ever telling the employer what I make per hour. Sadly standard when working through a consulting company.)

Eh, I'm not asking them to be perfect. I am also reminded how people figure out how to exploit arbitration to be even WORSE for the company that a class action suit would be. To the point DoorDash refused to pay its own arbitrator and got smacked down by a judge well known for being technically literate. Divide and conquer doesn't help when enough people show up anyway and you wind up having to manage a "mass lone demonstration".

And NOW Jeff tells me that he actually got the money yesterday (cash-in-bank-account), and we could go back to Japan and Do The Thing. If he'd told me that YESTERDAY I would have told the recruiter this morning that I was spoken for, and wouldn't be halfway down this path. But now that I AM, I must admit Jeff would still be paying me less than half my market rate and could only guarantee a couple months from his current funding, and the new contract is at least 6 months (with noises about wanting it to run longer; allow telecommuting and we'll talk) paying actual market rates. But Jeff's thing in Japan would help me get to the Google contract to work on toybox (which is still an "if") and we'd actually be bringing tech I spent FIVE YEARS working on through manufacturing to the point people could actually use/buy it? Arrrrrgh.

Neil Gaiman's "towards or away from the mountain" says stick with Jeff. Paying back my wife's savings says take the new one. I can put five more anecdotes on each side of that decision, but after that first job offer with the terrible NDA (I read this one's closely and it looks fine to me), and the second job offer that was yanked back before I got any paperwork to sign, I kinda want closure at this point? Jeff DIDN'T tell me he had the money, and tends not to let anybody know things until all his ducks are in a row (the opposite of "release early release often", instead he chooses the perfect which is the enemy of the good). This contract is work I know how to do, which refills the bank account. Every choice leaves a road not traveled.

It's not ENTIRELY a good news day, although "answer I expected instead of being pleasantly surprised" isn't exactly BAD news either. A week or two back BB&T (which recently renamed itself "Truthiness") asked us if we wanted to expand the home equity loan I ran up working for Jeff, and we went "ok, sure". So they asked for pay stubs and I went "I haven't got any" (because canada/japan/singapore but no usa subsidiary... we eventually decided that meant "self-employed") so they took my 2020 taxes where the new tax lady (Susan at H&R block retired) deducted the Per Diem amount from my multi-month stay in Tokyo BEFORE writing down my income, so it looks like I earned even less than I did putting Fade and myself down at approximately the median US household income. And today the bank person went "you don't have the income to justify more home equity loan". Sigh, YOU asked ME to start this process and you're judging my pandemic numbers? I wonder how retirees with reverse mortgages manage to get them when they're not even working anymore?

Anyway, this is exactly what I expected from someone wanting me to demonstrate that I don't NEED a loan as a prerequisite of GETTING a loan. (If it wasn't potentially useful to me, I wouldn't be applying for it?) Another good reason to take the new contract is to pay off this home equity loan and refinance the mortgage somewhere other than "Truist". There's a REASON I paid off and cut up my credit cards years ago, and I guess home equity loans fall under the same umbrella: too easy to run 'em up when they're available, best to just not go there. (I was mostly interested because the tax appraisal on my house went UP by more than the current home equity loan total this year alone, but "oh no, home equity loans are about your earings not your equity"... I guess capitalism says I should just go earn then? We already cashed out more savings to pay for September's bills and it would be nice to be able to put that back soonish.)

I am 100% aware that I am being annoyed from a place of extreme privilege. But the system doesn't really serve the top ~25% either, just the 1%.


August 24, 2021

Huh. Found a toybox infrastructure mismatch: when you have multiple commands in the same file (toys/example/skeleton.c demonstrates the little dance to switch flag contexts) but the first command is NOT the same name as the *.c source file, it tries to use a nonexistent GLOBALS block.

The function in scripts/main.h that creates generated/globals.h is using the filename to create struct filename_data { blah; }; blocks and to add them to union global_union at the end, but generated/flags.h creates a section for each NEWTOY(...) macro starting with:

#ifndef FOR_command
#ifndef TT
#define TT this.command
#endif
...
#endif

So the first #define FOR_command; #include "toys.h" (yes I know you can't ; like that in defines, work with me here) sets TT and it's left unchanged by any other context shifts later in the file. Which is why I never noticed this dependency before: when the first command name matches the filename, everything just works.

But the way I'm rewriting readlink+realpath, the first context I WANT is realpath's (because it has a lot more flags, so marshalling readlink's 2 extra flags not shared by realpath and checking them specially outside the FLAG() macros is less messy than marshalling the many more realpath flags in the other direction). But the filename is historically readlink.c and I don't want to write a commit comment explaining a gratuitous rename in the git history. (Blog entries can be long and go into details, commit comments less so.)

I want to use the __FILE__ macro instead, but unfortunately that's the full path to the file plus the .c extension. I don't have a basename version of __FILE__ and the C preprocessor doesn't actualy provide a lot of string manipulation tools at compile time. (That's why it needed an explicit #define FOR_blah in the first place, even before the gearshifts were added.)

I could just #define TT this.readlink before the #include with a comment about how it's a workaround, but that feels like accumulating technical debt. Or I could try to fix the infrastructure to avoid a problem I've honestly never hit before, which is... largeish.

The problem is the infratructure's hard to fix: generated/flags.h is created from generated/newtoys.h which doesn't know what file each line came from. I came up with the usual Horrible Sed Plumbing (ala for i in toys/*/*.c; do X="$(basename -s .c $i)"; sed -nE 's/.*USE_.*[(](NEW|OLD)TOY[(]([^,]*),.*/\2/p' $i | while read j; do [ "$X" == "$j" ] || emit_fixup; done) to find and fill in the gaps but unfortunately C won't let me do anything like "typedef struct newcmd struct oldcmd;" because typedef adds new types to the "int" namespace, not to the struct namespace. I can't have an empty unnamed struct member so "x.member" becomes "y.member" to forward it that way. (I can do it with a new union, but not an existing struct). I _can_ #define realpath_data readlink_data but don't want to? (Dangerous namespace polution, that'd be leaving out a rake to step on in future.)

Ok, I figured out how to duplicate the full struct definition in main.sh's function getglobals() with an extra for loop, but now that I'm there I'm not convinced that's much better? Bigger header, slower compliation taking more memory, for... no strong reason? I can just SAY that the first #define FOR_thingy has to match the filename. All the others already do, it's not a big restriction. But it IS a potential landmine where the filenames MATTER when they seem like they don't. Hmmm...

I need to do youtube videos.


August 23, 2021

Walked downtown from the table this morning (to drop off some paperwork at a bank), and then back home from there. Twenty four thousand steps, 9.7 miles. Ok, that's exercise.

Fade flew back to Minneapolis today. Part of my stress has been "running out of time with Fade, did not make good use of time, aaaaaah!" (We thought about going out to the drafthouse to see Free Guy yesterday, but stayed home instead. There's been a lot of that.) Stayed up another couple hours for a job interview phone call, which having had it I don't expect to turn into anything. (Last question: "Tell me why you're the best candidate for this position." "That's a relative statement, I don't know who else you're interviewing. I can tell you why I'm GOOD but I'd hoped we'd spent this call establishing that?")

My other pair of headphones broke, and I can't find the good glue. (I've found the elmers school glue, which lasts about 3 days of headphone use.) Planned obsolescence: these headphones have 4 plastic clips that obviously need to be metal clips. They HAVE to know, but they want us to order replacements every 6 months because capitalism! (I can fill the hole with glue but then the earpieces don't fold in for storage. The glue doesn't last any longer than the plastic clips did, but I can re-glue 'em.)

The Great Resignation continues unabated. Cutting unemployment benefits has had zero impact on employment (not that you get unemployment if you voluntarily quit anyway; and yes the antis attacking onlyfans is part of the capitalist fight back against the great resignation: how dare anyone exercise alternatives to flipping burgers in a cubicle. (Especially a way women can earn money more easily than men trying to do the same thing? HOW DARE THEY. If men can't hold "obey with me or you will inevitably starve to death" over women, how can they ever hope to capture a mate?) And thus conservatives rabidly defend conventional gender roles no matter how little sense they make in the modern world.)

I am apparently not alone in my reaction to the onlyfans thing (that's Diane Duane's tweet which I first saw when Neil Gaiman retweeted it). Sarah Taber had some excellent comments, I bookmarked a couple but can't actually read either one right now because her twitter account is private at the moment. Brigaded by antis I'm guessing.

Ok, THIS is what competent response to covid looks like. (Our equivalent over here would be AOC as president. Just put young people in charge already.)

The average american "city" is just a town with 1/100th the population density of real cities like paris or barcelona.


August 22, 2021

Still not sleeping well, but walking to the table helps. Both exercise to burn off stress and some work to focus on. (Alas I'm only getting a couple hours a night there, not heading out until pretty late, but it's better than nothing.)

Apparently waymo lost a lot of people during the pandemic, and is now drifting rudderless. Tesla isn't being cautious enough but Waymo is being TOO cautious. Their CEO quit in frustration (after Alphabet vetoed all his plans as too risky or ambitious) and now they're led by a committee. A 7 year head start does not mean you can sit on your hands for 7 years: with taillights to chase competitors will catch up in half that. I mean seriously, Lyft and Ford are bringing self-driving to Austin early next year, and Waymo hasn't shown its face here since abandoning the city in 2019.

Walked to the table the long way (45th to guadalupe, going down the drag instead of through east campus) and the CVS on guadalupe seems to have gone out of business. All the lights (and signs) are on, but all the shelves are empty, there's a big pile of trash in the side parking, grafitti on some of the windows and a parking sign, and a budget rental truck parked out front. They stopped being 24 hours early in the pandemic, and it apparently killed them. (The Walgreens at 45th and Guadalupe is still 24 hours and seems to be doing fine.)

Sigh, I got another transient tar error on the same "sparse" test (worked fine when I ran the test again), and this time I got a proper snapshot but it makes no sense? The first 16k of the file the tarball encodes is missing, so the length and the offset of all the segments is 16k lower than it should be. (Wha...?) This is not the same sha1 hash as the previous error, by the way, so the file is corrupted DIFFERENTLY this time.

And the problem isn't with what tar did, the problem is the test file "fweep" honestly is missing its first 16k. The testfile generation function in tests/tar.test is yes | (dd bs=$((1<<16)) count=1; dd bs=8192 seek=14 count=1; dd bs=4096 seek=64 count=5) 2>/dev/null > fweep and yes, the missing part is exactly that first dd bs=16384 count=1 call which is just... not happening? (And if "dd" did have an error the 2> discarded it because THAT'S NOT THE PART WE'RE TRYING TO TEST. That part is EXPECTED TO WORK.)

This is using devuan's host bash to run the shell, and the test used the host dd rather than the toybox dd (it was a "make test_tar" not "make tests"). Bash SHOULD open("fweep", O_CREAT|O_TRUNC) first via the redirect and assign that fd to stdout for the entire parenthetical block, and THEN run the three dd instances in sequence each of which should read from stdin (the pipe from "yes" which is just alternating 'y' '\n' chars endlessly) and then both write and seek on stdout (the fd pointing to fweep).

There IS one complication here which is that it's using ( ) instead of { } and thus forking a subshell. Possibly there's some confusion between the parent instance of stdout and the child instance of stdout? Which would make this either a kernel bug or a bash bug. Except each call to dd is also a child process: that's how shells work.

Hmmm... Let's see if I can force this to happen: while true; do sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; make test_tar || break; done and leave it running until...

bzcat: I/O or other error, bailing out.  Possible reason follows.
bzcat: Broken pipe
	Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)
PASS: tar extract dir/file from tbz2 (autodetect)

Which was not detected as an error??!??!? Sigh. The command is tar xvCf dd $FILES/tar/tar.tbz2 && stat -c '%A %Y %n' dd/dir dd/dir/fil and of course the race condition is "gnu-generated tarball randomly has multiple kilobytes of NUL on the end of it because reasons and 2 consecutive 512-byte NUL headers indicates EOF in a tarball, so we close the input when we know we're done and bzip2 hasn't necessarily written all its output into the pipe and closed ITS output yet, based on scheduler races. Which wasn't detected as an error because toybox tar doesn't care about the exit code of the compressors, just the output they produce. Right. Proper fix here is to attach the compressor child process's stderr to /dev/null? Except if it DOES say something about corruption we'd want to hear it, maybe "kill child process" is the correct action here?.

Ok, forcing the test to run in a loop found an unrelated error, which I have now at least addressed. I can tell dd "status=none" so that stuff won't discard stdout, and I should probably move on to something else rather than following this rathole endlessly. (I could spend a year on JUST the test suite, easily...)

(My instincts want to track down the shell bug, but this is not the shell I'M writing, this is host bash. I haven't had spare energy to poke at MY shell in weeks. The code I wrote this is trying to test does not CREATE the file, just consume it. File being created wrong by host OS tools: sigh and move on I guess. I hope someday to get to the point I can dogfood toysh and then it WOULD be my problem.)


August 21, 2021

The perl programming language is having a bad month. (Deleting all your transparency reports seems a bit on the nose?)

Speaking of pearl clutching, I've been too stressed to sleep the past couple days, of an "anger with no outlet" kind. In my 20s I was a fairly active nudist, and although it's one of many interests that's fallen by the wayside over the years I'm enraged at the misogynist Boomer prudishness that continues to outlaw admitting people have nipples. Leaving aside that sex work is work (suppressing voluntary participation is going to reduce involuntary trafficing HOW exactly?) they really need to stop confusing nudity with sex.

The rage comes in because Boomers control the financial industry. The US government no longer controls the US dollar, three private companies (Visa, Mastercard, and Chexsystems) do. Cash is down to 7% of the economy and the reason there are no bills larger than $100 (despite inflation making $100 bill in 2021 be worth the equivalent of $6.55 a hundred years ago) is so unapproved economic activity (the "war on some drugs") is limited by the physical bulk and weight of cash. But the other 93% goes goes through private monopolies, with nominally independent layers on top (like paypal) fully subject to the whims of those monopoly companies.

These three private companies are not just threatening OnlyFans with "you cannot have a credit card or a bank account ever again", meaning they cannot receive or spend money online. The threat is that if the executives of the company challenge this edict (via an antitrust complaint or first amendment tort) then any company those executives ever work at in FUTURE will also be permanently locked out of the american financial system. How is this legal? People have been arguing about where to draw lines on these issues since the Comstock Act. Both the Comics Code Authority and the MPAA sprang from artistic niches attempting to avoid being regulated out of existence by pearl clutching prudes. Obscenity law historian is a JOB. But by lobbying the three companies who've monopolized the US dollar, the Westboro Baptist Church types are shutting down any first amendment complaint AND any sherman antitrust complaint: if you try to fight back the "corporate veil" means nothing, all the executives of your company aren't just unemployable, they cannot have personal credit cards (including "debit card with visa logo") or bank accounts, for the rest of their lives.

And the REAL rage comes in knowing that Joe "79 in November" Biden and Nancy "81 years old" Pelosi are happily clutching their pearls alongside the "focus on the family" clowns. "How dare she show so much skin, she deserves it. And now we have this precedent, we'll apply it to the NEXT group we don't like..." The people nominally "on my side" very much aren't.

This has been building for a while. The evangelical pearl clutchers (who like most modern christians are against everything jesus taught) passed FOSTA/SESTA years ago and are forever trying to escalate (possibly as a right wing recruiting tactic conditioning white men to lose their humanity, creating more white male terrorists). Elsewhere the same right wing misogynist loons are trying to crowdsource victim abuse with a "narc on a neighbor you think MIGHT have had an abortion" hotline. (Where are the k-pop stans when you need them?). Fascism always starts with control of women: it was "the fatherland" not "the motherland".

The rest of us are all just waiting for the Boomers to die, but it's not happening fast enough. Yes I'm aware of tumblr "purity culture", which is to Gen Z what "straight edge" was to millennials. It's a tiny vocal minority trying to appear big, just like gamergate and the Rabid Puppies attacking the Hugo awards. There's always been a "crazy 27%", the reason they're not a tiny minority is the Boomers went septic. The "free love" hippies are now abiters of prudish morality for everyone else. When they said "never trust anyone over 30", they were referring to themselves when they got older, and they were RIGHT: most Boomers have significant brain damage from decades of cumulative exposure to leaded gas car exhaust both inhaled and getting into the food/water/soil leading to statistically steeper cognitive decline than other generations. The declining crime rates in recent decades boil down to lead-poisoned Boomers getting too old to commit those crimes, but they still vote and lobby the government on issues like these. (Yeah yeah, of course #notallboomers. Just most.)

There's a significant "first they came for..." element to all this. It's not just onlyfans. This has previously driven nudists off of anything touched by Google Ads (of course Youtube) and tumblr. While twitter doesn't officially ban nudity (yet, but they're the next target of the purity brigades) all the nudists I used to follow on there already had their accounts suspended one by one, and patreon's policies are "constantly evolving" as they dodge threats from the Tripartite Monopsony the puritans wield against society. Disney is censoring its old movies. Buried in Apple's "we blindly search your phone for hashes of content the government says you're not allowed to have", Apple's OTHER nude photo detector is alerting parents if their kids send or receive photos with nudity (or, judging by the quality of the tumblr version of this detector, bread dough), because obviously nobody's ever lied about or abused such a relationship. (Keep in mind how terribly Apple treats their own employees: their customers don't stand a chance.)

And of COURSE the libertarian loons screeching about government overreach from schools adding masks to the dress code and demanding vaccinations before attending classes (which has been normal for a century and a half; I had to get re-vaccinated every time I went back to grad school LONG before the pandemic) are 100% ok with three private companies (again: Visa, Mastercard, and Chexsystems) colluding to say what is and isn't allowed speech. I guess it's ok as long as private companies do it. No state attourney generals launching antitrust investigations, or any first amendment challenges? No? Of course not...

Oh, and I'm angry that the obvious fix to all this is "postal banking" (guaranteed no-fee bank account for every US citizen, like they do in many other countries already, which DON'T FORBID ACTIVITY THAT ISN'T ILLEGAL), but of course Biden still hasn't gotten rid of Louis DeJoy who is actively trying to destroy the Post Office and not even HIDING it. (How about passing a law preventing the head of any federal agency, or their spouse or immediate family, from owning ANY stock. A "blind trust" isn't good enough, you can put your money in Treasury Bonds or an S&P 500 index fund. You do not get to own shares in any specific companies that could benefit from or be harmed by your actions. Or just guillotine the billionaires.)

Meanwhile, the gerrymandering GOP is pretending they didn't arrange the withdrawl from afghanistan, even though the new Taliban leader of afghanistan was released from prison at Trump's request and Mike Pompeo met with him in November right after losing the election, to arrange Russian funding for bribing enough Afghan army people that the Taliban could take over the country unopposed if the withdrawl they'd arranged was allowed to proceed. (Russia isn't evacuating its embassy: it's FUNDING the Taliban to embarass the west.) None of this is secret. The part we can blame the Boomercrats for is not accepting FAR more refugees, and of course leaving behind so much equipment and data. Sure the previous administration screwed things up as much as they could, but the Biden administration had eight months to prepare for this.

DeJoy is still there and the visa hurdles are still there for the same reason the Boomercrats are refusing to prosecute the most obvious GOP atrocity or white male terrorist activity even when it's still happening right under their noses. Because Good Cop and Bad Cop work for the same team: the plutocracy.

You know that picture of what looks like the same helicopter evactuating refugees from Saigon and Kabul? It turns out it might actually be the same aircraft (serial number 154038). The Boomers learned NOTHING the entire time they were participating in the US military.

So Haiti had another eartquake recently, and they're asking people NOT to donate to the Red Cross because it won't help them. This is because back in the 1990s the Red Cross was taken over by republicans (starting with Bob Dole's wife using it as a piggy bank), and it remains hijacked to this day. Boomers/Boomercrats never fix anything, they just paint over the rot and let it fester.

Here's video of medic loading a person on a stretcher into an ambulance, and an LAPD officer running up and punching the patient in the face while they do so. This not being remotely unusual is why defunding the police (and deprivatizing too) is so popular.

Tesla's crappy self-driving keeps killing people and setting back regulatory approval of the technology.

US real estate has been going up in large part because of kleoptocratic money laundering and needs a big crash with massive losses for all the current investors. Such crashes are a thing that functional governments not only allow, but sometimes explicitly engineer.

Alabama is out of ICU beds. Austin isn't that far off but has a let them eat cake GOP government sticking its fingers in its ears and going la-la-la. All the GOP-controlled states are hurting, as usual. (That's the strategy, torture your base and blame whichever group you've trained them to hate. That's how you keep them "riled up" and active on your behalf. Domestic abuse applied to political ends.)

Twitter remains profoundly bad at being twitter. (Facebook is worse, but Twitter doesn't HAVE to be bad and Facebook's core business is being bad: it started out as stalkerware.)

Corporations love binding arbitration. You may have a constitutional right to a jury trial, but monopoly leverage can force you to sign all your rights away as a prerequisite for buying from the company store.


August 20, 2021

I tend to think about obsolescence a lot. For example, whenever anything offers a free service for life I expect at least one of my cats to outlive it. Other people take companies at their word, even when you'd think they'd know better.

The "88911" number used to text everybody in Austin about Covid the past few times sent out the usual "text followed by robocall", but this time it's from the Austin PD about a "77 year old black male about 5 feet" leaving a hospital a dozen blocks south of where I live. Setting aside that the police have taken over a public health forum, and that the police are asking the public to hand over a black man to their custody without further explanation, this hospital is also one block west of the hundred or so homeless people living under the I-35 overpass and they don't care if any of THEM live or die.

Toybox: I'm continuing to work on tar --selinux support and of course lib/portability.c wraps everything in "xattr_lget" functions because macos has a different number of arguments. (I'm pretty sure this could have been fixed up by #defining a macro, but... eh, it's there.) Sigh. So I'm using those.

I downloaded a current fedora livecd and did a "tar cvzf etc.tgz --selinux /etc" and scp-ed the tarball to myself, which has:

$ zcat ~/etc.tgz | strings | grep security.selinux | sort -u
51 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:bin_t:s0
51 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:etc_t:s0
52 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:cert_t:s0
54 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:dnssec_t:s0
54 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:locale_t:s0
54 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:shadow_t:s0
55 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:adjtime_t:s0
55 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:exports_t:s0
55 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:lvm_etc_t:s0
55 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:xdm_etc_t:s0
...
66 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:NetworkManager_etc_t:s0
67 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:namespace_init_exec_t:s0
67 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:pkcs11_modules_conf_t:s0
68 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:selinux_login_config_t:s0
69 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:NetworkManager_etc_rw_t:s0
71 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:vmtools_unconfined_exec_t:s0
74 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:NetworkManager_initrc_exec_t:s0
76 RHT.security.selinux=system_u:object_r:virt_qemu_ga_unconfined_exec_t:s0

Which explains why the ancient busybox patch I looked at just had an "if (len>99) size++;" check for how many digits it needed at the start there, and implies that using toybuf for the getxattr() would probably be reasonable? (This is just a label, there's no reason for it to be all that large. It's an identifying tag, not a ruleset, 4k should be PLENTY.)

That said, this isn't enough of a dataset for me to be comfortable with that assumption. Also, it's the same plumbing as the PATH_MAX stuff for hard/symlink which isn't NECESSARILY actuallly limited to PATH_MAX anymore... although in reality it is. (Grrr. Pick one, kernel guys. "When you break rules, break 'em good and hard." - Nanny Ogg. They could have actually TESTED that really long path names work instead of leaving things in a squishy half-state.)

Anyway, the OTHER curiosity here is that the 'x' packets look like:

00000000  2e 2f 50 61 78 48 65 61  64 65 72 73 2f 65 74 63  |./PaxHeaders/etc|
00000010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000060  00 00 00 00 30 30 30 30  36 34 34 00 30 30 30 30  |....0000644.0000|
00000070  30 30 30 00 30 30 30 30  30 30 30 00 30 30 30 30  |000.0000000.0000|
00000080  30 30 30 30 32 31 33 00  31 34 31 30 37 37 30 33  |0000213.14107703|
00000090  36 37 34 00 30 31 31 30  30 30 00 20 78 00 00 00  |674.011000. x...|
000000a0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000100  00 75 73 74 61 72 00 30  30 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.ustar.00.......|
00000110  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000200  32 39 20 6d 74 69 6d 65  3d 31 36 32 39 34 35 36  |29 mtime=1629456|
00000210  33 31 36 2e 37 34 32 39  32 34 31 31 0a 33 30 20  |316.74292411.30 |
00000220  61 74 69 6d 65 3d 31 36  32 39 34 34 39 37 30 37  |atime=1629449707|
00000230  2e 32 37 30 30 39 30 37  37 32 0a 32 39 20 63 74  |.270090772.29 ct|
00000240  69 6d 65 3d 31 36 32 39  34 35 36 33 31 36 2e 37  |ime=1629456316.7|
00000250  34 32 39 32 34 31 31 0a  35 31 20 52 48 54 2e 73  |4292411.51 RHT.s|
00000260  65 63 75 72 69 74 79 2e  73 65 6c 69 6e 75 78 3d  |ecurity.selinux=|
00000270  73 79 73 74 65 6d 5f 75  3a 6f 62 6a 65 63 74 5f  |system_u:object_|
00000280  72 3a 65 74 63 5f 74 3a  73 30 0a 00 00 00 00 00  |r:etc_t:s0......|
00000290  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|

Which puts all the _timestamp_ data in the 'x' record? Will old tar understand if I DON'T do that? (Just add an 'x' record as extra data to an otherwise conventional tarball?) Or... should I do that? And they have the nanosecond timestamps stored in there? (I mean, I _can_...)

This is another thing where I'm going to need to boot into mkroot and run the test suite in there to reliably test this, because I can't guarantee that the host filesystem supports xattrs (and if it DOES and the tests aren't running as root, it probably wouldn't be able to apply selinux labels new things it's creating anyway).


August 19, 2021

Today is Fade's birthday. She flies back to Minneapolis on monday. Sigh, I should get serious about job hunting after that.

I got an email from the Android guys saying they're still interested but have yet to secure funding, and I should definitely take any interesting contracts rather than wait around for them. I haven't been waiting, but I was sick for two weeks and have been hanging out with Fade while I could. Plus I thought I might wait out this "great resignation" thing, but apparently not: people volutarily quitting was the reason for 69% of all US jobs lost the NEXT month as well. If anything it's accelerating. There's a LOT of churn right now which makes it easy to get buried: every interview the past month I've been one of at least 3 candidates for the position, recruiters keep being SURPRISED I'm willing to go to where the job is and actually work onsite, and everybody's looking for full-time permanent instead of a contract. (Which I'm not AGAINST, but Fade graduates in 2 years at which point I'm moving to where SHE finds a job...) Plus Jeff now has... if not cash in hand yet, a solid promise of money? Enough we could go back to Japan for a couple months and try to make a J-Core ASIC for a paying customer. (If that happens, it's early September, so we'll see. One more iron in the fire...)

I want to do youtube videos explaining toybox stuff, I.E. talk-and-type. I'm aware "show a face" is a huge boost to "the algorithm" recommending stuff but I want to show the command line window I'm typing into and running stuff in. So I need screen capture, synced with ambient "outside" audio. The main blocker is my laptop hasn't got a microphone (and on laptops I've used that did the sound of typing drowned out speaking), nor have I managed to get a USB bluetooth dongle to work with it (because Linux). I can record audio on my phone easily enough (Android made all this work years ago), but recording audio and video on two different devices means they slowly get out of sync with each other, usually by somewhere around a second per minute: thermal variance in cheap quartz oscillators is a thing and nobody bothers to correct for what humans don't notice. So a multi-minute video is gonna require reblocking the audio over the video, and I don't really want to fight with VNC or audacity to make that work. Not on a regular basis over multiple videos. (Especially since Audacity went nuts recently and I don't want to track down a clean version to use.)

So I installed a VNC viewer on my phone, did the USB tethering with my laptop, ran "kvm -vnc 0.0.0.0 livecd.iso" (I still have that centos image lying around), ran the phone's VNC viewer in read-only mode and tightvnc on the laptop to give me a local window to type/mouse into, and recorded the result for a bit using the phone's built-in screen recorder.

It worked ok? Modulo the sound quality is terrible because the phone's either far enough away my voice s down in the "wind and crickets" background noise of the table (it's quiet here but not silent), or it's close enough that the typing is very loud. Tried again with my bluetooth headphones (which everybody says have much worse audio than my phone's built-in microphone), and it sounded better but still with noticeable "dolby nr" style background hiss. I think I need headphones with a proper microphone of some kind. (I had a nice USB mic, but destroyed it in Japan and it was discontinued when I tried to reorder. Decision paralysis shopping for another: too many variants I dunno the difference between and they're mostly "stupid expensive" for some reason.)

The other problem is kvm is popping up a 1024x768 display by default and a Pixel 3a has 2220x1080 video. The vnc viewer scales the horizontal resolution to match no problem, but then I have less than 2/3 the vertical screen displayed and for some reason it picked the bottom chunk to give me, which is awkward. I can do the two-finger pinch thing to see the whole screen, at which point the screen record is doing black bars on each side. Presumably I can run it through a video editor to chop those off... yes, I have an android video editor on my phone that can do that much. And it can chop off the head and tail of the video where I start and stop the screen recording.

Eh, doable. Not slam dunk inspiring, still want a better microphone. (I could also try recording at home, but Peejee gets jealous of my laptop and demands I pay attention to HER.)


August 18, 2021

My Android phone has automatic updates disabled because I hate having the UI of my apps randomly change out from under me. I uninstalled the Android "microsoft teams" app last week when I'd done the online chat somebody wanted to use that app for. Guess how THESE two facts interacted? Yes, Android cued up an update for "microsoft teams", the update DIDN'T get removed from the update list when the app was uninstalled and there was no way to remove it afterwards: the ONLY option it gave me was click "update" (thus reinstalling the app). At least I could uninstall it again afterwards.

Today I installed one of those RPG shop management games and broke it during the tutorial. I closed a menu during one of those railroady click-here-next "wizard" sequences and couldn't re-open it because the icon to access that menu didn't unlock until the END of that tutorial section, so the little chibi character sitting in the corner insisting I do a thing I literally couldn't do wouldn't let me do anything ELSE until I uninstalled the game.

On the way home from the table I stopped at HEB, their POS system couldn't read the chip on my card (unsurprising, the contacts are pretty corroded), and after multiple attempts it let me swipe the stripe, but then couldn't figure out if it was a credit or debit card, and when I told it debit it brought up the "enter your pin" field WITHOUT ENABLING THE ENTER BUTTON. So I could type four digits, but never actually tell it to USE those digits. (It did this multiple times, it's a bug in their fallback stripe handling, apparently it had a software update since it was installed with no regression testing.)

I guess I am feeling better, I'm back to breaking everything. (This is why I could never use windows. I remember sitting down at a PC in college and exiting it to DOS to use it for a bit and the windows machine NEXT to me, which nobody had touched for 15 minutes, crashed.)

I got a new $5 patreon supporter! I would log into the website and send him a welcome message except for the whole "Patreon's broken javascript erases the page right after drawing it" issue. (The support thread for which boiled down to "use an approved browser, debian's chromium doesn't count".) Sigh, I should boot a live ISO and try there... Heh, of course the ancient centos KDE live cd has Konqueror as its only preinstalled browser: blank white screen. Strongly suspect it's what happens if their javascript's if/else staircase to identify your browser type falls off the end.

Here's another attempt to name the phenomena where halfway through a creative project you burn out and think everything you've done is terrible: the 75% heebie jeebies. Years ago Neil Gaiman talked about experiencing this in his nanowrimo pep talk, and every other author I've talked to just nods in commiseration.

A reminder that the native americans terraformed the heck out of the americas. In addition to the herds of bison the US army intentionally slaughtered and literally billions of chestnut trees we infected with chestnut blight, and the various crops (potatoes, corn, etc) that europeans adopted and forgot were ever from here, there things like beans and peach orchards we've nearly lost. The current US agriculture model produces LESS food than things like the Klamath River Salmon Run, and that's AFTER the "green revolution".


August 17, 2021

I've been watching anime series to get exposure to the Japanese language (sometimes the same series over and over) and as nice/portable as phones are sometimes I miss DVDs.

Hulu's android app "updated" itself again. Now the subtitles have a solid blue background color and don't scale with the size of the video playing, meaning when you watch an anime with the screen rotated so the video is just the top part, it's essentially silent movie title cards with the english pop-ups COMPLETELY BLOCKING THE VIDEO using the font scaled for landscape mode. (Bravo. Did anyone at hulu ever USE this before deploying it?) And of course every time you answer a pop-up so Hulu backgrounds itself (instead of going into a picture-in-picture window like youtube does), when you go back into Hulu it forgets where it was and starts the episode over at the beginning again.

This isn't as badly programmed as crunchyroll (bufferbloat city, I mean really OBVIOUS about it) but this is... regressions. It wasn't broken like this in _either_ way last month. Crunchyroll's app seems to neglected (last updated during the Obama administration) and I assume since it was purchased by Sony the original people who did it probably don't work there anymore? But all the Funimation stuff is on Hulu (even though Sony's monopolized both now, go figure). I guess "Sony owns both, both are terribly programmed" makes a certain amount of sense. It is at least consistent. Of the two I prefer "devil you know" to "what fresh hell is this".

Blah. The realpath tests I checked in don't work yet (or more accurately only work with TEST_HOST, they're tests for the realpath stuff I haven't implemented yet), and I didn't think that would cause a problem but Android cares. Oops.

Of course I MEANT to get realpath finished in that same session, and then meant to get it done the next day, and now I'm halfway through implementing selinux in tar because that's where the user pokes led me and now finishing realpath has become time critical again.

All this is reminding me that technologies invented by Red Hat _or_ Cannonical are generally kind of crappy because they're pushed on the community by somebody with a lot of money, not because it was voluntarily adopted by users who wanted it in any kind of organic manner.

And calling Red Hat "Pointy Hair Linux" is no longer a current reference because Scott Adams ossified into a loon, following the long line of people who did interesting work in their 20s and then gradually either turned into or revealed themselves as toxic assholes and really WORKED to earn damnatio memoriae. (Is there a name for this yet? The Bill Cosby Effect perhaps? In the fiction writing space it's called "The Brain Eater".)


August 16, 2021

Feeling better. Which is not the same as "good", but at least my sense of smell is (mostly) back and I've made it to the table on consecutive days.

I have once again failed to convert an interested/enthusiastic newbie into a regular contributor to toybox. RUNNING a project is not the skillset I've been obsessively developing since age 12. I have sort of basic domain-specific bare competence-ish at it, largely via immitation of people who are better at it and a lot of trying. (And a near-vacuum of people doing a better job.) But I am by no means good at this.

(Many moons ago, I and a friend then going by "Mark" launched Linucon. I could handle bureaucrats in person, and Mark could handle paperwork, and between the two of us we cut a swath of destruction through various procedural obstacles, and each of us handed off to the other a LOT. Similarly, when we started an embedded Linux development company the skill we DIDN'T have was somebody who could do sales. I'm usually far enough up the Dunning-Kruger ladder to recognize things I'm not good at, but this doesn't help if there's nobody better than me to delegate to, or if the coordination costs resulting from integrating the delegated work outweigh the benefits of having somebody else do it.)

Anyway, instead of finishing realpath today (or the stack of displaced TODO items back to toysh and the stuff that's been occluding for a year), I'm poking at tar, and specifically redoing the tar 'x' header, and as long as I'm there the big pending todo item for that is --selinux option support, which apparently boils down to grabbing "RHT.security.selinux=" field's value and passing it to setfscreatecon()? (Because Red Hat invented the extension and it got de-facto standardized.) Does that last for one file creation, or does it need to be flushed/restored somehow? And the write side equivalent would use either lgetfilecon() or fgetfilecon(), and I don't understand what the _raw versions do? (Do not perform context translation? What IS context translation?)

The setfscreatecon() man page says it persists until execve(), and that calling it with NULL sets it back to the default. So should this persist between tar files with an 'x' header, or only with a 'g' header? Do I need to support 'g' headers?

Sigh, I really don't WANT to have to read the libselinux source to know if it's safe to setfscreatecon(x) and then free(x) before calling open(), but apparently it does a strdup so should be ok? Although honestly it's just opening /proc/thread-self/attr/fscreate and writing the text blob to it (and doing write(fd, 0, 0) to reset it), which is just /proc/self/attr/fscreate when your program isn't threaded, so WHAT EXACTLY IS THIS GIANT LIBRARY FOR? (Unnecessary layers of crap!)

The code I inherited was previously supporting the "path=" option from 'x' headers (as an alternate way of setting long filenames)... and nothing else. Not the 'size=' option or the 'atime=' option or... Nobody's COMPLAINED about that, but... eeeeeeeeh. (What qualifies as "the right thing" here?)

I need a lot more test tarballs. I don't want to add support for theoretical things that nobody anywhere ever uses, but I don't know what people DO use? (Other than we seem to have run out of complaints related to what's already there? Elliott wanted sparse file support and that's in, there were a couple tweaks I did for old tarballs...) Let's see, according to this Red Hat invented the selinux tar extention with a mutant "star" program in RHEL 4, which was released in 2005, and then the gnu/dammit version added support in 2012. In theory I want to grab an old distro CD full of as many tarballs as I can (not produced by their plumbing but collected from individual package maintainers), but the problem is Red Hat doesn't use tarballs, they use (cpio-based) RPMs. Debian uses tarballs (inside dpkg) but they don't enable selinux by default (because they not crazy).

Also, I'm looking to implement --selinux but not --no-selinux, and my old idea of teaching lib/args.c about --no-BLAH prefixes on longopts in general has some issues. Hmmm... maybe NEWTOY_ROOT(blahblahblah... , FLAG_thingy|FLAG_that)) could have an extra argument for flags that default to being switched on as root? Ew, but the part where the data needs to be supplied BEFORE main is called means it's gonna be an ew anyway and I can't pull the TOYFLAG_ARGFAIL() trick here of masking it into the high bits because A) I already did with argfail, B) toys.optflags is arbitrarily large so there's not enough space. Hmmm... recording a toys.optnoflags bitfield to indicate which ones were switched off is probably the least disgusting option, so the command can then manually geteuid() and adjust itself when command_main() gets called.


August 15, 2021

A reminder that Biden is implementing Trump's withdrawl plan for Afghanistan (and has in fact extended the negotiated deadlines by several months already). Of COURSE it's a clusterfsck.

Plutocrats suppressing social progress (I.E. socialism) gives rise to religious loons, which is where you get Iran and Afghanistan, both products of exploitative capitalism. (And of course here at home you get white male terrorists.) We know how to fix this, but the plutocrats don't want it fixed.

Less than HALF the money spent on the military industrial complex would transform society. An ACTUAL "war on poverty" would do amazing things if it wasn't embezzed by defense contractors. And of course defund the police and spend that money better as well. (When I have spare cash again I should give money to this gofundme.)

Never use a "smart" anything, Google Edition. And never trust a company's human resources department to do anything but protect the company. It's easy to de-anonymize "anonymized" information, and if you can't figure out how to do so _today_, just store it until it becomes easy in a few years (just like encrypted data).


August 14, 2021

This thread is quite good.

Walked to the table again. (I.E. for a second time since getting sick.) Not sure if I'm feeling better or more stubborn. Got about half of realpath implemented. Feels good.

The two month anniversary of starting my job hunt is tomorrow, and although it's historically often taken me far longer than this to find a good new job (especially when I'm being picky), I'm not convinced that "wait for a recruiter to bring something" is the best approach during this whole Great Resignation thing we're apparently in the middle of. (I have no idea how the larger economy remains functional other than David Graeber's BS Jobs theory, which is called "Shanai shitsugyō-sha" in japan, and a large part of my "being picky" has been avoiding those. Well, that and telling Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft recruiters to go fsck themselves consistently for several years now because that is not what I want to do with my life. I'm aware that's a significant filter, yes. Oddly, Fade's friend Em, who was boggling that I could have any difficulty job hunting until Fade clarified "has ethics" (Em: "that'd do it"), works for Facebook but she refuses to work for Google. My own filter is 100% opposite there, go figure. No ethical employment under late stage capitalism, and yet we try. To me Google, on net, seems to at least MEAN well. The bits of it I deal with, anyway.)

While I didn't resign (coresemi ran out of funding like SEI did; that's startups for you) I'm caught up in this phenomena anyway and there's a LOT of churn right now. And going through recruiters is a bit like deciding to get a credit card by responding to credit card offers being mailed to you: how much per hour are they asking on top of my hourly rate? In theory I can go check employers directly and browse sites that list jobs... heck, I've used some of them before, it's just been a while. Mostly because between SEI and CoreSemi it's been 6 years since I've really been on the market (I went to work for Jeff in October 2014 and have always at least dialed into the staff meetings ever since). Between SEI and CoreSemi (I.E. during the "funding knothole" while Jeff was "cleaning his capitalization table"), I started looking for a new job on January 2 and was signing paperwork for the JCI gig on the 10th. But that lined up with annual budget renewals, a bit like trying to sell a house over Spring Break.

I was hoping that any downtime this time around would be nice focused programming time, but it hasn't worked out that way, even before I got sick. For one thing, I've still been on the phone with Jeff daily and when he's talking about coinbro stuff it drains the life out of me. (Lately he's been talking about an actual real project which might get actual real funding, which would be lovely.) For another, after 4 years of GOP rule and 18 months of pandemic, my tolerance for uncertainty is apparently lower than I like? That whole "offer accepted... nope bad NDA", then "offer accepted... nope rescinded!" followed by a month of nothing? Not inspiring faith in the process.

Meanwhile, on September 1 the state of Texas eliminates all gun licenses so everybody can concealed carry anything everywhere 24/7 without a permit. (No really, the GOP governor who's forbidden mask mandates doesn't think that's killing Texans fast enough.) I was sort of waiting for our eldest cat to die of old age before trying to sell the house (3 pets in an apartment is tricky) but I'm really not comfortable with this new law? Do I maybe want to sell the house? (Fade wants me to, Fuzzy wants me not to, I'm the tie breaker.)

Hmmm... In part I've been lazy to see if Jeff gets more funding to pay me to work on the j-core stuff (there's been progress there), or if the Google "maybe" turns real (that I could TOTALLY focus on, to a possibly terrifying degree once Fade heads back to Minnesota), or to see what interesting offers come past (plenty wander by when I'm busy and can't take them, although there's some timescale bias there). And of course I've been SICK ALL WEEK. (I'm feeling slightly less bad today, which means I'm currently not actually hurting myself with constant coughing. The act of breathing is not regularly drawing blood, go me! And I sound MUCH less like a frog today, possibly related.)

Years ago I was hoping to meet a nice girl and support her career as a house husband taking care of the kids. Alas, didn't work out that way, in part because of my accidentally lucrative skill set. I literally went into computer science in college for the easy A's to get my GPA up after the D in French (mandatory foreign language courses, my academic achilles heel) by taking classes in stuff I'd mostly already taught myself. I resisted declaring a computer science major for years because I thought doing it as a day job might take the fun out of it. I've never really tried to have a career, I'm just extremely lucky that I happen to like to do stuff that's been in high demand. I fell in love with my grandmother's Atari 800 with a BASIC catridge because the machine listened to what I typed and did what I told it to and at age 10 that was completely unique in my experience (Boomer parents: hiding in my room reading books or leaving the house for long walks alone were all input, no output; my father immediately figured out that "restricting me from using the computer" was an effective punishment for not being "his name Junior" enough for him, though). Heck, my father ASSURED me that there was no money in software and that I should go into hardware (like him). I believe my mother suggested accounting as lucrative, but I didn't want to do boring lucrative things for a living. (Comic book author, or maybe work in a bookstore, that sort of thing.)

My first job out of college was just something I applied to before going on to grad school ("OS/2 might stop Windows and IBM under Lou Gerstner is hiring, give it a shot"... they flew me out and paid for a hotel, and then hired me). That followed logically into "Java is just like that Platform Independent Binary Executable Code idea I've been working on since I wrote a BBS that ran off bytecode", but I was too junior to have any mobility within IBM (IBM's JDK work was all at the Hursley England facility, I was tied to the 900 buildings in Austin for 2 years by the Boca->Austin site consolidation and my lateral move into test to work on JavaOS just convinced me JavaOS was a massive train wreck). So I left the "safe career, set for life" there to jump to a Java startup, followed closely by "Linux already is most of what Java wants to be". (Java needed an OS to run on and OS/2 was dying, Solaris was tied to hardware that priced it out of the market, Steve Jobs hadn't come back to Apple yet. Linux development uniquely couldn't be starved for revenue so it was likely to OUTLAST everything else, so I installed it and spent YEARS frustratingly beating a workable desktop out of it.) And then because I break everything and defensively remove what doesn't need to be there so it can't break, I gradually ripped out enough pointless crap (in 1999 Red Hat's default install auto-ran services like NFS EXPOSED TO THE INTERNET) to dig down through all the unnecessary layers of indirection in Linux to take the system apart and see what it's actually DOING and put back together a very simple minimal one with less to go wrong, and apparently that was called "embedded development" so I wound up doing that.

None of this was exactly _planned_. I would HAPPILY have stayed home and taken care of kids instead, and I especially never wanted to be "a breadwinner" because a white dude doing that is CLICHE and TRITE. I did eventually buy a big house (a good deal wandered by while I had a steady job paying reasonably well) to have somewhere TO raise kids, but... *shrug* It didn't happen. And I'm not the one who can actually _have_ them, so I didn't really get much of a say in the matter.

But at the MOMENT I have an expensive house I need to pay for or sell, and I'm the main financial support for multiple people and cats. Sigh. Need to figure out what I want to do about that.


August 13, 2021

A month after September 11, 2001, George W Bush rejected an offer from the Taliban to hand over Osama Bin Laden because he (and the 6 senior administration advisers from Lockheed Martin) wanted an excuse to go to war. This wasn't secret, but the GOP grift used to be corporate lying on behalf of plutocrats cashing giant defense checks (every dollar the government spends is received by somebody: follow the money) and now it's moved downmarket to snake oil salesmen and televangelists milking the base directly.

"Conservatives" think in excuses. Their conclusion never changes, but the reasons cited for it endlessly shift. Their method is divide and conquer: when they've lost ground they go "this far and not one step more" while still working out how to expel the nuveau riche who aren't REALLY "one of us" once they've held that line. Even their racism was originally a mechanism to divide and conquer the poor. (Racism is alive and well in the modern USA, casting it as a thing of the past is more divide and conquer excuses.)

The rich NEED the poor because without poor people being rich is meaningless. Bill Gates does not hire Warren Buffett to wash his car. To employ an entourage or harem, you MUST find people willing to devote their entire lives to chasing 0.01% of your wealth. If they too are wealthy this doesn't work. Wealth DISPARITY is how one person gets many people working to please them: inequality is CENTRAL to plutocracy. (Often with a three layer approach of 1) the plutocrats themselves, 2) a middle layer of skilled artisans useful to aristocracy, and 3) a bottom layer of homeless starving peasants used to terrify that middle layer into working AS HARD AS THEY POSSIBLY CAN for the plutocrats to avoid falling into that bottom layer.)

When "conservatives" can't exert enough control close to home, they go overseas and then try to import it back again from there. The GOP is a death cult. Not metaphorically: literally. (But remember, they're fascists not nihlists.) Misogynists are terrorists. Most terrorism has always been right wing terrorism, from KKK lynching to native genocides. The puritanical pearl clutching from the plutocrats is outright sad, and Boomercrats remain useless. Vaccines work. Defund the police and use the money for better things (like free ambulance services).


August 12, 2021

Still sick, thus a bit behind on the news, but glibc eliminated the copyright assignment requirement which has been a boat anchor around the neck of their development community since forever. Copyright assignment is something like 1/3 of the problem with FSF projects, and a big reason the 1998 usenix presentation of the cathedral and the bazaar used the GNU project as a "cathedral" example.

I'm still trying to field toybox requests but I'm _way_ underclocked right now, and don't really trust my technical judgement. (This illness has been going on what seems RIDICULOUSLY long, but there isn't a lot I seem to be able to do about it other than "hydrate" and "rest".)


August 11, 2021

Still sick.

Ubër is nearly bankrupt, and good riddance to them. You can still sing right wing loons are stupid to "every sperm is sacred". It turns out governments actually can do useful things when not intentionally sabotaged by plutocrats steering into into a ditch to prove a point while useless boomercrats wring their hands from the back seat in the name of unity and compromise and always meeting the other person's position halfway.


August 10, 2021

Still sick but very tired of lying around the house.

Fade got over the counter covid tests for Fuzzy and me (we both tested negative), and she went and got herself a professional one at a place that won't know the answer for a while yet, so I assume this at least means I'm not likely to pass Delta along to anyone else. (Yay vaccines work. Although having OTHER "knock you flat for a week" diseases going around during a pandemic seems like cheating somehow.)

The most annoying part is I've completely lost my sense of smell. (Everything tastes like nothing right now. Sometimes salty or acidic nothing.) To something that apparently ISN'T COVID, just HAS ALL THE SAME SYMPTOMS. Grrr. Really hoping the smell thing resolves itself ok, this is _boring_. And I vaguely worry about offending people around me because I can't confirm I _DON'T_ smell bad, especially with the "constantly sweating" part...

Heard back from the recruiter about Friday's call: they passed because they didn't think I'd done enough application development? Um... ok. (*shrug* I'm curious how they define "application", but always happy to stay away from companies that demonstrate we're not a good fit for each other.)

After successfully walking the dog (very slowly) around the block along with Fade and Fuzzy in the evening, I packed up my laptop and walked to the table. Also very, very slowly. Quite possibly inadvisedly. But Fuzzy felt well enough to go to fencing yesterday so... Ok, she's 3 days ahead of me on symptoms, so her feeling better now means I should feel better something like Thursday.

Nevertheless, I'm now at the table. I do not have the brain to do anything here. Wound up editing/finishing my past few days of blog entries so I could post them. (Which takes very little brain, but is ALMOST like accomplishing something. Janitorial flushing.)


August 9, 2021

Still sick. In bed all day again. Very, very tired of it. I feel like I'm malingering, but I get winded STANDING UP. I've advanced to the "coughing accomplishes nothing but inhaling fast makes a rumbling noise" stage, which is always fun.

Managed to check my email and reply to a couple things, but I'm NOT coherent enough to try to fix any programming issues right now.

The recruiter who set up the friday call called me 10 am this morning to say he hadn't heard anything yet, and that any news would go through people on the west coast who weren't in yet. So that's nice.

John Oliver is magnificantly petty (as announced toward the end of this week's show, if you wonder why I lobby for federal guillotines instead of taxes...) Disney is still being terrible. Facebook sucks. Significant numbers of police are right-wing loons and need defunding. The GOP's entire infrastructure is full-on fascist and the backbone of the modern GOP infrastructure is literally the Moonies (yes that cult from Airplane!). Boomers remain a problem.

*shrug* The usual. Going back to bed.


August 8, 2021

Sicker. Spent most of the day asleep. Accomplished nothing.

I have ZERO sense of smell at the moment. Hydrating like mad and mostly sweating it out. Sneezing a bunch, coughed my throat raw, and it feels like my sinuses are full of canker sores which I didn't know was an option? (And there's that fun thing where my upper teeth hurt in a way that no amount of mouthwash or toothbrushing affects because it's actually displaced sinus pressure.)

Not fun.


August 7, 2021

I walked to the table again last night, got the xabspath infrastructure changes checked in (which was a struggle, wasn't feeling properly coherent), went home early to sleep and woke up sick.

I really wanted to do the realpath changes taking advantage of the new xabspath infrastructure, but I get winded walking from the couch to the kitchen and back. Not heading to the table tonight.

My symptoms match what vaccinated people can expect from the delta variant, which is not entirely surprising. Today Fade and I got texts and calls from Austin's emergency system saying everybody "needs to" wear a mask. (Because they can't say "must": our nutball governor won't let us reimpose the mask mandate but if you get appendicitis right now you're gonna die because all the ICUs are full, although beds do become available again as the people in them die.)

All this might mean I've gotten covid THREE times (at approximately 6 month intervals): original recipe (from jury duty), south african variant (going around the Tokyo office in November), and now delta. But alas there's no point in trying to get tested to confirm it: what exactly would they do about it? I got vaccinated so it shouldn't be life threatening. (Fade meanwhile is trying to set up testing to see if she's got covid. This turns out to be very frustrating unless you want to pay about $300 on TOP of what your insurance covers; the clinic at Hancock Center says they do covid testing via phone appointment only, and the phone line says no one is available to take your call and hangs up on you. Whatever we have we got from Fuzzy, who has refused to wear a mask anywhere it isn't enforced ever since she got vaccinated, and had pretty much the same symptoms I do about 3 days earlier... and she's still sick. Wheee. Hasn't hit Fade hard yet, although she had two shots of Moderna and Fuzzy and I had one shot of J&J...)

*shrug* Maybe it's just a really bad head cold, but whatever I have is very, very annoying.


August 6, 2021

Phone interview with a potential employer a little after 5:30 my time (theirs too: this one's in Milwaukee but a different part of the city than last time I was there). It seemed to go well, but I'm unlikely to hear anything back before monday.

Walked to the table. Opened my backpack. Laptop was not in it. Walked back home. Picked up laptop. Walked back to the table. That's 6 miles so far with another 2 to go. Excercise is good, but it's possible I'm overdoing it today. (Then again back when I lived on Jollyville and walked to Metro on the drag, that was 7 miles each way...)

Oh I hate this, I'm redoing xabspath() so I'm running all the tests and the tar test just went:

FAIL: tar sparse without overflow
echo -ne '' | tar c --owner root --group root --mtime @1234567890 --sparse fweep | SUM 3
--- expected 2021-08-06 11:52:30.051553787 +0000
+++ actual 2021-08-06 11:52:30.055553787 +0000
@@ -1 +1 @@
-e1560110293247934493626d564c8f03c357cec5
+ede88727a239244ecef292528eb2abce2d615883

But it only happened ONCE. Cursor up and run it again, it did not fail the same way. I HATE THAT. I can't fix what I can't reproduce, and the tar tests check hashes because the raw output is way too big to compare. But then if anything DOES go wrong, and won't go wrong AGAIN, I can't see what the bad output WAS...

Hmmm. I assume if Elliott's guys were seeing this in Android testing (which the run a LOT) he'd mention it? Grrrr....

Anyway, I decoupled the various xabspath() modes into a bitfield and converted the users (except toys/pending/sh.c and toys/other/readlink.c, both of which are very dirty in my tree), and I was testing tar because commit b30fd4cb656d added xabspath mode -2 for tar (don't resolve a symlink on the last component), but alas it didn't add a tests/tar.test entry for it (sigh, technical debt), so I need to come up with one myself now.

I was also writing a demo_abspath for the examples directory, but now that I've finished converting xabspath I haven't got the energy to think through testing all the corner cases at the moment? (The extra 4 miles I walked before starting work on it are a possible contributing factor.)


August 5, 2021

The NYPD is even more broken than you can imagine. E-bay is evil (not surprising given they bought paypal, so the "paypal mafia" got their start as billionaires from ebay). A clear example of double standards. Defund the police, now in handy cartoon format. A formative story of childhood racism.


August 4, 2021

Ha, very amusing thread.

The maps showing how tiny the amount of earth's surface we'd need to replace all our fossil fuel usage with solar glosses over the massive transmission infrastructure to move power away from such a square. In the absence of room temperature superconductors, we're going to do distributed generation with not just the roof and sides of buildings covered with solar panels, but the windows collecting electricity too. (Which is an old idea that's been reinvented a half dozen times already, here's one from Korea and here's one from the Philippines.) Which of course means a large chunk of the electricity distribution network might wind up as a stranded asset? A lot depends on battery deployment which is a multi-pronged issue. I have NO idea what the energy industry is going to look like in the second half of this decade or the first half of the next, but "very unlike what we have now" is highly likely.

I wasted a couple hours trying to redo the xclose() infratructure to take a pointer argument so it could set the fd to -1. The actual function change is trivial, but changing all the callers in the tree isn't. I backed out several files of pending work to a big patch, started going though the users, found various cleanups, tested and checked them in, noticed that most close is the last use of that variable so setting it to -1 hardly ever helps and what we REALLY need is some sort of "open file, use it once, close it" wrapper but the only one that comes to mind in a generic way is would be a macro which doesn't really help...

Anyway, spent MORE time backing it all out again, which pops the stack back to changing xabspath() to be flag based instead of the "1, 0, -1, -2..." signaling that grew organically like a pile of dishes in the sink.


August 3, 2021

A thread about Louisiana's healthcare system melting down again (right now) under strain from Covid, because they're out of beds and out of staff. Sadly, Texas isn't doing that much better. If we have to vaccinate children to allow in-person school to start again in September, and they haven't cleared any vaccines for use on kids already, then lack of federally provided day care for the workforce is going to throw off the attempted "return to normal in September" timeline Biden's been aiming for. But Covid's health impact in children is becoming more pronounced as time goes on. A lot of historical diseases involve initial recovery and then the real problems show up later. On a short timeline that's how acute radiation sickness works. On a multi-decade timeline, the chicken pox virus stays in the body for decades before coming out again as shingles.

So I'm back at the table in the middle of the night instead of Wendy's. As socially distanced as it gets, trying to wait out the Delta surge.

I'm reading various threads about building clang, and I need to poke Elliott about where the Android NDK build script lives (if you google for it you get building WITH the Android NDK... poked). Meanwhile this linked to this which says "-DCLANG_LINK_CLANG_DYLIB:BOOL=OFF" is at least part of building an actual portable static llvm toolchain. (You know, I don't really _want_ to be building expertise in LLVM's build idiosyncrasies, but it's the next problem that needs solving.)

Meanwhile, 4 days ago Android added system/librustutils and Elliott's new boss is Google's corporate representative on the Rust Foundation board of directors. That decision is looking... kinda made at this point? Hmmm.

In theory adding rust to Android is no diffrent than java, python, lua, go, node.js, or any other language... UNLESS anti-C bigotry expresses itself as "we can do what they can do so you must replace it all with me me me" the way the C++ camp has been attacking C for 30 years now as its basic marketing strategy. I am entirely in favor of replacing C++ with Rust: it's not like it's going to get WORSE. But C is very good at what it does.

Years ago I was looking at reimplementing toybox in lua, but didn't because building lua and its dependencies was significant unnecessary complexity (requiring multiple packages from multiple maintainers), and lua is written in C so doing so couldn't remove any existing dependencies from the whole system, only add MORE.

I'm trying to create a minimal self-hosting system, and right now the 4 packages (kernel, commands, libc, compiler) needed to complete the circuit are all written in more or less the same language. To understand this entire system you have to learn ONE language (glossing over make and bash, which are both "run the source code" scripting languages mostly described by posix and implemented in C with implementations intended to be provided in toybox, and neither of which is something you'd want to try to implement sed/patch/tar/gzip in). The kernel->libc->process data is consistently represented without significant state transition handoffs (again, only "more or less" while using LLVM), and there are even tools like strace and readelf to pick them apart and examine them. You CAN, in theory, understand everything the system is doing without hopping between multiple implementation domains and worrying about translations between them other than "the system call layer".

To achieve the equivalent in rust would require a self-bootstrapping rust compiler (freestanding, I.E. without external dependencies), a kernel written entirely in only rust, and a rust standard library wrapping the system calls, at which point porting toybox to rust might made sense. (Once rust decides it's mature enough to have a stable ABI anyway.)

Right now, building the rust compiler apparently requires python, which is written in C. Even if a version of python written in rust were created (or python somehow developed a native code JIT implemented in pure python), that's still conceptually pulling in another entire programming language (and _its_ standard library) as a base dependency. Not in a "we depend on llvm and haven't rewritten that in rust yet" way, it's a dependency that exists because they didn't care about NOT depending on it. The result is not a small tidy circle capable of being binary audited with a finite budget, or read completely through and understood by a student with a year or two of study.

Toybox is currently 72k lines of C, musl is 58k lines, and the tinycc fork I worked on was 52k lines (with qemu's current tcg at 19k lines). These are all tractable for a human to understand, each is maybe a single semester community college course to fully explain. You could do all 3 in the same semester.

The Linux kernel is sigificantly larger, and an educational or build bootstrapping approach using a simpler kernel ala xv6 or one of the BSDs has its appeal. But "scaling to production" requires the range of hardware/driver support only Linux has collected, and nobody's ever quite worked out how to make device drivers fungible, so while you swap out different libc implementations (glibc/uClibc/musl/bionic) and different command lines (busybox/toybox/gnu/bsd) and different compilers (gcc/llvm today, and historically tinycc, open64, and intel's icc have all built a bootable Linux kernel; userspace is easy in comparison), but right now you can't switch the _kernel_ out the same way. (That'll come to a head eventually: Torvalds turns 65 in 2034 and GPLv3 has poisoned GPLv2 to everybody coming of age in the past decade to the point these days less than a quarter of the projects on github that DO state a license use any form of copyleft.)

I built mkroot's i686 kernel and looked at the .[chS] files corresponding to the resulting .o files, which gives 932k lines to wade through; about 24 megabytes of source code. (You could do a trick with atime to find all the files read by the build, trim that to "what's checked into git", and slim the result down by eliminating functions that don't wind up in the resulting build... but I didn't bother?)

For comparison, my notes-*.html blog files from 2002 to today are just under 10 megabytes of text, so a "simple" Linux kernel build is 2.5 times as much text as I've blogged. Blogging ain't my day job, and writing takes way longer than reading, so I'd guess understanding "what we use of Linux" is feasible, albeit a big lift. (And llvm is a pig written in C++, but I repeat myself. The phrase "false economy" prefectly describes C++'s supposed "advantages", but that's its own whole rant...)

Once again, I haven't come to a coherent conclusion, just taken a swipe over a dataset and gone "hmmm". Which is pretty much my position on this topic so far.


August 2, 2021

Woo, 70% of US adults have had at least one dose of vaccine. (There's at least 3 qualifiers in there, but hey...)

Interesting observation that the pandemic is a social divide like the great depression was (and arguably 9/11), such that people with clear memories of the pandemic are "Gen Z", while people too young to remember are... apparently we're calling them Gen Alpha now? Add in Generation Jones (which is to the Boomers what the Silent Generation was to all those World War II veterans; often lumped together yet raised with very different formative experiences) and demographers are likely to have a lot to talk about if we collectively survive long enough.

I got asked (in private email) why I haven't added the "runit" command suite to toybox. For the record, my answer was:

It's not part of the 1.0 release roadmap. There's a bunch of "maybe" stuff after 1.0 I haven't looked too deeply into yet. (For example, I think it would be great if toybox had screen and rsync, but they're not in the 1.0 todo list.)

I've got most of a system v init in pending already (from an external contribution), and I wrote "oneit" so my /bin/sh could have a proper controlling tty with signal delivery. My own systems mostly run a shell script as PID 1, which hands off to "the app" (often via oneit).

Android already has its own init (which they built from scratch). Over the years I've looked at openrc, upstart, that s6 init thing, OSX's launchd, and at Tokyo LinuxFest in 2015 I sat down with Lennart Pottering to have him explain systemd to me (which resulted in lots of notes but no actual code yet).

When I looked at Dan Bernstein's daemontools (which runit presumably reimplemented) no distros were using it. Yes, I read Denys' page on why he likes it and wasn't convinced: he starts out by saying he hit a bug in another package, and rather than fixing that one bug he went off on a big tangent.

Runit is also not simple or self-contained: a quick grep of busybox's "runit" directory finds ELEVEN applets in there, and runit's own man page talks about stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3 as things I'd need to know to use it. (Meanwhile busybox's svinit didn't even support runlevels because that was unnecessary complexity.)

This package is not in posix, LSB, or man7.org section 1, it's not installed by default on debian, not needed for a self-hosting development environment, not used by android, and is one of a half-dozen candidates to provide an alternative to sysvinit (which I haven't even bothered finishing and moving out of pending yet).

(And since then I've been reading more of their man pages and... really?

To signal runit(8) the system halt request, runit-init removes all permissions of the file /etc/runit/reboot (chmod 0), and sets the execute by owner permission of the file /etc/runit/stopit (chmod 100). Then a CONT signal is sent to runit(8).

I remember now why I wasn't a fan. (I've been poking at init stuff since the busybox days. Sadly I've forgotten more about this stuff than I remember, but I know where to look it up again...)

The big todo item things like upstart tried to solve was running init tasks in parallel for speed, and THAT raised the spectre of init tasks having dependencies (which you also get from hotplug, so this is all basically genericizing hotplug infrastructure to bring the system up that way in the first place).

An example of dependencies are that if you want to bring up a persistent ssh tunnel for port forwarding, you can't launch sshd until dhcp gives you an address, which may wait for usb bus probing to find the network device... The hotplug layer supported dynamic device probing making /dev nodes suddenly appear which need responding to, but this isn't exactly a config file responding to a single specific device showing up. Waiting to launch an app once a network filesystem mount comes up can involve branching dependencies with multiple prerequisites asynchronously completing, and even if you busy-wait for them when the system comes up what if later eth0 went away and came back because of a transciever link toggle when somebody stepped on the cable, so kill and restart the "services" that need to know about that... Alas, too far down that path leads you to systemd (which is a bad thing).

Oddly enough, the first public attempt at doing parallel init with dependencies on Linux was an IBM engineer using "make -j" as init, which was a classic "don't ask questions, post errors" approach that got everybody else immediately trying to implement something better ASAP to prevent THAT horrible solution from spreading and taking hold as any kind of de-facto standard.

The first mover to actually deploy was Ubuntu's "upstart", but Cannonical made so many terrible technical decisions all in a row (switching /bin/sh from bash to dash, switching to the "unity" desktop, replacing x11 with mir instead of Wayland, trying to promote the bazaar source control system instead of git, and generally picking every wrong horse imaginable simultaneously) that tech originating in Ubuntu became a kiss of death. (Ironically I myself jumped ship off of Xubuntu when the last version without systemd went out of LTS: the bad ideas they failed to reject were more damaging than the bad ideas they introduced.)

If you're Not Going There on parallel init with dependencies, sysvinit is fine. (Or just running a PID 1 shell script to set up the system, which can exec something else at the end to hand off PID 1: keep in mind shell parallism is as simple as sticking & on the end of a line and then doing a "wait $!" later if you want to join up again.)

If you _are_ going there, runit isn't really sufficient.

I also note that (years ago) oneit grew a "-3" option which would write the 32 bit PID of each exiting process to the child's file descriptor #3, so that orphan processes that got reparented to init could be tracked (and restarted as necessary) by the child process. So this whole "stage 1/2" thing that they're on about: I already DID that, and left 2 as an exercise for the reader because specifying the dependencies between packages is a whole config file format can't of worms I didn't want to open. (It's in the "read my systemd notes and figure out the 80/20 on that" todo heap. In theory packages that DO care about systemd are providing some sort of config file specifying their dependencies, and that's why they care? I guess?)


August 1, 2021

A couple of updates on Disney screwing people over.

Ah. The problem with Blizzard is it's been taken over by Trump appointees. That administration's revolving door castoffs were hired by Activision/Blizzard to run the company, and have destroyed it. (And a good follow-up thread.)

A story of how white men at the World Health Organization ignored women engineers and physicists (and men named Yuguo Li and Jose-Luis Jimenez) who were telling them they had the physics of covid transmission provably wrong.

Machine learning (AI) has been 100% useless dealing with covid.

Boomercrats refuse to prosecute anything. They're better than the alternative but still profoundly frustrating. They need to hand off to the the squad, which will only happen when the Boomers die. So we're waiting, but letting the other side cheat without sanction is not a recipe for success.

The way vaccines work is an informed immune system prevents localized "hangnail" style infections from spreading through the body. This means reinfection is small and short-lived, but it can't prevent localized infections because the regular cells are still vulnerable to the virus and it takes the immune cells a while to get there. That's why vaccinated people can pass on the virus, not as widely as unvaccinated people whose entire body turns into a virus factory for days, but once there are more OF the vaccinated people, our 1/8 as contagious spreading becomes a significant vector in infecting the unvaccinated. (Even without a full "breakthrough" infection.)

Fascists attempting to go back to the past.

Billionaires continue to demand guillotines, especially supporting an entire lies for hire industry (which Boomer media does nothing to counter).

We're building new ghost towns.

Phones are even more privacy invasive than we thought, especially the accelerometer and front-facing camera.


July 31, 2021

Elliott mentioned that realpath -s is a thing he needs to make AOSP hermetic building happen, and it was already on my todo list but I've been reminded. Except the first thing "realpath" really needs is a whole lot more test cases: figuring out how "don't resolve symlinks" interacts with /../ removal in the presence of -e or --relative-to and so on. (There's no spec, it's all testing the debian one. I've already found two places the debian one is clearly wrong, one of which I'm doing right in toybox and the other of which I'm doing the wrong way for compatibility.)

The other thing I need to do is make toybox's xabspath() api more flexible. It really wants to be a bitfield, except the various behaviors it has right now are either/or things not bits? I need a range of behaviors with a bitfield imposed on top of them? (Two arguments maybe? Hmmm... Either way, all the callers need to change.)

Speaking of --relative-to, I never did fix that did I? (Which even mentions realpath --relative-to.) Sigh. The "tabsplosion" failure mode is piling up half-finished things because I'm too busy to close off and commit things I did half of.

Fuzzy got back in the evening and the agenda became "decamp to the HEB parking lot where we put all her stuff into airtight plastic bags for sorting later and threw out the luggage". And the "put the clothes straight into the washing machine because roaches drown" theory led to the discovery that the dryer is dying. (Washing machine got replaced a couple months back, dryer is now getting WAY TOO HOT and making alarming noises. I'm expecting a clothesline-based solution for the short term, until this whole job hunt situation is sorted. We CAN get a new one, but shouldn't just now.)


July 30, 2021

Heard back from Patreon's bug report people about their javascript throwing an error and intentionally erasing the page after it's already loaded and rendered. They sent me a form letter that made it very clear they didn't read my bug report.

Jul 30, 2021, 11:41 AM PDT

Hi Rob,

Thank you for writing to the Patreon support team — I know it can be frustrating when things don’t work, so let’s go through a few steps to fix or diagnose what’s happening here. Please retry after each step, and if one step solves things then there’s no need to go on to the next.

While on a strong internet connection (WiFi or data),

Google fiber, I am less than 10 feet from the router.

please go through these 4 steps:

1. Clear your browser cookies and cache. This Google guide will help you with that on Chrome, and if you use Firefox this doc will help

2. Restart your device, and reattempt using the most recent version of *Chrome* or *Firefox*. Even if your browser is up-to-date, try again using a different browser

I have tried turning it off and back on again, yes. It is the most recent version of chrome.

So your answer is "don't use chrome, patreon does not support the chrome browser"? Good to know, I'll pass that on.

3. Remove add-ons, ad-blockers, and any browser extensions that did not originally come with your browser. The added software may be interfering with Patreon

So you didn't read my original message about there not being any and how I'd checked to confirm that?

4. Lastly, log in using an incognito (private) browser session and retry

As I said I already tried that and it didn't help. I blogged about it at the time.

If these steps don’t resolve things, please take a screenshot of your *entire browser window* with the developer console opened. This will allow me to review exactly what you’re experiencing on your end to further investigate this.

You mean the error messages I included in the original report? *shrug* I can send you a graphical representation of a subset of them, sure. (Attached.)

Here’s how to open your browser’s developer console:

I figured it out, thanks. (That's how I sent you the error messages in the original report.)

Sigh. I'd say 90% likely what I have to do is configure the user-agent to lie to patreon, but I think what ACTUALLY happened is that Google eliminated user-agent and its new "privacy sandbox" stuff is confusing patreon's stupid javascript, and of course its error handling path BLANKS THE PAGE. (What is it with stupid error handlers turning something harmless into a complete failure? You'd think Steinbach's Guideline would apply here.)

(There appears to be a fad of attributing that quote to a book author who quoted it, except that author was born in 1962 and I first saw the quote in a button catalogue in 1984 as an "old saying". Older sources all attribute it to Steinbach. I suppose somebody could ask him...)


July 29, 2021

Oil companies are moving out and leaving the mess behind while still fighting a vicious rearguard action. (Fun new phrase: "morally stranded assets".)

Huge amounts of modern "AI" just reinvents phrenology and tarot reading. (An app that reads tea leaves can produce reproducible weather prediction output from reproducible pictures of bottoms of teacups input without actually _meaning_ anything. "Same input produces same output" is just a hash function.)

Capitalism remains incompatible with human life. Today's employee Disney is using any business model change as an excuse to weasel out of paying: Scarlett Johansson. (And of course they're escalating the slime.) It doesn't matter how high profile you are, it's the exact same thing they were doing refusing to pay authors a couple months back. Late stage capitalism is about screwing over everyone you can, in every way you can, using every conceivable excuse and perpetually searching for more exploits to feed the "endless growth" paradigm. You can't just milk a cash cow, you MUST kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and squeeze blood from every stone or the investors will have management replaced.

Defund the police. After the last Boomer dies the survivors need to figure out how to sustain fact checking as a public service ala wikipedia (only, you know, consistently correct). Performative masculinity as multi-level-marketing scam. Ending the carceral state turns out to be easy when you're not us. RIP Itanium.


July 28, 2021

I'm still trying to strip out some of the hexagon-specific micromanagement from the llvm build script, specifically the clang-rt module (their libgcc replacement; still has nothing to do with librt.so which predates linux). Telling the llvm base project to just build all its targets seemed to work, as in it didn't take noticeably longer to compile and the result worked as a prefixed hexagon cross compiler, albeit the main compiler binary is over 100 megabytes. But then I don't remember how big it was before, and it _is_ written in C++ so pig city is expected. (Slow to build, big to run: the C++ way. Template expansion!)

I then compared clang -print-targets with hexagon's arch directory and it looks like clang's "arm64 arm i386 mips mips64 ppc32 ppc64 thumb hexagon systemz" targets should all work with musl? (Assuming "thumb" compiles as "arm" for musl, I've built a cortex-m static PIE toolchain so I think it has to, but...? I continue not to care about Open Itanium.)

Which means musl's configure needs something like:

-arm*) ARCH=arm ;;
-aarch64*) ARCH=aarch64 ;;
+arm64*|aarch64) ARCH=aarch64 ;;
+thumb*|arm*) ARCH=arm ;;
-s390x*) ARCH=s390x ;;
+s390x*|systemz*) ARCH=s390x ;;

...to understand the clang names, although maybe that last one should go the other way? (Teach clang to understand s390x, since the kernel calls it s390 not "zseries"?) Dunno. In any case, "arm" seems like a good starting point both sides agree on (not a native compile, but the most used platform that isn't x86. Well, modulo 32/64 bit but let's start with 32...) So let's throw that at the clang-rt build and see what happens.

First it complains clang-13: warning: unknown platform, assuming -mfloat-abi=soft with basically every file it compiles (I'm assuming you have a sane default, that's why I didn't specify!) and then dies with CMake Error at lib/scudo/standalone/CMakeLists.txt:14 (string): string sub-command REGEX, mode REPLACE needs at least 6 arguments total to command. which is just SAD. It's because CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS wasn't set, so I set it to "-pipe" (the most NOP thing I could find) and THEN it died with sanitizer_platform_limits_posix.cpp:1043:1: error: static_assert failed due to requirement '__builtin_offsetof(__sanitizer::__sanitizer_dirent, d_off) == __builtin_offsetof(dirent, d_off)' "" CHECK_SIZE_AND_OFFSET(dirent, d_off);

Next question: how hard is it to just write my own libcc replacement? Because THIS codebase is too stupid to live. I tried adding -DCOMPILER_RT_BUILD_SANITIZERS=OFF and the build is ignoring it. Even after deleting the build-rt directory and confirming that yes that's how you're supposed to disable it (not some magic case sensitive "=False" or something). Right, to get it to stop including that directory I had to ALSO whack-a-mole -DCOMPILER_RT_BUILD_XRAY=OFF and -DCOMPILER_RT_BUILD_MEMPROF=OFF and THEN it advanced to failing with (yes, the lack of newlines is in the original):

lvm-project/compiler-rt/lib/builtins/arm/sync_fetch_and_max_4.S:18:193: error: instruction requires: data-barriers
.p2align 2; .thumb; .syntax unified; .arm ; ; .globl __sync_fetch_and_max_4 ; .type __sync_fetch_and_max_4,%function ; .hidden __sync_fetch_and_max_4 ; ; .thumb_func ; __sync_fetch_and_max_4: dmb; mov r12, r0; .L_tryatomic_max_4 : ldrex r0, [r12]; cmp r0, r1; mov r2, r1; it gt; movgt r2, r0; strex r3, r2, [r12]; cmp r3, #0; bne .L_tryatomic_max_4; dmb; bx lr

Which... it's building out of the arm subdirectory, presumably has figured out how to use an arm assembler to do it, and it's complaining about needing barriers? What? Alright, throw a few of those error message keywords at Google and we get a bug report about armv4/5/6/7 instruction set version skew. Great. Whatever arm variant this is defaulting to is... I want to say too old? To support the assembly compiler-rt has. There are arm instruction set version assumptions baked into the compiler-rt assembly, not in an obviously documented way, and it does NOT match the clang+llvm arm default target.

I'd go back to Khem Raj's yocto build, but that's just layer upon layer of bitbake and such to drill through trying to find anything useful. I have 72 lines of shell script that are ALMOST doing this, and the specific package I'm trying to build now takes 16 lines of bash to build it (which has no excuse to be even half that long). But no, giant overdesigned build systems, only reason to dig through them so I can throw 99% of it away...

Sigh, it smells like I need to feed -march into this but there's no obvious way to do that? And no obvious way to get the supported -march list, as in there's five year old presentations about maybe fixing that someday as the first google hit. Hmmm. (I found "llc -march=arm -mattr=help" which has v5t as something I feed into the _mattr_ option... to -march? To the _linker_? This is the compile and code generation phase barfing...)

Time to subscribe to the mailing list... which has normal subscriptions disabled because of course it does. Let's try emailing their magic address... no immediate reply. Wait for somebody to notice I guess.


July 27, 2021

Managed to pill the cat this morning on the third attempt. I'm out of practice. My back gave a very awkward and painful twinge trying to gently place said cat and a bowl of wet food on top of the chest freezer (where the dog can't eat it) afterwards; leaning at an unusual angle while holding a squirming 10 pound cat and something in one's other hand: apparently contraindicated. I lay down immediately, and took some ibuprofin. That ate 2 hours, but I have no interest in back problems becoming chronic, thank you. (Getting covid twice over the past 18 months has already required some recovery when it comes to "joint issues", I'm not taking chances here.)

The baby incubator job fell through (that offer I'd accepted was rescinded) because a candidate who'd previously interviewed with them but took a job at Nasa instead became available again (_his_ new job didn't work out?), and the boss of the manager I interviewed with wanted him. I suppose this is karma for me cancelling on the people with the bad NDA last week, what goes around. I would of course MUCH rather do the Google thing... which is not noticeably more real than it was on friday. If it was a "definitely will happen" I'd be willing to hold out a couple months for it... but at this point they don't know either. If it's the kind of thing that goes into the Q1 2022 budget, the obvious thing to do is start a six month contract ASAP so it's wrapping up when they're ready to start. Once again, I'm making decisions based on insufficient info, because NOT making a decision is itself a decision. (The human experience in a nutshell.)

Anyway, after last week I didn't treat the incubator job as real until the ink was dry on the paperwork they never sent me (Vindicated! Unexpectedly!), and thus I didn't cancel other in-progress interviews, so I had my first programming test in years today as a second round interview.

Generally these days people see a 20+ year resume of Doing The Thing and they assume I can Do The Thing. Plus open source developers have not just a resume but also a public portfolio where people can see code you've done (as a commit history if they like), and can even search other projects you mention to see if any commits (or even series of commits) have your name on them. But that wasn't this company's procedure, they needed a Microsoft Teams call (with video) while we all logged into a website, for a job that does not allow telecommuting but would need me to show up there in person every day.

*shrug* Did the thing. Seemed to go ok? I make a function that calculates the number of days in a month, and then made a set of tests for that function, then started redoing those tests because they wanted automated pass/fail instead of human readable output (then half the time was spent with them trying to get me to guess what kind of test format they wanted), and then I had to answer questions about what could go wrong with two variable assignments in two threads with no locking.

It was hard to tell quite what they thought because the quarterly pest control service showed up shortly before the test, and Fade's dog Adverb (who is already neurotic because he came to the southern den with Fade and then SHE ABANDONED HIM) absolutely freaked at the stranger in the house until I locked him in the bedroom to bark at the door. And I needed to talk to the bug guy about what to do about Fuzzy's luggage when she gets back on Saturday from helping clean her mother's new york city roach infested apartment that's gone full episode-of-hoarders bad with a 70 year old woman living alone during the pandemic. (Fuzzy's cleaning everything she can, but her mom won't throw stuff out.) I can't put the luggage in the shed because it turns out there's mice in the shed (zabina has been unwell), but I couldn't open it for the bug guy because Fuzzy changed the lock on the shed and I don't have that key. He left me roach traps, and mouse traps, and landscaping advice to cut the weeds that are providing cover for mice/rats in our yard (this whole area of austin is full of them because of all the pecans and acorns for them to eat). And he sprayed indoors while I was doing the coding test, with Peejee being her usual "this is why I've been going out to a booth at Wendy's and such for YEARS now" clingy must-hold-the-cat 18 year old self.

During said programming test I got a voicemail from another recruiter. (Calling him back afterward was how I found the incubator job had cancelled. Did you know that if you try to dismiss the incoming conventional phone call notification while Microsoft Teams is running, the phone call dialog gets STUCK and the only way to make it go away is to reboot the phone? This is why I never run any Microsoft software on anything when I can help it.) And I got email from the recruiter who'd arranged the interview this test was the second half of, wondering if I'd be interested in an opening at an electric car company (sounds like fun, and they allow telecommuting). So the process continues with various irons in the fire, despite two misfires so far.

In the evening I sent another way too long reply to Elliott's boss's email I hadn't had the energy to reply to yesterday. (Pascal's apology again, but lack of spoons more than time; trying to be concise meets geek infodump giving him all the backstory he needs to understand the scope of my ambitions bwahahaha... without scaring him off, AFTER spending hours dealing with recruiters and interviews and sick cat and a possible back injury and the bug guy and neurotic dog who kept barking randomly at smells for the rest of the day.) So that's progressing. Last time I engaged with Google's "process" it took 7 months to get a "please start over", but that was a lifetime ago in internet years (pre-alphabet even) and I didn't know anybody already working there, I'm hoping this one is shorter. But I'm not expecting it to contribute to next month's mortgage payment, which is month 3 of not being paid by my old job...

I have a definite favorite among the possibilities in play, but I can't control what gets offered or when, only what I choose to take from what's presented to me. I've reached the "I want to huddle in a ball and hide" stage of the job interview process, which is the traditional halfway point. Fade gets back tomorrow and I need to Clean All The Things before her plane gets in. No idea where I'll find the energy for that, but hey, I've got until morning...


July 26, 2021

Job hunt continues. Today's follow-up interview got bumped to tomorrow, because they wanted to bump it to 3pm but I had to take Zabina to the cardiologist at 3:30, and then they wanted to bump it to 1pm but that's when Fade and I were having the call with the banker about increasing the home equity loan (in case job search takes a while).

I wound up taking a lyft to the wrong cardiologist location (they have two!), but they were very nice and saw me there instead. They diagnosed Zabina with genetic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is incurable and fatal, but properly medicated (4 pills per day) she might last 2 more years.

I have more email to reply to, and work to do, but I'm out of energy.

I did get the hexagon build script working and I'm on to poking at qemu-system-hexagon. (Quite possibly implementing it because it turns out it's not there yet. Thought it was, but no.)


July 25, 2021

Twitter is spectacularly bad at being twitter.

If you stimulate your economy, it goes up. If you take money away from people, the local economy tanks. Republicans will never understand this.

Austin was ahead of the curve on all this flooding, it's everywhere now: London, Belgium, Turkey, India, Costa Rica... Heck, Las Vegas is flooding. (How?) Arizona is flooding. (The name means "Arid Zone". It has no water = why it is called that. And it has a monsoon season now.) Apparently the pandemic and flooding in China is domestically being interpreted to mean Emperor Xi of the Communist dynasty has lost the mandate of heaven. (And they are censoring the HECK out of that interpretation.)

Of course Biden the Boomercrat let Trump's climate denying nasa head ship a report saying "moon wobbles" would cause flooding... starting in 2030. Billionaires are still trying to blame climate change on anything that would let them continue to pump and burn oil, and humans still suck at wrapping their heads around exponential growth. It's not 2030, it's now. We're simultaneously on fire and under water, and it's getting worse every year. The GOP is blatantly using the classic four stage strategy from the 1986 BBC sitcom Yes, Prime Minister, and the boomercrats don't call them on it because Good Cop's job is to provide cover for Bad Cop.

Intellectual property law has to collapse at some point: the "twilight" series (movie series box office $3.3 billion) started as harry potter fanfic, fifty shades of grey (the first movie did $570 million) started as twilight fanfic, and the trend of acknowleding your sources is growing (in part because they're harder to hide now that everything is searchable), but the corporate IP regime is trying very hard to eliminate fair use to the point where doing that today is seen as a threat to the online fanfic archives that only survive by rigidly enforcing "not for profit" status.

The IP uproar du jour is because the moneygrubbing idiots who bought tumblr (rather than let pornhub get it and run it sanely) screwed up their most recent rapacious overreach, because they're idiots. And the people who suffer aren't the corporate owners, they're the users and sites like AO3. The Boomers currently in charge care nothing about sustainability, they'll be dead in a few years and want to milk everything they can from the last moments their boots are on everyone else's faces. Capitalists constantly invent new ways to extract money from people the same way bacteria and viruses find new ways to infect and evade antibiotics.


July 24, 2021

Aha! My chrome windows switch desktops when I start typing the URL of something I already have a tab for and it gives me a "switch to this tab" botton. Instead of jumping to that desktop, it summons the window to the current desktop. I don't even know WHO to poke about that one. (Linux on the desktop! Smell the usability!)

So making flashcp work means getting a test environment setup, and that means using the mtdblock driver to fake an mtd device under qemu, except of course when I go "-hda block.img" qemu spits out "I refuse to let you write to block 0 of this because you didn't use the new eldrich device specification mechanism that wraps around 3 lines on an 80 column console to specify a single device".

Of course on qemu-system-i386 you can't see the error message because QEMU's bios output gratuitously clears the screen so the warning flashes by and gets erased, but if you pipe the output to a file you can spot it and then grep for it in the source, so you can patch it out:

--- a/block.c
+++ b/block.c
@@ -3715,3 +3715,3 @@
     /* Image format probing */
-    bs->probed = !drv;
+    bs->probed = 0;
     if (!drv && file) {

This USED to work just fine, the QEMU a commit that caused the regression was a bad fix for a KVM exploit caused by them overcomplicating things (-hda feeds in a raw image, if you want qcow say -qcow) And their solution to "relying on in-band signaling turns out to be user-exploitable" was to break -hda. Great.

Grrr. They want me to move to "-drive format=raw,file=block.img". They'll break that in a few more years, just wait...

Trying to tidy up pending commits to work towards a toybox release, my www/license.html file is dirty with various "why 0BSD" and the start of a "history of 0BSD" section, and editing that I got curious what packages in AOSP actually _are_ still licensed GPL or similar, and doing a "find aosp -iname '*MODULE_LICENSE*' | grep -i GPL" and going through the resulting hits, the _interesting_ stuff looks like it's all in the "external" directory:

kmod mtools iptables libusb exfatprogs elfutils f2fs-tools fec libexif libcap-ng squashfs-tools e2fsprogs libnetfilter_conntrack libiio libnfnetlink libfuse iproute2 dtc selinux libcups blktrace dnsmasq libnl lz4 gptfdisk erofs-utils

Half of which is linux interface glue libraries like "libusb" that... really shouldn't exist? Just access the kernel API directly already. Some of the rest (like kmod) is already on the toybox roadmap.

That list isn't quite everything, but it's what interests me. There's openjdk and friends because of a legal dispute, not any technical reason. Several test suites and build-time tools don't ship on the device; as with toybox still using kconfig: meh. I included "dtc" because I'm interested in that (although the data files it parses are also mostly GPL, which is why none of the BSDs or MacOS will touch it, and why ARM got an acpi port. 100% self-inflicted wound there, the kernel devs had that argument back in 2015 and sanity lost. Oh well.) There's also some GPL code written _in_ java (such as tools/external/fat32lib) that I don't have much opinion on (they'll probably rewrite it in rust when they move off java; no idea when that'll be). I included libexif because I'm curious about what it does: why is that big enough to have a _library_? I didn't include external/hyphenation-patterns because document layout and font rendering isn't an existing area of interest.

Possibly this should be another roadmap section, but it's far enough post-1.0 that I'm not focusing there yet. I'm trying to close tabs at the moment, not open more...


July 23, 2021

Texts from the City of Austin reinstating the mask mandate, even for vaccinated people, due to the Delta variant. Except it's a "recommendation" instead of a mandate because the GOP loons in charge are homicidal, but the hospital system is down to 31 free ICU beds. (Can I still go to program at a booth at Wendy's between rush hours? Dunno.)

Got a job offer at a place that makes baby incubators 5 miles from my house, 6 month contract with option to extend. Said yes, but they still haven't sent me the paperwork. (After last job's NDA shenanigans, I'm not counting it until I see everything I'm expected to sign...)

If I do want to maintain my japanese residence card/status, I'd need to schedule a couple weeks in Japan sometime between now and December 15 (the one year anniversary of flying back from Tokyo).

Two hours later: Elliott emailed introducing me to his new boss, and asked me for a quote for finishing the toybox infrastructure needed by the AOSP hermetic build. Um... wow. I... do not currently have the emotional energy to handle this, but I'll happily expend an adrenaline surge here. Got the reply sent back around 6pm california time so probably won't hear back before Monday. If this was a sure thing I would call the incubator people back to apologize, but at what point is a dream job "asking for a quote" that may not get funding and which for all I know might last 2 weeks if it does happen (and not actually turn into reality for months) worth pissing off not just a potential employer but the recruiting company that got me the JCI job? I mean, cancelling same day is more or less the job equivalent of the 5 second rule for food on the floor (gauche but acceptable)... but this isn't an offer, it's just an inquiry. *uncertainty intensifies*

I was all set to go out to the table after that (no WAY I could sleep), but Jeff called again and at first we talked about other stuff, but of course an hour into the conversation it worked around to why his current project MUST include issuing a new coin (for the same reason issuing new PGP signatures and having any mechanism of verifying who each signature represents, such as keysigning parties or putting an https URL on a known website, could never historically have been done without first issuing a new crypto coin and any examples of that happening must have been hallucinations)... he TRIED to explain it to me. Repeatedly. And after an hour and a half of that conversation, I went to bed instead of going to the table.

(Yeah yeah, I'm backfilling Friday's blog entry on saturday. I slept through until morning. It's a little like having an alcoholic friend: any conversation eventually turns to him wanting me to study Etherium's cargo cult version of RFCs to help him "design data structures that minimize gas usage" and I just can't.)


July 22, 2021

After three phone interviews with potential employers, plus Jeff calling to explain how doing blockchain stuff is the only way forward for the company and I NEED to focus on it and engage with it and learn blockchainitude because there is no alternative... I was too exhausted to leave the house the rest of the day. (I packed up ready to go out the door and to try to program at my usual outdoor picnic table outside the UT geology building and then just... went to sleep instead. I lay down and did an "alarm in 30 minutes" and reset it twice, then just slept until morning.)

I've been putting "programming" and "politics" tags around my even/odd entries this year because I keep meaning to tweak the rss feed generator to produce multiple feeds so people who don't want to read my venting can have it skipped for them, but... today isn't programming. Or politics. (Or "health" or "energy" or computer history or any of the other tags I've occasionally used.) Today is just tired.


July 21, 2021

Billionaires should not be allowed to exist.

Removing parking spaces increases revenue, even WITHOUT robotaxis.

Boomercrats are useless can be sung to "every sperm is sacred". Boomer media is not helping.

Defund the police.

Late stage capitalism is collapsing into disaster capitalism, where the pain and destruction they cause is the direct source of their profits. (Clearcutting society itself, plus regulatory capture ala Citizens United and the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.)


July 20, 2021

The Audacity project is getting worse. Notice how the project being licensed GPL has been precisely zero help to anyone.

Fade flew off to visit friends in Maryland for a week, and I'm staying home today reassuring the clingiest dog. I stayed home/up with Fade until she left for the airport at 3:30 am, and then tried to sleep except for SEVEN PHONE CALLS from recruiters starting at 8:30 am. I have two interviews tomorrow (I need to reinstall the Microsoft Teams app on my phone for them; I've already got something like 4 different videophone apps on my phone but no, they need the Microsoft one. To interview for Linux positions. Wheee.)

No programming today. Not up for it. But hey, Denys merged cut -DF into busybox.

I need to work out the UI for toybox flashcp. I don't really want to make 6 flash commands, and having a separate nandflash command from norflash command seems silly? But need more brain than I have to throw at it right now, job hunting is a looming persistent debuff. Too much uncertainty to plan anything...


July 19, 2021

Fade and Fuzzy are both up north and having trouble breathing. Jeff also sent me this news piece of the wildfire smoke in canada with the comment "it arrived here yesterday".

As broken as Austin is with the performative GOP lunacy, so far our weather is less bad than most places. Yeah, Austin got a monsoon season 5 years before _everybody_ got a monsoon season, but once we coped with the _rate_ increase that was causing flash flooding, we have pretty good drainage that could adjust to the increased throughput. Meanwhile Houston being underwater is now a regular event that merely stopped being newsworthy after hurricane Harvey. The extra rain may actually have cooled Austin down a little, it's barely hit 100 degrees yet this year; last year we'd hit 108 by now and in 2018 it was 110 June 23rd. (Yeah yeah, Freedom Units. "It's been below 40C all year, last time that happened was 2007". Famous last words with August coming up, of course...)

The floods hitting Germany and such are just as bad in china. It is NOT "moon wobbles", it is global climate change. Here's an article from 1912 titled "coal consumption affecting climate". It was never unknown, only vigorously denied by those who profited from it, I.E. the same people who gave us leaded gasoline.

The difference between the GOP and the Boomercrats is the GOP thinks 1955 was the perfect year and the Boomercrats think 1975 was. Both sets of Boomers are trying to recapture a "glorious imaginary past" when the world was better because they weren't so old yet, they just disagree on whether everything peaked before the Millennials were born or before GenX was born.

A surprising amount of things the Boomers take for granted, such as american gender roles (forcing Rosie the Riveter and her World War I era Flapper mother back into their bottles) didn't exist before World War II. Between the 1929 stock market crash, the great depression (and New Deal bringing plumbing/electricity/telephones into everybody's home), and a worldwide military mobilization that gave us antibiotics, computers, jet aircraft and nuclear weapons (and led to the interstate highway system)... the world CHANGED DRASTICALLY right before the 1950's. The world the Boomers grew up in was brand new and large swathes of it were always PROFOUNDLY unstable. Things that COULD NOT persist more than their lifetimes. These days everybody else's normal is trauma from Boomer abusers, and that gets to END soon.

It's kind of amusing how much classified intel capitalist data collection has sucked up and published over the years. ("Security by obscurity" doesn't always survive contact with legions of bored hobbyists in an internet connected world, but it DEFINITELY doesn't survive for-profit algorithmic data mining with no regard for who gets hurt by sending a teenager's bible-thumping father diaper coupons in her name.)

There are no good billionares: millionaires do the good things that billionaires don't. (That's how they become/stay millionaires instead of billionaires. Once their own needs are met, they give the extra away. And "your own personal needs met, for life" kicks in at 7 figures, 8 if you're nervous about healthcare expenses not being covered by insurance, nine if you're supporting quite a large entourage ala Downton Abbey or Dollywood.)

Defund the police.

Nudism FTW.


July 18, 2021

An amusing anecdote about memory leaks in missiles. (Know your environment and what your program is trying to accomplish.)

As lithium demand increases, new mining operations are scaling up. It's not exactly rare: the earth's crust has 1/3 as much lithium as copper, which is 1/3 more lithium than lead, 250 times more lithium than silver, and 5000 times as much lithium as gold. Plus lithium dissolves in water so you don't have to pan for it, just find old dry lakebeds or brine from once-large seas that concentrated the lithium for you. (And of course there's 5000 times as much lithium in the ocean as on land, but it's too dilute to be economically viable unless it's collected as a side effect of water desalination, the way cobalt is mined as a side effect of copper mining.)

Speaking of which, electric bicycles are outselling electric cars 3 to 1. If your commute is five miles or less and the weather is reasonable, an electric bike makes pretty good sense.

Sigh. I've composed a response to the hexagon guys twice and thunderbird has crashed and taken out my reply both times. (Kmail would save half-finished replies and pop the windows back up when the program restarted 15 years ago. Thunderbird is still not that advanced yet, because Mozilla.) Alright, lemme collect the info HERE and then cut and paste it into thunderbird:

They pointed me at the latest llvm binary release which continues to be dynamically linked on the host against CRAZY defaults:

$ bin/clang --help
/lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1: No such file or directory

Each package build in their script adds a lot of extra command line options to the compiler, and I don't know why. The clang_rt build has CMAKE_ASM_FLAGS="-G0 -mlong-calls -fno-pic --target=hexagon-unknown-linux-musl" which the documentation defines as:

I don't understand why the library needs no-pic? (Are we only building a static libgcc.a instead of a dynamic one? I'm fine with that if so, but why does this needs to be specified in the MAKE_ASM_FLAGS and what happens if you DO build -pic code that wants to use libcc?)

Why is it saying --target=hexagon-random-nonsense-musl to a toolchain we built with exactly one target type? How does it NOT default to hexagon? (Is this related to the build writing a hexagon-potato-banana-musl.cfg file in the bin directory, meaning a config file is in the $PATH? Does clang only look for it in the same directory clang lives in?)

It took me a while to figure out that clang_rt is NOT librt.a, I think it's their libgcc? Especially confusing since librt.a has existed for decades and was on solaris before it was on linux, and the OBVIOUS name is libcc the same way "cc" is the generic compiler name instead of "gcc". (In fact that was the posix compiler name until they decided to replace it with "c99" and everybody ignored them the way tar->pax was ignored, largely because make's $CC defaults to "cc" so it Just Works, and yes the cross compiler should have that name but the prepackaged clang tarball above does not. *shrug* I fix it up when making my prefix symlinks.)

Next up build_musl_headers does CROSS_CFLAGS="-G0 -O0 -mv65 -fno-builtin -fno-rounding-math --target=hexagon-unknown-linux-musl" which:

Most likely none of those flags are needed here because this is just the headers install, and this looks like it's copied verbatim from the musl library build. (Why does building librt-but-not-rt need the libc headers? The libgcc build EXPLICITLY does not require that, because otherwise you have this kind of BS circular dependency. Also, how do you EVER build a bare metal ELF toolchain with that dependency in there?

Next up build_kernel_headers has KBUILD_CFLAGS_KERNEL="-mlong-calls" which again, A) why does the compiler not do by default, B) you don't even need to specify a cross compiler when doing headers_install. (I just confirmed by diffing installs with an without a cross compiler specified: they were identical. I thought so, but checked again to be sure. Presumably more "shared wtih full kernel build".)

And then build_musl, covered above under the headers build.

Ok, email sent. Yay.


July 17, 2021

Capitalism is wobbling slightly. Which is good because capitalism is incompatible with continued human life on earth.

An excellent thread on why coddling selfish assholes is what they want and is counterproductive.

Another rich white octagenarian fascist died. Dance on his grave, and ponder the need for at LEAST 50% death taxes. (Each of your kids can have a couple million dollars which seriously is enough to set them up for life, the rest gets BURNED ON YOUR FUNERAL PYRE because we are NOT AN ARISTOCRACY.)

Because of the GOP, the pandemimc is not over. The GOP has been all about censorship since back when it was called "christianity". Defund the police.


July 16, 2021

Walked to the table at UT this morning but just didn't have the energy to do any programming. I'd just sat down to watch a Leverage episode with Fade (doing a rewatch before the new series) when Jeff called and spent an hour on the phone sucking all my energy out. I'm already paralyzed by job hunting and uncertainty about moving, and when I opened my laptop at that table there was that whole wikipedia nonsense which nobody's replied to for 4 days (the page still uselessly lists licenses the project hasn't been under for years, when gcc's page doesn't give the date it switched from GPLv2 to GPLv3 which made half its userbase abandon it and directly led to Apple and Google sponsoring LLVM development as its replacement).

And even though I finished a cut -DF patch for busybox and sent it to the mailing list yesterday morning, the busybox mailing list web archive hasn't updated? Is this an infrastructure hiccup or did google's spam filter eat another OUTGOING message? (Which it usually only does when I try to email a co-worker a windows driver for our in-development USB hardware. This is not a thing I asked Google to block, but it's unshakeably certain it knows better than we do what's good for us and offers no obvious way to contact a human.)

Sigh. I don't mind things being hard. I mind spinning my wheels.

Got a bit of traction on implementing flashcp eventually, which is fairly straightforward (it's just a couple ioctls, modulo the historical dysfunction in the linux kernel development process) but trying to come up with a test environment for it led me down the path of qemu's "-mtdblock filename" option, which turns out to be useless because although you can define it anywhere it only shows up on boards that have mtd hardware in their board profile (or device tree?), which none of the qemu board emulations I've currently got kernels for do.

So I looked at the "block2mtd" driver, which is undocumented so you have to read the source, and said source has its own inexplicable failings where it's allocating space for "device_name,erase_size,timeout" and then only parsing the first 2 of those. It initializes a local variable "unsigned long timeout = MTD_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT;" (#defined as 3) and then never writes to that variable again until it passes it to add_device().

I keep meaning to do a talk "how to bloat code" where I take a simple hello world program and incrementally expand it to over a thousand lines long with "good programming practices" like container structures and generic base classes and get and set methods and error checking for parameters that we're only ever passing to ourselves... this has some of the classics:

(One of the themes here is it's not reuse if there's no re. Infrastructure in search of a user is a bad thing. If you build it, they will find code rot if they ever DO come and then it won't quite fit their needs and have to be adapted anyway. Apply "lazy binding" and "deferred allocation" to actually creating infrastructure in the first place.)


July 15, 2021

Oh look, another example of employer paperwork it is inadvisable to sign.

Climate change is predictably causing massive flooding so of course the denialist loon that Trump appointed to be head of Nasa commissioned a study blaming any flooding on "moon wobbles", and this is being reported as news for some reason. (Of COURSE the Boomercrats aren't pushing back against it, why would they? Good Cop doesn't want to WIN, that's not what Good Cop is there for.)

On the other hand, Biden will eventually go with the flow when a hundred people around him all shout the same thing long enough. Twitter is also capable of learning when enough people scream at it, although they still suck at being twitter. Facebook just sucks in general. So does the Free Software Foundation. And while there are many reasons I will never use AT&T this one's especially bad and should trigger antitrust action.

Billionaires gonna bill, and guillotines gonna gill. (You don't try to get ticks to put blood BACK into the system, you pick them off and burn them, making sure you got the head. Billionaires are parasites. They don't create value, they collect it. They clear-cut forests and take credit for the existence of all the wood. Damming rivers to hoard water and doling it out, when otherwise there would be enough for all. Billionaires claim credit for other people's work and insist they are needed: they are not.)

Of course facial recognition is racist and sexist and also illegal.

A good thread, from the co-creator of dogecoin, about why cryptocurrency sucks.

Interesting point about "the world starts hurtling towards inevitable doom when you personally turn 50" (which there are apparently ancient Roman speeches about): interviews about when things were best always say it was whenever the interview subject was in their early 20's, and that includes questions about "prominent organizations you belong to" and "the industry you work in".

That said, the GOP was was never any good (since the 1964 polarity swap when they embraced the confederate racists via the southern strategy anyway), And the Boomercrats (plutocracy's "good cop") remain intentionally useless.


July 14, 2021

Nope, not doing the water meter job. They offered me the job yesterday and I accepted (three times what Jeff was paying, still 100% telecommuting, doing real work making a product that ships to customers who want it to do everything it does), but today they sent me the NDA to sign and it was... unusual.

I've signed plenty of NDAs over the years, but this was the first one where admitting it EXISTED would violate it, or showing it to my own lawyer after signing it:

"Confidential Information" shall mean and include the contents and existence of this Agreement as well as any information that is not generally known outside the Company relating to any aspect of business of the Company, whether existing or foreseeable, including information conceived, discovered or developed by Recipient.

Agreeing not to disclose anything I might forseeably conceive or discover in the future seemed a bit open ended. Ordinarily violating an NDA requires information to already exist. Also, there's no requirement that I MENTION things to them for this to apply: any idea I come up with at some point in the future that might relate to any aspect of their business? They own it.

If we ever _did_ wind up disagreeing about what that covered, they had a paragraph promising that in case of any conflict I would pay them potentially unlimited amounts of money EVEN IF they lost the "binding arbitration" I would be signing away all right to avoid (which would be performed in the legal jurisdiction of Alabama):

In the event legal action, including any non-adjudicative proceeding (e.g., arbitration or mediation), is necessary to enforce the terms of this Agreement, Recipient shall pay to Company the amount of any award, judgment or settlement sums due to Company or its Affiliated Parties plus reasonable attorneys’ fees, court or arbitration costs and other expenses incurred by Company or its Affiliated Parties relating to such enforcement and, in addition, the reasonable value of Company’s time and expenses spent for such enforcement.

And I'm still not sure what this part means:

Recipient acknowledges and agrees that Company will be irreparably harmed by, and that money damages alone will not be a sufficient remedy for, any breach of this Agreement by Recipient. Accordingly, Company shall immediately be entitled to preliminary and permanent injunctive relief against Recipient for any breach or threatened breach of this Agreement, without the necessity of posting any bond, in addition to any and all other rights that it may have at law or in equity. Company’s right to preliminary and permanent injunctive relief shall be in addition to other remedies available to Company at law or in equity. Recipient expressly waives any defense that a remedy in damages will be adequate and any requirement that Company post any bond in any action for specific performance or injunction.

I'm liable for a "threatened breach"? So if I disagree with them about what is covered but haven't released anything while we negotiate they can get an injunction granting... what? That I post a youtube video clucking like a chicken? And having me "agree" that they get an injunction... either you can get a judge to grant you an injunction, or you can't, I would not be the SOURCE of any injunction.

So let's put this together: if we ever disagreed about WHAT was covered by the NDA, any "threatened breach" about information I could "forseeably conceive" would put me on the hook to pay their "other expenses" and receive a "permanent legal injunction", and I couldn't even show the agreement I'd signed to my own lawyer.

As I said, I've signed plenty of NDAs and expect to do so again, but there's a difference between setting up a well-defined relationship where I keep both the information they provided to me and the work product I provided to them confidential, and... whatever that is.

I sent them back the subset I was willing to sign, and the manager got insulted. (Who was not either of the two engineers I interviewed with, but some other random guy who was now in charge of the process without having spoken to me at all in the "should we offer this person a job" phase.)

I told said manager I was sorry it hadn't worked out, and I'm back looking for other stuff again.


July 13, 2021

Sigh. Biden is good cop. Good cop's job is to do as little as possible as slowly as possible while endlessly asking for more from the suspect. Good cop is still a cop, a servant of plutocracy who does not want the system to change and is not on your side.

A surprisingly good summary of why Google can't pay me to work on toybox: I was telecommuting before it was cool. Google apparently has rigid gender employment roles straight out of the 1950s. All the special chairs and company cafeterias (which suit-and-tie corporations modeled on military commissaries after world war II; IBM had one when I worked there) are designed to lengthen the amount of time employees spend in the office. If working 16 hour days including weekends increases productivity (um, no?) then ramping up attendance hours is a metric they could measure and use as a proxy for productivity. As long as you can keep them from going home, life is good. Now people want to telecommute which means they're not in the office which means they're not working, ergo...

Billionaires continue to suck, as does Faceboot and the GOP. Defund the police and the carceral state.


July 12, 2021

Whee, not satisfied with deadnaming my license, Wikipedia[citation needed] has dead-licensed the project. Toybox is not under any of those licenses. I will happily delete the old tarballs off the website if it bothers whichever clown did that. Seriously? The gcc page doesn't say when it went GPLv3, but mine needs 8 year old licensing decisions that predate android inclusion memorialized in the summary box? Somebody is REALLY threatened by 0BSD...

I'm trying to build the hexagon toolchain by manually following the build script they checked into qemu. They're more or less building vanilla llvm (a mainline commit from a couple months back), the vanilla kernel (a bugfix version of a year old release), and that fork of musl I pointed Rich at.

First thing they do is download and build LLVM, and I ran their cmake invocation in my devuan setup and its configure stage barfed with the "CXX_SUPPORTS_CUSTOM_LINKER" test failing. The suggested fix is to install lld-10 (the devuan banana I recently upgraded TO only comes with lld-7). I trimmed the -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="clang;lld" to JUST lld and... same error. The llvm linker wants to ONLY build with the llvm linker, not any other linker? Bravo.

Is it because the command line has -DLLVM_ENABLE_LLD=ON set? No, removing that changed nothing... Oh you little bastard. If I rm -rf the build directory, recreate it, and re-run the config with the changed parameter THEN it stops complaining. It's cacheing command line arguments I'm no longer supplying it when I re-run the configure stage. What a horrible piece of overengineered junk.

Ok, I built lld by itself without the LLVM_ENABLE_LLD=SURE, and then "ln -s lld ld" in the bin directory of that, and then stuck it at the start of the $PATH, ala:

PATH=$PWD/../llvm/bin:$PATH taskset 7 cmake -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(readlink -f ../hex) -DLLVM_ENABLE_LLD=ON -DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD="Hexagon" -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="clang;lld" $(readlink -f ../llvm-project/llvm)

And yes it has a new output directory because overwriting the linker while you're using it seems like a bad idea. And THAT invocation of their autoconf reimplementation completed without obvious error, so time taskset 7 ninja all install and... Ahem, try that again with the $PATH prefix. (Although complaining it can't find ld is an odd failure message for having forgotten to do that...)

The "taskset 7" is because this laptop is 4x SMP and 7 is binary 0111 so it's restricting the child process(es) to 3 of the 4 available processors, leaving one to keep the desktop reasonable. I often do that when I'm launching a long-running CPU hog but want to still use my laptop while it runs. I tend to "pkill -f renderer" to get chrome tabs to stop eating CPU (reload them when I want to use that particular one), and these days I "killall -STOP thunderbird" when on battery and "killall -CONT thunderbird" when I want to use it again.


July 11, 2021

Cycled back around to busybox cut -DF and I read the testsuite/README file and ran "./runtest -v cut" and it went:

FAIL: cut-cuts-a-field
+ + /home/landley/busybox/busybox/testsuite/echo-ne -ebusybox f1\tf2\tf3 cut
 -f 2
+ test f2 f2 f3 = f2

And I am just <sarcasm>SO HAPPY to be dealing with this infrastructure</sarcasm>. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? Off to read the source to understand what the test suite output is trying to say.


July 10, 2021

Phone interview with a place making water meters, good solid utility work (a bit like SEI's synchrophasors and JCI's climate control systems). Always nice doing work that the customer wants done and would miss if it didn't happen.

Saw Fuzzy off to the airport at 3am (fencing tournament in philadelphia then visiting her mother in NYC).

A nice video of streets reclaimed for pedestrian use. As robotaxis ramp up we should see a lot more of this, as well as redeveloping parking lots into useful space. (Servicing our travel needs with 1/10 as many cars which don't spend 96% of their time parked means we don't need to devote so much infrastructure to hitching posts and horse water troughs and those guys with the push brooms and circular wheely bins to sweep up the poop.)

Yay, my s390 perl removal patch made it into the kernel.

Ok, upgrading to the new musl-cross-make broke all the 64 bit targets and it's because toysh is segfaulting when it calls free() on the "/proc/self/fd/$NUM" string, which looks fine, but something's making musl mad. Since last toolchain musl replaced its entire malloc implementation, and this segfault because there's a next->psize != self->csize check in __bin_chunk() of musl's src/malloc/malloc.c. (Yes I stuck printfs into musl and rebuilt the toolchain to find that, after first confirming that musl's dprintf(2, blah) does not malloc or free anything.)

Musl's new free() is doing __bin_chunk(MEM_TO_CHUNK(p)); and musl's src/internal/malloc_impl.h defines MEM_TO_CHUNK(p) as (struct chunk *)((char *)(p) - OVERHEAD) also defines OVERHEAD as (2*sizeof(size_t)), and size_t is long. This is kind of weird since in the same header file:

struct chunk {
        size_t psize, csize;
        struct chunk *next, *prev;
};

So we have a struct, but we're only using the first 2 fields of it? (The next and prev pointers would be the first 16 bytes of the user-visible memory returned by malloc()? Weird.)

So self->csize != next->psize, and self is the argument to __bin_chunk() but next is NEXT_CHUNK(self) which is c+CHUNK_SIZE(c) and CHUNK_SIZE is ((c)->csize & -2), which forces it to 16 bit alignment? (-1 is ffff, -2 is fffe, it switches JUST bottom-most bit off. Why? No idea. Not even 32 bit alignment: 16. Huh. Ah, the bottom bit is used to signal that the chunk is mmapped(), IS_MMAPPED() is !(csize&C_INUSE) which is 1. Specifically, the bottom bit is NOT set when it's mmapped, I guess? Right, tangent.)

So I need to check that:

int validate(char *p) {
  size_t *st1 = ((size_t *)p)-2, st2 = (void *)(p+(st1[1]&-2));
  if (st1[1] != st2[0]) barf();
}

So I need to stick in stuff that validates that string's header and bisect to where the damage happens, and THAT means reading the musl malloc code. Hmmm...


July 9, 2021

Today I learned that most of the viral "missing person" notices are abusers trying to track down a victim that escaped them.

I still advocate for guillotines (billionaires are modern kings, france had a solution to its aristocracy a couple centuries back), but antitrust and taxes are good things to do on TOP of that.

Defund the police. In the USA cops take more money from people via "civil asset forfeiture" than all burglaries combined, and you have to pay hundreds of dollars for the RIGHT to challenge it and then it's a civil matter (so you don't get a lawyer, but they do). No crime on your part has to even be alleged. Cops only spent 4% of their time on what THEY call "violent crime". The thread ends with a New Yorker article.

Right wing loons are bad, frantically denying that american culture is steeped in sexism and racism for the same reason fish don't see water (and couldn't survive without it). Internet advertising not only doesn't work, it never worked. Capitalism can't outlive the Boomers.


July 8, 2021

Pointed Rich at the musl hexagon fork and their docker test image and llvm build script in the qemu test suite. I'd previously pointed him at the musl xtensa fork (which is against a stale branch, and he says was done wrong), but qemu-system-xtensa and qemu-system-hexagon both exist and I'd like mkroot to build systems that run there, which means getting a working toolchain for those targets, and musl-cross-make is a FLAMING PAIN to feed external tarballs into. (I have to do it for llvm anyway, but it would be nice to at least use vanilla musl and a vanilla kernel.)


July 7, 2021

The thing about guillotining the billionaires is that Mackenzie Scott is an interesting edge case. She IS the mythical "good billionaire"... so how does that work?

Mackenzie Scott divorced Jeff Bezos exactly two years ago, inheriting 4% of amazon then worth around $36 billion. She didn't work to BECOME a billionaire, she disentangled herself from one, and immediately vowed to give away money until she wasn't a billionaire anymore. She has already given away over $10 billion, which is almost a third of the money she inherited, but her net worth has GROWN by $23 billion (almost doubling since the divorce) because the system is so slanted that being a multi-billionaire is giving her money faster than she can dispose of it. (It's not "earning" her money, she's doing nothing for it and is literally trying to get rid of it, an outright Brewster's Millions situation.) In the last 4 months of 2020 she was giving away a billion dollars per month which was just about breaking even with her rate of income.

The reason her generosity is rate limited is she's researching to have the greatest impact and do the most good with the money. For example she gave $10 million to the Navajo covid-19 relief fund, matching their donations so far. That amount didn't require them to disruptively scale up their operations, nor did it render irrelevant the outpouring of Irish generosity. Instead it let them continue what they were already doing for the rest of the pandemic. She didn't give them more because she could easily have flooded their engine: too much money can destroy an organization even _without_ depending on volunteers to do most of the work. She made a targeted donation that had a real positive impact, one of many.

It's HARD to spend a billion dollars on anything real: a single million dollars is enough to set someone up for life, and a billion dollars is enough to set a THOUSAND people up for life. She's basically trying to mobilize a new army of a thousand people, every month, permanently.

Yes, a million dollars properly managed is lifetime financial security for one person (at least while Obamacare holds out). Even if you didn't earn ANY interest on it and just spent through the big pile of cash, the $1000/month "basic income" rate would take 83 years to spend a million dollars. At the "fight for 15" full time salary rate, $15 an hour times 40 hours a week times 52 weeks a year is $31,200, which means 1000000/31200 = 32 years to run through it all, spending as if you had a "good job" without ever having to show up to work. And unlike working a job this money would be tax-free because you're spending money you already HAVE (no income tax, social security tax, medicare tax, state taxes...) which makes that $15/hr more like $25/hour which is edging up into "job requiring college degree" territory without the student loan payments.

If instead you invest that million dollars in Coca-Cola stock (a company that's been around doing basically the same thing the same way since 1892 and thus a reasonably "safe investment"), that's currently $54/share with 42 cent per share quarterly dividend so you'd get (1000000/54)*0.42*4 = $31,111 each year in dividend checks mailed to you (almost exactly that fight-for-$15 rate). That's taxable, but the dividend goes up over time (it was 40 cents in 2019) so not only would you NEVER work through your principal but you'd get a raise every year or two. (And your principal would grow as the stock price went up.)

Mackenzie Scott is trying hard to stop being a billionaire, and the system is so rigged it's actually difficult for her to do so (without just giving the money to somebody ELSE to be a billionaire on her behalf, or giving life changing amounts of money to thousands of strangers). But "didn't intentionally become a billionaire" and "giving away over 10% of her net worth per year" are mitigating factors. That said, the longer she remains a billionaire... being a meth addict would probably be psychologically healthier? J.K. Rowling was one of the most beloved people in the world when she became a billionaire in 2004, and seems to have avoided being publicly hateful for about 10 years after that until "I know better than everybody else because I am a superior person" disease set in. Notch, the creator of minecraft, became a billionaire in 2014, immediately faceplanted, and by 2017 there were articles about how much of an asshole he was. You can argue "reveals" vs "corrupts", but either way the timeframe is pretty bleak.


July 6, 2021

Freenode continues to circle the drain. People are connecting the audacity nonsense with this as an "assault on open source", but it's the same market-cornering that capitalism has always done. Sellers of bottled water MUST attack tap water in order to have a market, whether by badmouthing it or sabotaging the infrastructure via regulatory capture. (Meanwhile, nobody anywhere should be surprised that microsoft buying github is working out as well for github as microsoft buying hotmail worked out for hotmail.)

Wow, somebody's reinvented car2go and thinks it's a new idea. Remember that Morgan Stanley analyst with a 4-quadrant chart from individually owned manually driven cars to app summonable self-driving fleet vehicles? Yeah. Those other two quadrants ain't stable.

We had a similar migration over the past quarter-century from "landline" to "smartphone", which _also_ had two other quadrants that weren't stable. Back during the dot-com boom lots of people tried to make "smart landlines", but they only succeeded at connecting the internet to devices that already had a reason to exist (like a computer, game console, or television), and NOT by selling any sort of new dedicated "phone with extra abilities". Meanwhile non-smart cell phones were the only option for decades, but once the "attach cellular service to general purpose computing" cell provider monopoly bottleneck was broken, smartphones rapidly caught up and these days 4/5 of all cellphones in the world are smart phones (despite still being significantly more expensive and having much shorter battery life than "feature phones").

I suppose you could say "yellow taxicab" and "rental car" have been around forever, so once again silicon valley douchebros think reinventing the idea of public transit is somehow new. But if you specifically put "my own car in my own driveway" on a grid with "self driving" and "app-tracked car sharing" as competitors to it (rather than supplements for people who are either keeping their car in their driveway or never had the option because New York City apartments don't have parking spaces)... the answer is going to be "both at the same time".

Robotaxis have a problem similar to smartphones in that everybody knew it was coming, but until it could overcome the gatekeepers (monopoly phone carriers last time, regulators of what is "street legal" this time) it couldn't deploy. People quibble about self-driving technology's readiness, but remember with cell phones the ergonomic issues were a perennial complaint until touch screens replaced keyboards, but it didn't stop the "thumb generation" or palm pilot users. The real blocker was gatekeepers preventing the new techology from attaching to existing infrastructure. Once AT&T acquiesced to unmetered data going into a full fledged posix system, all the other carriers fell in line (using Android because of Apple's exclusive 5 year contract) within months rather than be left behind. Once a major city allows a full robotaxi fleet deployment, the rest will probably do the same? (Hard to tell with regulatory hurdles, but "I can move to where cars just pick me up and drop be off at will and never need to be parked, for a flat monthly rate that's less than I paid for car insurance" is on the level of "we have broadband and you don't" when it comes to civic advantages.)

The cell phone market could take off in the days before smartphones because regulation and lawsuits forced open access so people could go into businesses that the incumbents weren't yet interested in. But the market for self-driving individually owned cars has never had a chance to take off because its regulatory hurdle (what is and isn't "street legal") does not have a successful history of legal challenges. Cars are big and dirty and dangerous and were only allowed into cities because they replaced horses, which were already big and dirtier and even more dangerous. Around the world cars kill over a million people annually, which is why both cars and drivers have been heavily regulated. But regulatory capture protects incumbents from competition, and the 1997 book the Innovator's Dilemma pointed out this is why electric golf carts weren't acting as a disruptive technology in the united states: the electric vehicle market couldn't scale up organically from existing cheap short-range vehicles because they could never drive on public roads for short commutes or trips to the grocery store. This delayed the switch to electric cars by multiple decades and forced it to take a different path to regulatory approval. Giving a driver's license to software programs has met similar resistance, but again it's just delaying the transition, not preventing it.

The blocker for individually owned self driving vehicles is the same blocker for robotaxi fleets, so there's no window for non-fleet self driving to build any sort of lead on an app-summonable self driving subscription service. When self-driving gains regulatory approval, robotaxi fleets get to recruit subscribers at the same time car owners get to switch to self-driving. Tesla is trying to cheat by installing self-driving hardware in all its vehicles so it can just "flip a switch" once it gets regulatory approval... but they're half the reason approval has taken so long: every time their self driving stuff gets enabled people die. (Waymo does not have that problem.)

Meanwhile, shared manually driven cars have a long list of companies that have already tried it (zipcar, getaround, silvercar, hubber, Japan has Orix, there's a european one that focuses on RVs...) without ever really making much of a splash. As with the "smart landline", it's just not very interesting.

The point of robotaxi fleets is they're sufficiently cheaper to run that solar powered electric vehicles cleaned inside and out by an automated car wash honestly could be a service "too cheap to meter"... if capitalism ever allowed such a thing under any circumstances (instead of constantly striving to replace tap water with bottled water because profit). If waymo puts a "Go" button next to "Directions" in your phone's Google Maps app (which when pressed turns into a countdown of the number of seconds until a vehicle arrives at your location to take the holder of that phone to the selected destination) no humans except the passenger(s) are involved, so nobody has to be PAID.

You only ever pay PEOPLE. You don't pay cars. You don't pay batteries. When there are no people providing the service, only rentiers (a form of legacy parasite charging repeatedly after the fact for work that's already been done, often lasting long after the people who did the actual work die) get paid.

Automating away the need for people to do manual labor is often attacked as "putting people out of a job", but it's actually an obvious form of progress. Once upon a time we had people called "operators" manually connect every phone call, then they invented rotary dialing, then touch tone dialing, then speed dial, and now it's usually a voip app. "You'll never get rich by digging a ditch" because we have hydraulic excavators now, which means we don't need prison labor to perform that task; machines allow one person to do the work of hundreds, and computers allow NOBODY to do it.

The problem is capitalists hate "free". They want to insert themselves as unnecessary middlemen so they get paid for doing nothing, because they own... the right to get paid, by you, for doing nothing. (IP law is probably the purest expression of this.) But the big draw of robotaxis is the flat rate model. If you get charged per ride people will have loss aversion for paying for a ride, but not loss aversion for driving a car they've already filled with gas... It's analogous to charging for internet connections by the megabyte: it's the business model greedy providers want to provide, but not what customers want to buy. The "unmetered" option beats the metered option, and with more than one provider in the city the flat rate offering is likely to win out. But there may be a lot of churn to get there from here, especially with...


July 5, 2021

I made special K bars for the first time in ages. The recipe's pretty straightforward, but I had to dig to confirm bits of it:

2 cups corn syrup
2 cups sugar
4 cups creamy peanut butter
12 cups special k
2 cups chocolate chips
2 cups butterscotch chips

That's one 16 oz bottle of clear karo syrup, one package each of chocolate and butterscotch chips, and there's a box size where it's exactly enough cereal but I almost always buy the wrong one. Can't avoid measuring the sugar and peanut butter.

Mix together the sugar and corn syrup and bring it to a boil (but don't LET it boil) stirring more or less constantly until it goes clear-ish. Add the peanut butter and stir until smooth, which takes longer than you expect. Pour the result over the special K and mix until everything's evenly covered (big steel bowl and wooden spoon, yes it is enough topping, this takes too long, your arm will hurt). Upend result onto 2 cookie trays while still hot (it sets up like concrete as it cools) and flatten evenly (you want a smoothish surface on top for the next step). Let cool for a bit.

Melt together the chocolate and butterscotch: you're supposed to use a double boiler, but you can do it in the microwave if you're really careful (30 seconds, stir, 20 seconds, stir, 15 seconds, stir, 10 seconds, stir, 10 more seconds, stir...) Burns VERY easily though, which makes hard lumps. When smooth, spread evenly over the surface of both trays: again there is enough but it takes spreading. Let the whole mess cool at least half an hour before trying to cut it.


July 4, 2021

There was a tiny kitten on the front porch last night, mewing loudly in distress. Fled every time I opened the very loud screen door, but I left the inner door open and screen door closed for a bit and saw it sitting on a corner of the porch. Left chows and water out for it.

The Audacity audio editor project appears to be imploding. (New capitalist owners changing the license and filling it with spyware.) This is clearly working up to an ethereal->wireshark, xfree86->x.org style retrench under new management, and there are already a couple forks but no clear successor yet. (Here's some backstory on the change of management, from someone who seriously did not see it coming.)

An explanatory thread about why Linux has so few women involved with it anymore.

Ok, got tail -F hopefully sorted. What else is on my todo heap from the 24th? Plus new things coming in. And other stuff I don't even think I wrote down, such as "I updated the musl-cross-make toolchain and now none of the 64 bit targets make it through init". (Sigh, my s390x patch removing perl from the makefile didn't make it upstream this release, it sort of seems to have been accepted...?)

Blah, I've still got pending j-core mailing list messages to reply to...

Asked how to stop windows from jumping between workspaces on the #xfce channel on liberia, no reply for 2 hours. Let's see if this gets a reply... (Spoiler: haha, nope.)


July 3, 2021

Not feeling up to organizing today's linkdump into a narrative, so here's a bunch of snippets.

One of the many reasons to defund the police is that in many cities they are profoundly useless.

All that child sex abuse stuff the right wing loons are on about is projection: organizations ACTUALLY doing bulk child abuse include the catholic church and the boy scouts.

Billionaires continue to demand guillotines.

Climate change is still a problem.

The world athletics organization is sexist and racist.

Worries that the USA might become fascist ignore the fact that the USA has been fascist for quite some time, it was just harder for white male middle class american citizens living domestically to notice before the massive concentration of wealth Ronald Reagan started moved almost everybody into the "them" camp that a very tiny plutocratic rump "us" exploits.

Blockchain is the new Godwin's law.

Christianity is literally trying to overthrow democracy. Christianity is also fascist.

3800 artifacts stolen by hobby lobby's fundamentalist christian owners have been returned to Iraq.

Medical debt owed by individuals is less than 1% of hospital revenue: it's about control. Capitalism's carrot ran out so the stick's getting bigger and bigger.

Medical science is misogynistic.

You've got to know where the bodies are buried in order to hide them.


July 2, 2021

Videos of my talks are being reposted in china now? *boggle*

Phone interview for a job in New Mexico on tuesday. It's not one of the telecommuting positions, but they got back to me first and I've historically gone where the work is. (And it passed the "seems interesting enough" filter.)

WHY is thunderbird getting itself stuck in a CPU eating loop doing nothing? I'm not making it out to the table (if Fade is home, I want to hang out with her when she's awake) so I'm getting a couple hours at Wendy's, which is like an hour tops when I don't notice Thunderbird gratuitously draining my battery: killall -STOP thunderbird should just be standard practice when I'm not actively checking mail; anything written by the Mozilla foundation is crap. Which does not say nice things about Rust.

And yes, this is why I held off updating devuan for so long. I dowanna have to track down all the new bugs in a giant flag day change I can't easily bisect with no option to revert and stick with old non-broken versions of individual packages. Ubuntu had LTS. Devuan does not. But ubuntu has systemd now, and is thus dead to me.


July 1, 2021

Today I learned that EMTs stopped asking who was president around 2017 because most people either got angry or refused to answer. The GOP is not popular anywhere, they've just done extensive voter suppression: if only 50% of the population votes, their 27% support can produce a nominal majority. The south has been voter suppressed since the civil war, spreading it to the rest of the country is fallout from the "Southern Strategy" and has taken off since the GOP-packed supreme court repealed the voting rights act in 2013. (The 5-4 decision was Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and that Kennedy guy who retired so Trump could appoint Kavanaugh rather than let a democrat nominate his replacement. RBG did a Leeroy Jenkins that was merely stupid, but Kennedy actively sold out.)

And yes, RBG was stupid (and/or senile): in 2009 she was diagnosed with her _second_ cancer at the age of 76, and decided to keep going until she died in office (of complications from that cancer) and could be replaced by an absolute loon. She judged this preferable to letting Obama name her replacement, because gerontocracy or something.


June 30, 2021

Exhausted. Emailed three recruiters, but got nothing else done today.

Jeff called and sucked the life out of me again. We had another hour long talk about his grandiose scheme du jour to resurrect the company, and these talks consume SO much emotional energy. (I would LOVE to see his plans succeed, but even attempting them demands more commitment to his cause than I have left in me right now. All that coinbro stuff burned through my faith in the viability of any of this, and I need to pay the mortgage.)

The sad part is he's finally got a good idea (resurrected one from last year) that he isn't poisoning with crypto shenanigans, but it just seems too late. He keeps performing heroic CPR on something that's about to tick over in the second month of not paying any of the employees; the team will break up before we can do anything that might eventually turn into money. I can't fix that part.

For months Jeff was convinced that only coinbros would invest in his ideas anymore (no conventional investors left anywhere who actually wanted something real), so every time we fleshed out a new idea he'd eventually derail the conversation with "how do we work issuing a new coin and/or NFT into the business model". (Answer: we don't, and I CAN'T HELP there. I cannot wrap my head around "this will never be real but coinbros will buy it because they think they can sell it for more to bigger fools in a month". I cannot make issuing a coin be a retroactively inextricable part of an idea that did not initially contain such a coin. There IS a version with no coin, that's what we've been talking about, therefore gluing this to a blockchain is demonstrably NOT an inherent part of the idea.)

Now we're past that because I got very explicit about the "talk to the hand" part the last couple times "Coin!" came up, so now he's back talking about good solid technical stuff. Specifically, there's a fully open source toolchain path to FPGA now (on lattice ice-40 and ecp5 anyway), and Jeff thinks he can put one together for ASIC too, which nobody's done yet.

Ordinarily creating an ASIC (making chips from silicon wafers) involves feeding the fab high-level information which they run through their proprietary toolchains, linking against proprietary libraries to suck in things like their SRAM implementations and I/O pads which are all black boxes you license per instance. Their toolchain does its own physical layout and inserts test chains and so on, so the result is something where even if you decap it and examine it under an electron microscope you don't know what it's SUPPOSED to look like, so how can you make any security (or reproducibility) statements about the result?

What we wanted to do (a year ago) was dig up our own implementations of all those components, and use open source tools to create our own mask (I.E. a big graphic file with all the rectangles the fab needs to make a mask from, where they just PRINT it as-is instead of compiling or rendering anything). Then we can feed this file to simulation packages (called magic and spice) that can simulate the actual physics and run a virtual chip burned from this virtual mask, albeit very, very slowly.

There's all sorts of complexities, like "each fab process has its own specs about each dimension of the rectangles and the gaps between them for each type of component" (which you have to sign an NDA to get but Google paid Skylake a bunch of money to release theirs, and some old 350 nanometer ones have leaked multiple times over the years and it's a table of numbers which is not copyrightable and it's not a trade secret if it's been handed out to hundreds of people over the course of decades so we got it from multiple different sources and never signed anything). And the rectangles need to be distorted because the burning process is kind of a fisheye lens that distorts it back, and THOSE equations are also propreitary (and fab-specific), but that's manageable too. Jeff knows the full list of things that need to be done, he's made ASICs before, has friends that work for fabs.

It's a bit like cross compiling, where each fab has its own proprietary toolchain and we're trying to come up with a generic one that makes a standard AST and then has understandable backends for each target. What skylake did is buy tech from one fab and release it, resulting in open watcom (only targets one architecture, has its own unique behavior all the way up and down, and is immediately abandonware). Another common solution (berkeley did some of this years ago) was creating a website you upload your design to and they do the black box transforms and send you back a file: we want you to be able to reproduce this on your own laptop.

So there's a lot of really cool stuff there, and this description is just scratching the surface, and we've talked about it for hours, and I CANNOT get enthused about it because it won't happen. This is at least six months worth of work to get some good demonstrable prototype output, and maybe a year to produce a fully open arduino-style processor running at like 8mhz. And that's IF we were fully funded and not distracted chasing contract du jour to keep the lights on.

The company won't last that long. We can't finish it. And even if we DID, how would that attract funding? Yes it's a lovely thing worth doing, and lots of people who don't understand what they're doing have uselessly half-assed it. (Imagine if the gnu project only ever made userspace tools like "tar" which needed a proprietary compiler and proprietary OS to run on: that's Risc-V. Companies spend $2 million designing a chip and $100 million manufacturing it, and they can save you most but not all of that $2 million. Bravo.)

I have done many things over the years which were "retroactively obvious". Nobody could do this thing, I made it work, then everybody went "well of course, it was inevitable" and obviously I didn't do anything important because it was always going to be like that. That's normal, but when I don't get around to things (like initmpfs) they're still on my todo list 10 years later because nobody ELSE did it. (Which is annoying.)

This is another retroactively obvious thing. Of course it should happen, but nobody's going to fund it ahead of time. I can't even turn working on toybox into my day job, and that has users now. (I had hopes patreon would, but my monthly health insurance is 6 times what patreon brings in, the mortgage is 3 times THAT, and then there's food, electricity, internet, cats...)

I've already GOT hobbies. The scourge of late stage capitalism says I need a paycheck. Thus talking to Jeff drains the life out of me. Yes I can do the work he proposes. It would be great to do. But I'm spread too thin. If we'd started working on this the last time we talked about it (what, November?) I'd at least have momentum.

Speaking of momentum: do you know why all diesel lotomotives are actually electric, with a diesel generator driving electric motors? Because only electric motors produce enough torque to get a stopped train rolling. No piston can manage the amount of compression required to get four hundred stopped cars moving. Once it's moving, pistons could KEEP it moving, but only electromagnets can pull hard enough to get it STARTED. And that's why trains have been electric for a hundred years, steam engines replaced by disel generators driving electric motors allowed much longer trains of cars, and the limiting factor is that it's so much harder to get started than to keep going.

I can keep going on a project for Jeff, but I haven't got the energy to start a new one right now. And there are probably better ways of job hunting these days, but I'm repeating the old tried and true "poke recruiters until one of them tells me to fly to $CITY" because I rode another startup down until I'm too tired to break a new trail and have to follow an existing one to a rest area where setting up camp may be a bunch of work, but much less of a gamble about whether that work will pay off.


June 29, 2021

Late stage capitalism has now given us mattresses full of fiberglass that goes airborne. Bravo.

Random people are saying (without studies or real evidence) that the delta variant requires booster shots for people who took J&J vaccine. I'm not sure I buy it? The pfizer and moderna vaccines are paying for new MRNA manufacturing and distribution infratructure that lets drug companies treat-but-not-cure a wide range of conditions, so those companies would LOVE the covid vaccination gravy train to become an ongoing profit center, which puts them in conflict with the CDC which says that isn't necessary.

That said, I have motivated reasoning of my own here: I have a PROBLEM with needles. The answer I believe is correct seems to have a lot of support: delta spreads faster (it has an R value of 5), but doesn't cut through existing immunity better, and the earlier scaremongering about astrazeneca being ineffective against it turns out to be more of the smear campaign against the technology that DARED to waive patents in the face of a pandemic... But I also WANT it to be true, which is a problem for trusting my conclusion.

That said, I've more or less resigned myself to probably getting covid a THIRD time at this point. (I got the original via jury duty, and got it AGAIN in November when either the UK or South Africa variant was going through the Japan office; my co-worker Mike was hospitalized for a bit.) My wrist has finally recovered to the point I can do push-ups again and I keep meaning to try the Chloe Ting videos again. Walking 4 miles/day made my knee stop hurting (both times covid gave me joint swelling bordering on arthiritis) but that didn't help my wrist, and she hasn't got any exercise videos that DON'T involve some variant of push-ups at some point. No vaccine (or previous exposure) prevents you from getting a mild case of a new variant, and that's apparently enough for my old high school sprained wrist to ache for a couple months when I put weight on it. Sigh.


June 28, 2021

Austin is slowly limping towards robotaxis, one business model change at a time...

The musl-cross-make toolchains I just built haven't got include/linux directories for m68k and s390 because the issue from last year never got fixed. Ah, it did get fixed but never got integrated because nobody was regression testing m68k and s390x. (Hello, I PUBLISHED my builds. Anybody should be able to do this now, why are you waiting for ME to do it?) Right, m68k works and s390x does not... except ALL the 64 bit targets are broken with the new toolchain? Why...

Um, wait, what? Why is that repo mentioning my name? Is that my linux-fullhist tree? On kernel.org? (Yay! What?)

Highly useful, and I did not expect that. It seems to clone cleanly and everything. It's good to know people are still using a thing I did (and good that I can point people at web versions of older commit hashes), but... I'm not part of that community anymore? I'm very angry about a number of things, and do not feel part of some communities I once felt part of, which makes participation difficult. I'm not sure how much of it is that I've changed, that they've changed, that I HAVEN'T changed... Hm.

I try hard NOT to ossify into a loon, which I've seen far too many people do over the years. I have to regularly examine my beliefs to figure out (and ADMIT) when I'm wrong about stuff, which is hard painful work that falls somewhere between maintenance and cleaning.

There are many luminaries in the field who once upon a time did good work (Bill Joy, Eric Raymond, even Richard Stallman once upon a time) who stopped being a net positive and had to be excised from the productive flow. Other fields have plenty of this: Richard Dawkins once did good work which stopped abruptly, and these days Neil DeGrasse Tyson is constantly being corrected by Steak-umm's marketing department... But we still use the ancient artifacts handed down from the days their creators Weren't Obviously Crazy Yet. (Or at least were still presenting as a net positive within their niche, despite them being Bill Cosby or Hans Reiser behind the scenes.)

I'm hoping that the work I leave behind won't be tainted by senile ramblings or closet skeletons where "this person wasn't a net positive because the work they did was a tiny fraction of the work that WOULD have been done by the people they kept from participating". (Linux no longer has Sarah Sharpe or Val Henson. Grace Hopper built the field of computer science with her bare hands but manbaby dudebros have been chasing cooties out of that playground since about 1983. Seperating the creator from the creation goes both ways: sexists basically did cultural appropriation on the invention of the compiler.)

Then again this is what most of IP law does too: protect a small privileged class of creators at the expanse of the far larger group that would positively outclass them if not suppressed.


June 27, 2021

New research on how the Boomers' chronic lead exposure (from burning billions of gallons of leaded gasoline in all major cities for decades) caused brain damage and crime sprees, and basically explains why the Boomers express so much widespread brain damage as they become senile.

The remains of the GOP are a giant elder abuse financial scam (and other more specific financial scams, such as Trump's postmaster general gratuitously announcing another US mail slowdown), which is otherwise spiraling inwards. Right wing loons are a tiny minority that constantly screams to see the manager. (They also lie about their racism a lot. Canada found another 750 umarked graves under another christian boarding school they forced kidnapped native children into. Wasn't really hidden, they just weren't looking.) But as with the Tea Party jumping up and down yelling "clean cup move down", there really aren't that many of the truly dedicated assholes, they're just loud and constantly writing letters to the editor. Heck, kids are going behind their parents back to get vaccinated because the old and out of touch are wrong, same as it ever was.

Disney was built on copying and is now a major supporter of the IP law regime destroying content. Pulling up the ladder after them is what billionaires do.

Never trust cloud anything, Apple edition. Apple wants to voraciously consume all your data including state ID, but private companies can't be trusted with it. And gatekeepers like Youtube are seldom on the side of the good guys either.

Another reason we can defund the police is that most theft is wage theft by employers. Boomers are terrified of hoodlums breaking into their house to spraypaint their cat but that's just another way they're out of touch with reality: the big ACTUAL threats are corporate, brazen, and ongoing.


June 26, 2021

Rich did several commits to musl-cross-make, and I pulled them and rebuilt the toolchains last night (and well into this morning), and now mkroot is rebuilding all the images against the current toybox and linux kernel (v5.13-rc7 and change), and... huh, I didn't actually install rebuilt qemu binaries in /usr/local/bin. And typing "make install" in that directory is trying to rebuild everything. Right, "git clean -fdx && git checkout -f && git pull && ./configure" to make sure I'm building the CURRENT random git snapshot du jour. What dependencies did that ./configure find... No virtfs support. Not tracking that down right now.

Current qemu lists 30 qemu-softmmu targets but 34 qemu-system-user targets? System emulation and application emulation aren't quite lining up, what's different there.... -linux-user has aarch64_be, armeb, mipsn32, mipsn32el, ppc64le, and sparc32plus that don't have -softmmu equivalents, and -softmmu has avr, hexagon, rx, and tricore that don't have -linux-user versions.

Oh right, hexagon-linux-user. It has application emulation (but not system emulation) for hexagon. I asked about that ages ago (they were using musl). Where do I get a toolchain? There was that llvm build script once upon a time, but do they have a prebuilt sdk? Apparently so. Except trying to actually download it is "access restricted" requiring a 'validated account'. Of course. (And that's gonna be bare metal and not linux anyway.) My ex-boss Taylor Simpson did a KVM forum talk on qemu support for hexagon.


June 25, 2021

Ever since I updated devuan versions from Alcatraz to Brunhilde, all patreon creator main pages turn into a blank white page a couple seconds after loading. The console errors when this happens are "datadog-rum-us.js:5 TypeError: Cannot read property 'value' of undefined at postFormatHook (index.tsx:26)", "react-dom.production.min.js:161 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'value' of undefined at postFormatHook (index.tsx:26)", and "instrument.ts:129 [Facebook Pixel] - Duplicate Pixel ID:...". Which mean very little to me.

I tried Patreon's suggestion of loading the page in incognito mode and it didn't help. I checked chrome://extensions and there were still just the two builtin ones, the PDF viewer and "cryptotokenextension" which despite the CREEPY NAME is a builtin google thing for 2 factor authentication. (Why is a base part of the browser called an extension? Jazzhands!) Anyway, you can turn it off in incognito mode and I did and tried again and it didn't change anything.

I note that the version of chrome I had before the "upgrade", which had been complaining about being out of date for 9 months (because Devuan Artichoke stopped providing updates for it in the previous version repo despite still nominally being maintained) rendered all these pages just fine. "Upgrading" broke it. And you wonder at my reluctance to do so? I have elaborate experiments set up all over this lab bench happily bubbling away, and you want to SWAP OUT THE BENCH and change the brand of beakers in use? Decanting everything in the process? And this will be non-disruptive, will it?

Also annoyed that when a chrome page finishes rendering, the chrome window jumps to my currently active desktop. And modern pages load MEGABYTES OF CRAP behind the scenes. (Pages can easily take 5-15 seconds to finish loading/rendering.) So if I start a page loading and then switch desktops, the chrome window winds up on the desktop I'm on now a moment later, but NOT at the top of my window stack because I told the window manager background windows are not allowed to randomly jump in front of the one I'm looking at, so they insert themselves UNDER the stack, on a different desktop, and I have to figure out where they've gone later. It didn't do that in Devuan Aspartame, it's probably an "updated" xfce window manager thing in Devuan Brobdingnag, but I dunno how to MAKE IT STOP yet.


June 24, 2021

Good news: connecticut just made all prison communication free which is at least a small blow to the prison-industrial complex that uses everything as a profit center. And the NIH stripped 75 principle investigators from grants as a result of sexual and racial harassment probes. Baby steps are still progress.

Samsung is now putting solar cells on small electronics like remote controls. I dunno if their "goodbye batteries" tagline is because they're using a capacitor (supercap?) or just recharging a small battery from the solar cell, but it got me wondering if our old "two chips, an IR sensor, and an LED scotch taped to the front of a coin cell" j1 demo could be done with a capacitor and a solar cell instead? Hmmm... (It would be so nice if coresemi actually got useful amounts of funding. There's so much good technology we could DO if we weren't constantly scrambling to keep the lights on.)

Sigh. WHY is thunderbird eating 100% of a CPU for the last hour? It still seems to be working fine, the gui isn't blocked. It's just... spinning endlessly for some reason eating cpu. Can't take it to a battery powered table like this, but gotta close email windows before killing it... And it STOPPED eating 100% cpu when I sent one of the pending email messages I'd been composing on and off for a couple days now. *boggle*

Alright, what's my current todo heap before I can get back to toysh:

Rich actually did a commit to musl-cross-make! (For the first time in 8 months.) Time to rebuild all my cross compiler toolchains...

Blah, I did an xxd -I patch for busybox and then threw it away again because it's probably unnecessary because the language-specific wrapper around the CSV isn't output when reading from stdin. So I can implement it and Elliott can fix his use cases.

Implementing it is a bit tricksy though: xxd -i has non-obvious naming, adds leading underscore for non-alphabetic first file/dir name including "xxd -i _/two" which is a legitimate C identifier without the extra underscore? (I guess the test is just isalpha()?)

cut -F needs -O because otherwise regex can produce inconsistent delimiters:

$ echo "one  two   three    four" | toybox cut -DF 2,4
two four

You don't "output the delimiter the regex consumed", out output a single space as the default delimiter. (To replace the common AWK use case.) Which is funky and means you really should be able to SPECIFY the output delimiter, hence needing -O. (Which is just a short option for the existing --output-delimiter which busybox doesn't currently implement. Hmmm, did I already test that "echo one,two,three,four,five,six,seven,eight,nine,ten | cut -d, -f 7,2-4,1-3" produces "one,two,three,four,seven"? )

I'm trying to use busybox's tests, but:

$ make check
...
10 failure(s) detected; running with -v (verbose) will give more info
$ make check -v
GNU Make 4.2.1
Built for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
...

Thank you busybox. Ever so helpful. Meanwhile, running the toybox tests against busybox is just "PATH=$PWD/somewhere:$PATH TEST_HOST=1 VERBOSE=all make test_cut" which is easier for ME to do, anyway...


June 23, 2021

Abigail Disney describes her family's dynastic wealth in The Atlantic. Does this make her the mythical "good billionaire"? Nope, google says she's worth $120 million. In the same "still has a soul" range with Dolly Parton and that Zappos guy. People are starting to figure out that "income" isn't the important metric, it's wealth.

Today billionaires figured out a new way to fleece small investors in... spins the wheel... cryptocurency. Hands up everyone who is surprised by this.

Rule of law is breaking down in the UK because the tories have sabotaged their court system (while increasing funding to their police). Here in the USA the "unreasonable search and siezure" prohibitions in the constitution mean nothing to modern police. Obviously we need to defund the police, but it goes deeper than that.

The Boomers don't actually want to retain democracy. The madness of Boomers is the same as the Madness of King George that the USA revolted against over two hundred years ago. Senile old farts with unquestioned power gone to la-la land. Many Boomers have literally stopped being functionally human, and it's expressing itself in myriad ways from homophobic racism to plutocracy, but also acting like insane control freaks against anyone younger than them.

Boomer capitalism's hostility to youth continues to try to ban the idea of sex while fetishizing sexless supermodels. Corporations are enforcing prudishness and bigotry on behalf of the Boomers via surveilance capitalism, which is a very Boomer "get off my lawn" type of thing that's obviously bad and should not outlive the Boomers, but afterwards all these corrupt business models need indictments and prosecution.

Boomers love to pardon nixon and go "back to normal" (a return to the mythical golden past on the fascism checklist), but "you can keep what you've already stolen, just stop stealing MORE" is never a fix. Every cycle of it escalates when there are no consequences.

Random examples du jour: capitalism just created a motorcycle airbag vest that stops working if you miss a payment, and Peloton is all-in on attacking the concept of ownership. Airbnb found a new way to be evil (on top of the various previous ways.) "Covering up rape on a large scale" was not a previously published issue for them that I know of. As with Uber their business model was always to bankrupt the competition and then raise prices, which ain't new. And here's a thread about the "gig economy" model moving into IT.

Geriatric plutocracy's current exit strategy is regulatory capture, hence the need to lobby for guillotines rather than taxes. The downside of "fighting to steal all the money" can't be the same as "not fighting to steal all the money", I.E. merely not getting more money.

Without serious loss aversion there's never any reason to STOP fighting to steal all the money and power from everyone. France guillotined its aristocracy a couple centuries back, and these days has government funded child care, 35 hour weeks, and 5 weeks annual vacation. They went though a bit to get from point A to point B, but it seems to have worked out for them ok.

The racism and sexism on the fascism checklist are why the GOP is so upset about "Critical Race Theory". The people attacking it are mad about historians explaining how white men committed genocide against native americans, enslaved millions of black people systematically for hundreds of years (and still doing Jim Crow today), treated women as property (requiring a woman to have a male co-signer to take out a business loan was legal until 1988)... That's why they're eliminating humanities education in favor of STEM STEM Uber Alles, because fascists hate science but love technology.


June 22, 2021

Last month I watched a couple of videos about how Kraft foods got acquired by a predatory private equity company known for milking its acqusitions dry and moving on to the next purchase. (A bit like the way Bain Capital destroyed Toys-R-US, or that Ann Rand fan looted Sears.) Ever since then I've been purchasing the HEB store brand rather than the Kraft version.

Today Jeff noticed that the canadian verson of Kraft mac-n-cheese (there known as "Kraft Dinner") just switched to a "new improved flavor" that swapped out half the cheese for sugar. As in the amount of added sugar mentioned on the label works out to half the weight of the flavor powder packet in the box (although you have to do the math yourself to work this out, he was clued in by the taste). The new owners just sold Kraft's cheese business (which was Kraft's original business), so presumably cheese is now more expensive to Kraft than sugar is, hence this unhealthy cost cutting measure.

Working on the busybox patch adding cut -DF, but debugging it's a bit of a pain. Not familiar with this infrastructure.


June 21, 2021

Just-in-time delivery supply chains continue to collapse. Container based shipping is acting overloaded and swap-thrashing, with regularly scheduled delivery producing nothing for months and then multiple deliveries at once. First you have nothing to work with, then nowhere to store it.

Free Software people continue to work out the limits to their philosophy. I remember pointing out to them how various GPLv3 drafts meant if the World of Warcraft servers were running busybox and I had a WoW account, the license required I get root access to the server to replace the busybox binary. Which is stupid, but it's what the then-current wording required. Any license that gives manufacturers incentive to burn code into ROM instead of flash and cut the jtag traces so NOBODY can update it is probably not an ideal license, but the FSF has consistently been a net negative since 1993.

Microsoft Github is deleting security tools, while the rest of Microsoft is signing rootkits that connect to IPs in china. Microsoft co-founder Bill gates is using 22 shell companies to surreptitously buy US farmland. Twitter continues to suck at being twitter.


June 20, 2021

Ok, when I upgraded from devuan ascii to beowulf, xfce changed its default window manager policy from "click to focus" to "focus follows mouse" (luckily it's fixable but an upgrade changing that kind of preference is just CREEPY) and THAT'S why I've been randomly typing into so many unintended windows recently. Also, the thunderbird key binding for "a" is "archive". So the reason when I click on a text window and try to pull up a man page and the email message I was looking at disappears and is NOT in the trash folder is it got moved to some sort of archive->year folder.

Linux on the desktop: smell the usability! 30th anniversary edition! (Yeah, I'm trying to salvage _android_, not desktop Linux.)

I'm coming up with a patch to add cut -DF support to busybox (because Elliott thought it would be a good idea), and WOW do I miss my infrastructure. My menuconfig text IS my help text, my #defines are all autogenerated from the OPT_STR (which parses itself before main is called), and instead of having to:

#define CUT_OPT_NOSORT_FLGS (1 << 6)

My plumbing generates a header I #include at the start so I can check FLAG(D) and it Just Works. And if -D had an argument it would be in "TT.D" which would be NULL if none was supplied...

Instead I'm staring at busybox's:

opt = getopt32(argv, "^"
        OPT_STR
        "\0" "b--bcf:c--bcf:f--bcf",
        &sopt, &sopt, &sopt, <ok
);

And going "why is that second line of string data not in the OPT_STR #define up above?" Is there a REASON, or just a convention? It SEEMS like it's #defined up top and then used once and there aren't any other #includes in between, but then why do it that way? And then I'm assuming all that "x--abc:y--"... syntax is busybox's way of saying "[!bcf]" at the end of the option string? So instead of changing it to "[!bcfF]" I need to add a fourth stanza and add F to the first three? "b--bcfF:c--bcfF:f--bcfF:F--bcfF"? WHY does "-b--bcf" have b in it twice? Selecting -b switches off -b? What?

Except I need to make the new -F conditional because busybox micromanages size and has the regex support drop out, and they did it individually in each command instead of having ONE global symbol in the config indicating the presence of regex support (which would be probed for rather than manually selected based on what the toolchain had) and then xregex.h could give you stub functions so it all drops out? But no, they have this nonsense. Sigh...

Is my cut easier to read than their cut merely because of familiarity, or is the busybox one actually harder to understand? I can measure that mine's 100 lines _shorter_, but that's not the same metric...

Oh goddess, I don't want to KNOW what POP_SAVED_FUNCTION_VISIBILITY in busybox's xregex.h does. Not going there.


June 19, 2021

Android has added rust as a supported language, there's an MIT licensed coreuilts reimplementation going on in rust, and Elliott doesn't think C is "salvageable" and is talking up Rust. Sigh. I can see which way the wind is blowing, but I'm not really interested in jumping on board this particular new bandwagon. I intend to get toybox to a 1.0 release anyway, even if Android migrates off of it. They haven't yet, and I'm trying to view this as "deadline pressure" rather than "lost cause".

Meanwhile, once again "not selling past the close" I composed the following big long email and did NOT send it. I need to just reply to the first paragraph with "here's the patch". But for posterity:

On 6/19/21 6:50 AM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
>On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 3:01 PM Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> wrote:

>> The pending follow-up question to my previous email beyond "do you want this
>> feature" was "are you willing to add it yourself, or do you want me to
>> refamiliarize myself with busybox cut.c and whatever libbb sharp edges I hit
>> enough to knock up a patch". I felt the odds of you implementing it yourself
>> were higher if I DIDN'T offer a patch in the email, but if the busybox project
>> only wants the feature if I provide a patch, yes I can provide that patch.
>
> I would be quite happy if someone posts a patch.

I'll take a stab at it, let's see...

Sigh. It would be easier if I could use the existing toybox regression tests for this. Toybox has TEST_HOST=1 so I can run my tests against the host versions to make sure they're testing something real, and if I put busybox cut in the start of the path and run the toybox cut tests against that four of them fail:

FAIL: cut -bO overlaps
echo -ne '' | cut --output-delimiter ' ' -b 1-3,2-5,7-9,9-10 abc.txt
--- expected	2021-06-20 05:22:37.975989241 -0500
+++ actual	2021-06-20 05:22:37.979989241 -0500
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
-one:t o:th
-alpha beta
-the q ick 
FAIL: cut high-low error
echo -ne '' | cut -b 8-3 abc.txt 2>/dev/null || echo err
--- expected	2021-06-20 05:22:37.987989241 -0500
+++ actual	2021-06-20 05:22:37.991989240 -0500
@@ -1 +1,3 @@
-err
+:
+e
+c
FAIL: cut empty field
echo -ne 'a::b\n' | cut -d ':' -f 1-3
--- expected	2021-06-20 05:22:38.031989239 -0500
+++ actual	2021-06-20 05:22:38.035989239 -0500
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-a::b
FAIL: cut empty field 2
echo -ne 'a::b::c:d\n' | cut -d ':' -f 3-5
--- expected	2021-06-20 05:22:38.039989239 -0500
+++ actual	2021-06-20 05:22:38.039989239 -0500
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-b::c

None of those are the -DF test, that has a "toyonly" annotation so it'll only run it on a command where --version spits out the string "toybox". (Or "This is not GNU" for sed, which would also trigger on the busybox sed I wrote all those years ago...)

I find it ironic that we're arguing how it's ok to be missing stuff (like --output-delimiter or error checking that a range goes from high to low), but anathema to add stuff. I personally consider it an equal judgement call in both directions. One is easier to FIX, but NOT doing stuff for 20 years because a perfect solution may present itself someday and in the meantime doing without becomes the status quo? Most people who hit an issue won't tell you they did.

Even the switch from toybox "ls" default escaping from -q to -b broke some people's use cases, and we coped because where it was before was slightly more broken (the change was to match ubuntu's behavior). That wasn't even a feature, that was a default value. Everything inconveniences somebody. Balance the goals, minimize the damage, apologize where necessary, fix it AGAIN when you get more info...

>> (You may remember I had a dim view of the FSF _before_ the Second Coming of RMS.
>> Now that they've warmly embraced his post-#metoo self back into their ranks, I
>> don't think I'm cynical ENOUGH about them.)
>>
>> >> and assumed it would be easier if both busybox
>> >> and toybox already supported the same syntax.
>> >
>> > Yeah...
>> >
>> > What I worry about is gratuitous divergences we create.
>>
>> Hence us asking busybox if they wanted the new options, yes.
>
> Yes, I would accept new options.
>
> My point is, I would be happier with new options if coreutils
> people would be at least semi-positive about having these
> options as well. With the same option letters and syntax.

I checked the bsd man pages at the time to make sure they weren't using the new option letters. (I think I still had a bsd image running under qemu at the time...)

> The situation of "oh no, fork XYZ added essentially the same
> functionality too...but with other option letters, and they
> count fields from 0, not from 1... and they used OUR option
> letter for something entirely different! ARGH"
> is irritatingly repeating itself, as if we never learn.

I'm aware. I vaguely recall the 0 vs 1 field thing switching awk versions in 2002...

>> So rather than add missing features (or fix incompatibilities) in the
>> implementation busybox already had, you added a second implementation (alongside
>> the other one, without removing it),
>
> Yes. Because now we have users of this other, incompatible implementation,
> and if they upgrade bbox and their scripts break, they will be rightly
> pissed off.

I've generally worked out ways to fix up this sort of thing using the existing code base so far? Abandoning any users the CURRENT tool has isn't good, and adding a second incompatible one is the opposite of help.

But I couldn't even offer to do that with busybox netcat because you didn't say what it was that was needed in the new one, and these days I put that sort of effort into toybox instead of busybox.

> This is one facet of the incompatibility landmines: they are so innocuous-looking
> in their infancy. "I can add this useful option, what can possibly go wrong?
> People who don't need it will simply not use it!"

Many moons ago I split "catv" off as a separate command because I agreed with the article objecting to cat doing -v (it never should have been added, doesn't belong in this tool). Which made sense in the context of busybox already being a subset of existing functionality, but didn't survive my OWN work expanding it into something you could use in an actual development environment running existing scripts. Shifting goalposts...

You haven't been following my bash replacement shell implementation stuff, have you? It's compatibility corner cases all the way down. 90% of that work is figuring out what bash is doing. The actual implementation of toysh plumbing is the easy part. If I didn't care so much about compatibility I'd be done by now, but I'm making a _bash_ replacement, not just "a shell"...

> Right now, with these proposed options, we are doing EXACTLY this.

No, I just think it's a thing cut should be able to do, and that a cut implementation that CAN'T do that is a whole lot less useful.

Why can "sort" trivially work on word ranges but "cut" can't produce them? Needing "awk" for this is a bit like needing perl or python for it, that's a LANGUAGE not a tool. "Slice bread off the loaf? Sure, mount it in the laser cutter and run this program..."

>> with no additions to the test suite or
>> other documentation of the use cases motivating its addition, reasons you had
>> already forgotten by the time I noticed and asked ~3 years later.
>
> Trying to recall... I found my old posts about nc:
> https://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2010/q1/44
> https://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2010/q1/42
> https://sourceforge.net/p/netcat/bugs/37/

In 2003 I posted my "count" tool to the busybox list, which I'd been using for several years at that point, demonstrated as an example in an intro to unix course I taught at ACC in 1999, etc. The busybox list bikeshedded this into "pipe_progress" with a very different user interface. It was kind of annoying that they didn't respect the existing UI, but the new context immediately had more users than the existing one, so that's what won out.

> TL;DR: (at the time of me writing these comments in 2010,) OpenBSD, GNU
> and Nmap's reimplementations of nc were *mutually* incompatible.

Which is why I didn't implement compatibility with "the standard" because there wasn't one, yes.

> Not only
> they broke trivial use cases like "nc -l -p PORT", they broke them
> in different ways!

The functionality in my netcat worked in my testing. There was no standard interface for it to be compatible with. (I looked. ftp was similarly fragmented, as I recall...)

Back in the day I emailed the guy who did busybox awk when his code needed fixing. Even though he wasn't a regular busybox contributor I gave him a heads up about issues in case he wanted to handle it before I tried. But I didn't get emailed about any busybox netcat deficiencies, never had a chance to fix them, and instead found out about the change ~4 years later. (I believe defconfig changed so the other one built instead and broke an aboriginal linux thing?)

Again, do you have a compatibility example OTHER than netcat? (Are there any other commands that busybox has two implementations of in the tree, other than the command shell situation?)

> This should not be happening. People who code Unix utilities should not
> be this oblivious to what happens in real world when people try to use
> their tools.

I'm still subscribed to the austin group (posix mailing list) but stopped posting there after this interaction because I'm not going to deal with Joerg Schilling on a volunteer basis.

That said, they continue to more or less function as _a_ standards body, and the Linux Standard Base does not, so that's "the standard" to eventually try to get into. (IETF doesn't cover this, man7.org doesn't have versioned releases defining a coherent API so what "the cat man page" says can theoretically change a year from now which is why SUSv3 had a 3 in it...)

"Eventually" try to get into because back in the day the IETF had a requirement of two interoperable implementations for anything presented to it for standardization, and that sounded like a good rule to me and one I wanted to follow before bothering posix. Hence poking busybox about the new option.

> I get it that some developers were never wearing
> an admin hat in their careers, but still...

Do you believe I fall into that category?

Working on a patch. Very much out of practice with this infrastructure (and already homesick for mine), but I'll blog about that rather than bothering you here. :)

Rob


June 18, 2021

I'm circling back around to implementing flashcp, and I want to use the 64 bit API but they only merged 64 bit erase, but not the 64 bit write and info commands? The submission had all the commands, but they didn't merge half of them? (Wha...? Seriously guys, it's been TWELVE YEARS since that commit. You wanna finish what you started, or...? I know Linux kernel development culture's gone toxic and dysfunctional but this is just silly.)


June 17, 2021

A decade ago china built a bunch of nuclear power plants in response to the 2008 Beijing Olympics (the same time it started seriously copying Germany's solar panel technology: because its air quality was an international embarassment), and modern chinese construction projects tend to fall apart after a few years. Which brings us to the reactor leak du jour in china, which made me curious about whether anybody sold a geiger counter that plugs into phones, and it turns out yes they do (and they seem reasonably functional).

I miss having a twitter account so I could ask Sarah Taber about this. (Meanwhile, here's a fascinating thread I have absolutely nothing to contribute to other than attention.)

Republicans invent labels (like "partial birth abortion") to steer the narrative. It's called "framing the debate" and THAT link goes to a 20 year old article about when the first went all-in on this strategy.

Billionaires gonna bill. Billionaires are buying up residential real estate (although it's not _just_ blackrock doing it), and Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland he can. France fixed this kind of market cornering with tax policy, but they deployed guillotines first. (You have to get the parasites off before you can prevent their recurrence. Cut the tumor out THEN chemo. Drain the abcess then antibiotics.)

The Boomers will never go for that, for a definition of "never" that has maybe a decade left, during which they're trying to make The Handmaid's Tale become a documentary. Boomers are blind to their own biases, and immediately forget anything they don't like.

We still need to defund the police. We can at least start by disarming the police.

Handy infographic to help spot the left wing wrapping around to fascism.


June 16, 2021

Ok, I like the new FTC chair. That's good news.

The remains of Freenode seem to have found a way to faceplant harder. The obvious reason to switch servers is moving from the volunteer-provided servers to ones owned by Andrew Lee. That's why "the old servers are still up": because Lee doesn't operate them, and thus can't take them down. Other intersting tidbit from this article: Freenode had 70k users before this. The old volunteer-run freenode servers they're migrating off of collectively report 27k users. The new ones... 1500. No that's not missing any zeroes. Freenode has even lost the Free Software Foundation, leading to the obvious joke. *shrug* #toybox and #jcore are still at libera.chat.

Implementing the "declare" statment in toysh, and... "g" and "x" are different! Of course they are. You can export a local. Global means "not local". And of COURSE "declare -pg" does not work. The local still completely hides the global from the point of view of the function, but now I can write to something I can't read. How nice.

$ X=potato; chicken() { local X=42; declare -g X=abc; echo local=$X; declare -pg X;}; chicken; echo $X
local=42
declare -- X="42"
abc

Except locals NEST. Is there a syntax to say "write to previous nested context before this one?" Of course there isn't. Why would there be?

Sigh, how much of this is because I hadn't noticed before, and how much is because I finally updated from devuan 2018 to devuan 2020 and thus got a new version of bash? Compatibility with a moving target. Grrr. (Yes I stayed on an LTS for 3 years. The horror.)

To be honest, I'm mostly trying for compatibility with bash 2 (which was released in 1996 and just had bugfix releases until 3.0 came out 8 years later) and anything else is a bonus. The FSF had a multi-year period where they were dead and irrelevant (gcc forked to egcs, tar went 5 years between 1.13 and 1.14 releases where all the distros patched in -j to support bzip)... They were snapped out of it when their ftp site got cracked because nobody'd paid attention to it in forever, and people went "oh hey, we inexplicably depend on this stuff, it's easier to put work into it than migrate off". Bash 3 was part of the gnu revival that led to GPLv3, which is not exactly an endorsement. But Chet seems reasonably independent, and several of the new things get used (for a definition of "new" that's over 15 years at this point), so I _am_ implementing against the current bash man page and what the bash on my laptop right now runs. I'm just not _that_ bothered by it being a moving target.


June 15, 2021

I emailed 4 recruiters yesterday and asked an organization about sponsorship for open source work. Two follow-up phone calls so far. (Job hunting is emotionally exhausting, and tends to START when a job has already wrung you dry.)

I'd follow up on the "how google sponsors open source projects" link Elliott sent me back in March if it hadn't gone down shortly thereafter. I can fetch it out of archive.org but I'm assuming it's no longer current policy. Google the corporation does not culturally understand paying people who are not full time employees, and the money side of the company has only EVER shown interest in me as a "Site Reliability Engineer" which just SOUNDS like being paged out of bed is your job.

VOIP call with Jeff went a bit sour today: he's been bait-and-switching me on work where we sketch out a technical thing that would be great to do, and then he tries to turn it into "how do we issue an NFT coin on this", which I have zero expertise or interest in. Today I wasn't having it: I do not understand the coinbro mentality, I don't know why "issuing a new coin" is ever a good thing. I cannot help with that part. I understand that bitcoin is used for money laundering, and by the "unbanked" like sex workers who can't get access to the existing banking system due to stupid prejudice and persecution, and that's the fundamental underpinning of that having a nonzero price. (Its use as a medium of exchange is nearly drowned out by the Beanie Babie speculative tulip bubbles, of course. Governments spend a lot of money each year stabilizing exchange rates. Libertarian clowns who think stuff "just happens" because their servants operate discretely are pampered idiots.)

I've been focusing on plans where we make a thing that works and can then manufacture and sell it to people, and today when pressed Jeff said he no longer believes investors looking for that actually exist. He didn't quite phrase it this way, but he now seems to think the ONLY source of funding left (to him) is crypto-bros looking to pump-and-dump a coin they'd buy from us and sell on to someone else for more money. (Why would it be worth MORE money to a second person? </jazzhands>...) And that the business model actually DOING anything discourages them. (It's a responsibility, obligation, unnecessary complication...)

I... can't help with that.

(I just want to program. Unfortunately there's all this capitalism getting in the way.)


June 14, 2021

Why do I do zero clause BSD? Because copyleft easily turns into a trap.

The ELC CFP says it closed at 11:59 pm pacific time on the 13th, so looking at it at 4am central time I'm pretty sure I'm off the hook for any obligation to submit a proposal. (The button still seems active on the web page, but they made the deadline and I assume their database would discard it. That solves the "I feel like I should" vs "yeah but I don't really WANT to" conflict. Pressure's off, I can relax and take the loss.)

Sure there's plenty of stuff I want to talk about, but... I normally submit 4 proposals on different topics to give the commitee something to chose from. It's a defense mechanism for the ADHD symptom Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria: when I submit one proposal and it's rejected I tend to lose interest in the conference, that's why I didn't bother with the O'Reilley conference even though it was in Austin for 2 years: I'd previously submitted a talk proposal and been turned down and my brain Sour Grapesed it into a conference not worth attending. (And I can't go and NOT talk because they charge $500 to attend; the talk is literally the price of admission.)

Coming up with many different topics of potential interest isn't usually hard for me, but right now I'm in a "focus and get things DONE" mindset. I have been stretched too thin, and things I wanted to see happen may never come to pass which means I wasted (a lot of) effort on them. Leaving this job means leaving the j-core/gps/vpn work without any of it getting properly commercialized. The C++ crowd driving everybody from C to Rust means circling back to tinycc/qcc someday... may not happen?

At my day job I've been suggesting interesting things we COULD do, and building development/business plans around them, for months. Hey Jeff, here's another plan you can wave at investors and maybe get funding, it would be great if we could do THIS... and I'm tired.

Work still has not managed to run payroll yet this month. That's two full weeks into the month with no paycheck, I should really start looking for a new job. (I love the people, I love the technology, I love going to Japan, but running up a home equity loan to keep doing somemthing is not a job.)


June 13, 2021

I honestly didn't realize that the news articles about last night's mass shooting here in Austin weren't talking about the previous mass shooting until Fade informed me. I was around 25th street when it happened, 19 blocks north. Remember that new GOP law that guns no longer require permits? (But cars still require licenses.) Expect more of this, I guess. (That law doesn't even kick in until September 1, this is the pre-anarchy level of shooting.)

There should be a NAME for the big problems being easy and the small problems being enormous time sinks. Things like dunning-kruger and "disruptive technologies" become so much easier to talk about once there's a name for them. (Yeah people misuse the name, welcome to humanity.)

The sh2eb support in toysh had a regression, which I'm laboriously tracking down on my turtle board with "add next debug printf(), cursor up to big long compile line, pop sd card from board, stick in adapter, cursor up to sudo copy vmlinux to sd card (type in expired password), pop adapter, click sd card back into board, plug usb serial/power cable back in, cursor up to sudo microcom to see serial console, unplug/replug board about 3 times until it actually boots (something about this bitstream, it works fine once it's up but doesn't want to load reliably...), frown at output, rinse repeat". It's not HARD, but it's very tedious.

There's almost certainly a more elegant way to do this. The REAL fix is "I should remember to pack an ethernet cable next time" (and script the dance of the loopback cable setup with 192.168.1.42 and 192.168.1.43 addresses assigned manually via ifconfig/route, which was a real PAIN making work on ubuntu because networkmangler would ifconfig them back DOWN again twice a minute so I had a "while sleep 1; do ifconfig...; done" loop going in a tab because making networkmangler STOP DOING THAT without killing it was impenetrable, and killing networkmangler meant bringing the wifi up was painful....) Anyway, hopefully devuan doesn't have that problem and I can just DO it, but I need to remember to pack the cable.

Meanwhile, I could uuencode the vmlinux and paste it across the serial console, but that's not really FASTER than popping the card and copying it. Nor is it fewer steps using mousepad to actually cut and paste a file. A quick google finds xclip -sel c probably does what I want from the command line (hopefully without size constraints, the file is 4 megabytes before uuencoding and I was using mousepad because it doesn't choke on selections that big). And then there's the problem that our current turtle j2 bitstream doesn't support soft reboot because our "boot rom" is just an sram block that's initialized to known contents via the bitstream load, but then that sram is repurposed as L2 cache when Linux comes up so when you reboot there's nothing to reboot INTO unless you reload the bitstream. There's a physical button on the turtle board that does that, but I can't reach it without taking the board out of the case (downside of repurposing rasperry pi add-ons) and I dowanna. (Exposed circuitry, no anti-static wrist strap.)

It's one of those things where I can spend cycles on infrastructure to come up with a faster way to do this, or I can just do it manually, and figuring out which is the best use of resources is non-obvious. I know the tedious way at least makes measurable progress and termiantes. The tangents tend to spawn tangents...


June 12, 2021

As the temperature has risen the mosquito population at my nightly work table at the UT geology building has gone up with it. They're not a problem late at night (yet), but around 6am they start to converge. I re-apply bug spray but there's a CLOUD of them hovering about a foot away. You'd think the bats would eat them, but in rainy years the bats can't keep up and Austin has an outright monsoon season now. (That's not a joke, it's climate change. The monsoon band that used to hit Mexico has shifted up to cover Austin, and the droughts we were getting have shifted north.)

The ELC call for papers closes tomorrow, and I just don't feel like trying to deal with it. I should make and upload videos, not fly across country (at my own expense!) to visit rooms full of white middle aged men.

My job going under is part of it. They haven't managed to pay me yet this month, so I took more money out of the home equity loan and gave my first "here's my resume, tell me more" reply to a recruiter email instead of the usual "sorry, I'm busy". (It's not a job if I'm not getting paid, it's a hobby. And I have plenty of hobbies already.)

Still banging on toysh. I do not understand what $SHLVL is for. I _thought_ I did, but:

$ echo $SHLVL; (echo $SHLVL)
1
1
landley@driftwood:~/toybox/clean2$ echo $SHLVL; echo $(echo $SHLVL)
1
1
landley@driftwood:~/toybox/clean2$ echo | echo $SHLVL
1

I mentioned bash "optimizing out" subshells, but this is a bunch of cases where it seems to need to HAVE subshells?

$ time if true; then sleep 5; echo $SHLVL >&2; fi | if true; then sleep 1; echo $SHLVL; fi
1
1

real 0m5.005s
user 0m0.006s
sys 0m0.004s

The two sleeps happened in parallel therefore it HAD two shell instances, one for each if/fi in the pipeline occurring in parallel, but $SHLVL was 1 both times? So what's it measuring?


June 11, 2021

Trying to wean myself to "every 4th day" instead of "every other day" on the <span id=politics> entries, but boomerdamarung has not slowed down. Just been locally muffled. Maybe I can just stick one paragraph at the start of entries without accumulating too much of a backlog? Especially if it's "good news", whatever that means these days.

I'm trying to figure out if the proposed antitrust legislation is good news. I think it is, but I've been tricked before. (Meanwhile, Google's most recent attempt to eliminate the URL so people have no navigation option except google searches was about as well received as I would have expected.)

The "tether" scam propping up the price of bitcoin is nearing implosion, and sadly may take down El Salvador's economy with it.

As a white male american, I grew up thinking "we are the good guys" in basically everthing. It's important to recognize that we are not always the good guys. Sometimes you have to acknowledge, change course, and often fix what you broke to the extent you can even when it wasn't you personally that broke it (the "royal we" has splash damage). That's why it's my job to acknowledge that you can sing T-mobile is sexist to "Every Sperm is Sacred" (although the accent falls on the wrong syllable, and it's not so much them as a pervasive cultural problem). Or boggle at attempts to dodge accusations of racism by being even more racist.

The REASON I grew up thinking "my tribe never does anything wrong" is I was shielded from it by people who never mentioned the many things my tribe was doing wrong. The police were represented as incorruptible and upstanding instead of a net negative resource drain in serious need of defunding. We replaced aristocracy with plutocracy. The fight over what lies public school textbooks should contain is not new; heck, that's what the Scopes Monkey Trial was about in 1925 (the 1960 movie about which was nomiated for 4 oscars).

Of course recognition that "yes, we did wrong" can be weaponized against the people doing the recognizing. The "plastic straw" style hairshirt distraction remains effective and is an explicit strategy used against people who want to performatively repent and make others do the same. I've grown tired of watching left wing activists wrap around to the far right. ("Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." - George Santayana.) But our sexist culture killing young women and making the rest alcoholics is a PROBLEM. Racism is a problem, global warming is a problem, plutocracy is a problem: the world the Boomers have steered into a ditch is collapsing around us all and they need to STOP DRIVING.

The supreme court just unanimously ruled that the FTC can't force companies convicted of scamming their customers to pay them back. The Boomers' system is broken, and the fix is to remove all Boomers from elected office. Electing Boomercrats fixes nothing. We need to fix the system.

Sigh. No, don't use facial recognition as yet another way to deny benefits. (Don't means test the benefits at all, just make them universal like public school and the ability to call the fire department.)

Internet should be municipally provided like water and sewage (and in Austin, electricity). The private ISPs suck at it.

A common GOP trick answer all questions in private, off the record, with no recording or public accountability.

Lip service (n): anything Merrick Garland does.


June 10, 2021

It's always nice when people who used to actively oppose what I'm doing come around to my side of the argument.

Once again Devuan failed to suspend my laptop when I closed the lid, and I didn't notice, so the battery drained in my bag and I lost all my open windows. Since I did a full backup yesterday, I decided it was as good a time as any to bite the bullet and "apt-get dist-upgrade" from Devuan Ascii to Devuan Beowulf. Except running that command as root turns out to be a NOP, first you have to manually edit files and then the process is a lot of steps, and prompts for many things I do not care about. (I'm not reading the release notes of hundres of packages, I don't care what they decide to show me and get me to click through. "Just do it.")

And yes, the power management bug that thing says to manually downgrade a package to work around is still there a year later. The last few entries in that bug tracker are literally spam emails. (Query: does that package simply never upgrade again? Stuck at that version forever? Will this cause a problem with library version skew at some point using ancient binaries?)

So much user interface stuff changed and needed to be tracked down and changed back. The background color changed from a light grey-blue image to a dark red image (changed it back). The terminal window font changed to something that wasn't even MONOSPACED but a reboot fixed that. Thunderbird's changed fonts and decided the list panels need to have a dark grey background so the text has less contrast... and it's replacing > in replies with outlook style vertical reply bars! URGH. KILL IT WITH FIRE. How do I...

(2.5 hours of searching later.)

Ok, this comment from five years ago is still current, albeit the .css file is ignored. But there's an advanced magic config editor ALL THE WAY AT THE END of the "general" tab of preferences, where you can toggle the magic booleans indicated and now it merely COLORS the reply lines insted of microsoft-outlooking them. But "reply color" has its own separate config thing under the general tab where I can set it to black, and then thunderbird is spending a lot of extra effort to behave normally, which is Mozilla in a nutshell.

Back on Kwajalein age 7 I was diagnosed "hyperactive". These days we'd call that ADHD with definite elements of the autistic spectrum I've spent a lot of effort learning to performatively paper over, but I still REALLY DISLIKE my daily environment changing out from under me without warning. If you get into your car and the steering wheel is on the other side today, I feel you have the right to be annoyed by that. I didn't like twitter doing it, I don't like my Linux distro doing it, and I'm still using stuff like Google and Chrome because they DON'T do that much. They put the new stuff off to one side and there's always a way to make it stop bothering you until you have some downtime to experiment.

That said, my resistance to systemd (I.E. reason I used devuan rather than debian) isn't because I haven't tried it. It's because systemd is an insecure pile of unnecessary complexity with a design that violates the unix philosophy.

And hey, devuan/chrome even restored my open browser tabs after the upgrade. (Here's a good history of tumblr.)


June 9, 2021

Didn't make it to the table tonight because of 3 hours of intense intestinal distress shortly after eating the rest of that absolutely delicious date cake fuzzy made. Last time I ate some I got my first visual migrane since I stopped drinking energy drinks. I think I'm allergic to something in that cake.

The finance guys have finally pulled the plug on the keystone xl pipeline, which is probably a sign that all oil projects are now categorized as stranded assets, which is sort of the commercial version of an underwater mortgage. It means the revenue stream from this won't last long enough to pay off the loan taken out to build it, even before you include cleanup costs decomissioning things like oil wells. (One reason abandoned gas stations STAY abandoned for so long is it can cost quite a lot more than the purchase price of the property to clean up old underground fuel storage tanks that slowly leak petroleum products into the surrounding soil over the years, and of course the purchaser would be on the hook for that (ala love canal). This has been a known problem for decades.)

Twitter remains bad at being twitter.

Israel's far-right (led by 71 year old Benjamin Netanyahu) is losing power, and thus gearing up to do their own January 6th style insurrection to topple the government that didn't re-elect them.

$DAYJOB has now gone through THREE different "money/sales guy" Boomers who went senile on the job and had to be eased out to pasture because they could no longer function. Some were only in their late 60s when it happened. (Of course "Boomers never let go" was operative every time; denial of incapacity and doubling down in the face of all evidence.)


June 8, 2021

Sorry if the toysh blog entries get a bit repetitive but job control is one of those changes that refuses to break down into smaller chunks, and I keep having to restate stuff to get it clear in my head what I'm trying to do next, especially when small parts of it don't quite line up right yet (leaving rough edges that may indicate unresolved design issues).

I think I've got most of the subshell backgrounding sorted out now (parentheticals, pipelines around curly brackets, and blocks like if true; then echo hello; fi > filename & getting backgrounded). The trick was ripping the run_subshell(NULL) option back out and instead adding another if (CFG_TOYBOX_FORK) check to the one-and-only caller of run_subshell() with a NULL, and have it do the fork() stuff itself, and in the nommu else case do the pl2str() itself and call run_subshell(str, len) like all the other callers do. The run_subshell(NULL) option was trying to avoid extra if (CFG_TOYBOX_FORK) stanzas, but there's already multiple instances of that test in toybox and the result of having the test in run_subshell() was "sometimes it runs a child shell, sometimes it returns twice to the caller" which was just incoherent. Now run_subshell() always spawns a child process to "eval" a chunk of shell script, returning the child's PID. When that's not what we want to happen, we don't call it and the caller does the fork() itself instead.

But tying that off still leaves four unfinished functions: fg_pp(), bg_pp(), wait_main(), and run_subfunc().

The foreground and background process functions (fg_pp() and bg_pp()) take a struct sh_process *pp and either foreground it (waiting for it to end) or background it (adding it to the jobs list). My current thinking is the foreground job shouldn't be ON the jobs list, it should be in TT.fg which previously existed as a hack for exec_main() called TT.pp but is being renamed and genericized.

The wait_main() function implements the wait command, which is a bit of a can of worms due to the 4 types of things you can wait for: %tasks, numeric pids that were backgrounded at some point, the most recent $! process which is kind of a special case for <(a specific bash extension), and the TT.fg foreground job. Except TT.fg is only waited for by fg_pp(), you can't use the "wait" command on the foreground pipeline (which would already wait for itself and have to complete before you could run the wait command), but they're both sort of the same infrastructure? You don't know what child process is exiting next, and "set -b" says to asynchronously report jobs so the plumbing needs to handle each exiting process as it comes rather than doing waitpid() for something specific. And that means doing waitpid(-1, &stat, maybe_nohang) and hunting though TT.fg, TT.jobs[], and TT.bangpid, and when the last pid in a TT.jobs[] pipeline exited adding it and its exit code to the dead process memorial.

And since TT.memorial[] needs to store the PID and the exit code, I can combine them as (pid<<8)+exit and as long as I'm doing that anyway I might as well eliminate pp->exit and keep it in pid always. Which is another "pull the thread and see what unravels" change pass but logically part of this design shift.

The run_subfunc() function is about running individual functions and builtins in their own process (whether backgrounded or not). Where run_subshell() is handling blocks and pipelines, run_subfunc() is handling individual commands what WOULD be run_command() except there's nothing to exec() out of the $PATH for this one. This still involves marshalling data to a child shell, but the command line you run in there has already been parsed, it HAS to be to see what we're running:

$ X=echo; > potato $NOTHING $X hello
$ cat potato
hello

We can't know that we NEED to run a shell function until we've parsed the command line, and yes that redirect is BEFORE the command to run; variable assignments also come first. You can expand the entire command line and wind up with an empty string at the end and thus not run anything (although running $NOTHING as its own command blanks $_ which just hitting enter doesn't, thanks bash).

Avoiding parsing the command line again isn't just an efficiency thing: repeating variable expansions would make side effects like $(x++) happen twice, and repeating redirects would cause "set -o noclobber" exclusive file creation to error out. Re-parsing the command line isn't just expensive, it would be full of buggy corner cases. So instead, we wrap each already-parsed argument in $'stuff' with appropraite backslash escapes, although bash's ${x@Q} logic is doing something more complicated and if I implement that I should reuse the function...

The problem with doing all THAT is $BASHPID is going to resolve to the parent PID, since that's the context in which the expansion took place: "true | echo $BASHPID" would give the $$ pid not the "readlink /proc/self" PID. Supporting vfork() makes that VERY HARD to get right, because you don't know the new PID until after the vfork() and you don't unblock the parent until the child exits (discarding said PID) or execs() which needs to know the new command line and have all the redirects resolved already. Unless you do the variable expansion and redirects in the child process after the vfork (which is DEEPLY inadvisable) expanding $BASHPID can't know the right values.

The only[1] way to get $BASHPID right would be to run EVERY pipeline segment through run_subshell(), so the command line is expanded in a child process, and then add an implicit "exec" on the front of single command subshells. Even WITH a fork() that's expensive because it glues the parsed arguments back into a string (which is what nommu needs to send the data through the pipe) and then parses them back into individual arguments again.

Sigh: run_subshell() started life handling $() contents which were kept as a string all along because "$(blah)" is logically one argument until it's evaluated. But now with case patterns) potentially living in $() blocks the simple parentheses counting approach isn't good enough, although supporting that remains a todo item. But having the caller produce the string instead of having run_subshell() traverse a list of pipeline segments is what I just went BACK to, noticeably simplifying the design.

The thing is, most commands don't need any of this. The "parse command line, vfork() and exec()" approach is the COMMON CASE. It's fast and efficient when you're NOT in a pipeline, and in that case $BASHPID is showing you your shell's PID anyway. Running "echo $BASHPID" several times in a row, typed in at the prompt each time, will repeat the same PID. And for ( echo $BASHPID ) subshells, the toysh design would get it right, or at least match bash:

$ (echo $BASHPID; readlink /proc/self; echo $BASHPID)
14860
14861
14860
$ (/bin/echo $BASHPID; readlink /proc/self; /bin/echo $BASHPID)
14866
14868
14866

This is bash implementation details bubbling up to the surface. (Note how readlink is one higher than echo but 2 higher than /bin/echo because shell builtin: implementation detail!) I'm not sure TRYING to match it is the right thing to do? In toysh, evaluating arguments to the function CALL happens in the host context, running the argument BODY takes place in the child process, and $BASHPID shows that. That's... not wrong? But not the same. Hmmm...

[1] Modulo horrible in-band signalling that's probably even worse.


June 7, 2021

Canada is still in denial about the whole child murder thing. Late Stage Capitalism has now invented a barbecue with proprietary charcoal. Disaster patriarchy is analogous to disaster capitalism: the haves using any crisis to tear down the have-nots. Defund the police. Atheism is a religion the way zero is a number (they have specific beliefs, prostletyze about them, persectue unbelievers, and so on) so of course that cult has joined the GOP right alongside the evangelicals.

Microsoft continues to suck. Not that Faceboot and Google are exactly covering themselves with glory these days, and I sent the last Amazon recruiter to contact me (ten days ago) the first three links that came up when I searched for "amazon employee" in recent news, which did not include yesterday's facepalm about taxes. (Amazon doesn't report a profit because it chooses not to, it's always spent the money on growing bigger instead which just HIDES the profits. They've always used it to dodge taxes, and are trying to nerf new tax laws so their trick still shields them.) And don't get me started on Elon Musk, who's still regularly mocked about buying credit for things he didn't create; dude's been operating under a cloud of drama since before paypal.

Intellectual properly law is not salvageable. In a post-Boomer world we need Universal Basic Income to support artists and inventors, with improved systems like Patreon, plus better snopes-style attribution tracking. Today our political system is paralyzed by Boomers and nothing can be done until enough of them leave the voting pool.


June 6, 2021

I have once again lept to the defense of C when perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut. I'm old enough that I'm constantly scrutinizing my opinions for "is this right or merely comfortable". I'm willing to learn other languages, but so far nothing does what C does better than C.

Technical merit aside, I'm not sure that C can be politically defended because the C++ people are trying hard to drag C down with them. That's a shame, and a practical annoyance, but FIXING it would require as much marketing effort in FAVOR of C as the C++ people have put into standing on top of it and screaming "look at me, not them!" Failing that, all I can do is watch it happen and adjust to the fallout.

So toysh forks a subshell if A) the curent command ends with the "&" background operator, B) we're in a parenthetical block, C) we're in a pipeline. Right now I literally have code doing if (TT.ff->blk->pipe || !strcmp(s, "(") || (ctl && !strcmp(ctl, "&"))) to see if it needs to call run_subshell() there. The problem with that is if a command is in a pipe, and in parentheses, AND backgrounded with & it only spawns ONE subshell to handle all 3 cases. Shouldn't it spawn multiple nested child processes if you annotate multiple times?

Testing bash's behavior, the answer appears to be... no?

$ echo $$; echo $BASHPID >&2 | ( echo $BASHPID ) > $BASHPID
6206
6377
$ ls -tr | tail -n 1
6378
$ cat 6378
6378

The parent shell is 6206, the first pipeline segment is 6377, the second pipeline segment is 6378 when evaluating the redirect and it's STILL 6378 when running echo inside the parentheses. The ( ) in that pipeline is being ignored (optimized out?) because the process is already in its own shell. And it looks like it does that a lot:

$ echo $BASHPID& (echo $BASHPID)&
[2] 13068
13068
[3] 13069
[1] Done ( echo $BASHPID )
13069

Consecutive PIDs even though the second one was inside parentheses, and the PID output by echo is the same one that got backgrounded as a job. Translation: the parentheses did not spawn a subshell within the context they ran.

$ readlink /proc/self& (readlink /proc/self)&
[1] 13196
[2] 13197
13196
13197

Not an artifact of how variables are evaulated, it's what the commands themselves see when they run.

$ readlink /proc/self >&2 | (readlink /proc/self) & readlink /proc/self
[3] 13286
13286
13285
13287

Three consecutive PIDs (if in a different order, partially due to one going to stderr and the other two going to stdout).

$ readlink /proc/self >&2 | (readlink /proc/self) >&2 & | readlink /proc/self
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `|'

I.E. you CAN'T have an & within a pipeline, the terminators are exclusive.

$ (readlink /proc/self&); readlink /proc/self
14117
14118

It's not an attribute of ( ) either, & inside parentheses won't fork an extra process going in the other direction either. Hmmm... and this is related to:

$ readlink /proc/self; bash -c "readlink /proc/self"
14264
14265

Which I've had on my todo heap forever. The bash process doesn't fork(), it does exec("readlink") from within the bash PID that ran -c, because it knows that this is the last command (presumably with no "trap EXIT") and thus it's already IN an otherwise empty process context. Note that the Defective Annoying SHell doesn't do this:

$ readlink /proc/self; dash -c "readlink /proc/self" 14367 14369

Non-consecutive PIDs because the dash process forks to run readlink.

A nommu shell has to vfork() and re-exec itself, which means FINDING itself. This makes

A NOMMU subshell is way more expensive than just a background process: a background process is just vfork()/exec() of a command line we've prepared. The difference between fork() and vfork() there is minimal. But a subshell has to re-exec the current process, which is awkward: I first asked the linux kernel developers if there was any way for a process to re-exec itself without /proc being mounted 15 years ago, and most recently brought it up last year, but just haven't had the spoons to engage with linux-kernel for a while now.

And then once the shell has re-execed itself to unblock the vfork()ed parent, it has to re-establish the current context in the child shell by creating strings representing all the currently defined variables and functions the new shell snippet might use (local variables, read only variables, integer variables...) and send them through a pipe to the new process which reads and digests them, and then reads and executes the command(s) the new child process should execute in the new context.

I have that code already, but it's expensive. (And I need to update bits of it to fully support functions.) To avoid this expense, I want to do enough analysis to see if the command in the pipeline is a shell function (needing to run in a shell), a shell builtin, or an external fork/exec command, so the 99% of the time it _is_ running something like "ls" it can just vfork() and exec the thing without depending on /proc/self/exe to exist or marshalling anything through a pipe.


June 5, 2021

Catching up on Paul Krugman's columns, when people talk about 1970's inflation (stagflation) they often treat it as a labor supply problem. Except the Baby Boom was entering the workforce so there wasn't exactly a shortage of labor. (There may have been a shortage of Greatest Generation skilled labor from World War II veterans; but warm bodies to throw at a problem weren't hard to find.) The real problem was the origin of the phrase "volatile food and energy prices".

The "food" part was a series of worldwide crop failures (due to the initial climate shifts that started the modern alarm over global warming), resulting in trade shenanigans that caused the price of food to spike. This popularized an alarmist book about how humanity was all gonna die because those dirty foreigners would breed faster than the food supply and eat all the white people's food. This fearmongering lead china's easily influenced dictator Mao "Dunning Kruger" Tse-Tung to institute the famous "One Child" policy in 1979 (following up on his violent revolution murdering millions to take over the country, "The Great Leap Forward" murdering millions more, and the "Four Pests Campaign" starving millions, with a way to just _prevent_ millions from ever existing). Meanwhile in the reality-based community, Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution quadrupled the world's food supply and put us all into permanent food surplus ever since by (among other things) removing limits on application of the Haber-Bosch process to agriculture. Borlaug won the Nobel Prize for for this in 1970, but it took a while to deploy globally and scale up. (And yes, the 1967 Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" named Quadrotriticale after the same "triticale" wheat/rye hybrid he was working on at the time in his nobel prize biography. Mao started his mass sterilization campaign 12 years later.)

The "energy" part was the OPEC oil embargo, started as boycott to punish the USA's support of Israel when the arab states attacked it in 1973 and turning into an economic bonanza for Saudi Arabia when oil demand turned out to be way less restricted by price than anyone had realized, since especially after World War II we were using it for EVERYTHING. (Home heating, transportation along the new brand new interstate highways, electricity for refrigeration and air conditioning, newly invented plastic soda bottles, all that Haber-Bosch nitrogen powered by fossil fuel energy...)

The spike in food and energy prices gave us the inflation, and the federal reserve added the stag- part.

Today, things like used car prices are being driven up by catalytic converters, where covid-based rare earth mining/refining disruption has driven the prices of the platinum/palladium/rhodium in them up over a thousand dollars an ounce, so old cheap cars are being junked to sell the catalytic converters (when the part isn't outright stolen from parked cars). Of course Boomer Media writes entire articles about the dwindling supply of used fossil fuel burning cars without ever MENTIONING this issue.

Articles about the "global chip shortage" never seem to mention the sanctions against China's largest chip manufaturer when discussing said global chip shortage. Orders they would have filled have now gone to the other fabs, which are now backlogged. Sure, SMIC is only the fifth largest global semiconductor foundry, but that seems kind of significant? And Japan had TWO semiconductor plant fires (the one in March made news in the USA, but one back in March didn't) which makes me think there might have have been some sort of insurance fraud with the covid-idled plants that still had to pay rent? Dunno...

It would be nice if we had a little more "why", but you have to TEACH history before you can analyze it and apply that analysis to current issues...


June 4, 2021

Last night I had my first serious visual migrane in several years. No idea what triggered it, but it was really annoying. (Way better than having a stroke, of course, which is the other thing that comes to mind when "there is a serious problem with my vision and it's the same in both eyes" happens.)

Circling back to weaning the $DAYJOB root filesystem off of busybox, I have a current vmlinux but not the cpio.gz file? Let's see, readelf -a gives me a file offset for the start of init.data, and the gzip signature is "1f 8b" so find a plausible start, dd the data out starting there and pipe it into zcat and pipe THAT to cpio -tv and ... boom, got the files.

Ok, run the busybox out of that and it says:

[, cat, dd, dumpleases, echo, flashcp, httpd, hush, ip, ntpd, route, sh, sleep, stty, test, tr, udhcpc, udhcpd

Toybox already has "[ cat echo sleep test" (which are probably enabled in busybox for sh/hush), and toybox also has an sntp client which can be used instead of ntpd -p. (You can use an sntp client with an ntp server, but not the other way around.)

Toybox pending has dd, stty, tr, route, dhcp client and server (dumpleases is a udhcpd tool), and although there's also an ip in toys/pending that was being used to set up the kernel wireguard implementation (which is being replaced with a userspace one). This means the commands toybox hasn't got ANY implementation of are just httpd and flashcp. I actually started on flashcp last month, I should dig that up...

A toybox httpd is basically reverse wget, and just needs to serve static files and cgi. Either it's a file sent verbatim, or it's a child program to execute in a netcat-ish way with known environment variables. (That even handles cookies, which are sent from the browser to the server as http 1.1 "keyword: value" lines. I did that at some length in 2002, don't remember the details but I can look them up.)

Plus some basic rate limiting (as in drop connection, not 503 error: that's also SENDING A PAGE. If somebody tries to flood/tiergruben you, refusing to ack and close connection for 503 errors is just as paralyzing).

The tricksy bit is supporting https. I wanted to pipe it through the openssl/bearssl/stunnel command line wrappers, but Denys built an https engine into busybox? Sigh. Feature parity implies I should too. Supporting ONE handshake crypto and ONE symmetrical data flinger crypto type doesn't seem that hard (and there's RFCs on them?) and it's not that far off from learning/implementing another data compression engine; a largeish timesink but I've done worse. But the list of server keys (while easy enough to install) is an external dependency, so by default toybox would only serve self-signed pages? (It should come up with the signing key in a secret but consistent way for a system, and I have NO idea what that would be... Hmmm.)

Right, first pass, get http:// right without the s.


June 3, 2021

Amazon is creating a mesh network protocol so refusing to give your washing machine access to your router won't stop it from automatically connecting to your neightbor's wifi to exfiltrate data about you for their information gathering. Starting to think I need a remodel to install faraday cage wires in the drywall. (My phone can get the password to my router, the point is ME granting internet access to devices. My TV does not get it. Admittedly I expected cheap cell modems with ipv6 addresses to eventually show up in everything, but thought I had a few more years before it would be cost effective enough to worry about.)

Tesla continues to suck at self-driving. Google spent 8 years longer than everybody else working on self-driving (mostly at a maximum speed of 25 mph) before trying to deploy for a REASON. Every time those clowns make another stab at monetizing this they set back regulatory approval of the technology another 18 months.

78 year old Biden continues to sabotage his own plans to beg for republican approval he will never get. (Meanwhile, the administration's cleaning house goes very slowly, but it's still it's refreshing to be up against a snorlax instead of a nihilego.) 71 year old Netanyahu continues to want to destroy his country rather than give up power, but then attacking the process is how fascists advance their agendas. And yet another source points out conservatives focus on STEM because studying humanities makes people less likely to vote "conservative".

Canada's processing of the discovery of hundreds of dead children buried under those catholic schools they forced indigenous children into to destroy native culture has advanced to the finger pointing stage. If you're wondering where the taliban came from, this thread on soviet atrocities in afghanistan and this one on the USA making it worse are a good start. The Bitcoin Money Laundering Protocol has been having a bad week.


June 2, 2021

Dan Brown submitted a patch series to md5sum.c to add sha2 support, doing all 4 (sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512) variants. I've cleaned it up and am pretty happy with it. (Bit more I might do, but it's good for now.)

That's one of the big remaining chunks of TODO stuff in the roadmap, and lets me remove two items from the $PENDING list in scripts/install.sh, which implements "make install_airlock". The remaining $PENDING commands there are:

dd diff expr ftpd less tr vi wget awk sh unxz xzcat bc bison flex make nm ar gzip

I'm guessing dd, expr, tr, awk, sh, bc, bison, flex, make, ar, and gzip are needed to build the kernel, leaving diff, ftpd, less, vi, wget, unxz, and xzcat as things the target system should have for native building. I don't believe this was the full aboriginal linux dependency list, but that's what the roadmap is for.

I should dig up my latest analysis of toybox road-to-1.0 status and recheck everything.


June 1, 2021

Somebody on twitter asked a really good question: If oil is so profitable why does it need state support? (The answer is probably "the resource curse".)

Here's an entertaining story about how broken corporations are. People are standing up to the Boomers. IP law is slowly collapsing. Billionaires gonna bill. The GOP remains terrible (but GOP Evangelicals remain the worst). Women's tennis is having an attack of misogyny. The police still need defunding.

The ex-british colonies seem esecially racist, which implies britain is where we got the racism from? But then again it was the dutch trading empire in south africa who invented apartheid on the land they'd taken to control the Cape of Good Hope. (They also had an East India Company.) Capitalism creates plutocracy which finds racism extremely useful to divide and conquer the populace. I suppose the UK was just an early and enthusiastic adopter of capitalism, and hence racist as all get out.

The bitcoin-demanding cyberattacks have now hit the meat pipeline. The JBS plant in Texas is up in the panhandle between oklahoma and new mexico, probably not affecting fresh meat in Austin much? We just don't work that way. (HEB has an onsite butcher that takes delivery of half-cows from ranchers. That's why the one on Far West could convert to a kosher butcher.) Might drive up the price of steak-umms though. I should stock up.


May 31, 2021

Fade is back in Austin for the first time since the pandemic started, so I expect to spend far less time on the computer this week.

I got a response to my must recent perl removal submission (for s390x kernel build) and replied quite tersely because of the concept of "selling past the close". (If they offer to do a thing you're happy with, say yes and stop talking.)

There's a lot I WANTED to say about his earlier points, how I'm working to counter trusting trust by creating a minimal build environment and it needs to be able to rebuild itself under itself as a verification step so adding perl to that means perl would need to be binary audited. I don't care if peripheral drivers need perl to build, I just want to build a basic minimal system that can run the build tools without extraneous dependencies.

I've been maintaining perl removal patches for basic builds since Peter Anvin added the dependency in 2008, before the documentation changed to mention perl, and when I got most of the perl removal patches merged back in 2013 I didn't try to remove it from things like the RAID driver because that doesn't block my use case. Possibly if that was a mistake if it's going to metastasize and be entrenched as policy. (We're not THAT far from a day where to build a kernel you need perl, lexx, yacc, the BPF compiler, rust, openssl, and the latest version of python 3 not the previous version of python 3...)

But he needed agreement, not nuance. Yes please, merge my patch with a different description, doing so still removes the depencency.

Meanwhile, there's a good reason a reason I'm trying to steer Android rather than turn vanilla Linux into a desktop OS.


May 30, 2021

I have three functions that try to hand off to subshell in a nommu-friendly way without significantly penalizing the fork() case.

The core is int run_subshell(string, len), which is fairly straightforward when run with a string: for the fork() case it runs do_source() in a new function context, and calls _exit() when that returns. For the nommu case it runs a child instance of the shell using xpopen(0) and marshalls state to it through a pipe to a known high filehandle, ending with the command to run in the new context.

Second, run_subshell() grew the ability to have its string be a NULL pointer. The nommu case is not too different, it would still xpopen(0) a new child shell and pipe data to it, but it would create its own string using pl2str(TT.ff->pl, 0) to convert the child's block of parsed context _back_ into a string for the child to run. But in the fork() case the function returns twice: the parent returns the child PID and the child spawns a new function context and returns 0 PID so the parent can continue until end of the block the child should run. The problem in both cases is figuring out where the child's block starts and ends: for ( ) it should advance past the ( and stop before the ) but the parent already did trailing redirects so those don't get marshalled to the child. But for & case you run a single command, except when you background a block...

Third, I'm making a run_subfunc() to handle running functions in subshells, which also includes the four NOFORK functions that aren't NOPs. When called in a pipeline they need context marshalled into a child shell to be able to work as a background process. This is basically another wrapper around run_subshell() except its job is to convert the already parsed command line (minus redirects and such) into a string (series of $'' quoted literal strings) for run_subshell() to run. And again, it only needs to do that in the NOMMU case and the with-mmu case can just fork and keep (some subset of) the existing context.

I need to add SO many tests...


May 29, 2021

I'm very lucky to have opted out of windows years ago. Apparently Windows 10 is terrifying.

Huh, European cars are way more efficient than american cars.

Google is so bad at privacy even google engineers are complaining about it. (I keep meaning to install a different image so I can try out locally built binaries and do system development on the thing, but I use my phone as a phone.)

Boomercrats suck. The GOP is throwing everything they can at the supreme court they hacked (abortion bans, the texas gun thing) because they know Biden will never pull an FDR and expand it to undo the Merrick Garland thing plus the "Boomers never let go" expiration of RBG and justice Kennedy during the Trump administration. Heck, Biden hasn't purged the DOJ yet or gotten that clown out of the post office (let alone prosecuted him). Boomercrats even kept the filibuster. The Boomercrats are Boomers. They are the problem. Bad Cop is entirely predictable, but Good Cop retains the capacity to disappoint.

Boomer media organizations are apparently not allowed to call white people terrorists. (Was the Unibomber a terrorist? Was Timothy McVeigh a terrorist? Gun massacre du jour it's always a white guy pulling the trigger, with the very occasional white woman.)

Of course it was at christian schools that hundreds of students were murdered and buried in shallow graves. Christianity has been about racist murder since emperor Constantine made it the state religion of Rome. (Christian schools murdering their students are also powered by sexism.) When not actively suppressing indigeous cultures, white people lie and claim to be experts about them.

Defund the police. They cannot be reformed.

The GOP is using Jurisdictional disputes to divide and conquer investigations (when not just stonewalling them) so they can loot and pillage on behalf of the billionares. For example, remember how 150 died during the Texas blizzard and prices spiked over a thousand percent? The republicans running the Texas legislature see this as an excuse for a permanent rate increase and doubling down on fossil fuels.

Meanwhile billionaires (in this case Peter Thiel) are forming their own extrajudicial vigilante squads (as-a-service).

Capitalism has always been dehumanizing. They do it to brown people _first_. They never ONLY do it to brown people.

North Carolina keeps finding ways to be even more racist.

Cory Doctorow makes a case that billionaires have already defeated democracy. As in we haven't got one anymore. I still have hope that enough Boomers dying will drain their power base, but as with solar displacing fossil fuels before global warming kills us all, it's gonna be close. But this is also why I advocate for guillotines, not taxes. It's not about re-establishing parity or funding necessary programs, it's about purging a cancer from the body politic. You don't rehabilitate a tumor, you cut it out. And your negotiating position can't be the MINIMUM you will accept, the Overton window must extend past your "safe school" fallback.


May 28, 2021

It's still monsoon season in Austin. Today it rained hard enough to turn 45th street into a river (cars still driving down it but threw up spray walls like they're going through a big puddle the whole time), and it shorted out the train crossing signal at the corner so the barrier was down and ringing for an hour and change.

I tried to go out to the table during a break in the tunderstorm around 10pm, and made it about a block before running into tree that broke in half in the storm where there weren't enough streetlights for me to be comfortable about NOT stepping on a downed power line I wouldn't notice soon enough, so I backed up and went down Red River instead until I Noped right back home at the second big lightning flash. I set up at the kitchen table and got nothing whatsoever done because Fuzzy did the usual "you're home I can talk to you" thing that's the bane of telecommuters everywhere. (Not the cats this time!)


May 27, 2021

I'm still under the weather. Freenode continues to implode.

Oh hey, the toybox entry in Wikipedia[citation needed] just replaced the link to the long detailed command analysis of what's still left to be done before 1.0 (which came to the conclusion the project's about 80% of the way to 1.0) with a hundred word release announcement mentioning an upcoming anniversary and that one of the commands in pending is enabled in defconfig. Bravo, Wikipedia! Golf claps all around. (Never read Wikipedia about any topic you already know anything about. It'll make you queasy at how easily we swallow everything ELSE they say.)

I went out to Wendy's and sat in my old booth from The Before Times, where I used to do a bunch of programming in between lunch rushes. I'm vaccinated AND kept my mask on, but wasn't comfortable enough to actually pull out my laptop (just ate and went home again). I'm hoping I can get used to it again? Walking to the table at UT is nice exercise, but consumes 2 hours of travel time, is easily blocked by weather or minor health issues, and imposes an inconvenient schedule. It's good to have other options.

Finally sat down an worked out how to get diff --color=always -u toys/*/sh.c sh.c | less -R to show me colors in less, but when using the gnu tools in debian it doesn't work right? The FIRST line of each range is colored, but if there are multiple + lines or multiple - lines in a row, only the first is colored and the rest are white. (These are colored properly in "git diff" but that 90% likely wrote its own implementation of all this stuff.) Anyway, there IS a way to do it, even if the gnu/dammit crap is buggy as usual. I just need to replicate the interface but not the bugs.

I'd really like to get toybox to do that automatically, but even when toybox "ls" and toybox "less" are talking through a pipe launched by "toysh", it's a bit awkward? I can have less default to -R (dunno why it would ever NOT do that?) but "ls -l" knowing that its output doesn't go to a tty and yet is color safe is less obvious. It definitely should NOT do it for "diff -u > file.patch". The design question is when SHOULD it do it? I can make "less" a MAYFORK, but "you were started by toybox and piped into another toybox command" is a bit inside baseball to special case? Hmmm. I suppose toysh COULD export an environment variable into child processes to that effect. Except "diff -u | gzip" is a toybox child that probably should NOT get the escape sequences. But then gzip isn't a MAYFORK, it's an always fork? Hmmm, are they any MAYFORK commands that SHOULDN'T get the color escape sequences output to them? Let's see...

$ grep MAYFORK toys/*/*.c | grep -v NOFORK | sed -n 's/.*TOY(\([^,]*\).*/\1/p' | xargs
help echo false kill printf pwd test [ time true

None of the current ones even look at stdin. :)

Of course IMPLEMENTING less as a mayfork is tricksy, it has to clean up its memory allocations and filehandles even in the error paths, and listen for interrupts and gracefully exit back to the shell with whatever "trap" integration needs to happen there (dunno, haven't implemented "trap" yet, the generic trap handler sets toys.signal to the signal number so later code can respond to it, and that's part of the preserved context that DOESN'T get cleared for NOFORK commands so signals caught that way should be presented back to the shell infrastructure normally). But that seems doable...


May 26, 2021

I've had some sort of stomach bug gradually getting worse for a few days now. It causes that kind of persistent nausea that reads as anxiety even though I know(?) it isn't. (Alas, masking doesn't stop other kinds of viruses. My hypochondriac streak immediately jumps to "Intestial cancer!" or, somehow, "Heart attack!" but both seem unlikely. Possibly I ate something that disagreed with me? It's vaguely like food poisoning, but a lot more persistent than usual.)

Got a couple bug toybox reports on the list, find -quit was easy enough to add, but making date handle +0000 timezone stuff turns out to be tricksy. I cc'd Elliott on the email to see if he has an opinion (he worked on the date command more recently than I have), but I'm cranky and irritable at the moment. Not at my best.

Toysh job control actually has 4 categories of jobs (not just 3): the current non-backgrounded pipeline you're running is something the shell has to wait for. But it hasn't got a job number (until backgrounded). That's why I currently have two functions: wait_job() waiting for those first 3 categories, and wait_pipeline() waiting for the current foreground pipeline. I'd like to merge them, but have to work out the data representation I want. (Do I temporarily add the pipeline to the job table? Do I use that TT.pp entry that's currently just used to hand off a process context to 'exec' so it can drop the unredirect info on "exec 2> boing" redirects that should persist?

Right now a job is a linked list of sh_process entries, one for each PID in the pipeline, with no encapsulating data structure representing the job itself. This means pointing to the _first_ job in the list is important, but exec needs TT.pp to point to the CURRENT context (so it can yank the correct unredirect info)... well, no. Because "true | exec > /dev/null | false" is running exec in a child process where it's once again being a NOP. So the only time exec > /dev/null clearing urd matters is when it's the only process in the pipeline. (Not even the FIRST process, because "exec > /dev/null | cat" is still running exec in a child process that can't persist redirects past its exit. It only matters when it's the ONLY process, because that's when it runs in _this_ shell.)

Anyway, yeah I can probably use TT.pp to point to this job's pipeline, and have the wait plumbing check all 4 cases to match the PID it waited for. It's really TT.fg at that point.


May 25, 2021

Half of US states have fully vaccinated 50% of their adult population. That's a lot of qualifiers (half have gone at least halfway if you ignore children), but it's still progress. We need to get to around 70% of the total population vaccinated to prevent the health care system from overloading again from the next variant du jour that can reinfect people who've already had it. (Jeff got the UK variant after having had the original variant, and now the new india variant is reinfecting people again. That's why non-iditos vaccinate even after having had it, especially since "long covid" seems likely to act like shingles or polio where you recover from the initial infection and are fine for years and then problems crop up in later life. Fauci's already said to expect annual booster shots, which I do not look forward to. Texas is a little behind the national curve, but we're getting there.)


May 24, 2021

I'm switching toysh to storing PID and exit value together in an "unsigned" by doing (pid<<8)+exit. A process exit code is an 8 bit value and PID_MAX_LIMIT is 4<<20 (4 million) even on 64 bit systems (since 2002), so 24 bits of PID should be enough for the forseeable future. (Even supercomputers are only going to stick so many threads into a single shared address space.)

Job control seems to have three categories of process you can "wait" for: 1) numbered jobs (including %+ and %-), 2) the PID of the last process in the pipeline of backgrounded jobs, and 3) the $! PID. (Which is PID of the last backgrounded job, but is also updated by <() and >(), but not $() because that's not asynchronous, its exit is already waited for and the exit value discarded.)

Bash keeps a memorial to dead processes of type 2, as in you can wait for the PID of an exited background job (to query its exit code) long after the job is gone. Except you can wait on the SAME pid multiple times without consuming it, only calling "wait" with no arguments seems to clear that table. The Defective Annoying SHell only lets you wait for active pids, and returns 127 immediately for any PID that's already exited (meaning there's a race condition waiting for anything if you care what its exit code was). Which is a pretty strong argument that I should do it bash's way: dash, like most FSF code, is mainly useful as a counterexample. (I consider it a dishonorary gnu program in that regard.)

My existing wait_pipeline() function is designed to wait for a foreground pipeline, but jobs are backgrounded: I don't think bash assigns a job number and adds things to the job list UNTIL they're backgrounded? So I sort of want wait_job() and wait_pipeline() to share code, but the data structures are wrong-ish?

The naming of my current data structures is slightly confusing, but data goes through a multi-stage life cycle: "struct sh_pipeline" is parsed command data ready to be run, and WHEN you run it you create a "struct sh_process". The former hasn't got the environment variables expanded and has the "name=value" leading assignments and "<file" arguments for redirects still there. The latter has all that sorted, the variables are expanded and the assignments worked out and the redirects are done and sh_process's "struct sh_arg arg" member is what got passed to exec() -- either real execv() in a child process or toy_exec() for builtins -- and it has an unredirect array to clean up redirects.

There's actually a TT.pp global instance of struct sh_process pointing to the current one being processed, so the "exec" builtin command can reach out and clear the unredirect array when you perform persistent redirects. (They persist because they don't get cleaned up when the command exits.) I suppose I could use pp for the foreground pipeline and teach wait_job() about that? Hmmm...

The UI is inconsistent between & and the bg command:

$ sleep 5
^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 sleep 5
$ bg
[1]+ sleep 5 &

vs:

$ sleep 5 &
[1] 3622

That's three different kinds of output, each preceded with the same job number. (And the & backgrounding output doesn't identify the job as the most recent job.) Hmmm...

Right: I need to track when a pipeline has exited. I can't use pp->exit because exit 0 is a valid status (and it's becoming a 0-255 range). I want to use the "pid" part being 0 to indicate process go bye-bye (after copying the (pid<<8)+exit value into the memorial array), but builtins also have pid 0 when they run in the shell's process context. In theory only the NOFORK builtins should do that, the MAYFORK ones fork their own PID when run in a pipeline. But if you run a NOFORK like "exec" toysh won't run a child process, and bash will although you've gotta be sneaky to catch it:

$ echo $BASHPID >&2 | exec boink > blah-$BASHPID
6984
bash: exec: boink: not found
$ ls blah-*
blah-6985

Another corner case is "abc=def | echo hello" where the abc=def doesn't actually RUN anything, but has a PID! Because every pipeline segment has a PID in bash.

$ echo $BASHPID >&2 | abc=def > $BASHPID | echo $BASHPID
4094
4092
landley@driftwood:~$ ls 4093
4093

I'm supporting nommu so don't want to gratuitously fork() when I don't have to because relaunching the shell and marshalling data into it to get the child process back to where the parent process was so the parent can unblock is EXPENSIVE. That said, "echo hello | read i ; echo $i" doesn't print anything because it didn't set $i in the parent process but in an immediately-exiting child process.

Sigh. I'm forking at the wrong level compared to bash, and I know it:

$ echo one >&2 | echo $(sleep .25)two >&2 | echo three
three
one
two

That $(subshell) should happen in the second child process context of the three pipeline child processes, and NOT block the launch of the third process. The problem is, NOMMU makes that expensive so I dowanna. I want the parent process to do as much as possible, and fork children as late as possible. My design performs all the variable resolution and redirects in the parent process (and duplicates the displaced filehandles to high FD numbers keeping an "undo list" to move them back afterwards) before running each command (via vfork/exec as necessary). So I've accepted that as a behavior deviation, but it has ramifications that I'd like to minimize.

Of course if I treat the NOFORK and MAYFORK commands the same for pipeline purposes (scrute the inscrutable, vince the invincible, fork the noforks), would that imply you can call NOFORK commands through the multiplexer? Well, I can still filter them out there if I want to. The currently implemented NOFORK commands are cd, eval, exec, exit, export, jobs, set, shift, source, unset, and wait. (The punctuation ones are both aliases: "." is an alias for source and ":" is an alias for true.) I can trivially make exit and true MAYFORK commands (true already is, it's ":" that's NOFORK so the toybox install doesn't make a symlink for it), and exec sort of drops out as a MAYFORK? (It just... runs... the thing?) Lots of noforks are NOP in a pipeline: cd, export, shift, set, and unset do nothing but possibly with error messages ("cd /doesnotexit" would complain, but whether or not it succeeded the PID the chdir() applied to would then exit) and the big question is making sure they're happy running in an uninitialized shell context (since the nommu toybox entry path would call command_main() without going through sh_main() first) so might need an extra if() statement or two. The other four need shell context marshalled to them in order to function: eval and source are running code in a context that has functions and local variables and such defined, and wait/jobs needs to know what the active jobs are.

Ok, so NOFORK marks commands that don't show up in the command list when you run "toybox", but if I add a few extra tests then almost all of them can MAYFORK (even if a lot become essentially NOPs when that happens). But four (so far) can't, and shell functions also can't. Those need to do the $() subshell dance, which implies I should annotate those four as part of a THIRD category. MAYFORK, NOFORK, and... SUBFORK?

Hmmm, have I added the correct sequencing tests to sh.tests yet?

$ x() { echo potato; }; X=x; $X
potato
$ X=y $NOTHING; echo $X
y

Ok, for farming builtins (functions, eval, jobs, source, and wait) out to child processes, I need to marshall full context BUT I've already parsed the command line and don't want to parse it again. (Not just to save effort: an argument that evaluates to <blah or $BLAH would get mangled if it was re-parsed. Can't re-split for $IFS either.) The EASY thing to do is encapsulate each argument in $'blah' which is probably what I should do even if I need to eventually reproduce the crazy user visible escaping for declare -p.

Right, annotated eval, jobs, source, ".", and wait with NOFORK|MAYFORK (instead of adding another SUBFORK bit just chord those together). The rest nommu re-exec toysh with the command line. (Gotta make sure it always re-execs THIS process rather than trying to find "eval" in the $PATH.)

Always forking background processes in pipelines means I always have a nonzero PID which I can set to 0 to indicate that process exited. (And add an entry in the memorial for looking up its exit code later.)

It would be nice if I could figure out how to do this in stages. I should try to chip off a few of the smaller pieces of this diff and check them in if anything looks easily severable...


May 23, 2021

Russian fighter jets forced down a civilian airliner flying from Greece to Lituania so they could arrest a putin critic. And of course Boomer Media is downplaying it.

The observation "Boomers never let go" provides useful insight. Nothing can come from negotiating with them, or convincing them, they never voluntarily relinquish ANYTHING, to anyone, ever. Boomers have held the presidency for 39 years now. Biden is watering down his proposals to beg for republican approval he'll never get, but his job is to do the absolute minimum necessary to delay any sort of reconing. The Boomers are way past their sell-by date, with fallout ranging from squeamish Puritanical Prudishness to the ongoing racist hypocritical GOP insanity. Boomers are what currently preventsdefunding the police, and AT THE SAME TIME the rich white mindset leads to stupid vigilante crap by wannabe Batmen. (You can't "but what if" when it's already happening.) But the Boomers HAVE to die soon. They will take as much with them as they can, crapping on everything on their way out, as is their way. But they will die. It's the reassuring thought that lets me sleep at night: this too shall pass.

Venmo sucks, Venmo is Paypal, and the alumni of Paypal funded Tesla, Linkedin, Palantir, and Yelp (all evil in their own ways, Facebook is another such metatstic disaster, and the bitcoin money laundering protocol is the main reason ransomware is back which similarly boosts identity theft when not just just directly scamming "investors"). Billionaires have have always been terrible, but the Silicon Valley Douchebro is its own peculiar strain of sexist/racist evil. The USA's broken medical system is also full of full of guillotinable billionaires, and has gotten too capitalist and sexist to be compatible with civilization.

So they lie. The lies don't even have to be consistent: fossil fuel companies can simultaneously claim plastic is recyclable and point to plastic straws as a hairshirt people can performatively give up to hurt disabled people. When gas companies point to farting cows as a source of non-fossil atmospheric carbon with a half life of 7 years, PETA happily jumps on the bandwagon because they like the hairshirt. New york has a bill that would forbid unions from striking: define "union" please?

Apparently american jews aren't driving the USA's policy towards Israel, christian evangelicals are. (Because they want to bring about "the rapture" where they're bodily taken to Narnia to meet Thor and Black Widow and ride the teacups. They can't wait to die of old age and go to heaven that way because they don't actually believe it will happen. That's just what they chant in church while tithing, much more reliable to try to start a nuclear war, that'll CLEARLY turn heaven into a real place. Gotta die in battle and be collected by a topless valkyrie, or something.)


May 22, 2021

Looks like libera.chat is mostly winning out over Debian's OFfTopiC, so I moved #toybox and #jcore to there. I then emailed the mailing list of both projects to point at the new channels, because Freenode's new owner is treating attempts to point to new channels from the old ones as "spam", so I dunno if a regex is going to find the topic changes and blank them in the next few days. (He's updated the terms of service to say he'll reclaim "abandoned channels", which there are an awful lot of now. What did he THINK a sudden hostile takeover of a volunteer organization was going to do? The Linux Foundation spent TEN YEARS subverting the linux development community before the frog boiled enough Microsoft could buy github and officially join the Linux Foundation board of directors.)

Reading a twitter user listing channels that have moved over to libera, #devuan has a support channel. Ooh there's an Austin Hackers group... which requires a keyword to join their channel. Nope, not interested in exclusionary "prove your worth" bs. Huh, lots of old freenode volunteers have come out of retirement to help the migration. (amdj has been quite helpful getting me set up, it's been ages since I've had to change the flags to get auto-opped and so on.)

Got pinged about the ELC CFP which is in Seattle in September this time. Hmmm, I suppose I could talk about writing a new Bash compatible shell since I've spent two years working on that now. Or talk about mkroot and system bootstrapping. Or countering trusting trust. (I mean they're all related.) And of course I could talk about 0BSD...

But really, I should just do youtube videos. I mostly speak at conferences to give me a deadline to prepare a talk somebody will record and post, and I could cut out the middle man here rather than paying my own way to these things.


May 21, 2021

Finland did a pilot of universal basic income and (once again) found that it doesn't reduce incentives to work (instead employment actually increased).

I look forward to buying Sarah Taber's book, but suspect it won't cover anywhere near all her fascinating threads.

Israel allowed a ceasefire because palestinians went on a general strike and shut down israel's economy (which needs the cheap labor to function). Hands up everyone surprised Netanyahu's government immediately broke that ceasefire (because if the crisis ends he has to give up power due to failure to form a government; he's transparently bombing civilians to stay in power).


May 20, 2021

Some rich guy bought Freenode, which now appears to be imploding. People are trying to figure out if they go to oftc (the irc network Debian's used for many years) or the new libera.chat the ex-freenode volunteers are setting up in some sort of "etherial-vs-wireshark" thing. (This takeover seems to be about as healthy for the old project as xfree86 relicensing itself was.)

I wrote a summary of current toybox plans to patreon, but of course when I sat down at the table today I went back to grinding on job control because I have a half-finished commit it would be nice to finish and check in.

And job control is full of corner cases. If I "sleep 10 & jobs %sle" bash shows the "sleep" job because it matches the start of the name, but if I "make sleep && ln -s sleep 42; ./42 10 & jobs %4" bash does NOT show 42 because a numeric job reference is unconditionally taken as a job number and not a prefix to match against jobs. So even when there IS a job that matches by prefix, and no job of that number, it doesn't fall through. And speaking of falling through:

$ sleep 30 &
[1] 20093
$ sleep 30 &
[2] 20094
$ jobs %sle
bash: jobs: sle: ambiguous job spec
bash: jobs: %sle: no such job

My current code just returns the first hit. I think I'm ok with that if the alternative is printing _TWO_ error messages. (I more or less expected it to show both jobs and have to do more work, but they somehow managed to do more work to accomplish less? Sigh. Implementing this is easy, figuring out WHAT to implement is hard.)

$ sleep 3 & sleep 3 &
[1] 24186
[2] 24187
$ jobs %2; jobs %2; jobs %2; echo hello
[2]+  Done                    sleep 3
[2]+  Done                    sleep 3
[2]+  Done                    sleep 3
hello
[1]-  Done                    sleep 3
$ jobs %1
bash: jobs: %1: no such job

Displaying a job by % marks it as reported so the prompt doesn't show it again, but doesn't remove it from the table? What removes it from...

$ cat test.sh
#!/bin/bash

sleep 3 &
sleep 5 &
jobs %1
sleep 4
jobs %1 %2; jobs %1
jobs %1 %2
$ ./test.sh
[1]-  Running                 sleep 3 &
[1]-  Done                    sleep 3
[2]+  Running                 sleep 5 &
[1]-  Done                    sleep 3
./test.sh: line 8: jobs: %1: no such job
[2]+  Running                 sleep 5 &

Once again, ; and newline behave differently. Advancing to a new line clears "done" jobs from the job table. I don't think my parse plumbing is maintaining that distinction? (Because it's ALMOST never relevant otherwise? Sigh.) How about line continuations?

$ if true; then sleep 1 &
> sleep 2
> jobs %1; fi
[1] 24960
[1]+  Done                    sleep 1
bash: jobs: %1: no such job
$ cat test2.sh 
#!/bin/bash

if true; then sleep 1 &
sleep 2
jobs %1; fi
$ ./test2.sh 
[1]+  Done                    sleep 1

This behavior is NOT CONSISTENT. (It's reproducible, but shell script and command prompt are behaving differently.)


May 19, 2021

Huh, apparently Google caved to the NSA and is going to distribute backdoored apps now? This sounds like a bad thing.

The CDC has gone to to plaid. Seriously, getting the science right and getting the POLITICS right are two different things, and the second they are very much not doing. (I mean, still better than Canada's government, or the previous administration, but neither seem like a very high bar at the moment. In the Boomerdamarung "mediocre" is high praise.) And even the Economist is estimating the global covid death toll is between twice and four times the official figures. (And in some places measurably 14 times the official figures.)

Bitcoin is propped up by something called "tether" which is a giant scam.

Billionaire Elon Musk's "starlink" ISP has terms of service forbidding "obscene" or "sexually explicit" use of the internet, such as mentioning the existence of gay people. (Not that other ISPs have clean hands.) A common failure mode of naieve white men is thinking that someone who is nice to them is a nice person. Dave Barry saw through that one 20 years ago, in the book "Dave Barry Turns 50". This is how naieve young silicon valley douchebros get led down the path of racism and misogyny, because it doesn't pesonally affect THEM so all these squeaky wheels complaining about being subject to it must be imagining things, blowing it out of proporation, oversensitive, weak, lying... Cognitive dissonance takes it from there: the only way to defend your established position, originally arrived at by inertia and militantly defended ignorance, is to declare everyone saying you're wrong to be evil. (A good scientist admits they're wrong six times before breakfast, but it's not science if you can't reproduce it from first principles under laboratory conditions and 99% of silicon valley is doing computer alchemy at best.)

But the OLD white man are the big unsalvageable problem. It doesn't matter how they got there, Boomers in government are just as intrusively condesecendingly puritanical because obviously now that dried up old Boomers are done with sex everybody else should be too. The septuagenarian (and octogenarian) Boomercrats aren't dying fast enough. Sure the GOP is both insane and irredeemably evil without a single mitigating factor remaining, condensing into a personality cult held in place by fraud and lies and late stage capitalism, with the main remaining attribute of the GOP being their ongoing collapse into a black hole of racism. But the real problem is Boomers in general. Boomers have been a net negative for decades, have stuck their fingers in their ears and gone la-la-la about the entire concept of learning from history, and won't relinquish power until they die. (The racism is actually a big driver for this "STEM STEM Uber Alles" nonsense at universities: if they eliminate teaching history they can replace it with white supremacist messaging.)

Here's another excellent thread by Cory Doctorow explaining why the Boomercrats are incapable of fixing the IRS to actually tax billionaires, and thus the proper goal is to guillotine the billionaires, not just tax them. The federal government needs to declare hoarding a billion dollars a capital offense punishable by guillotine, and THIS is what we should lobby for as post-Boomer reality. (Turnabout is fair play, and given the ever-increasing concentration of power the question is _how_ it collapses.) Guillotining the billionaires isn't primarily about the well-known billionaires, the real damage is from the other 600 that stay out of the news, those are the people driving up rent and privatizing the water supply.


May 18, 2021

Time for a toybox release. (If full job control is out of scope for the next release, might as well cut it now.)

I did release notes for the news page and COULD just ship what I've got, but the mkroot images are still failing. Alright, where were we... Last time, the set of architectures included aarrcchh6644 armv5l armv7l i486 i686 m68k mips mipsel powerpc s390x sh2eb sh4 x86_64.

Sadly musl-cross-make hasn't had a new commit to the repo since October, despite musl itself having a release in January (fixing a security bug), so mcm is still building a stale version of musl by default. Oh well. My toolchains built from mcm-buildall.sh running in the repo from October 20th contain the following architectures:

aarch64 armv4l armv5l armv7l armv7m armv7r i486 i686 m68k microblaze mips64 mipsel mips powerpc64le powerpc64 powerpc s390x sh2eb sh4 x32-cross x86_64

Of those, mkroot didn't even try armv7r (a nommu armv7l) or x32-cross (the x32 abi), because those toolchains are borked. (The armv7r one hasn't got a "cc", looks like binutils built but gcc didn't), and x32 has inconsistent prefixes: there's no x32-*cross/bin/x32-*-cc because A) x32-cc wouldn't match x32-*-cc and B) the binaries in bin have the prefix "x86_64-linux-muslx32-". I thought I had that working at one point, but it seems to have bit-rotted.

Neither mips64 nor armv4l have kernel config descriptions in mkroot, and those images didn't ship last time. Possibly I should make another stab at 'em, but neither one is a regression.

The kernel developers are blaming the m68k hang on qemu version skew, which isn't something I can test right now because of python 3 version skew in the qemu-git build. Pass for now, upgrade my devuan image after I get a release out.

I've poked at the arm64 vs armv7l virtio qemu boards differing for no obvious reason, but it turns out it was broken last release so that's also not actually a regression? (Should fix. Tired.)

The kernel's s390x build is failing because this commit reintroduced perl into the kernel build. Sigh. Emailed a fix to the list, which is enough of a fig leaf I'm willing to ship the result. (It's build code, doesn't even wind up in the binary...)


May 17, 2021

Ooh, another excellent article on how efficiency and resiliency trade off, this one casting it as an efficiency vs effectiveness tradeoff, and pointing out that idle cycles are a vital part of low-latency responsiveness. ("As a practical matter, it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 percent busy unless we allow for some buffering at each employee’s desk. That means there is an inbox where work stacks up.") Having 3 people do the work of 10 is more "efficient", even if those 3 do the job badly, with long unpredictable delays and things falling through the cracks.

I'm poking at updating the j-core roadmap and the first link it makes is to Hitachi's "introducing the superh family" PDF which we linked to a mirror of on a random russian .doc site that's gone down. I checked archive.org and their first record of the URL is a cached 404 error from 2019.

I have a copy of the file (I compulsively mirror stuff), and could put it in the roadmap directory on j-core.org, but the reason we didn't previously do that was licensing. I suppose I could put it on landley.net (presumably in my history mirror directory) and link to that from j-core.org? Or submit it to archive.org as a library document? Either is a grey area...

The thing is, it's PROBABLY on hitachi.org somewhere, since the document said hitachi, but their archive isn't very well indexed and Googling for Hitachi document number "19-040a" isn't helping. I found a similar announcement about the dsp (years later, less generic), and another one about shipping 133mhz processors back in the day... But they're not THIS document.

Whatever happened to Sony's sh4 by the way? Ooh, here's the sh4 intro press release. And one about porting wince to it. (Microsoft itself called it Windows CE, how did they THINK that was going to be abbreviated? Things like "hey Microsoft, I'm bending over, windows me" can't be ENTIRELY accidental...)

Sigh, I could link to an old encyclopedia article, but don't want to? Hmmm, here's an old Hitachi glossy flyer on another fly-by-night site that could be 404 again in a couple years. Ooh, fun history article. And j-core.org should probably link to this series (which I had a todo item about already)...

But none of them are the article in question...


May 16, 2021

Some students and/or security researchers at the University of Minnesota submitted three backdoored patches to linux-kernel as part of a research project (about which they wrote a paper they'd planned to present at a conference this month). The kernel devs flipped out when they noticed, and Greg KH (my nemesis) decided to blackball the entire university Damnatio Memoriae style and revert every patch from a U of M address since the Obama administration. (A calm and well-reasoned response to the situation, obviously.)

Greg came up with a list of 190 patches that still "patch -r" reverted without failing hunks, and wanted to mass yank the lot of them without particularly caring what they did (which would obviously cause rather a lot of regressions and reintroduce WAY more vulnerabilities than the researchers had done, but the important thing isn't code quality it's avenging the insult).

Other people less defensive about their egoes objected, and actually reviewed the list of patches, and narrowed it down to 42 they were willing to revert because they're not actually very good. And this is the part I boggle at: 1/5 of a completely arbitrary list of linux-kernel patches turns out, on closer review, to be crap. This means if you review ANY list of patches that's gone into the linux kernel, it's quite likely that 1/5 of them probably shouldn't have gone in.

You know how I keep insisting I don't want to get the linux-kernel community on me anymore because it's a toxic pile of insular bros? Turns out this may be impacting the quality of the Linux development model faster than I thought. I know the average age of kernel developers is Linus' age, and he's no spring chicken anymore, and I guess this is just early symptoms of the expected rot, but it's still sad to see it happen.


May 15, 2021

Good thread explaining why buying a new iPhone does not mitigate a compromise. (You have to turn off Apple's iCloud data harvesting service or the new phone is immediately compromised too.)

Insatiable late stage capitalists have become "so desperate" they're... allowing basic supply and demand to apply to labor wages again? After their actions killed a significant chunk of their employee pool.

71 year old Benjamin Netanyahu's government was falling apart and he was about to lose power to his political opponents, so he started a war against civilians as an obvious distraction (which did indeed keep him in power, at the cost of over a hundred civilian lives so far), and 78 year old Joe Biden is cheering him on for some reason?

A mid-level CDC functionary suddenly decided to end masking via clusterfsck with no warning, in a way that's among other things an endorsement of the insane florida governor. So of course Biden immediately endorsed the decision. I boggle: yes the numbers have recently been heading in the right direction, and being fully vaccinated reliably prevents you from getting covid in a meaningful way, but not a single state has hit 50% fully vaccinated yet and we're only aiming to hit 70% vaccination by the end of June, so we won't have "herd immunity" for at least a month and a half. The new policy forces business owners to figure out who is and isn't vaccinated, and even if you are willing to card the vaccination cards being handed out are trivially forged, not even laminated, and the wrong shape to fit in most wallets. (Speaking of which, do we count the 22,000 flu deaths that didn't happen this year because of masking, social distincing, and hand washing AGAINST the Covid total?)

The reason that big oil pipeline shut down was the billing system failed. They could still pump gas just fine, they just couldn't accurately invoice people, and capitalism will happily create widespread shortages (up to and including mass casualties) before allowing even the POSSIBILITY that someone somewhere might not pay full price.

Google just hired the surveilance expert who created the NSA's warantless wiretapping infrastructure for AT&T, to replace the researcher they fired for reporting on their intrusive data collection practices.

The GOP is a full blown terrorist organization at this point. Sadly, this is not hyperbole.

The first step towards defunding the police is to demilitarize them. Using local police as a dumping ground for surplus military hardware (because the pentagon buys more military hardware each year than it can store, let alone use) is bad policy. The fundamental mistake in the Vietnam war was using the military to perform a "police action", and militarizing domestic police is the exact same failure mode here at home. It gives you domestic vietkong, to which the military inevitably loses by attrition but causes massive chronic civilian casulaties and gives the entire population PTSD. This was common knowledge in the 1970s, and yet the Boomers managed to recreate this failure mode anyway.

Late stage capitalism conditions "consumers" to respond to any stress by buying things,which results in panic buying of gasoline, panic buying of toilet paper, panic buying of microchips... which creates shortages. Just-in-time delivery is brittle, there are no reserves anywhere, so news of possible shortages easily creates actual shortages. Add in covid, and that cyberattacked gasoline pipeline being out, and now a bridge is out that takes out I-40 and the Mississippi river simultaneously. I expect america's suppy chains to curl up in a ball and rock back and forth whimpering for a bit.

Despite the pipeline hackers apologizing to Putin (presumably for accidentally spending Russian political capital without promising him a cut), their ransom demand was paid and presumably Putin was too.

Uber's core business is tax avoidance. That's the "secret sauce" that makes its business model profitable enough to undercut existing taxi fleets.

Racism remains pervasive.

Right to repair and open source meet HIPPA. Capitalism in medical care, like capitalism in food and shelter, is Darth Vader's "he will join us or die my master" level of evil.

Guillotine the billionaires, reason du jour.

Religion continues to suck.


May 14, 2021

A github thread on 0BSD has resulted in a tweak to their template turning the "Copyright Rob Landley" to "Copyright Your Name Here" (which is how I submitted it to SPDX in the first place).

Toybox release prep continues. I'm cleaning up the new unicode command so I can promote it (and merging it with ascii.c because it's got the same low-ascii string), which raises the question "what is the valid unicode range anyway". I remember it's 4 utf8 bytes (even though utf8 encoding can go to 7), but not the exact cutoff, just that it's weird and stupid? I had to look it up: 0x10ffff. (Because microsoft, which is also why 0xd800-dfff are occluded.) I tweaked demo_utf8towc to only test that range (which records WHAT the range is).

This also means that wchar_t is "int". A utf8 code sequence starting with 0xff could encode 42 bits requiring a 64 bit number, but unicode capped at 21 bits ain't doin that. It's too big to fit in a short and never even touches the high byte of an int. So I should go through my utf8towc and such functions in lib/lib.c and just convert them to use "int". (Ah, the function going the other way is already using unsigned, I should make 'em consistent.)

I've mentioned the bootloader stuff I was poking at in $DAYJOB. It's one of the balls I'm juggling, anyway: the immediate task got handled by another engineer who already knew our bootloader code, but I'd came up to speed on this domain a little before they got around to it and have been picking at it since.

Which means I'm also glancing at u-boot and coreboot and such and trying to see if any of them are a good fit for j-core. Years ago u-boot threatened to move to GPLv3 and I've been leery of it ever since, but coreboot seems minimal... and also incredibly user-unfriendly.

In _theory_ coreboot supports both x86 and arm (because chromebooks) and thus could do other architectures, but the first google hit for "coreboot arm" announces itself as obsolete and then links to a git tree that isn't there anymore (and the redirect loses context because of course it does).

Going to coreboot.org and clicking "videos" is just "would anyone like to make videos" (so why is the tab there on an equal footing with all the other tabs?) and clicking docs and going to "CPU architecture" in the nav bar... doesn't even mention arm?

Sigh. I dunno what code coreboot actually _has_ that might be of interest. J-core's bespoke bootloader already has DMA init code, ELF and FAT handling code, and a gdb stub to load a kernel over serial. It would be nice to have pxeboot: we used a tftp/bootp loader on the old red boards that had ethernet but not sd card, but I couldn't find that code in the archive. I could always poach the toybox implementation to redo it if I needed to, but haven't yet.

It seems like 90% of what coreboot does is maintain "not device tree format" versions of hardware layouts so it can do enough hardware bringup to hand off to grub or similar. It's tempting to add our board to their list (as a form of advertising if nothing else), but possibly the easy thing to do would be make a device tree parser to produce their format and feed our device tree through it and call it good? In which case... why would WE do that? Why hasn't someone else already done it...? (Maybe they have and it's just unintelligible to me...) So far I haven't found any interesting platform-independent drivers, but it seems like a project where you have to read the source because the docs are useless...


May 13, 2021

What is the lifetime of job control remembering old PIDs? Because I can go:

$ for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9; do exit $i & done

And then "wait 12345" on any of those PIDs multiple times and it will remember them (and give me their exit code more than once), and if I run it AGAIN it will still remember the ones from previous rounds. If I call "wait" with no arguments it clears the table, but the prompt displaying exited PIDs does not, and waiting for a PID does not. (I haven't checked if returning from functions or source context does.)

Meanwhile, "wait -n" returns 127 because the prompt display reaps what "wait -n" is looking for. (Ok, fine...)

I thought this meant that bash HADN'T special cased $! and it was just this "retains old PIDs until you call wait with no arguments", but nope:

$ echo <(exit 37)
/dev/fd/63
$ echo $!
31474
$ echo <(exit 42)
/dev/fd/63
$ echo $!
31481
$ wait 31474; echo $?
bash: wait: pid 31474 is not a child of this shell
127

What design idea am I missing here that makes this make sense? It seems like a gratuitous hash table of old PID exit values is endlessly leaking until you call "wait" with no arguments, and on TOP of that $! is special cased? That can't be right...

Anyway, my specific question is "does something OTHER than wait clear the pid result table"?


May 11, 2021

Yes of COURSE all Bill Gates' "philanthropy" have been about exerting control. All billionaire philanthropy is like that.

Fraternities are white gangs. They do exactly the same things as any other gang, they just have money and police smile on their activities instead of repeatedly raiding them.

The oil industry remains irredeemably evil.

People keep trying to work out tax based alternatives to guillotines; what they have in common so far is that none of them work. Historically, the divine right of kings was not taxed away.

Rich people keep stealing poor people's victimhood and draping themselves in it. For example, farm owners are rich people. The median net wealth of farm owners is 9 times higher than average and 97% of farm owners have above average net wealth. But they steal the stories of farm WORKERS by lumping themselves together on the census to say "half of all farm households are losing money": which is true, the farmowning landlords pay their hired help TERRIBLY. This is how they finagle endless farm subsidies and bailouts, that and by being white landed gentry.

IP law needs to die with the Boomers.

Defund the police.


May 10, 2021

I'm tired of the endless C++ developer microaggression regressions eroding C support in the FSF's compiler, but alas nobody's stepped up and added support for all the other hardware targets to llvm yet. (We haven't even gotten superh support merged yet, because we're woefully understaffed and it's a moving target.) And I haven't had time to poke at tinycc/qcc for over a decade.

My sleep schedule's been creeping forward for weeks, and today I woke up at 5am after falling asleep somewhere before midnight, which USED to be a very productive schedule when I lived on west campus and could walk to Einstein's Bagels to get a couple hours programming before it was time to head to $DAYJOB. The problem is, due to the pandemic there's nowhere to go work indoors (modulo the "home under a cat" part), and it gets progressively harder to see my laptop screen outdoors as the sun rises; by 10am it's outright annoying even in deep shade.

On toysh I'm trying to tie up basic job control (not even the signal handling parts yet, just "sleep 10 & jobs", fg/bg, kill, reaping children from the jobs list, displaying backgrounded and finished jobs in interactive mode...) but I struggled for a couple days with "what integer represents a job", the options being "pid", "job number", and "index into job table". The problem with PID is I need a table search each time I use it (and error handling for "this PID was not in the table") to find the corresponding struct sh_process, and job number turns out to be basically the same as PID in that regard. (Especially once I figured out that the %+ and %- entries don't need TT.job_plus and TT.job_minus variables to track them, but can just be the last 2 entries in the table if bg moves the selected entry to the end of the table; it never DIDN'T require a search since jobs can exit out of order, but that means it can't even be a binary search.) But "job number" and "index into job table" are still conceptually similar enough that I confused them a LOT writing the code, and had to go back and clean it up to consistently use index.

Another issue is that toys/posix/kill.c is currently its own file, but I need to inline it into sh.c to add job control support, and that's wrong and hairballish. Maybe I need a toys/shell directory I can move all the MAYFORK commands into, and a new sh.h they can #include, and a lib/sh.c with shared infrastructure? Hmmm... Right now with sh.c in pending it's sort of moot, but when sh.c moves _out_ of pending that's going to need addressing. Of course at the moment I can't merge kill.c into sh.c in pending without de-promoting kill and taking it OUT of defconfig, which I dowanna do.

There we go, I have pressure to promote sh.c out of pending, which means defining a "usable" stopping point. (Before heading back to Japan and downing tools on it all again for who knows how long... Huh. June 25 is the 2 year anniversary of my restart on toysh. That might be a good goal to try to get something promotable, if not necessarily finished. "Better than dash" is not a high bar, and I'm already using it in some mkroot systems...)

Speaking of releases, the first failing mkroot target is armv7l, which hasn't got an ethernet adapter. Which is sad because it's the exact same target as arm64. I mean the miniconfig is the same (qemu virtio board), all that differs is the ARCH=arm vs ARCH=arm64 passed to the kernel make command line. But somehow dependency resolution is turning this into the virtio ethernet device being disabled in one expanded kernel config but not the other.

What I did is booted the two in adjacent terminal windows and lines up the kernel messages, and... why does aarrcchh6644 have five lines of RCU spam that armv7l does not?

-CONFIG_TREE_RCU=y
+CONFIG_TINY_RCU=y
 # CONFIG_RCU_EXPERT is not set
 CONFIG_SRCU=y
-CONFIG_TREE_SRCU=y
-CONFIG_RCU_STALL_COMMON=y
-CONFIG_RCU_NEED_SEGCBLIST=y
+CONFIG_TINY_SRCU=y

Because that. Why is that different? Why do most of these options not even have help text in menuconfig? Why is there now a CONFIG_RCU_EXPERT menu with FAST_NO_HZ and NOCB_CPU sub-itions? (Sigh, the Linix devs added a great big horrible CONFIG_EXPERT menu in init/Kconfig -- which is NOT the same as the horrible CONFIG_EMBEDDED menu they special cased having to switch _off_ in allnoconig -- and then they sprinkled extra expert crap all around the tree. They really SUCK at all things user interface, don't they?)

Sigh, I have no idea if this change is even relevant, it's just the first difference in the boot messages that isn't trivially explained by the architecture being different. There's no obvious reason for a significantly different RCU implementation from a selectable list here? The miniconfig didn't ask for it, the dependencies working from the architecture information _supplied_ it...

Still trying to work out quite how to represent job control, because:

$ echo hello >(false)
hello /dev/fd/63
$ wait $!; echo $?
1
$ echo hello >(true)
hello /dev/fd/63
$ wait $!; echo $?
0

I think I need to retain the exit code of the $! process so wait can special case returning it. That's unpleasant. It's not even a special job table entry because the prompt would reap it and wait couldn't fetch it after the next prompt? No wait...

$ false &
[1] 29401
$ echo hello
hello
[1]+  Exit 1                  false
$ echo hello
hello
$ wait 29401; echo $?
1
$ wait 29401; echo $?
1
$ wait; echo $?
0
$ wait 29401
bash: wait: pid 29401 is not a child of this shell

Ok, wait with no arguments removes it from the table. The prompt reporting does not. Waiting by PID does not. And it's not a $! thing because I can wait for the last 2 PIDs alternately and it remembers them.

Right, I figured out that <(echo) sets $! but $(echo) does not because the first is asynchronous and the second is synchronous. It's the same reason (echo) doesn't set $! which is because it's not a background process.


May 9, 2021

Huh. I knew Gen Z hated the Boomers (with good reason), but I underestimated quite the level of visceral disgust they have for any reminder that Boomer and Gen Z are even related biological species.

Here's an excellent thread explaining exactly why we need to guillotine the billionaires.

Waiving patents increases vaccine production, exporting from rich countries to poor countries does not. (We need to vaccinate 7.7 billion people, arguing about single digit millions of doses is completely irrelevant. But capitalism is a mechanism for regulating scarcity. In the absence of scarcity, capitalism CREATES scarcity by wastefully using up all the "too cheap to meter" clean air and clean water and shooting all the buffalo and passenger pigeons until it can put a price on what's left. The idea of REMOVING scarcity from the equation, ever, even temporarily, rubs capitalists the wrong way. That's why capitalism has BECOME the problem.)

An excellent thread on why intellectual property law needs to follow the billionaires into the guillotines when the Boomers finally keel over. (The Boomers' misogynist capitalist prudishness also needs to end with them.)

Over 80% of the FCC "net neutrality" comments in 2017 were broadband industry astroturf.

Amber Ruffin did a good report on how Obama "compromised" away the infrastructure tracking right-wing terrorism created in response to the oklahoma city bombing, allowing white supremacy to flourish leading to the January 6 capitol attack.

The GOP sadly continues to GOP.

One route to reducing police is the record numbers of retirements caused by making "police" be on par with "tobacco lobbyist", but they still need to be completely defunded.

India is lying about its covid death toll, the reality is far worse. But then that's true globally, and here in the USA the death toll is estimated at over twice the official figures, something even Fauci admits now.

The last time capitalism teetered was the great depression of the 1930s, but it's doing it again now. Last time we patched it up because high levels of unemployment give rise to nazis, and then when we got done fighting them we were opposing the Soviet Union which draped itself in communism the same way "neoliberals" use the world "liberal" (and Germany's "National Socialist Party" was not about providing universal healthcare or rent control: fascists pretend to be the exact opposite of what they are: they accuse their opponents of their own crimes and give lip service to the other side's goals while actively preventing them from happening). The backlash against soviet "communism" led the USA to double down on capitalism (with massive state subsidies and protective regulation) long past its expiration date, circling us right back to the gilded age that led up to the great depression.

A reminder that Vladimir Putin is a mass murderer. It is how and why he's in power.


May 8, 2021

My tea is back in stock at HEB! They haven't had it in MONTHS. (I tracked down the mainfacturer last month and sent email through their website form, and their US distributor replied with an import store halfway to Round Rock that carried it, and I've been meaning to bike up there ever since, but HEB is finally carrying it again!

The kids are all right.

A few days ago I didn't understand this part of the "wait" command's explanation in the bash man page:

If no arguments are given, wait waits for all running background jobs and the last-executed process substitution, if its process id is the same as $!, and the return status is zero.

So I emailed Chet Ramey (who remains very nice), and he clarified that: 1) the return status of "wait" with no arguments is always zero when it runs to completion, but a signal interrupting the foreground process has its own return code regardless of what command was interrupted. 2) "wait $!" has to "always work", even though $! can be set by <(process substitution) which isn't a job.

For a certain definition of "has to always work", anyway. In a new tab where $! starts unset. (Or at least I think it's unset, declare -p can't see "!" at the best of times):

$ echo $!

$ wait $!
$ wait "$!"
bash: wait: `': not a pid or valid job spec
$ wait 0
bash: wait: pid 0 is not a child of this shell

But my code wasn't doing the "pid X is not a child process of this shell" test. I _can_, but I didn't see the point in arbitrarily limiting it like that? (If I disown a PID, why can't I wait for it later? It hasn't got a JOB number anymore, but it's still a process? I know I've hit this before, the lack of a wait --raw as it were...) So whitelisting $! wasn't a thing I needed to do?

And while we're at it:

$ echo $(echo hello)
hello
$ echo $!

$ echo $(echo hello &)
hello
$ echo $!

Why is <(thingy) different from $(thingy) for setting "$!"? And (in yet another new tab):

$ wc <(<README)
      0       0       0 /dev/fd/63
$ echo $!
12264

Why is that a process? Come to think of it, why is it fd 63 instead of the path to the file? No, wait... echo $(< README) is the special case I'm thinking of, the above is just a weird NOP.

The sun came up hours ago and it's getting hard to see my laptop screen. Texas sun is not compatible with working outside on electronic devices, but the pandemic doesn't offer indoor working spaces outside the home (under a cat).


May 7, 2021

I just don't have the energy for politics this week. (There's been some good news, and bad news, and sadly facebook still exists... but post-vaccine I am TIRED right now.)

I need to get a toybox release out. The last release was in October, which means I should have gotten the next release out January 24 if I'm doing time based releases every 3 months. In reality, april 24 was SIX months from the last release, and may 24 makes seven, and that's too long.

Of course I've been hip deep in adding function and job control support to toysh, and I'm sort of reasonably there on both now, but there's still a lot of work to do on each. In functions there's still a failing test with $* expanding function arguments, I really need to teach pl2str how to marshall functions to nommu subshells (which is sort of related to recursively parsing case statements inside "$()")... Over on job control more is missing: I haven't implemented 'fg' and 'bg' yet, $(()) isn't setting $!, I need to write the default ctrl-Z trap handler and the "trap" command...

Any release is just gonna be a snapshot, but at some point I need to take said snapshot, test, and publish it. And get all the mkroot targets working with the current kernel release, which is v5.12 at the moment.


May 6, 2021

Back at the table! Potential for productivity! Except probably not actual productivity because yesterday I was back to like 60% and today I'm maybe 80% and likely to introduce bugs and design glitches if I get in too deep. (The fingers on my right hand are stiff and achy. This whole experience seems like a preview of what feeling 20 years older is probably like on a daily basis. Wheee.)

But I can at least debug stuff. I'm always up for root causing bugs, that's just a matter of being vindictively persitent running a sort of design level bisection search (for a definition of "design" that includes all the OS/hardware/compiler dependencies) for where the behavior of the running code deviates from the expected behavior. At some point, a variable or function/system call argument has a different value than you expect from a code walkthrough, and enough printf() statements will lepidoptrically pinpoint the moment of deviation to a specific assembly instruction and clock cycle if necessary.

Keep threads out of it and it's just about deterministic; any problem you can reliably reproduce you can debug. The only real creativity is in A) modeling potential system interactions to GUESS the answer faster than it takes to tediously grind to it, B) figuring out how to instrument each new situation to get data out. Which can involve building dependency packages from source, including the kernel and C library. Sticking a printf into glibc or the kernel doesn't mean the problem was IN the C library or the kernel, that's just where the deviation from expected behavior occurred. The CAUSE is often earlier, and once you've seen the test deep in the kernel that's going off model you go "oh, I need to set this extra bit in the flags option of the system call to send it down the branch I want, no wait I _did_ that, why did libc mask it out... because it wrapped the system call in a "smart" way and wants to force me to use this other API, great, use syscall() instead of their wrapper..." (In extreme cases you may need a high-end oscilloscope to get visibility into something that heisenbugs when you instrument it, although reproducing under a VM is much easier. Most of the time strace and ltrace and printf cover it.)

Alright, where DID I leave off with all this stuff? Sadly my laptop has developed a fault where it powers off when carried in my backpack for any length of time (battery's probably slightly loose, software suspend needs to keep the memory powered up) which means I lose my open windows every day. It's moderately annoying, but this IS one of those extra-big batteries that sticks way the heck out from the back of the laptop, as was all the rage circa 2015.

So much back email. Spam that made it through gmail's feral filter included one from a random gmail account with no subject line, the body of which is the disclaimer section of a BSD license. I ALMOST replied "Um... what?" to that one on the theory they might have been trying to raise an issue about 0BSD... except comparing the disclaimer text with 0BSD it was the disclaimer section from a DIFFERENT license. (It covered all the same points, in the same order, using different wording.)

That whole 0BSD license disclaimer section is ballast anyway. It bulks up the license so the deviation from the existing license looks smaller (it means that half-sentence I removed was 14 words out of 111, leaving 97, instead of 14 words out of 34, leaving 20), and is full of chewy legalese to make lawyers feel comfortable, but the real reason such disclaimers ever existed in the first place was that a $50 million mainframe depreciating 50% every 18 months lost almost fifty thousand dollars of value per day, which made even a short service disruption was worth suing over. Plus the kind of organization that can afford to spend tens of millions of dollars on computers annually is likely to have an in-house legal team on staff (or at least on retainer) so it doesn't necessarily cost them anything to sue. Which meant all the bespoke big iron software development contracts of the 1960s and 70s included huge CYA "do not sue me" clauses in case they caused the client a service interruption, which were copied by the early 1980s shrinkwrap software guys to look like the big boys. (This is a computer, this is software development, obviously this is what you DO. The fact one was a multi-million dollar bespoke development contract and the other was a $50 retail boxed software copyright license was carefully ignored by white male twentysomethings in their parents' silicon valley garages cosplaying as Fortune 500 executives performing "fake it till you make it" style affinity fraud.)

Keep in mind capitalists started whining about microcomputer licensing in 1976 but copyright wasn't extended to cover binaries until 1983 and then shrinkwrap software licenses (license text inside the box so you can't see it until after the purchase) weren't enforceable until the DMCA changed the law again 24 years later. Any actual license text was marketing bluster for decades; it didn't matter what it said back when none of it was enforceable. Huge disclaimers being a thing everybody does dates back to that period, and as with the /usr/bin split it's another case of grandma's roasting pan. (Grace Hopper basically promised to haunt people who said "but we've always done it that way".)

These days the disclaimers are retained for the same reason the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass had anti-shark anklets on his horse: obviously they worked, do you see any sharks on this mountain? Imagine if we DIDN'T have them. Of course half the software on github has NO license specified, and thus no disclaimers, but nobody's been sued over it yet. Very little of the javascript in web pages comes with license terms, and it runs on your computer and some of it mines bitcoin or performs rowhammer attacks amidst a continuing lack of lawsuits.

I'm sure I wrote a better and more detailed explanation of all that license disclaimer stuff years ago but can't find it via google, possibly it's in the missing second half of the 2015 or 2016 blog pages? I should really dig what I wrote off the relevant backup drives and edit them for posting. Or it could be one of the holes in the mailing list archives from dreamhost's repeated faceplants. (And yes, six years later the "temporarily disabled" message is still there, because dreamhost.)

Oh hey, I figured out why the fingers in my right hand hurt as if they're cold: because they ARE much colder than the fingers on my left hand. My upper arm is still swolen from the injection enough to compromise my circulation. :P


May 5, 2021

Day 3 post-vaccine. "Better" is a relative statement.

I walked to HEB early this morning! (They open at 6am and the day's clearance is marked by around 7.) Walked home (2 blocks, carrying about 5 pounds of stuff), and collapsed in exhaustion until the handyman showed up to frown at the washing machine. (But yesterday walking to the kitchen was an ordeal, I'll take it.) The problem of course wouldn't reproduce in front of him; I figured out later that it's _draining_ fine but the spin cycle isn't spinning (so works great when there's no laundry in it, but the wet laundry is too soaked for the dryer to handle and if it sits for a few minutes it leaves an inch of water behind in the washer despite having drained fully at the time).

I actually had a few hours of feeling reasonably coherent after that, then took a 4 hour nap until the alarm for $DAYJOB's weekly engineering group call, which I attended but was not particularly coherent for. Followed that by doing dumb things all evening like pouring myself a glass of tea with milk, taking a sip, setting it down in front of me on the kitchen table, and NOT defending it from peejee who knocked it over 10 seconds later (onto me) and happily drank milk tea off the table while I toweled myself off. (She's a very experienced Elder Kitten, who recognizes an attack of opportunity when she sees it.)

After another couple hours of nap I finally headed back to the table shortly after midnight (technically the 6th now). It's a 2 mile walk, but between generous use of caffeine (after 3 days of just heavily milked tea for caffeine), taking it slow, and the whole "sit down at the end" part, it seemed worth a try. I expect to have SO much email to shovel through...

Called the fire department on the way to the table when I tracked down the strong smell of gasoline (cut right through my mask) to a motorcycle dripping into a puddle underneath it, parked next to the sidewalk. (Well, I called the 311 austin non-emergency line to ask if this was a thing they cared about, and they forwarded me to the fire department who were indeed interested.)

The time of the past few entries is weird: I wrote about solar+LN2 the morning before getting my shot, then didn't turn my laptop ON for 3 days and am backfilling entries. It's currently 4am on the 6th and I'm at the table downloading All The Email. Then again whenever I'm in Japan I'm never sure whether an entry should be the Japan date or the USA date 11 hours later, and my preferred nocturnal pandemic schedule raises similar issues. The even/odd day topic sorting thing I settled on after Twitter took away my political venting space (because they consider billionaires a protected minority) means I mostly shove stuff into whichever adjacent day handles that topic, but I haven't been keeping up with world events this week and am conflicted about covering that stuff anyway. (I'm torn between "this is not my area, I should leave it to others and focus on what I actually do" and "even germany's Nazi party wasn't LITERALLY TRYING TO END HUMAN CIVILIZATION FOR PROFIT". I really should fiddle with the python script that makes the rss feed for this blog to teach it to make a separate feed for each <span> tag's contents. It's on the todo list...)


May 4, 2021

Had my J&J covid 19 vaccine injection yesterday morning. I'd scheduled it at the UT HEB pharmacy so I could just stay at the table a couple hours after sunrise and then walk a few blocks to the pharmacy. It took me an extra half hour to actually take the injection because of my needle phobia (I apologized repeatedly for running outside to hyperventilate, they were very nice about it), and then I got a lyft home instead of walking because AAAAAHHHH NEEEDLE!!! and took a nap to sleep off the adrenaline aftereffects.

The downside of receiving an effective vaccine for a disease you've already HAD is your immune system is prepared to strike HARD, and a large part of covid's effects aren't due to the disease itself but the immune response to it. Fuzzy caught covid from me back when I got it at jury duty last year, and her J&J shot on friday left her sick all weekend.

By this metric, my experience is at the high end of typical: I feel like I've been punched in the arm, exhausted, joint aches, muscle aches, headache, and my EYELIDS somehow hurt. And while I don't feel cold I _really_ want to stay under thick blankets, and am sweating and constantly dehydrated. I've gone through most of a gallon of tea and a large can of coconut water just _today_. I haven't left the house in two days, and either slept or lay on the couch the entire time. Spoke to Jeff on the phone a little, but I wasn't particularly coherent or able to concentrate. My achievements in the past 48 hours include making 1 pot of macaroni and cheese from a box mix, and taking a shower. Each was an exhausting challenge.

Jeff seems to have had covid _twice_ (he caught it in canada and then a second strain in Japan; his lung function has been below average for years so it was quite noticeable both times), and his first Astrazenica shot left him sick in bed for 3 days, but didn't interfere with his breathing, so that's nice. He hasn't had his second shot yet because Canada's ring-wing loons sold Canada's domestic vaccine production capacity to capitalists who and dismantled it and moved what was left overseas a decade or so back, although the current government is trying to pretend this all happened 50 years ago rather than recently enough politicians still in office could be blamed for it. What covid-19 vaccine Canada has managed to obtain was purchased from India which is now regretting selling it and unlikely to provide more any time soon. Hence Jeff only getting one dose.

The USA appears to be on the downswing of its vaccination bell curve: the people willing to come to the vaccine are getting it, leaving the people the vaccine has to come to which is slower. (This isn't "hesitancy": I myself waited until I could get vaccine without driving to it, and for the one-dose version instead of a 2 dose version. The vaccine came to me, I didn't go to it, and this is normal.) This already means we're producing vaccine at a faster rate than the population is absorbing it, and we should be able to politically ADMIT this and be able to start exporting some... by the end of the month maybe?


May 3, 2021

So here's an interesting trend, solar panel manufacturing in 2021 is at trying to at least LOOK like it's moving away from china.

I just watched a "best solar panels to buy in 2021" roundup du jour, and the first two solar panels it recommends are korean (one in partnership with germany). Then the next one is from a Norwegian company (which moved its manufacturing to china in 2012 because it was cheaper, but can presumably move it back out again if necessary). Then the fourth is korea again, and the last one is a silicon valley douchebro-run company that just _recently_ spun off its manufacturing and now seems to be regretting it, but even they tout "manufacturing in france, malaysia, mexico, and the philipines" in that first link, and mention manufacturing moving from china to malasia in the second link.

The solar industry is most likely trying to get out ahead of the obvious coming trade war with china caused by the dictator-for-life's "wolf warrior diplomacy", territorial ambitions, and consolidation of power (eating Hong Kong and Jack Ma and so on). Taiwan and Korea building new high-end fabs in Arizona and Austin is probably also related to this: moving infratructure physically far away from China.

China's escalation against Taiwan seems partly due to the dictator taking personal insult from Foxconn's new CEO... for a definition of "new" applied to a 65 year old man replacing a 70 year old. China's Chairman Xi is 67, Putin is 68... Lots of stuff has to come to a head over the next decade just because the people pulling the strings are expiring.

Yes, Foxconn is a taiwanese company, not chinese. Another reason china is insecure is their education system brainwashes kids to instill obedience to the communist party in a way that (intentionally!) destroys all creativity. You can't make "huh, that's funny" discoveries when saying "there are four lights" gets you renditioned to a death camp. Shenzen was BUILT because it was a suburb of (then british-controlled) Hong Kong where creative people could be borrowed from, and Taiwan provided the rest of china's new technology designs. China's obedient citizens are very good at copying and grinding through established procedures (which can mechanically improve the efficiency of existing designs), but anyone capable of doing anything new inevitably winds up in trouble with China's government. China MUST copy all their designs from somewhere else (or import creative workers from overseas). This is why China is great at manufacturing silicon solar panels based on the same World War II era Bell Labs "Aha!" research that gave us the transistor, which NASA poured money into during the space race and the Carter administration doubled down on during the 1970s OPEC oil embargo, then Germany grabbed the baton in 1991 and led the world for a couple decades until China started trying to recover from the national embarassment of Beijing's terrible air quality at the 2008 olympics. China is successful manufacturing solar cells because the basic technology is most of a century old, it's just more of the same with higher tolerances. There's very little creativity in what china does with solar panels, just precision, economies of scale, willingness to employ slave labor and poison their environment, and throwing money at the problem. Plus it's the training wheels version of the silicon wafer tech done for semiconductor fab: same big crystals minus the need for purity and clean rooms and putting anything ON them, and even the big crystals part is optional.

Interestingly, 78 year old Biden did NOT cancel 74 year old Trump's two stacked tariffs (30% plus 25% totaling over 50%) on importing chinese solar panels into the USA, instead he's keeping and enforcing them. The dorito taxed them to protect fossil fuels from competition (he failed), but as long as the political cost to put the tariffs in place was already paid Biden is using them to build domestic solar panel manufacturing capacity and wean the USA off of dependence on china. Extending the investment tax credit to install panels while taxing china's panels is a subsidy for domestic manufacturers: it allows panels made outside of china to be cheaper than panels made IN china, at least to US consumers.

There's a lot of weaning to do: china has thrown a LOT of money and people at solar panel manufacturing since 2008, on an exponential growth curve. In February 2021 the global solar manufacturing percentages were:

China  : 71%
"other": 9%
Malasia: 6%
Korea  : 6%
USA    : 3%
EU     : 2%
Japan  : 1%
Taiwan : 1%
India  : 1%

But those numbers are really volatile because there was a 43% increase in solar panel installs from 2019 to 2020. It's hard to compare that "19.2 gigawatts of new capacity" (so ~45 gigawatts of total capacity?) to the USA's total generation capacity, because those figures are peak output rate and the EIA gives cumulative energy produced, but it's interesting to note that 1% of the USA's electricity now comes from rooftop solar.

The main thing China is producing is raw silica: assembling cells into panels can be and is being done elsewhere. Silica mining is like rare earth mining in that it's not scarce or hard to scale up (silica is just sand/gravel refined in electric arc furnaces vaguely like how aluminum and steel are made today), the problem is both the mining and the refining are an environmental disaster that poisons people (although not as bad as fracking and oil pipelines). There's some time/investment scaling up to replace that elsewhere, but it's not _hard_. The main issue is political: figuring out who/where to poison, which is why the west NIMBYd this to China in the first place. But as the fossil fuel industry has repeatedly demonstrated, poisoning people at home is merely a political cost not a hard roadblock.

China has been dumping this toxic process in Uighur areas (and bussing in people from the concentration camps to work on it). As with rare earth mining the USA was until recently happy to pay someone else to poison their people (and lie about it), but with china making an ass of itself diplomatically such considerations resurface and help tilt the scale back against them.

Meanwhile, the recent Los Angeles Times article about California's electrical grid hitting 95% renewable energy needs a giant asterisk: it's only a "record" because the california electrical grid operators have been DESPERATELY TRYING TO AVOID IT. California's crazy state laws make "wasting" electricity illegal, and that includes curtailment of solar and wind farms that are producing more power than the grid can currently use, which means they wind up paying other states to take the extra electricity because simply unplugging the panels (which doesn't hurt them) is NOT ALLOWED. That is a stupid law, and it PREVENTS california from installing enough (ever-cheaper) solar and wind capacity that their peak generation would ever even momentarily go above 100% of what the grid is using. Of course having renewable generation at or near 100% any significant amount of time means it goes OVER 100% some of the time, and their crazy laws force them to PAY to dispose of the extra electricity, and they can't afford to let that happen. Yes they could install twice as much solar, no the cost of panels isn't a big deal and it's easy enough to find space and wire them up, but it would bankrupt them legally DISPOSE of that much electricty in the middle of a sunny day. Once it exists, you can't WASTE it. A sort of electrical grid anti-abortion position: it's somehow morally ok to prevent it entirely up front, but once you CAN create it you MUST follow through and find a home for it. This is a california problem, it is entirely self-inflicted, and it's REALLY STUPID.

So the LA Times is reporting "we had a sunny day, power went to 95% of capacity" as an achievement, and the grid operators are probably panicing and looking for any excuse to permanently decommission enough solar and wind farms that they NEVER GO OVER 100% because doing so would cost them MONEY thanks to stupid laws. Just UNPLUGGING some of the panels/turbines is forbidden by law, therefore they must forever use less solar and burn more coal and gas instead because that never gives them EXTRA power they'd have to PAY SOMEONE ELSE TO TAKE to avoid "wasting" it. (Idiots.)

Another interesting side note: an alternative to curtailment is to use the extra electricity to make liquid nitrogen from air using existing off the shelf technology (the process is over 100 years old and been in mass production since the 1940s), and recent advances let you get the energy back out with over 70% efficiency (and about the same weight-to-power ratio from liquid nitrogen as current electric car batteries, with a WAY faster fill up time). So an alternative to curtailment is using extra energy can run compressors to liquify air (which is 4/5 nitrogen and 1/5 oxygen, relatively easily separated out when liquifying them; there's also 1-4% water you generally want to condense out earlier in the process, 1% argon, 0.04% CO2, 0.002% neon, and the rest is a rounding error), and sell the oxygen (and other gasses if you like) and store the (chemically inert) liquid nitrogen in big tanks (commercially available in million liter sizes; this is well-established technology). Then you can turn it back into electricity as needed on-site (after the sun goes down), or transport it by pipe/truck/train. All that infrastructure being used for liquified natural gas applies to liquid nitrogen just as easily (liquid CH3 is -162 C, liquid N2 is -196 C) except THIS stuff is easier to make, less dangerous (yeah yeah, modulo oxygen condensing on it), and doesn't pollute.

I have some experience with liquid nitrogen, which people think is scary because it's unfamiliar. But lots of things are dangerous, and gasoline, boiling water, and liquid natural gas are all generally considered MORE dangerous than LN2 by people familiar with LN2. It's entirely possible to get hurt by it, but this interview explains the difference between the bond villain theatrically frozen to death by LN2 (which has a lower specific heat than water even WITHOUT the leidenfrost effect) and the actual mild scalp burn the actor got when some of the liquid nitrogen they indeed dumped over him while filming got caught in his "hold still so we can replace you with a statue after the cut" harness and he wasn't allowed to move to shake it off. And no, he didn't suffocate either.

LN2 is safe enough that it's a common thing to let children play with (under adult supervision) when trying to impress them about science, which is not something normally said about gasoline. Nitrogen is a liquid at room temperature when pressurized to 3000 psi. In a tank that keeps it at that pressure, it lasts literally forever with no loss, but 3000 PSI is rather a lot of pressure and those tanks tend to be expensive and not get transported much. At the other end of the scale, a common thing to do is get an insulated but unpressurized dewar: the 30 liter one we used to borrow from UT had a missing lid so they stuck a styrofoam cup into the top and it was still over half full after 2 days when we got it filled on Friday and used it to make ice cream on Sunday. In between, you can have an insulated and pressurized tank that keeps SOME pressure (22 PSI is common), but a valve releases pressure above that, so the liquid inside stays cold (due to the evaporation and gas release), but not FULLY cold, and stays pressurized but not FULLY pressurized. Those containers keep their contents longer than a dewar but are much cheaper than the "lasts forever at room temperature" ones and if they get damaged venting 20 PSI isn't that big a deal. I think the big 220 liter cylinders we rented from Airgas for Penguicon and Linucon were that sort (it's been a while).

At sea level air pressure, nitrogen is a liquid at -196 C, and what happens when you open those big pressurized 220 liter tanks is that enough nitrogen boils off to get the rest DOWN to "stay liquid" temperature (which is loud, squirty, and accompanied by a lot of fog: they make a little metal sponge you screw onto the end of your long metal hose to manage the pressure differential) but only a very small part of the liquid (fraction of a percent) actually boils off when you do this, the rest just gets really cold. You have to wait for the remaining liquid to heat up to get it to boil off and turn into a gas: at Linucon and Penguicon we poured LN2 into normal steel kitchen bowls and carried them with kitchen potholders. Yes it was boiling (rapidly at first as the bowl cooled down, then slower as it constantly picked up heat from the floor under it), but just like a pot of water can boil for 20 minutes and still be nearly full there was still plenty of LN2 in the bowl for quite a while. (And it actually went from "full boil" to "simmer" in like half a minute as the metal bowl cooled down.) In the video linked above I was holding such a bowl with a towel wrapped around it, and the reason I was in a hurry was the edge of the towel had dipped INTO the LN2 and was wicking some up into contact with my hands, which stung a bit. Not enought to leave a mark, but it was uncomfortable. Yes the nitrogen expands about 700 times going from liquid to gas, yes you can make a bomb out of that if you try (same goes for boiling water, which expands 1600 times); this expansion is why it's capable of storing energy. (A bigger concern is that the "condensation" exposed liquid nitrogen picks up is liquid OXYGEN condensed out of the air; oxygen condenses at a few degrees warmer than nitrogen does. Generally it's tiny amounts dripping off the bottom of the steel bowl onto the carpet and evaporating immediately, but still: good to know. Only really happened on the outside of the bowl: the constant positive pressure from evaporating nitrogen prevents much oxygen from coming into contact with the actual liquid.)

Lots of people have been proposing using "compressed air" energy storage (in old salt mines and such) for decades, which is slightly more dangerous than nitrogen but again fairly common and mostly a known risk. The reason liquid nitrogen is safer than liquid air is nitrogen is inert: if the oxygen and nitrogen AREN'T separated, at high pressures partial pressure of oxygen goes over 100% which makes fires tricksy. (You know how blowing on tinder/coals can make them flare up? Pressurizing the air around them does that too.) Also, at LOWER pressures you don't have that "it wants to be a liquid" happy medium option where you naturally trade pressure for temperature when vented, which means if something DOES happen without that phase transition ALL the gas is trying to leave containment at once, rather than just enough to get the rest down to temperature. This is why given a CHOICE, liquid nitrogen is cool. (Yes I know, and I typed it anyway.)

Anyway, there's lots of domain expertise to be had here and I'm happy to see people working on it. I did my usual jack-of-all-trades wander through this way back when so I know where to look stuff up and find domain experts, but wouldn't try to do it myself unsupervized. Not my area. (I did a reserach writeup with sources and numbers for the penguicon mailing list back when I was first proposing bringing liquid nitrogen ice cream to... year 3 I think? But you can tell I'm no longer involved with Penguicon, they don't preserve their history in an obviously accessable way and that web archive went down. I remember looking up partial pressure of oxygen mountain climbers experience before needing supplemental oxygen to perform heavy labor, and trying to work out how much nitrogen would have to displace how much oxygen in the room to match that, and how many liters of liquid that would translate to given X cubic feet of room space; tl/dr the carbon dioxide exhaled by the people in the room was a way bigger health risk...)


May 2, 2021

Covid injection tomorrow. Not exactly looking forward to it (thanks to a childhood trauma about needles I used to be able to make my gums bleed by thinking too hard about them; haven't replicated the experiment in some time because I'm better at NOT thinking about stuff these days), but I walked to the pharmacy the appointment's at on the way back from the table this morning, to make sure I know how to find it.

There are a number of authors who... if I give them money will they write faster? The amount of money I'm current capable of giving them is not going to be enough to move the needle much, but I feel I should show the flag anyway? Of course, there's like 37 other authors I should ALSO support. I have a patreon with several donors contributing to my toybox work, which is amazingly cool, but unfortunately I can't contribute to other creators directly FROM that money. Instead I have to give patreon my credit card info so they can charge a credit card each time in order to send money OUT to anybody else. (Incoming money can be paid out via direct deposit, which is different bank information. But incoming money pools in patreon until I log in and hit a button, and I can't donate OUT from that pool because patreon won't let me.)

I mean either way it's my credit union account and not the main household account, but still. I am VERY BAD at online financial anything because I know too much about how the sausage is made to trust it. (Fade and Fuzzy do all the online financial stuff for the household. That doesn't make it any more secure, but then it isn't ME doing it. Yes irrational trauma-based behavior is the theme of today's blog entry.)


May 1, 2021

So many thunderstorms trying to walk to the table at the geology building at night. (And asian tiger mosquitoes, although mosquito repellent works on them too so far.)

The washing machine is leaving a couple inches of water left in the bottom when it's finished washing. Putting sopping wet laundry into the dryer turns out to have been bad for THAT, although it made it about half an hour before it went... um... let's just say it doesn't normally have that many lights lit up while running. The scorched smell isn't too bad (the laundry itself is fine, albeit still pretty dam), and it stopped buzzing when I unplugged it. (It wasn't _loud_, but it doesn't normally doesn't continue to make noise once stopped?) I left the door open and am hoping the thing is less unhappy once it dries out a bit. (You're not supposed to get a dryer wet: who knew?) I now have as much laundry hanging up to dry in texas as I did in the Tokyo apartment, which is new. We should probably call someone to frown expensively at both things, but we're TRYING to pay taxes and after _that_ our non-elderly cat needs a cardiologist appointment.

GOP loons are still trying to retroactively steal the 2020 election, censor their critics, and dismantle free speech. I'm not a fan of biden but he could be worse. Restarting prosecutions helps a lot, although as usual the Biden administration is half-assing it.

Here is an excellent thread on why we should defund the police rather than "reform" them. Law enforcement doesn't have to be done by police. And a reminder that the police brutality mega-thread is still going, although he doesn't bother add every single new instance to it now that realization of how big a problem it is has become more widespread. (If there's one saving grace, it's that the police tend to be really stupid.)

One strong reason to speed up self-driving is that "tail light policing" is one of the main revenue sources of most police departments. (Of course the rest of it is a grift too.)

You know how Disney is primarily responsible for copyright terms being infinitely extended? Turns out they do lots of other evil too.

Oh hey, remember the hairshirt problem the left has? It's back, or more accurately never went away. (And yes, the recent "biden banning red meat" thing is the exact same idiocy from PETA that even AOC falls for which leaves us vulnerable to exactly this sort of nonsense.)

A good thread about how bringing back the "fairness doctrine" would most likely make things worse, which links to an earlier thread making a strong case that everything I wrote back in 2017 about the topic was... naieve at best. (People have been gaming the system as long as there's been a system.)

International pursuit of money laundering needs to be a top priority. I mean, they're doing some but need to do more.

Christianity remains deeply problematic (and republican). Indigenous people make much more efficient use of resources (not that it's hard to beat out massively subsidized white landed gentry failsons), but of course white people freak out when forced to follow their own laws.

The military is profoundly misogynist and will not protect women who join it from their fellow soldiers. (Semper fi is gendered.)

SO many reasons I do not have a Faceboot account. (I still miss twitter the same way I miss livejournal, but have zero interest in ever joining Faceboot.)

Guillotine the billionaires. Not any _specific_ billionaire: all of them. Being a billionaire should be a federal capital offense, and not JUST because of the pun.

Remember how terrible Nestle is? They've been bottling water from US national parks under a permit that expired in 1988, and continued right through the big california drought because capitalism.


April 30, 2021

I got a covid vaccine appointment! J&J monday morning at the HEB pharmacy at UT (a bit southwest of MLK and Red River).

The weather forecast continues to say "all the thunderstorms" today, and tomorrow, and the day after. (Austin has a monsoon season now, which is why my house needed tens of thousands of dollars of landscaping after tens of thousands of dollars of flood remediation. I miss having savings, but imagine if I HADN'T been able ot throw money at the problem? I don't have to: two houses on my block got condemned due to black mold and were sold, torn down, and replaced with 3 story mini-apartment complexes.)

There was a forecasted hour long break in the weather with no lightning OR rain which I used to walk to the table. It's coming up on 3am and the rain has just started back up (oh girl has it) and the loud once-per-second snapping sound from the roof has just started again. (Whatever's periodically shorting out up there does NOT like getting wet. I've emailed facilities about it more than once, but they don't seem to care? Oh well, the Norman Hackerman building hasn't burned down yet...)

Playing mkroot regression whack-a-mole is always tedious. The armv7l target hasn't got a network card, but the aarrcchh6644 target does, and they're the EXACT SAME THING in 32 and 64 bit versions! It's virtio all the way through, and it's a virtio network card that's failing to show up in 32 bits (but works fine in 64 bits). I can't upgrade qemu to current until I upgrade devuan to current because the qemu git repo moved its python 3 prerequisite version to something newer than Devuan 2.0 packages so it refuses to build from source. (I suppose I could build python3 from source to build a more current qemu from source, but this turns into a dependency cascade REALLY quickly, which is what reproducing the LFS build under mkroot is for, which comes AFTER promoting toysh.)

Speaking of which, I want to set up a wireguard test server for $DAYJOB in a kvm instance, and I poked our sysadmin wale for instructions, and he sent me a link to a page that is exactly the kind of thing I DIDN'T want. ("Install this package, which installs 37 prerequisite packages in a cascade, and then use this fully automated mechanism so you don't understand anything that actually happened.)

In toybox development I hit an ISSUE in "make test_sh":

[: missing argument after ‘=’
FAIL: sh $! = jobs -p

Yes sh is behaving wrong, but the more SUBTLE problem is that this error message has “smart❝ 〝quotes‟ which means it's not toybox code producing that error. And it's not bash code either:

$ [ x = ]
bash: [: x: unary operator expected

What it is, is:

$ /usr/bin/[ x = ]
/usr/bin/[: missing argument after ‘=’

And THAT is a problem with the test suite, and how "sh" is special cased as the only standalone command that needs the multiplexer. Under certain circumstances (mostly having to do with nommu in pipelines but apparently triggering here, I should track down why) toybox won't run MAYFORK commands directly, but will instead fork and exec them. And we're not providing toybox versions of those MAYFORK commands in the $PATH, so it's calling them out of the host $PATH. And debian has TWO implementations of test, one as a bash builtin and one in /usr/bin, which behave DIFFERENTLY because gnu/FSF/dammit.

So I need to A) upgrade the test suite to provide wrapped versions of the mayfork commands when building the shell, B) figure out why a toybox with fork() support isn't calling this mayfork as a builtin, C) finish implementing the "jobs" command and $! for background tasks.

Someday, I should cycle back around to writing about computer history stuff. Here's a fascinating article about an early macintosh adopter in February 1984, who explained that you could only write Mac software by buying an apple Lisa (its predecessor system) until Microsoft Basic and then C compilers (first Softworks, then Megamax, then Lightspeed) were ported to the Mac. This is exactly the problem I'm trying to address with Android: lack of native development environment. This system is 14 years old and still isn't self-hosting. That's inexcusable.


April 29, 2021

Walked partway to the table under an IMPRESSIVE amount of lightning, lost my nerve about 2/3 of the way there, and then checked the weather huddling in an apartment's covered parking area (thunderstorms for the next 12 hours, this is not a "wait for it to clear up" situation) and got a lyft back home. Alas, no programming session today.

Biden gave his own State of the Union address last night, which apparently got half the TV viewership of The Trainwreck because everybody trusts THIS guy to just get on with it without needing to scrutinize his every move for travesty du jour we need to defend ourselves against. The newsdrones are sure this is a bad thing, because we're not watching newsdrones. Ok then.

I'm all for pervasive encryption, but I have yet to see a use of the "signal" app that wasn't hilariously insecure. It's not just that it points a giant neon sign at you saying "I have something to hide", the bigger problem is the user interface of software created by crypto people always immediately turns the things into a footgun. The classic tradeoff between usability and security means the most secure possible system is one that's been crushed and burned to ashes which were scattered at sea: nobody's getting data off of that! And nobody can use it to accomplish anything, either.

Not only is correlation not causation, but it's really easy to invert cause and effect.

This is why Intellectual Property law must be destroyed instead of "reformed". Intellectual property law is an all-or-nothing principle that strives to fail universally for everything simultanously. (Absolutists often destroy the thing they defend, because they give its opponents no alternative but to burn it out root and branch.)

Good thread from a member of the precariat.

The "leveraged buyout" remains a scourge. (Guillotine the billionaires, and defund the police.)


April 28, 2021

Hah, bumped into an old busybox post I made (while looking for something else) that shows the roots of how the designs of busybox and toybox diverged, back before I even started toybox.

Ok, now that I have shell functions sort of basically working (just fixed a premature free issue with function command line arguments getting the lifetime wrong)... it turns out I have more design work to do. The question is does a function() call need a struct sh_process instance to represent it, in addition to the struct sh_fcall added to the TT.ff stack. Because run_command() is returning one right now, with pl->pid set to 0. (Which means "ran as builtin", except we added an entry to TT.ff so execution FROM HERE continues on into the new function. All the other builtins have already FINISHED when they return pid 0.)

From a flow control perspective, a function call is sort of a goto (jump into a different chunk of parsed code), and also a bit like a "source" command. But "source" is implemented as a shell builtin (a NOFORK calling through toy_list) which means it's recursing on the C stack (thus I made a hard limit on the number of recursive "source" calls it can make, which shouldn't be a big deal because source doesn't generally nest very deep and the limit is 50 for nommu and 250 when you have an mmu and thus a growable stack). While I _can_ make "function" a shell builtin as well, A) that means it would also recurse eating stack space, B) it's naturally a flow control statement and none of the other flow control statements are shell builtin functions... no wait, that's confusing the "function" keyword DEFINING functions with calling them (which is the current design rough edge). I am NOT adding arbitrary function names to toy_list, no way.

But a function call can be in the middle of a pipeline, in which case it needs to run in a background process. That WOULD need an sh_process to represent the pipeline stage, but that's because there would be a PID of another shell running the function. Right now a shell function isn't backgrounded: it runs inline like a NOFORK process. I can't JUST stick a fork() in random places because we support nommu, and although I have plumbing to handle "echo hello | { cat; } | cat" marshalling compound statements (that middle part parses as "{" "cat;" "}" to three pipeline segments: a type 1 start-new-block, a type 0 execute-statement, and a type 3 end-block), I haven't taught the pl2str() plumbing to marshall function data to a nommu subshell yet (it doesn't know about type 'F' pipeline segments). Bash has a syntax to export functions to child shells as specially formatted environment variables, but what it documents and what it actually DOES don't match and I'm not sure how much compatibility matters here? Plus for nommu subshells I'm passing child data through a pipe instead of the child process' environ[]. Plus I don't want to accidentally reproduce the shellshock bug. :P

The other issue is I still need to implement the "return" statement, which SORT of isn't hard except that right now the function call is advancing pp = pp->next (because my first attempt was looping endlessly, returning back to the same function statement and calling it again), but that needs to be mediated by && and friends. You don't JUST advance, you return and figure out if you SHOULD advance (or end block).

I actually glued a NOP type 0 statement onto the start of each function definition because when I set pl in run_command() and return, it advances past it before running the next thing (because it thinks it just ran the current statement, so needs to pl = pl->next before looping). On return it would make sense for pl to point to the function() call, except any && on the end of the } for the function needs to be transplated to the 'F' record rather than the 3 record at the end of the function->pipeline list. I think I'm already doing this during parsing? (So why did it loop?)

I need to add tests for ALL fo this...

This cartoon is related to Neil Gaiman's talk, and Ira Glass had a good related talk. It's not just easy but NORMAL to get discouraged partway through doing something because what you've got so far is inferior to what you intended to create. And my father used to say "eventually you have to shoot the engineers and go into production" (a saying he picked up working at NASA before I was born) because what you're working on can always be improved. Deadlines can be highly motivational.


April 27, 2021

At my second tax preparation appointment yesterday I paid an accountant $300 to confirm that I need to pay the government another $5600 on top of that. There was some witholding, but not enough. Fade's and my most recent stimulus payment was earmarked for this, but doesn't quite cover it. We have until June 15th to save up the rest.

The downside of working for a company that doesn't have a US legal presence (and thus leaves me with Schedule C self employment to explain wire transfers from singapore) includes figuring out what portion of my electric bill being stuck at home most of 2020 allows me to deduct as an office expense.

I like my job, and like most creative people am not strongly motivated by money (but AM highly distracted and stressed out by a _lack_ of money), but I admit loss aversion and the prospect of retirement are making me wince a bit. I earned four times as much when I spent a year (2018) at another employer while this job reshuffled their financing (reincorporating and "cleaning their cap table") after finding out one of their original investors was the lawyer for a canadian oil company who had been ACTIVELY SABOTAGING "Smart Energy Instruments" attempts to technologically wean electrical grids off oil coal, oil, and gas. (Conflict of interest, anyone?) Jeff made his saving throw and I'm back doing the "interesting rather than lucrative" work, but there's still no 401k (let alone contribution matching), my health insurance is through my wife's college (as husband of a grad student)...

Yeah yeah, if our startup strikes gold I get stock, but I have never in my entire career had employer stock options trigger even once. I've had an employee stock purchase plan at a Fortune 500 turn into stock (only slightly more than I could have bought myself through a broker, but it saved commissions and there was matching similar to a 401k plan without the tax penalties for not having inherited it from a dead relative)... but options aren't real. I like that I get to publish open source on company time, my schedule is flexible, I (remotely) work with really smart people I learn all sorts of things from, I'm just about able to pay the mortgage, and when the stars align I spend months at a time in Tokyo (which is lovely, despite my continued failure to absorb useful amounts of the language). Those are the benefits of this job. But according to my new tax appraisal, the equity in my house increased almost as much as I got paid this year (which means nothing if I live there instead of selling it, except that my tax bill gets even higher next year, and the 2017 GOP tax thing means mortgage interest is no longer deductible).

Speaking of taxes, Biden's proposal to give more money to the IRS is another half measure: guillotines would accomplish this and so much more. Sure it's worth doing (outright obvious in fact) but it's the merest tip of the iceberg. Alas, half-assing it is what Biden is there for. Allow just enough change to let off a little steam, while keeping the boat unrocked until the baby boomers have died. The solid year of protests in the streets (from both sides) have died down since the inauguration. That is Biden's role, a heat sink to delay the engine burning up while the people who drained all the oil out of it cover their tracks.

The Onion is back to merely documenting reality. This doesn't mean The Onion is bad at its job: they're very good at it. Baldly stating truths powerful people dance around for a laugh was one of the standard jokes of medieval jesters. Professional comedian Hannah Gadsby's netflix special "Nanette" (a meta-comedy that among other things explicitly breaks down and explains the rules of comedy) has a section about managing "tension" in comedy, and "thing everybody knows but nobody can say" is a huge source of tension. (Avoiding being an asshole, and punching up instead of punching down, is an important part of doing this right.)

Republicans continue to serve plutocracy, but the result is a death cult. We need to zero out all current police budgets, there are much better ways do policing. Intellectual property law only serves corporations. Individual creators get screwed.

On the bright side, Elon Musk's upcoming kessler cascade should mostly clear itself in about 90 years. (Everything that man touches is problematic at best.)

Sexism thread du jour. (White guys need constant reminding of what the world is like for other people, on a daily basis because everyone else experiences it on a daily basis.)


April 26, 2021

I'm closing in on getting toysh function() definitions working, but this command has now passed 4000 lines of C. I have failed. (The sad part is it's all DOING stuff. Bash is tricksy and complicated.)

I can't get the order of operations to quite match. My function performs redirects and variable expansions at the same time. I had a hack so "abc={a?b} > potato" wouldn't create "potato" but had to undo it again to make function calls work right, because "x() { echo hello; }; ABC=x; xyz=42 $ABC" needs to resolve variables before knowing it's calling a function, and I want to use the same function context to hold the variables that xyz=42 is already creating, since the lifetime is the same. But resolving $ABC before assigning xyz=42 also creates the file "potato" before resolving abc=${a?error message} and thus aborting further processing the command, where bash errors out before creating the file. I shuffled it around multiple times, but the way I implemented it the variable evailuations and redirects on the command line are atomic (or at least handled by the same expand_redir() C function), and in bash it's gratuitously two passes. Bash does a LOT of extra passes on stuff, over and over again, and... I dowanna?

Bash has implementation details like this visible at the surface ALL OVER THE PLACE. I haven't looked at bash source code in ten years, and yet I wind up knowing how they did things because IT SHOWS AT RUNTIME. Sometimes I would very much like a little MORE ambiguity because it means the implementation is flexible, rather than overdetermined.

Meanwhile, did you know you can pipe the output of a function _definition_? Of course you can. Which means I gotta rip the union back out of struct sh_pipeline so strcmp(arg.v[arg.c], "&&") and friends can work on "x() { echo hello; } && echo also". What does the && mean there? Can a function definition FAIL? I mean, an invalid name can fail but that's a syntax error aborting the whole compound statement... Ah wait, no it isn't:

$ a\b () { echo hello; } || echo toast
bash: `a\b': not a valid identifier
toast

Bash? You are REALLY WEIRD.

$ function one two || echo toast
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `two'

THAT's the syntax error. (Why? Why is "function one echo 'hello world';" not a valid function definition? It's obvious what it DOES.) Right. THROW IT ON THE TODO HEAP, I already WROTE this section of the code and would like to get it to work before tearing it apart again.

Anyway, getting "a() { true; } && echo" to work means when I'm transplanting the pipeline block right after the function definition INTO the function structure during parsing, I need to transplant the terminator from the trailing type 3 segment (the "}" in this case) into the function definition segment (making it logically "function a $MAGIC &&" where $MAGIC is a pointer to a struct rather than a string argument because FUNCTIONS).

If you wonder why I've been quiet on the mailing list, this is what working on toysh is like. I don't expect this to make sense to anybody else. I fling it into my blog on even numbered days, but otherwise...

$ x() { echo hello; } | tr e x
$ x
bash: x: command not found

Bravo, bash. Just... sigh. The function definition occurs in a background process, just like variable assignments there would, and thus does not persist in the parent process's context. Trailing redirects attach and become part of the function each time it's run, but pipes and && and such stay in the initial context. Right.

Elliott sent a patch which made me say "ow, no, ow ow, no" and so on several times out loud. I mean I still applied it, and it was easy to fix, but it's kind of impressive how such a small change can be wrong in so many DIFFERENT ways. Here's the offending line (in main.c):

-  if (!(which->flags & TOYFLAG_NOFORK)) {
+  if (strcmp(which->name, "toybox") && !(which->flags & TOYFLAG_NOFORK)) {

Which is... let me count the ways:

  1. Repeating the string "toybox" violates Single Point of Truth: the strstart() in toyfind already looks for "toybox"
  2. Adds an extra string compare in a global fast path that's performance critical enough I actually bothered to implement a binary search (which I haven't even done in the _shell_ yet)
  3. This is a different test than other "are we the multiplexer" checks use, so potential behavior divergence if code changes around it
  4. The name "toybox" works (uniquely!) as a prefix (hence the strstart in toyfind();), this does not

The reason toybox works as a prefix is because WAAAAAAY back in the busybox days my solution to this complaint (where somebody wanted the suid commands in a different file from the non-suid commands but to still be able to use the multiplexer to call each set, meaning it needed two names if both were in the $PATH) was this patch making the multiplexer name work as a prefix, and when I wrote the toybox multiplexer a year later I made it do that too. Since then other people have found more uses for it. For example, distro package install plumbing can provide "alternatives", which means they wanted a busybox-coreutils that replaced the coreutils parts without installing E.G. ifconfig; to me it's a question of what symlinks you do/don't install but some people like to micromanage? I added "make change" to build EVERYTHING standalone if you really want to, but this is another way to do it. There's also toybox-static vs toybox-dynamic, toybox-musl vs toybox-glibc, and so on. It's a generic mechanism, it can do various things. I don't want ANY unknown name to call the multiplexer because that becomes a security issue, upgrade to a verson that doesn't have an old command but leave the symlink lying around and suddenly it's 'catv rm -rf *' time in some cgi-bin or something. (And THEN I taught toybox to follow one layer of symlinks to find a name it can understand, which would be another way to implement this instead of the prefixes, but some people are already using the old mechanism, so...)

To be honest SPOT says that strstart() shouldn't say "toybox", it should use toy_list->name which already says "toybox". (Because the first entry in generated/newtoys.h says toybox, because scripts/make.sh has an echo explicitly writing the first line into the file.) I totally need to do a youtube video with a walkthrough of the plumbing. Probably for the 1.0 release.

Anyway, I changed the offending line to:

if (!(CFG_TOYBOX && which == toy_list) && !(which->flags & TOYFLAG_NOFORK)) {

Half of which drops out at compile time.


April 25, 2021

It's easy to call the Boomers terrible parents, but the reality is many of them just DIDN'T parent: "Latchkey kids were a Generation X phenomenon. Of course being ignored by the Boomers was probably the best thing they could have done for us, given how profoundly incompetent they turned out to be at everything they valued enough to focus on. The Boomers inherited the postwar prosperity built by FDR's New Deal and the Greatest Generation's efforts in World War II and after (turning the infrastructure and training built for the war to eliminating Malaria and landing on the moon), and like so many trust fund kids they squandered their inheritance (as described so well by Spike Trotman).

I still really really hope the end of the Boomers breaks the fever of big oil, the 99%, financialized consumerism redefining "citizens" as "consumers", and so on so that we can start FIXING stuff. I look forward to a post-Boomer world as pretty much the main thing giving me hope. They CAN'T last much longer.

When people vote, the GOP loses. That's why they've turned every resource they have left exclusively to stopping it.

Didn't peleton do the horrible ad that Ryan Reynolds parodied? Why are they still being taken seriously?

Demilitarize the police.


April 24, 2021

Here at the table outside the UT geology building, I get net by associating with my phone via wireless tether, because the USB tether keeps disconnecting. (The question of whether USB-C cables become flaky and disconnect when jostled is easily answered: yeah, takes a month or two longer than the previous generation did, then it's flake city when you breathe on it.) I still plug the phone in to my laptop so it can charge, but it's not reliable delivery of data (and the transciever toggle hangs up existing connections, thanks Linux). Except the problem with a wifi tether is that there are multiple dozens of access points within range of my laptop (courtyard of a multi-story university building, facing two more multi-story university buildings), and every half hour or so the wifi disconnects and refuses to show any access points despite multiple rescans, and if I run "iwlist wlan0 scanning" from the command line it exits with "Failed to read scan data: Argument list too long." (The devuan wifi thingy seems to be a wrapper around the various command line tools.) The sad part is it drops the EXISTING connection when this happens, presumably because the access point is no longer in the list... even though it's still connected to it? Grumble. (I wasted SO much time blaming the driver before figuring that out, switching wifi off and on, suspending and resuming my laptop to try to jostle it back into working... I should make a toybox iwlist command. Throw it on the todo heap.)

So, about that toysh order of operations issue...

$ x() { echo hello; }; Y=x; $X $Y $Z
hello

I need to resolve the command line arguments in order to know whether this command is a shell function, and the new variable context created for prefix assignments could easily be reused as the function's variable context but only if we DIDN'T assign those variables into existing context (I.E. a bare assignment that's not before a command). Meaning "we are about to run a function" is a useful thing to know before performing variable assignment...

Oh, hang on:

$ abc=def $Z
$ echo $abc
def $ abc=123 > potato $ echo $abc 123

Right, we MUST peform resolution first in order to know IF it's a local variable context, because "arguments are left over" is not a sufficient indicator for whether or not variable assignments are persistent. But the order in which these things happen in bash...

$ abc=xyz > /not/found bash: /not/found: No such file or directory $ echo $abc xyz $ abc=def ${a?b} bash: a: b $ echo $abc xyz

My code really isn't designed to split these hairs exactly where bash does. Yes, this is all order of operations IN ERROR PATHS, and nobody but me seems to test error paths, but still. I was trying to get this RIGHT. Grrr.

$ x() { potato 123; }; alias potato="echo"; x
bash: potato: command not found

Well at least THAT'S sane. (Parser HAS to convert alias at parse time, not at runtime. Otherwise you can't work out line continuations.) But this isn't:

$ x() { echo $_ hello; }; true; x; echo $_ true hello x

The function being run calls into the other context, so the last thing run was the "echo hello" not the x. The x executing is a CALL into the function context, my code would print "x hello\nhello" and it's hard to see how NOT to make it do that without consuming an unlimited amount of stack space for deep function call stacks (bad on NOMMU systems). I made the function call stack a linked list for a REASON...


April 23, 2021

Of course Biden's proposal to return tax rates to where they were in 2018 is half-assed: they need to go back to where they were in 1963. The point isn't to raise revenue (or even control inflation), it's to keep billionaires from dominating all political and economic discourse. And lifetime appointments to the supreme court remain a real problem, but the Boomercrats will never impeach any of them, nor do what FDR did and dilute them.

Remember that thread about emergent properties of group decisionmaking leading to the most boring possible decisions? This thread calls it the ice cream problem.

Sometimes you don't know a horrible thing was happening until there's a proposed fix. Always mixed feelings about those: yay it's being addressed, outrage that it was ever the case...

Following John Rogers (co-creator of Leverage) you find out about so many scams, and if you start thinking about Bernie Madoff and Fox News and the rise of spam email, it's easy to see how the Boomers let the economy turn into a giant mirage. Then again their lead poisoning left them extra-vulnerable to scams on a massive scale, even reaching out to distant lands DEMANDING to be scammed, such as the Foxconn Wisconsin debacle.

You know the old phrase "great artists steal"? It applies to financially comfortable white male artists. The first issue of Batman was literally traced from a Tarzan comic, the setting was fanfic of a film noir detective movie, and Bob Kane outsourced the new creative parts and hogged all the credit. Just imagine a black woman trying to do even half that "just reach out and take success" schtick without already being comfortably atop the dominant cultural hierarchy. It's not just a "white male european" thing, Koji Kondo's music for Nintendo was, ahem, "strongly inspired" to existing songs. Imagine what would happen to a zainichi korean composer doing that...

The fact the criminal justice system "would implode" if every trial went the way of the Chauvin trial is an excellent reason to defund the police, who don't know what to be afraid of.

Billionaires have cornered the market on lumber as part of preventing construction from undoing billionaires' cornering the market on residential housing. Yes that is why rent is going up: billionaires are driving the price up so the 99% has to pay them ever-more money, constantly, forever until the guillotines come out. People are trying to push back, but I am not expecting the end of the Boomers to be without a full-on Damnatio Memoriae dismantling of everything they ever touched. "Rent reform" is not the same thing as returning the stolen money, punishing the guilty, and making a sufficient example of the perpetrators to dissuade many generations to come.

Meanwhile, all this "just-in-time delivery" nonsense has advanced until supply chains for everything are incredibly brittle, leading to shortages and price spices, making market cornering faster and easier. It's the classic efficiency vs resiliency tradeoff (like security vs usability). I actually rooted for the early stages decades ago writing for the motley fool, back when it was still an optimization (and I was more naieve about the downsides). During the recent texas blizzard it hurt my community. Over the years the old saying "premature optimization is the root of all evil" has gradually been turning into "over-optimization is the root of all evil": specialization sacrifices flexibility. In the case of modern supply chains, this has gone way too far in a lot of places and needs unwinding. (Part of the ongoing chip shortage is people realizing just in time delivery ISN'T reliable and trying to amass inventories. Simultaneously. Which turned into the digital version of toilet paper hoarding, which became ticket scalping because capitalism. The fix is suppliers flooding the zone, which takes a while.)

Credentialism is just one more filter billionaires use to lock out the 99%. Unpaid internships, "presentation" in hundreds of dollars of clothing changed daily, buying up all the housing near the jobs, destroying public transit, and finally cracking down on homeless tent camps (and then wondering why they can't hire anybody to cook, clean, or stock shelves in their city anymore). Austin tries to swim upstream against this (and we have the "rich parents paying to send their kids to school, who work part time jobs" labor pool hack of a large university), but the market-cornering strip-miners always come in and screw it up for profit.

As usual, the question seems to be how long holding actions delay mass deployment of guillotines. Taxing the aristocracy into submission isn't how previous monarchies fell, and rich people can afford to game the system full-time. The current strategies for gaming tax code enforcement are already quite elaborate, and intellectual property law is weaponized to suppress criticism. Here's a good thread on the thesis "every billionaire is a policy failure".

Putting cops in schools gets students killed. Lightly paraphrasing: Cop's gun misfires into officer's leg, they blame a 17 year old student and kill him, then call it a "mass shooting," lie to media and refuse to release the body camera footage for days.

Faceboot remains especially terrible, they track hate groups on their platform and intentionally leave them online because that's its business model.


April 22, 2021

I just regression tested mkroot with linux 5.12-rc8 (in part to make sure my recent toysh changes hadn't broken anything obvious in the init script). The two "known broken" architectures are armv7m and microblaze, but a lot more aren't working: armv7l has no net, armv4l doesn't build, m68k hangs, mips64 doesn't build, powerpc64le exited immediately (unable to open initial console), and s390x didn't build. Sigh, I need to reestablish a baseline (under what kernel version did they last all work?) and bisect to see what commit broke each one. (Half the time it's a config change, but I still need to bisect to see WHAT new config symbol is suddenly required. Ah, I left myself a note, last release I tested them all with the 5.9 kernel.)

Poking around I discovered that modern mount understands -o offset= and -o sizelimit= for loop devices, which toybox mount does not. It's very useful to have, and was the main reason I've called losetup directly over the years, so I'd like to support it. But toybox autodetects loop mounts, and does so by the first attempt to mount failing with ENOTBLK and trying again. But the command line options are parsed before then, and we need to peel out the options that WON'T be understood by the filesystem driver (because otherwise they get confused), which means peeling out offset= and sizelimit= BEFORE we know if this is a loopback mount. Unfortunately, the old crufty "autofs" driver has "offset" as one of the options it understands, so if I snip it out unconditionally (whether or not we're doing a loop device mount) that's at least one driver that would be inconvenienced by that.

I should do a FAQ on how to use NFS and SMBFS with toybox mount. I mean I had a patch to make it much cleaner which of course never went upstream because the kernel clique circled the wagons, and in my experience they never really pay attention anymore except for bikeshedding unless you put in the persistent schmoozing to become a member of their clique in good enough social standing to be worth listening to, which I just don't have time for. I don't have the "social capital" with them to have my technical issues listened to. But hey, they got rid of the "code of conflict" so I guess everything's fine now.

Anyway, if you "mount -o offset=$((2048*512)) file.img dir" it should work on a loop device. I can't find any filesystems currently using "sizelimit" except loop.c, and autofs checks "offset" not "offset=" so if I only grab ones assigning a value it shouldn't conflict with that? It can always break in future, but we can burn that bridge when we come to it.


April 21, 2021

That Los Angeles Basic Income pilot seems a lot less praiseworthy when you realize they want to spend $3 billion next year on police. That's a $1000/month basic income for 250,000 people.

A surprising amount of Silicon Valley's ideas aren't new, they're just ways to dodge well-known legal liability and regulation. Just as blockchain automated the function of a Notary Public (minus any sort of "Garbage in Garbage Out" filter), NFTs reinvent pedigree papers... again, with the exact same GIGO problem. People have a bridge to sell you, and have drawn up the FANCIEST documents on full color glossy paper to claim onwership of said bridge. I await the lawsuits.

Nancy Pelosi is 80 years old, and it really shows. Alexandria Occasio-Cortez is profoundly more clueful.

I'm not surprised netflix is stumbling, I uninstalled their Android app after they broke it last month. In theory I could still watch it through the praystation (we haven't cancelled the subscription because Fade still uses it), but I don't. It's a pity, they've got stuff I want to watch, but when I click on an entry in the app I want it to show me what I clicked on with a play button, not give me a status bar at the bottom with no play button. (Double click. Triple clock. Long press. Nothing: no way to get the old fullscreen page for the entry back.) I asked their tech support how to downgrade the app to the version BEFORE they broke it (I did not consent to the change), they said that was impossible, so I uninstalled it. It's been a month, don't really miss it that much? The time I used to spend watching netflix is split between crunchycrunch, hulu, tubetube, tiny bit of prime (most things I want to watch there that I haven't _already_ watched sticks ads in it: I am _never_ going to pay to watch ads), and... just plain watching fewer videos.

Michigan is currently having a covid wave that's filled the hospitals to 100% capacity (and filled up a bunch of "overflow beds" on top), spread by racist GOP loons.

Of course that "Q" nonsense is a russian op. I mean, we knew this, right?

The GOP is flipping out about granting DC statehood, but wyoming has far fewer residents and they're fine keeping that. (They want land to vote, not people. Then rich people buy land and their votes count more.)

Religion remains a wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP, shrinking down to their 27% "crazification factor" core. Almost half of 30 year olds say they have no religion, and 20% of 70 year olds. Pascal's Wager has a pretty obvious answer these days (bowing to the golden idol puts evil old white men in charge, plus Homer Simpson's "What if we chose the wrong religion? Every week we just make god madder and madder").

Today I learned the word "fracklog", which is the count of oil wells that have started drilling but are as yet uncompleted, and thus not producing oil. This represents money oil companies sunk into mining without producing any results yet. The acronym DUC for "Drilling UnCompleted" has also lead to "Dead DUC", for a well that won't be finished because the business case for it went away. Meanwhile, all those oil pipelines everyone was rushing to build are sitting empty, and thus missing debt payments on the financing the companies took on to build them. As one financial analyst said, "It has created some skepticism on the investor base about the sustainability of the sector". And of course oil prices going back up brings US shale pumping back online which lowers prices again, the oil industry is in a no-win scenario these days. The OPEC cartel no longer functions (partly because it's now led by a murderous clown).

The reason black people seldom call the police is when they do the police REGULARLY show up and murder the person who called them. We still need to defund the police. I don't feel like coming up with a long sentence of exactly the right length and linking every word of it (and worrying about whether "a" and "of" should be their own link or grouped with an adjacent word) today, so: link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link. And no, "we gave you a crumb, grovel before our mercy and leave us alone forevermore or we shall smite your uppity ingratitude" is not the appropriate response here: a murderer went to jail after his institution lied to protect him. This only happened because of a solid year of protest that included setting the police station on fire. Derek Male Chauvanist Pig was one of literally thousands of perpetrators, and new murders by police happen daily. Police who murder civilians listing themselves as the real victim on the incident report is an old police trick. And "murdering people" isn't REMOTELY the only bad thing police do to the populace they subjugate, it's just the most obvious. Well, that and the civil forfeiture.

An example of how downticket races matter.

A good article on the thesis that Capitalism is broken.


April 20, 2021

The nearest vaccine appointment at HEB is now 9 miles away instead of 80, which is progress, but I'm still waiting for J&J at the one near me. Try again next week... Ooh, Los Angeles is proposing a Basic Income Pilot, $1000/month for 2000 families for a year. And another part of Los Angeles is doing a 500 family pilot program with money diverted from the police budget. Meanwhile, the scottish greens are proposing universal basic income. And Arthur C. Clarke said "The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play" back in 1969. Speaking of diverting money from police budgets, the cop who killed George Floyd was found guilty on all counts (nature is healing). Meanwhile, the scottish greens are proposing universal basic income. And Arthur C. Clarke said "The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play" back in 1969.)

Elliott just sent me a large patch to toybox hexedit that A) improves several things, B) makes the display significantly uglier. I've applied it, but am unhappy with it for bikeshedding reasons.

Hmmm, I've got a fairly obvious missing design thingy in toybox, and should probably figure out how to deal with it: struct sh_arg has a pointer array and a count, and there's functions to add entries to that which realloc() the array part (with a stride of 32 entries) and keep it NULL terminated each time, I.E. "arg->v[arg->c] = 0;". It's not hard to do but it's convenient to have the function that does it, and means I'm not repeating the check for 32 in multiple places (if things disagree about the size of the stride it would potentially write off the end of the allocated space).

But the thing is, the sh_arg stuff works with char * as the data type, and other stuff doesn't necessarily. The variable plumbing borrows the sh_arg plumbing (making temporary sh_arg structs to manipulate them) but otherwise stores the char ** and the long len separately. And now I've got the function array, which I want to have as an array (faster to search than a linked list, maybe even sort it and binary search it) but it's NOT an array of char *, it's an array of struct sh_function *. And while I _can_ abuse sh_arg again and typecast... it's gratuitously ugly?

There's a similar problem with the doubly linked list plumbing. The struct for that has the payload as a char *, because I first wrote it for patch.c which needed that. But lots of other stuff wants a different payload, an I've made dlist_add_nomalloc() and typecast to void * a lot, and I keep thinking I should do a pass making dlist_add() be the nomalloc one and have a different name for the one that mallocs a struct dlist? Also, if struct dlist is _just_ the next and prev pointers, then you could EMBED it in other structs as the first member, and the types get potentially less awkward all around? (Pointer to first element of a struct is equal to the pointer to the struct, guaranteed to work in C99.)

Sigh: problem at hand. Do I genericize sh_arg to use void *, or do I do another wrapper pass like I did for variables? It's a question of what's less ugly, which is REALLY a question of what the common case is. And "string" is a pretty common case...


April 19, 2021

Biden keeps comparing himself to FDR, but FDR said "I welcome their hatred" and Biden keeps begging for republican approval he is never going to get. If he actually committed to progressive policies, they turn out to get widespread support from unexpected places. Also, what "every accusation a confession" really means is people believe their opponents are willing to do what they themselves are willing to do.

Austin had a mass shooting yesterday, in the Arboretum (about 7 miles away). The police identified a black man as the suspect, and I did not believe them, until I heard he was a former sheriff's detective and I went "oh, a cop did it, that sounds plausible". I would appear to be developing some distinct biases in this area...

Tesla continues to set back the cause of self driving, but Musk is also bad at other stuff too.

Please stop connecting random things to the internet. It does not help.


April 18, 2021

Whaddaya know, when the police don't show up, peaceful protest is peaceful.

As of today, 50% of US adults has gotten vaccinated (at least the first dose). The percent saying they would get vaccinated was 67% in january, and is 75% now. (Given that 27% of the population is crazy, that's digging 2% _into_ the wingnuts who think drinking water is communist.)

Early voting opens tomorrow in Austin; they took away the voting place in Fiesta so the closest place to vote is a mile away now. The Austin boomercrats texted me to that they only care about the first three propositions (Prop B is GOP nimbyism targeting the homeless so of course everybody who isn't outright evil is against it; the Boomercrats care about A and C which I had no strong opinion on, and didn't mention E because they care more about keeping the job more than doing the job. Nuts to their white mice.)

I think the cpio thing is resolved now. There's more I could do, but it's not strictly required. (Got the Android build unblocked, moving on...)

Dear bash, what counts as a valid function name? And what processing is done on that name?

$ function ab=cd if true; then echo hello; fi
$ "ab=cd"
hello
$ function ab^cd if true; then echo hello; fi
$ ab^cd
hello
$ function ab$cd if true; then echo hello; fi
bash: `ab$cd': not a valid identifier
$ function "abcd" if true; then echo hello; fi
bash: `"abcd"': not a valid identifier
$ function function if true; then echo hello; fi
$ "function"
hello
$ abc=def function
hello
$ function ab*cd if true; then echo hello; fi
$ "ab*cd"
hello
$ function ab!cd if true; then echo hello; fi
function abcd www if true; then echo hello; fi
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `www'
$ function ab\!cd if true; then echo hello; fi
bash: `ab\!cd': not a valid identifier
$ function ~landley if true; then echo hello; fi
$ "~landley"
hello
$ function a>b if true; then echo hello; fi
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `>'

Seriously? The man page DOES NOT DOCUMENT THESE RULES. (Wildcards don't execute but the !history thing does?) At least this:

$ function one if true; then echo hello; fi > potato
$ ls potato
ls: cannot access 'potato': No such file or directory
$ one
$ ls potato
potato

Is documented in the man page. Of course the same section of man page says that if you use the function keyword without parentheses then the { braces } are required which is CLEARLY NOT THE CASE...

I need to add so many tests to the test suite. Ok, a function name can't have a $, backslash, single or double quotes in it... Um:

$ function `echo hello` if true; the echo hello; fi
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `fi'
$ function `echo hello` if true; then echo hello; fi
bash: ``echo hello`': not a valid identifier

I do not understand bash's parsing order of operations here. Why would you check for a valid function name AFTER syntax checking the compound statement?

Hmmm, trailing redirects cling to the function, but leading variable definitions don't (specifically, they're not allowed):

$ ab=cde function hello if true; then echo $ab; fi
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `then'

This does _not_ smell like a design, it smells like an ad-hoc accumulation over a number of years. Which is the worst kind of thing to try to be compatible with: when the implementation IS the spec every weird behavioral hiccup is "part of the spec", and I have to figure out what subset I care about reproducing and testing.


April 17, 2021

I'm not the first to point out how capitalism is putting all the sites that post facts behind paywalls, but the propaganda sites are all free. Capitalism is no longer the solution, it has become the problem.

Russia's GOP is in full throated party of NO mode in the House right now, essentially reinventing the fillibuster by slowing every bill as much as possible forcing full procedure for each vote to rename a post office. And yet we still can't turn the Senate fillibuster back into a talking fillibuster (where you have to physically BE there to block it) because Joe Manchin is a republican.

Raising the top federal tax rate back above 90% like it was in 1963 might be sufficient to get us through the end of the Boomers, but I still lobby for federal guillotines for the capital offense of being a billionaire. Mackenzie Scott is the only billionaire with a soul, and the way you can tell is how hard she's working to STOP being a billionaire (giving away a billion a month). Remember, the only reason Dolly Parton isn't a billionaire is she keeps about 0.8 billion and gives the extra away on a regular basis.

For all the police posturing, they're less likely to die on the job than garbage collectors, bartenders, taxi drivers, roofers, electricians, landscapers, mechanics, fishermen, miners, or loggers. Police are not even in the top ten most dangerous civilian professions. Most police in twenty countries don't even carry guns, and it turns out when they don't bring them they don't NEED them.

Another reason to defund the police (apart from the constant lying) is they're so insistent on funding themselves. The amount the USA spends on police would make it the third largest military in the world. (The UK's entire military budget is 40% of what the USA spends on police, and THEY get aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons for it.) Of course old white men want full fascism, and progress is only likely to happen in the usual way. This is why the proper police budget is "zero". The racist geezers want it to be "infinite". If you lobby for half-measures, your position will be eroded to meaninglessness. (And once again, The Onion is on it.)


April 16, 2021

Good news: the chance of a noticeable covid infection among the fully vaccinated is slightly under one in ten thousand. (That's "person has any symptoms of illness", not "we drew blood and took a PCR test and yes there's some virus there" which is where the 60-ish precent efficacy figures from the clinical trials come in: enough virus to be detectable in a laboratory setting with specialized equipment. Which is NOT the same as getting sick or having any real chance of spreading it.) Meanwhile, Pfizer's CEO announced his desire to keep selling vaccine endlessly, customers should take a third dose and then a fourth, kaching. (It probably should become part of the standard flu shot regime, but the Pfizer CEO is 100% saying it because money.)

Oh look, mailing everybody in the country $1400 each boosted the economy, who'da thunk? (Now imagine what would happen if you sent out $1000 _every_ month, which is easy enough to pay for at the federal level.)

On toybox, got distracted fixing a cpio issue the android guys hit where the kernel lets you concatenate multiple cpio files and the gnu/dammit cpio doesn't, and they had a workaround with a shell for loop that didn't work with any other cpio implementation except the gnu/dammit one. Longish ongoing discussion with them to figure out what constitutes a proper fix. (Not hard to implement, hard to figure out what TO implement.)

Now I'm back to squinting at the toysh code to figure out how/where to add function definition support. In order to make the lifetime work I need to translate the pipeline chunk out of line into its own reference counted structure during parsing. I think I know what the data structure should look like but the parsing code is a bit awkward. Much re-reading of my own stuff to get it properly loaded back into my head. (Why did I do that bit again?)

I just got stopped by the university police. I got up from the table and paced the length of the porch of the geology building a couple times while trying to work out the design for the shell function lifetime stuff, and a couple minutes later two police cars pulled up and three uniformed officers (with, of course, guns) got out to ask questions. Somebody inside the building (at 3am) thought I might be trying to "get inside" when I'd just read a couple signs about social distancing on the window while trying to figure out the pipeline transplant lifetime rules handing off data between the parse-time structure, the runtime call stack, and the list of defined functions (which should probably be a sorted array of functions instead of a linked list).

Of course as a middle class white male it wasn't a problem for me: about 8 minutes of being polite and compliant to roving bureaucrats (and yes, handing over my driver's license and waiting for them to "run" it) and they left me alone again. They didn't even complain I'm using electricity from a university outlet, which would have been a legitimate gripe. Alumni or not, I do consider myself a guest here...

But I'm pretty sure if I was black or female, there's no WAY I could get away with being in a public place late at night in the USA. The culture here is amazingly toxic. Tokyo has advantages and disadvantages compared to the USA, but travel certainly points out the "wow, that's very different; different is a thing that can be" blind spots. There I am Gaijin. Here I'm Good Ole Boy. I want to dismantle a system I clearly benefit from.

(Defund the police doesn't mean you stop spending the money. If groundskeepers had pulled up to ask me questions, it's a different vibe than guys with guns. I've emailed facilities here multiple times about the lights that are still out, and the snapping noise whatever circuit that's shorting out makes every time it rains, and the fact the timer the lights are on doesn't switch them on until midnight and hasn't for YEARS. This table has had the same leaves under it for 6 months now, it's NEVER swept. THOSE guys are understaffed, but we've got multiple guys with guns paid to drive around all night? Reallocate that budget please. Hire the same people even, I'm sure they can sweep.)

Anyway, kinda killed the mood. Headed home about half an hour later.


April 15, 2021

A reminder that every year Intuint and H&R block spend millions keeping taxes hard to file, because they make money off of you confirming what the government already knows.

Japan very briefly had a mascot to promote its decision to release radioactive water from fukushima into the ocean. I have questions.

Boomercrats gonna boom, just like Evangelicals gonna evil. (We have junior Boomercrats in training, the dogpile brigades, but 27% of any population is crazy. Sadly, they're not all on the other side.)

Richard Stallman's supporters remain at about the same level as always But then, so does microsoft.

Another day, another example of how AI is constructed entirely out of biases.

Defund the police. Here's another sentence to consume a bunch more links on that topic. Even dinky little university police departments get pulled in and contaminated. (My wife, who sent me that last link and is getting a doctorate at the University of Minnesota, said of it "I'm thinking grimly of World War 1. It made sense to sign a treaty at the time...") Also, the saying is "one bad apple spoils the barrel", yet they keep talking about "bad apples" as an EXCUSE. (P.S. Du Jour.)

And yes it's "defund", not training. There is no productive way to pour sugar on a fire ant's nest, it will only EVER make the problem worse. The daily show had an excellent interview with the black woman who popularized the phrase "defund the police" last year.

Training on protecting yourself from police should be part of elementary school curriculums going forward. Of course the LRAD was developed for the military circa 2000 and then used by republicans against protestors at the 2004 GOP convention, against dakota access pipeline protestors, and against black lives matter protestors. The GOP are fascists ruling by force and treachery, the giant "defense" budget weaponized against US citizens by channels such as the 1033 program.

Taxes are a weak alternative to guillotines, and sure -- do both, but the fundamental problem is that capitalism has run its course and we need a new civic religion to replace it. (The pyramids weren't built by capitalism. The USA didn't go to the moon via capitalism. The great wall of china was not built by capitalism. Winning World War II involved a _suspension_ of capitalism. It's just _one_ way to organize human activity.)

For years I've said "dying business models explode into a cloud of intellectual property litigation." On a small scale, you get Oratroll (which lost the API copyright case against Google, if not as decisively as the rest of us would have liked, and oh boy is it a sore loser). When the dot-com boom disrupted the entertainment industry a quarter century ago, the dinosaurs threatened by streaming went for regulatory capture by passing the digital millennium copyright act with its anti-circumvention provisions. The fossil fuel industry undergoing the same sort of disruption from solar/wind/batteries went for regulatory capture in 2016 by making the CEO of Exxon Trump's first secretary of state (and making their first act in office an attempt to push through the keystone oil pipeline), but it's also got state governments too, being amazingly stupid. (Basically the whole GOP is a collection of drowning dinosaurs climbing on top of each other.)

The backpedaling in the "vaccines and clots!" thing has begun, because well duh.


April 14, 2021

Today's quote: "We beat polio with a vaccine with lower efficacy than J&J."

One of the other engineers lost patience with my bootloader flailing and already upgraded the old codebase to add the new features. (Sigh: "don't ask questions, post errors" still works. Except I was using it as a learning experience and excuse to write documentation, and might still do so but it's off the critical path for now and I'm on to the next thing at $DAYJOB because somebody else did the todo items motivating it. No, I don't know when/if the github repository might be updated with the new code, not my area.) So I guess I'm back to posting about toybox.

The toysh test program runs to completion on bash, but hasn't run to completion on toysh in a while because lots of the tests use features that toysh hasn't implemented yet. The biggest being shell functions, without which a lot of things are hard to test.

I've been going through and commenting out tests that don't pass because of missing features, and finding both regressions and stuff that NEVER worked, but which I thought did. One such thing is the $IFS corner cases with collating runs of whitespace. (It gets leading whitespace right but doesn't get trailing whitespace right.) I went through bisecting to try to find where I'd introduced this regression (I thought I had it working!) and it turns out... no, it's been broken basically forever. Huh. The fix for it is small, although tracking down where to put it and wrapping my head back around that code was time/energy consuming.

And now I'm wondering how much more of the test suite to try to chase, vs going back and implementing more of the missing stuff. I'm pretty close to having functions in, except that the next thing I need to do is actual function declaration/definition, which means I have to work out what the lifetime rules are supposed to be. (It's a design issue; the parsed pipeline data gets handed off, but still lives its original context, and two references to the same thing means reference counting. I should break down and just implement that...)


April 13, 2021

Sigh. Talk about transparent excuses: 6.8 million J&J doses were administered, and they had 6 cases of alien abduction, so they're pausing vaccine rollout. In reality, they had to discard ~15 million doses so there's a shortage of J&J vaccine for the next 2 weeks, and they're getting yelled at, so they went "no, we're INTENTIONALLY not giving it to you because... um, reasons!" Seriously, blood clots are a thing that happen, and even if this _is_ causing more it's VANISHINGLY RARE. 1 in 500,000 people are struck by lightning each year so you expect 14 LIGHTNING STRIKES in a population of 7 million. Ok, 3 months is 1/4 of a year, so 7 million times 2 because "per half million", then divided by 4 for the 1/4 year, and then halved again if you assume a smooth slope from zero at new year's to 7 million now (area under a right triangle), so it's like 2 lighting strikes in that population over that period. But still, is that a vaccine side effect? Answer, yes it officially is. (It happened during the clinical trials, so they had to list it!) Seriously, stop blaming one of the most common EXISTING causes of death on "and they were wearing SOCKS when it happened, blame the socks".

Prince Philip, who is dead, was a terrible person. Sarah Taber did another fascinating thread about the politics of wealthy landowners. The construction of the interstate highway system was racist in multiple ways. A reminder that nuclear reactors are not the answer to fossil fuels. They're just another kind of fossil fuel. There are sooo many reasons I don't have a faceboot account. Guillotine the billionaires, who got rich by stealing from everybody else.

Minnesota is declaring war against its own citizens, which would be hilarious keystone-cop incompetence if it wasn't simultaneously terrifying and very, very sad. But this is just one more of the never ending reasons why we need to defund the police. So many reasons big and small.

The GOP's popular vote is ever-shrinking, but their voter suppression game is ever-expanding. My rule of thumb is "the side the GOP is on is the wrong side", because they're never NOT lying anymore, but sometimes you need a long analysis thread to unwrap the spin and figure out what exactly they're lying about. Plus of course the endless racism , and claiming victimization even while dogpiling.


April 12, 2021

I am continually impressed by how WELL the steak-umm twitter feed has been doing at... being the steak-umm twitter feed. This is not a task I believed COULD be done well, it's not one I'm inherently interested in seeing done... but they're just so GOOD at it. (Specifically, Nathan Allebach is good at it.) Meanwhile, I remain deeply unimpressed by the constant stream of marketing emails from people who want to "add a resource to" my website, and then give a URL to my blog page from 2008 (which is now 13 years ago).

Alas, Austin did not get any J&J doses this week, just Moderna and Pfizer. (I have a problem with needles stemming from childhood trauma, so the one dose version is VASTLY preferable to the two dose version.) But then due to the manufacturing mixup that discarded 10+ million doses, the J&J vaccine supply is constrained everywhere for the next couple weeks. Starting on the 19th, HEB is supposed to start participating in vaccine distribution a lot more (hopefully including the pharmacy 2 blocks from me), and if the J&J supply picks up again the week of May 2nd that's probably when I can expect it?

I'm still banging on the j-core bootloader. We've already got a working bootloader but it's a bit of a mess (too many cooks over the years), its configuration mechanism is an #ifdef staircase, and it's brittle and hard to improve and it's basically gotten to the point where writing a new one from scratch is probably easier. (This isn't a secret, we published it as part of the bitstream build.)

I wasn't poking at it before because I strongly believe building a bitstream should be able to use the same toolchain we build the linux kernel with, but the boot rom we have now needs the ELF toolchain instead. Meanwhile Jeff says that bare metal guys who don't do Linux want an arduino-style bare metal ELF toolchain, which can't require a "-no-fdpic" argument and doesn't add underscores to symbol names (meaning it has an incompatible libgcc.a). I just don't want to have TWO toolchains, one of which is currently ONLY used to build the bootloader and nothing else.

We were at an impasse on this for a while, but over the weekend I had a phone call with Jeff where we establishd that if I can make the new one build with BOTH toolchains (the bare metal ELF toolchain and the fdpic one that builds the Linux kernel), that would be acceptable and he might merge the result.

Jeff is also concerned that if I post to the j-core mailing list about my learning curve coming up to speed on "turning the hello world kernel into a boot ROM", it would make the company look bad to investors. (We collectively know this stuff, we can't write about NOT knowing this stuff!) Except I personally do NOT know this stuff, and the people who DO know this stuff are so busy with other things that "write a better bootloader" has been a vague todo item for a year and a half now but nobody's DONE it. (We already have a bootloader that works, for a certain definition of "works", so they're working on higher priority parts of the todo list.)

Me, I've never been afraid to look stupid. It's sort of a constant, really. The background radiation of my life. I'm _persistent_, not necessarily smart or talented. Jack of all trades who has established some deep domain expertise in various weird niches that don't necessarily connect up, but mostly grinds away at stuff and does a lot of looking things up and head scratching while the real experts are busy elsewhere. Yes, I am reinventing a wheel and reverse engineering our own code, but I never claimed to be a domain expert here.

Anyway, my compromise is to blog about it on landley.net, but not post it to the mailing list on j-core.org.

So: the hello world kernel depends on the bootloader having already done LOTS OF STUFF for us. For one thing, DRAM init: it's mapped at 0x10000000 and we can't use that memory until we initialize the DRAM controller (you have to switch them on and tell them what types of chips they're refreshing). The j2 SOC has 32k of SRAM mapped at 0x00000000 and a bootloader needs to use that instead.

Second problem: a boot rom is not ELF loaded with relocations, we need to come out of power on into the ROM and call our start address. The j-core power on stuff is compatible with sh2, and that says in section 2.2.4 "initial values of registers" that at power on VBR is zeroed (the Vector Base Register, I.E. memory address of the start of the interrupt table), PC and R15 (the stack pointer) are loaded from VBR, and SR (the status register) set to 0xf (sort of, the bottom 4 bits are 1 and lots of the others are zeroed but the unused ones are "undefined" so the COULD be one, but we don't care; it's a future expansion trick that if we add bits that should start at 1, they can start at 1 without violating this spec). The rest of the registers are undefined, and interrupts start disabled.

The vector table is an array of 32 bit pointers, with entry 0 being the power on interrupt (so where to start executing code), entry 1 is what to set the stack pointer to when calling that interrupt (but stack grows DOWN so it's stack+sizeof(stack)-4), and then entry 2 is warm start address and entry 3 is warm start's stack. Higher entries shouldn't matter while interrupts are disabled, and we can move VBR somewhere else before enabling them.

Warm start isn't entirely implemented in the FPGA version of j2 because we haven't got a ROM in the FPGA (too expensive, it would eat thousands of LUTs). Instead xilinx FPGA bitstream format has a way of initializing SRAM to known values, so loading our bitstream initializes that 32k of SRAM starting at address zero with our boot ROM contents. The problem is that SRAM gets reused for other stuff when Linux comes up, so when you do a warm start the boot rom isn't there anymore (and xilinx doesn't give us a way to re-load it without wasting a lot of LUTs; it comes up once when the bitstream loads and that's it). In ASIC we'd have a real ROM, but in FPGA it's not worth the LUT budget to implement our own initialization machinery.

So I PROBABLY only need 2 entries in this vector table: starting the ROM with 0x00000008 and 0x00007ffc (code entry point right after the 2-entry vector table, and stack starting at the end of the SRAM; keep in mind it pushes and pops 32 bit registers so moves with 4 byte granularity, and stack grows DOWN so starts pointing to the last usable slot). But the old boot ROM had 4 entries (warm start as well as cold start), and wasting 8 bytes of 32k isn't a huge deal... maybe there was a reason for it? (Does the boot process call warm start at some point? Ah: I asked and it was so the same code could work in actual ASIC, where the ROM stays mapped and thus warm boot jumps back into it. None of this is designed JUST to work in FPGA, it's always silicon-ready when we have the budget to make a chip.)

Getting those 8 (or 16) bytes at the start requires a little linker magic. The text, rodata, data, and bss segments naturally flow in that order (in static binaries anyway), which is why the hello world kernel's compiler command line just has to set the starting address of "text". This needs a segment before "text", and linker script magic to stuff it in the right spot. Linux is doing similar linker magic when it sticks _init annotations on things, which are defined in include/linux/init.h as:

#define __initdata      __section(".init.data")
#define __initconst     __section(".init.rodata")
#define __exitdata      __section(".exit.data")

And __section() is defined in include/linux/compiler_attributes.h as "__attribute__((__section__(section)))". So in THEORY what I need to do is something like:

void *vt[] __attribute__((__section__(".vbr"))) = {_start, (void *)0x7ffc};

And some linker script to tell it to stick that section first in the binary. The problem is, the gcc command line argument "-Wl,-Ttext-segment=0" passes -Ttext-segment=0 to ld which moves .text, but if I change that in any way suddenly ld thinks the -T argument is a FILE it has to load, instead of using the data fed in on the command line AS the linker script. And this of course appears totally undocumented because gnu... (I really don't want to have to read the ld source code to figure out what command line options it understands. Gnu source code is horrific.)

Ah. I can't find it in the CURRENT documentation, but I can find it in old documentation, and it's that -T understands the special magic names "bss", "data", and "text" (but not rodata?). And I guess appending -section is ignored because it's matching them as prefixes or something? No idea. But in any case, if I strip the section indicator back OFF and put the data segment at the start, this lets me compile it:

sh2eb-linux-muslfdpic-gcc -Os -nostartfiles -nostdlib -mno-fdpic -Wl,-Tdata=0 -Wl,-Ttext=0x10 hello.c -o vmlinux

And I guess an asic-friendly bootloader would define both cold and warm start vectors, looking like:

void *vbt[] = {_start, (void *)0x7ffc, _start, (void *)0x7ffc};

It's curently the only thing in the data segment so has to come first... and now the memory contents are correct but the FILE has bloated by 64k because it's decided it needs a load alignment of 0x10000 which it DIDN'T NEED LAST TIME and it just INVENTED and I really dislike this tool. (Seriously? 64k? Everything uses 4k pages, where did you get jumbo pages from here? Why did the Linux developers use ANYTHING from the gnu project? Tecnical debt is what that is. They weaned themselves off the minix filesystem but not off the gnu compiler, and were crazy enough to let Ulrich Drepper switch them from their own libc5 to glibc because he'd sprayed it down with thread locking back when Java fundamentally could not run without threads because Sun had invented threads to overcome their terrible process switching performance and were SO PROUD OF IT that they never added poll/select bindings to Java... Sigh.)

And unfortunately if I do "-Wl,T<(echo thing thing thing)" as the argument (which doesn't work in toysh because <() is processed as a redirect, not a variable expansion; I should fix that now that I have an instance of /dev/fd/3 expanding into the MIDDLE of something actually being useful), the echo gets really long because there's all sorts of MEMORY boilerplate that suddenly has to be specified. Hmmm. Ugly.


April 11, 2021

How about a day of mostly good news: Solar is eating oil's lunch but Wind is eating its dessert. even Japan (with a power strategy of all methane all the time) is getting in on it. Sarah Taber is still doing excellent threads about random agriculture, environmental, and economic topics.

Even before robo-taxis become commonplace (app-summonable self driving car subscription services, where the Google Maps button adds "go" next to "directions" and when pressed you get a countdown in seconds until vehicle arrives at your GPS location to take you to the destination, for a flat rate monthly fee), Japan is having success with car subscription services. (As fossil fuel cars get more expensive, even the old the old "car2go" model is making more sense every month.)

This is a great article about BS jobs but walks right past the obvious observation that the "sense of worth" BS jobs erode is basically cultivating "impostor syndrome". If you have a BS job, you ARE an impostor -- that's the job -- and the feeling that you're just faking it and not really doing anything (because you aren't: that's the job) inevitably builds up into full blown impostor syndrome over time. Some people are better at coping with that than others, but you can't escape it when your job IS meaningless and your work DOESN'T matter, and there is no way to do it "right" because there's nothing to do right. (It's still possible to have impostor syndrome while doing real meaningful work, but when "how am I getting paid for this" is an inescapable question, it's hard NOT to have it.) Another reason BS jobs are so stressful is they follow you home: how do you know when you're DONE doing nothing? If you accomplished nothing today, how do you justify going home? Not that putting in overtime helps: it shows dedication, but never accomplishment if there's nothing to accomplish. It's a performative hairshirt to keep anxiety at bay, you've never done ENOUGH but can at least say you "worked" SO MUCH and tried SO HARD you weren't exactly slacking. Floundering, yes...

Austin's upcoming election gives us the opportunity to vote AGAINST republican nimbyism (Proposition B criminalizes sitting down), and to vote FOR ranked choice voting (Prop E). The others seem less important or mixed bags. Prop D lining up the mayoral election to capture presidential election voter turnout... more turnout is good but they're clearly doing it to trim 2 years off the current (term limited) mayor's term. Prop H is nice if likely irrelevant(?)? The "strong mayor" Prop F thing smells like a trap. And is Prop A proposed by the firefighters or by the city? (Does the union WANT it, or is it an anti-union thing? Not enough info.)

The story of Inga and Robert Smallbones didn't get a movie like Schindler's List, but good people rose to the occasion.

Huh. The texas department of transportation has a plan to screw up I-35 by digging a deep trench that can fill with floodwater every time it rains. Have they NOT noticed Austin has a monsoon season now? Also, the overpass on 43rd street (between HEB and Fiesta) has a bat colony living under the bridge, aren't they protected? (WHY do they want to tear the elevated section down? You already went and built the thing, it's not like the new plan provides a significatly different AMOUNT of road space, you're just changing where you put it.)

The Onion appears to have its groove back.


April 10, 2021

Updated the title of the blog page to say 2021. Only 4 months into the year.

I don't blog about $DAYJOB as much as I do about toybox because I'm not always sure what I'm allowed to publicly say. Even when we're releasing everything as open source, they want to control WHEN it happens. Jeff has a strict policy of making sure nobody can contribute to anything we're doing, because they only see it when it's killed and dried and pressed and polished into something nobody would want to change in any way, and is thus completely uninteresting for anything but rehydrate-and-eat deployment. Otherwise he thinks we look bad (unprofessional?). This may not be a fair assessment of the policy, but when I get told not to do stuff a couple times without understanding what was wrong, I back off to the next continent. If I dunno what I did wrong but it's important I not do it again, I stop doing it.

But my current banging is between two bits of open source, so it's probably ok to talk about? (It's not product stuff, it's infrastructure stuff which we _already_ open sourced.)

The reason Rich says he isn't using my mkroot script is it doesn't do incremental builds. The initramfs image doesn't take that long to build, but the kernel build takes a long time and you have to rebuild the kernel every time you update a static initramfs. The problem with leaving half-built kernel source lying around is you need a copy for every single architecture you're building (mkroot targets a bunch). To avoid using 3 gigabytes of space each time (and writing and deleting 3 gigabytes of bandwidth to the ssd each build) mkroot uses the cp -s trick, but if "git update" ran on the kernel source since last time the cp -s needs to be redone. (I suppose I could do a find for broken symlinks and then cp -ns to create new symlinks but leave existing ones alone. Does make use the timestamp on the _symlink_ or the timestamp on the file it points to? Hmmm...) But the easy way to fix it is to NOT have to rebuild the kernel, and the easiest way to that is to not statically link the cpio into the kernel.

So the first thing to try is getting the j-core bootloader to load an external cpio.gz from the FAT filesystem where the vmlinux currently lives. Our boot ROM has plumbing to load as many files as we like (and can already load a replacement device tree and plug it into the kernel), but how do I tell an arch/sh kernel where to find the external initramfs image? Let's dig into the code...

In arch/sh/kernel/setup.c function check_for_initrd() wants LOADER_TYPE, INITRD_START, and INITRD_SIZE to be nonzero, and INITRD_START to be page aligned. If so, it loads the external initrd pointed to by start/size. The units of both start and size are bytes, but INITRD_START is a byte offset from MEMORY_START, which configs/j2_defconfig sets to "CONFIG_MEMORY_START=0x10000000".

Those macros come from arch/sh/include/asm/setup.h which has:

#define PARAM   ((unsigned char *)empty_zero_page)
#define LOADER_TYPE (*(unsigned long *) (PARAM+0x00c))
#define INITRD_START (*(unsigned long *) (PARAM+0x010))
#define INITRD_SIZE (*(unsigned long *) (PARAM+0x014))

And that (somewhat inappropriately named) table comes from arch/sh/kernel/head_32.S:

  .section        .empty_zero_page, "aw"
ENTRY(empty_zero_page)
  .long   1             /* MOUNT_ROOT_RDONLY */
  .long   0             /* RAMDISK_FLAGS */
  .long   0x0200        /* ORIG_ROOT_DEV */
  .long   1             /* LOADER_TYPE */
  .long   0x00000000    /* INITRD_START */
  .long   0x00000000    /* INITRD_SIZE */

So in theory the boot ROM just needs to find the ELF section empty_zero_page and set "empty_zero_page[4] = offset;" and "empty_zero_page[5] = length;"

The complication is that our stuff is using device tree, and I dunno if this codepath still applies or if we have to patch an external initrd location into device tree? So I asked Rich (who is both the arch/sh maintainer and the developer who added device tree support), and he said he didn't modify this mechanism and it should still work: the initramfs load is layered and looks like it has at least THREE places it tries to find it. Rich says:

> init/initramfs.c:populate_rootfs calls unpack_to_rootfs
> for both the (builtin) __initramfs_start and the (param) initrd_start.
> So you should be able to test just adding an external parameter one
>l that extracts a file into / to see that it worked.

So device tree uses the command line parameter path. (Dunno if it replaces it or is just an alternate way to fill it out? Either way, irrelevant here. If the mechanism gets triggered, the init/initramfs.c plumbing is generic between archtectures. Just needs a size and a length. And, inexplicably, for CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM to be enabled on a kernel that might not otherwise have the block layer compiled in because initramfs doesn't need it.)

The next question is how to modify the existing boot ROM to load a second file from fat into memory somewhere and set the start/length here to point to it: the ROM code we've got wants the magic ELF toolchain, and I need to rebuild the bitstream which takes forever and I'm not 100% sure the tools are still set up right on my laptop. (I can ssh into a build machine to do it, but really prefer not to?)

I suppose I can build a "hello world" kernel to act as a stage 2 bootloader, loading the real kernel with initramfs. I just haven't built the elm-chan fatfs and our elf loader myself yet, nor gotten it to talk to the sd card without a driver. (Lots of stuff to rip out of the other bootloader to make this work. Probably worth doing anyway, but if I start down that road I'm _going_ to make a full replacement ROM with interrupt vector table setup and DRAM init and everything, and that's a political fight with Jeff I don't want to have right now.)

This is already its own ELF section in the vmlinux:

[Nr] Name              Type        Addr     Off    Size   ES Flg Lk Inf Al
[ 1] .empty_zero_page  PROGBITS    10001000 001000 001000 00  WA  0   0  4

Our ELF loader needs to load the cpio.gz into memory, then:

unsigned *rd = &empty_zero_page;
rd[4] = start_offset; // in bytes, physical address minus 0x10000000
rd[5] = len;          // in bytes

And in theory it should just work?

Another approach is that since our bootloader is loading an ELF vmlinux (not a flat binary bzImage), maybe I could replace the cpio.gz with objcopy? I.E. replace the static initramfs THAT way and avoid rebuilding the kernel each time? I dug into trying to replace the static initramfs in a bzImage back in 2006 and all the addresses had already been resolved, but the point of ELF is they haven't yet. (Not all of them, anyway.)

Digging into that initramfs loader path, init/initramfs.c is doing:

extern char __initramfs_start[];
extern unsigned long __initramfs_size;
...
static void __init populate_initrd_image(char *err)
{
...
        unpack_to_rootfs(__initramfs_start, __initramfs_size);

Which comes from usr/initramfs_data.S resulting in the ELF entries (via readelf -a):

Symbol table '.symtab' contains 22833 entries:
  Num:    Value  Size Type    Bind   Vis      Ndx Name
  185: 00000000     0 FILE    LOCAL  DEFAULT  ABS usr/initramfs_data.o
  186: 104416dc     0 NOTYPE  LOCAL  DEFAULT   11 __irf_start
  187: 104c5e74     0 NOTYPE  LOCAL  DEFAULT   11 __irf_end
12370: 104416dc     0 NOTYPE  GLOBAL DEFAULT   11 __initramfs_start
19234: 104c5e78     0 NOTYPE  GLOBAL DEFAULT   11 __initramfs_size

But none of those have a size, so I'm not entirely sure how to strip them out of the binary with objcopy and replace them? (How do I chop out NOTYPE ranges with objcopy?) It SAYS there's a section init.ramfs but it's not showing up in readelf?

The problem is that initramfs_data.S uses .incbin which I am not familiar with. The assembly file contains the useless explanatory comment "Using .incbin has the advantage over ld that the correct flags are set in the ELF header, as required by certain architectures." WHICH flags? WHICH architectures? What was the symptom you saw that prompted this change? Crickets chirp...

I tried grepping for other occurrences of 104416dc but in addition to the above 2 it only brought up:

12913: 104416dc     0 NOTYPE  GLOBAL DEFAULT   11 __initcall_end
17063: 104416dc     0 NOTYPE  GLOBAL DEFAULT   11 __con_initcall_start
18857: 104416dc     0 NOTYPE  GLOBAL DEFAULT   11 __con_initcall_end

None of them have a size either. I guess I can read the 4 byte value at _initramfs_size and use that as the size of _initramfs_start but the thing is the _section_ is one big blob:

[11] .init.data     PROGBITS   1043e240 43e240 087c3c 00  WA  0   0  4
[12] .machvec.init  PROGBITS   104c5e7c 4c5e7c 000020 00  WA  0   0  4

Can I patch in a size for NOTYPE? Or change NOTYPE to a different type that's allowed to have a size? (My knowledge of ELF is hitting its edges here.) Or it's the end of the .init.data section, and I could _depend_ on it being the end?

Another option is I could build the kernel with the tiny default initramfs (couple hundred bytes, it's the /dev and /root dirs, and the /dev/console node) and then objcopy in a _new_ ELF section, but the problem is I'm not sure how the initdata allocation/freeing would work there. (Would the kernel's early boot code know not to stomp it and when it can safely free it like it does with the _init stuff? According to include/linux/init.h the _initdata annotations are just grouping symbols into sections:

#define __init          __section(".init.text") \
  __cold  __latent_entropy __noinitretpoline
#define __initdata      __section(".init.data")
#define __initconst     __section(".init.rodata")
#define __exitdata      __section(".exit.data")
#define __exit_call     __used __section(".exitcall.exit")

We never use .init.rodata because we don't ARCH_HAS_STRICT_KERNEL_RWX in our j-core Kconfig. (Maybe we should?) But what I really want is ".init.ramfs" to be a section, and the rest of the plumbing to handle it properly.

Jeff also pointed out constants like the initramfs length can get resolved at compile time, but we should be able to do some horrible start = *(volatile char *)&thingy; typecast to work around that. I can tweak the build to produce a slightly different vmlinux (possibly even using an arch header), I just don't entirely understand why it's using this .incbin thing in the first place...

Another thing I can do is let the build use the default trivial initramfs image, objcopy in a new ELF section at the END of what's loaded in, and patch the zero page entries to load the builtin initramfs as an external initramfs. I have to read through the ELF loaders to see what sections they load. (Does the initdata go at the end of the ELF load? If not, how would it free it? I expect a linker script already has to specify that somewhere...)

More digging.


April 9, 2021

So far the evidence seems to indicate somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5% of humanity is trans (which would be 5-15 individuals in any group of 1000, so yeah you're gonna bump into them when they get to express themselves). As with other such minority populations (such as left handed people) this percentage seems basically constant over time with the big question being how accurately we've measured or suppressed what's there (I.E. how closeted they are), not whether anything's somehow increasing the percentage over time (left handed people don't recruit). Similarly, something like 1/3 of the population may be bisexual (or at least not all the way at one end of the kinsey scale). This seems more commonly expressed in women than men in western cultures, perhaps because the white male patriarchy's message of "women = sexy" is not contradicted by the concept of "a threesome" (which of course has its own enormous downsides). But so far there's no strong evidence to indicate the natural occurrence of bisexuality differs between men and women, just that men are far more reluctant to admit it in the aftermath of Queen Victoria's puritan cultural condemnation (unlike ancient Rome and Greece, where male bisexuality is common and unremarkable in surviving texts from the period). Of course there's still way too much cultural jamming on all this stuff to get an accurate reading on any of this yet, and reality is complicated (kinsey's scale didn't include asexuals back in 1948, and if anybody's come up with a kinsey scale for gender identity yet I haven't run into it despite the inherent contradiction of treating "being nonbinary" as "either you are or you aren't, pick one"), but the point is "creating" and "revealing" are not the same thing. (See also this thread about socially sanctioned risks; what we allow people to do and to acknowledge isn't rational, it's historical baggage.)

The birth control pill causes 3000 times more clot issues than the Astrazeneca vaccine. If that wasn't a crisis, this isn't a crisis. Meanwhile covid itself has killed half a million people just in the USA so your chance of bad things happening to you from the vaccine vs the chance of bad things happening to you from NOT getting the vaccine is multiple orders of magnitude different. The freakout is politically motivated by capitalists mad that a drug company DARED to waive patent royalties, and preventing that from setting a precedent at all costs.

H&R block's business model is to return to you some of your own money. In theory, the amount of taxes you owe and the amount of taxes you've paid are both fixed, so the refund you're owed (if any) is a constant. You shouldn't need to pay hundreds of dollars to gatekeepers to access your own money, and the only reason you do is they lobby to prevent the IRS from being as transparent as it is in most other countries. A uniquely american problem, caused by Late Stage Capitalism creating friction in what shouldn't even register as a transaction in order to insert gratuitous middlemen to act as parasites sucking cash out of people who don't want to be "customers". This is a form of Bullshit Job.

Here's a lovely explanation of how Late Stage capitalism is failing even at a theoretical level. "Believing you can buy your way out of anything leaves you unprepared to do the work." Late Stage Capitalism continues to eat its own tail, and gets into everything. What "standardized testing" really tests for is wealth and social class of the parents.

Another day, another long detailed article in a major news publication telling the story of a woman driven out of google by sexual harassment. (Well, technically that's the day before yesterday's article, this would be today's article.) The culture in general seems to slowly be becoming more aware of sexism, but "this space is populated primarily by white men" is only EVER the case because the white men drove everyone else out. Here's a primer on how "omitted variable bias" can teach an algoritm racism.

I keep condemning Boomers so hard because in a gerontocracy "policies track the desires of the pensioner class". The current increase in racism corresponds with advancing Boomer senility (hopefully as an extinction burst). Of course course Boomers supporting a theocracy helps the gerontocracy along, via a religion full of sexism and racism. White evangelicals are refusing vaccinations en masse, prolonging the pandemic, and are otherwise generally terrible.

The point of riot police is to create riots. We need to completely defund the police starting with their unions. (Which still aren't real unions.) The GOP is still pure evil, and everyone else's #1 legislative priority should still be to change the law to guillotine all the billionaires. Nine of the 10 wealthiest people in the world live in the united states, and those 9 collectively own over a trillion dollars.

The gun industry may go the way of the tobacco industry, not regulated away but litigated. (*shrug* Whatever works...)


April 8, 2021

After multiple days of being too depressed by the OSI mess to get any programming done, I am intentionally ignoring it and focusing on real work.

Fixed the $IFS thing (cache value needs to move into the function structure) and the bare assignments not persisting thing (wrong test: old pout variable's "unused" value was -1, new pipe variable's "unused" value is 0: switched variable name but not what I was testing for).

And now I've got... memory corruption! Which is always tedious to track down. But in this case it was just that the new variable assignment logic was blanking the VAR_NOFREE flag so when it temporarily inserted the "abc=def" argument string into the function variable context without making a copy, it would free it when popping the function context, and then the same string would get freed again as a command line argument in the exit path becuse it was still in the arg.v[] array.

That order of operations issue is back: either redirects are done first, or leading assignments are done first, and my code as-is really isn't designed to split them. I need the command line expanded with the OLD variable context so "abc=def; abc=ghi echo $abc" shows def not ghi, but if the echo was instead "env | grep ^abc=" it needs to show ghi...

I have tests where I force an error with ${a?b} to see what it has and hasn't done yet, and my test for "did redirections create files yet" is failing now...

Oh, I have disgusting solution. Ow that's ugly. I can create the new function (variable) context first, pop the function context off the stack but retain it, resolve the command line options, then put the context BACK where it was. For no other reason than to match bash's order of operations. (Ew. But reasonably small, done, and checked in.)

The main downside of not having an active twitter account is I can't favorite this.


April 7, 2021

So OSI has reversed itself AGAIN, and now insists that a memorial to its old mistake must remain in perpetuity or else the world won't know OSI had made a mistake. And the reason their 0BSD web page had a regression is OSI bureaucrats cycled out with no continuity of experience between them, and the new one tried to be ignorantly Helpful. (OSI is not only clueless about the history of the licenses it claims to manage, it also regularly forgets its OWN history. Bravo.) Said helpful new bureaucrat is, of course, tone policing me. I was spending a lot of effort attempting to be polite (and then just shut up when their discussion became 100% bikeshedding again). I am no longer attempting to be polite, but instead be bluntly truthful... except I see no benefit in further communication with them on their list until the NEXT time they screw this up again (every 3 years, like clockwork).

All I want OSI to do is stop. All I've EVER wanted them to do is just STOP. I've been very up front about this from day 1. I didn't submit 0BSD to OSI because OSI was irrelevant (after the falling out between Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens, then the disastrous handoff to Rick Moen, and then their announcement they were retiring from the license approval business). But sadly, it was just remission not a cure: as with the FSF they still have the ability to mislead, spread misinformation, do damage, insert themselves as a roadblock into other people's productive flow, and take credit for stuff they didn't do. (Completely unrelated, here's an interesting walkthrough of the mechanism by which committees filter out anything good leaving only the blandest and least interesting mediocrity, "an emergent property of group decisionmaking" which will "crop up whenever it's not compensated for in some way".)

It seems to me that I need to update my toybox license page with the history of the 0BSD license, and then point people at that timeline (and its links to primary sources) to update the Wikipedia page. Which is luckily all easily documented with primary sources with dates attached. (Kirk McKusick wasn't just a speaker at Ohio LinuxFest 2013, he was in the front row of the audience for my Rise and Fall of Copyleft talk, which is how I met him right afterwards to ask him about calling the toybox license 0BSD. That talk was me explaining the context in which I felt the need to come up with a new license. My talk made more sense if you could see the dozens of browser tabs I'd queued up in lieu of slides, which I didn't record because they pointed a video camera at me during the talk... and then published audio only a month later. Oh well, still better than Flourish in Chicago managed either time I spoke there.)


April 6, 2021

Right, license-review isn't a read-only announcement list, and it _is_ where the whole "please stop misnaming 0BSD" discussion was last time. But they've had some "trolling problems" and moderated all new users to both lists, which my resubscribe counted as. I didn't get bounce messages from license-discuss because it counted the license-review bounce message as my one (daily?) notification.

Anyway, I got email from the moderator early monday morning that he'd let my first message to each list through (so my fifth and sixth editing passes to make it sound less frustrated, respectively), and it's there now. Since then I got a couple responses, and have done my usual Pascal's Apology essay-style reply to both. (Here's the first, and here's the second.) Once again my bandwidth was taken up with Remaining Calm Despite Everything And Now THIS (for the THIRD TIME), which was... difficult. (I don't even want them to do anything, exactly, I just want them to stop. Which they'd previously agreed to do, but it didn't stick.)

In the course of replying I did basic research to answer the question "how many repositories on github are currently licensed 0BSD", and the answer (excluding forks) is currently twenty five thousand, one hundred ninety eight. The results are sorted by star count, with toybox coming in sixth, and the seventh being from Microsoft. I was not prepared for this answer. Um... yay? (So... so why am _I_ the only one speaking up in its defense on the OSI mailing list? Everybody keeps thinking this stuff Just Happens, and it doesn't Just Happen, and I would LOVE if it Just Happened so I didn't have to do it. David Graeber's observation that you make a cup once but wash it a thousand times remains true. So much janitorial work.)

Meanwhile, Lawrence Rosen said that Google just won against Oratroll in the supreme court, and can presumably go back to using its own Java implementation. (Two replies pointed out it's not a clean win, but it's 2021: take the win. Accept yes for an answer.)

Tried to get some toybox work done but there was a more immediate demand on my time. And my "edit this to not sound like I'm blaming the recipient" facility is a bit threadbare by this point. (It's a personal failing, I know. Maintainers need endless patience, and the ability to guide enthusiastic contributors into productive community members. I mostly just like to crouch in my corner and make stuff, which is not what I _should_ be doing.)

Alright, I moved TT.ifs to TT.ff->ifs and it still doesn't work and the reason is "IFS=123" is actling like it's in a pipeline when it's not (creating a temporary function context and discarding it again immediately), which the new cache plumbing I just made is dilligently mirroring. Great.

Alas, the night's over and the sun's coming up, someone's sat down at the table 20 feet away so I put my mask back on and my glasses are fogging up. Once again I walk home resolving to work some more on it from under a cat in the kitchen, but I hardly ever do...


April 5, 2021

The campaign against Astrazeneca has now leveraged J&J's manufacturing problems to kick them out of their US factory. And it's the one of the four that still hasn't been approved for use in the USA, despite our stockpile of it. Seriously? Capitalism is THAT pissed that they were going to waive their patent for the third world during a humanitarian crisis (until Bill Gates convinced them not to)?

Covid spreads by aerosol transmission. It does not noticeably spread by surface contact, which makes hand washing, surface cleaning, and "quarrantining" items irrelevant. We've got a LOT of good science on this now, which makes the early advice against masks even more tragic.

Christianity has disappeared into the GOP, which is still all-in on voter suppression as its only remaining option.

I have never had a Faceboot account, and do not intend to get one, and there are so many reasons for this. (I would happily come back to twitter, but will not give them a phone number and will not stop posting "Guillotine the Billionaries" as my comment on most links Janet Yellen is pushing for a Global Minimum Tax to fight against tax havens, but I still think inheritance taxes and legislating the hoarding of a billion dollars to be a capital offence are the best way for the government to get the money.)

As fossil fuel companies cling on by their fingernails, the "think tanks" that went seamlessly from leaded gasoline to tobacco to big oil are coming up with a constant stream of new talking points. It's a holding action they know they'll lose, but a global energy industry earning $1.4 trillion per year means every extra DAY they can hold out is worth around forty billion dollars. With a B.


April 4, 2021

Oh goddess, not again. The "Free Free All Hail Stallman Public 1.0.0" license misnaming of 0BSD is back. And it's because the OSI page has changed, which is NOT what it looked like back when they fixed the name (which was a decision to CHANGE not ADD ANOTHER with the explicit rationale that multiple conflicting names for the same thing was BAD).

Ok, that last link to the email announcing the name change was from license-review. Resubscribed to that list, wrote an email... Rewrite it 4 times to be less... frustrated. (I probably shouldn't title it "Please stop deadnaming 0BSD", among other things I doubt anybody there is young enough to know that word. Eh, maybe they have kids.) Sent it. Held in moderation because the list is moderated? (Probably by the dude responsible for the problem, who has not exactly shown himself to perform a Sam Vimes style "yes I will arrest my friends when necessary" impartial job to the best of his ability even when he doesn't like the outcome. At least not when being closely watched. (As much as I've disagreed with Bruce Perens over the years, _he_ turned out to have professionalism.)

Ok, that's an ANNOUNCEMENT list. Right, subscribe to license-discuss, cut and paste email into a new composer window, do yet ANOTHER editing pass to remove THE REST OF THE YELLING, sent email there, and... 40 minutes later there's still no April entry in the web archive? Are they running mailman as a cron job instead of an incoming message trigger, or did the message not go through, or...? I didn't get a bounce message...

Sigh. I WANTED to spend tonight on toysh development insead but wasted hours trying to figure out how much damage OSI's done to 0BSD again and how to mitigate it. (What is this strange fixation? Seriously nobody else has ever called it that. Nobody else CARES about this issue, or wouldn't if they didn't keep bringing it up and causing a problem.) Yes, maintaining a license involves surprisingly regular effort but this is just gratuitous.

Ahem. Ok, trying to get a LITTLE real work done: The NEXT toysh test failing is assigning to $IFS (Irritating Field Separator) and the assignment isn't changing the word separation rules. And THAT is probably because the variable list has layers of local variables now, but the TT.ifs cache (so we're not looking up a variable every character to see if this splits a word) is a single global instance? Hmmm. Except that implies the assignment would stick when it shouldn't, and instead it's being ignored. Gotta spray the code down with printfs to understand the behavior, bog standard debugging session but the sun's already coming up...


April 3, 2021

In a traditional sign of spring, half a billion Faceboot users just got their personal data stolen yet again, with the traditional terrible response from the relevant billionaires' mouthpieces. (Aren't we all happy about Faceboot's real name policy?) Meanwhile, other billionaires continue to suck. (The reason Nasa does launches over water from coastal cities like Houston and Cape Canaveral is so bits falling down don't hit anybody. How is this NOT OBVIOUS to certain rich white guys named after a strong smell).

Defunding the police is widely popular, but people who can't stop this one with means testing insist it isn't, even though reality undercuts them on a daily basis. (Oddly enough "male chauvinism" was NOT named after the minneapolis policeman on trial for the murder of George Floyd. You'd think, but no. Just a coincidence apparently.) The ex-british colonies continue to create the majority of their own problems. Georgia voter suppression is just one symptom of GOP hypocrisy, but then Jim Crow was always about plausible deniability. During the blizzard Texas oil and gas regulators were lying about renewable energy in realtime.

Boomers are a problem everywhere. Even Good Cop sucks at any issue Boomers care about, because they cower before Boomers intead of opposing them (hence running a 78 year old geezer to seem "adult" to 74 year old Boomers). Intellectual propertly law needs to die with them.

Christianity is now a wholly owned subsidiary of capitalist fascism, which keeps buying sock puppets to burn through established credibility: wall street journal, forbes, newsweek... now Rolling Stone has succumbed.

Of course capitalism always tries to do that with the output of creatives, owning and profiting off stuff it didn't create. Paul Simon just sold his catalogue, like the Beatles, and Michael Jackson did. The music industry is especially bad at this: Prince changed his name to a symbol and wrote "slave" on his face in public but ultimately admitted defeat Taylor Swift is re-recording all the songs she lost control of, Keisha lost in court against the producer she caimed raped her, Britney Spears has been her father's legal property for over a decade (at least Gary Coleman got away when he turned 18)... the classic Courtney Love Does the Math is a good intro to that sort of thing...)

But the music industry is by no means unique here. The Muppets belong to Disney, who fired Jim Henson's successor for trying to exert creative control. At least Neil Gaiman could walk away from the producer who wanted to insert a Giant Mechanical Spider into every movie he touched. As Neil explained in that interview:

And the other thing is Hollywood executives really love the smell of their own urine and what they really like doing is urinating on things. And then going, "Hmm, now this smells really good" and being really puzzled when the rest of the world goes "No, actually it smells like pee." A gorgeous example of that, Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who wrote "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Shrek" and some lovely movies, were brought in by Jon Peters to write the first draft of the Sandman movie. He hadn't actually read any "Sandman" because he had people to do that kind of stuff for him, but he had figured out that what the movie needed to be successful was a giant mechanical spider. He wanted a giant mechanical spider because that would make any film a hit. Elliot and Rossio, who had read "Sandman," who went in with their pitch and looking forward to it and going, "But there's no room for a giant mechanical spider."

I was thrilled on going to see "Wild Wild West" to see that he had finally put this giant mechanical spider that I'd been hearing about from Elliot and Rossio for five years into a film with no ideas of any kind. I really think a lot of it is [executives] are wedded to their giant mechanical spiders and they're also convinced they know best, because obviously they're Hollywood executives.

Of course corporate "creativity" is generally laughably obvious, such as Amazon's anti-union astroturf campaign.

Oh look, another thing Trump did as part of his official duties as presi