Monday, June 11

Queen's Birthday long weekend edition. I got nothing. Not even fireworks, thanks to the NSW State Government. So here's a few random bits.
- E3 is here, but it looks like an off year; no hardware announcements, just an outbreak of sequelitis. Elder Scrolls LXXVI and such.
- I'm reminded by that Tyan Ryzen server motherboard that you can get Ryzen servers right now if you look around a bit. It's good value and I might be tempted if Europe weren't so preoccupied with packing the internet with explosives and lighting the fuse.
- Someone wants to build the C256 that Commodore designed in the 1980s but never released.
- Udoo is Kickstarting a Ryzen embedded development board. For those who need just a little more horsepower than the Raspberry Pi. (For example, those taking the sensible approach and emulating that C256.) It's less than 5" square, yet supports up to 32GB of RAM and four 4K displays. Oh, and it has an Arduino chip in one corner. Starts at $229 with two CPU cores and Vega 3 graphics, and $309 with four cores and Vega 8.
- Huawei have released the MediaPad M5. If you play 3D games on Android, it's a big advance over the M3, with twice the GPU performance. Otherwise it's basically the same device, except that the headphone socket has vanished. In a shrinking market for small tablets, though, it's worth a look.

- MongoDB 4.0-rc4 07 Jun 2018
- GitLab 10.8.4 07 Jun 2018
- Django 2.0.6 01 Jun 2018
- Python 3.7.0b5 31 May 2018
- Ruby 2.6.0-preview2 31 May 2018
- Redis 5.0-rc1 29 May 2018
- PostgreSQL 11 beta 1 24 May 2018
- Caddy 0.11 10 May 2018
- RabbitMQ 3.7.5 09 May 2018
- PyPy 6.0 26 Apr 2018
- MySQL 8.0.11 19 Apr 2018
- Rails 5.2.0 09 Apr 2018
- Crystal 0.24.2 09 Mar 2018
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:07 PM
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-j
Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 13 2018 10:39 AM (tgyIO)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 13 2018 02:36 PM (PiXy!)
Reading about Commodore 256 makes me wish the hand-me-down C-128 rig (With a 1541 disk drive from the C-64) had not been tossed. I still have games for it sitting around.
It also reminds me of how much I wanted to play Reach for the Stars on the C-64 again, because the PC version was merely a crippled version of Roger Fleming's and Ian Trout's masterpiece.
Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, June 13 2018 03:15 PM (btoEr)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 13 2018 11:19 PM (PiXy!)
Of course, I was using it as a scripting language, not deploying a web site with multiple levels of caching to hide the scaling issues in Rails. If Crystal leaves out cruft like poorly-defined !-methods and attracts a community that builds fully-functional, fully-documented libraries, it might be interesting in about five years.
Not wild about the "shards" implementation, though; it's nice to specify dependencies cleanly, but I really don't want to deploy something that insists on pulling them from the internet for each install, rather than a local repo. Been there, done that, hated the cleanup. It looks like they just made it possible to work around this a week ago, adding a global cache and an option to do shallow clones rather than full mirrors of each dependency. So, yeah, five years. :-)
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, June 14 2018 01:59 AM (tgyIO)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 14 2018 09:45 AM (PiXy!)
I remember a mailing list or USENET post (Of another topic entirely.) where the author had described how he had upped his Commodore rig (Not sure if it was a C-64 or 128 - I think I still have the post but I need to dig up my old email program for it, which is just slightly more accessible than trying to find my Office 2010 install discs - except I need the latter.) to serve as a text-based browser and running at a surprising clock speed.
Now after reading about the 65C816, I think I know how they did it. Pretty impressive for a machine from the 80s.
Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, June 16 2018 10:30 AM (btoEr)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 16 2018 12:18 PM (PiXy!)
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