• Went out to the shops this afternoon to pick up a few things that didn't come with my grocery delivery, such as carrot cake, brioche, and Easter eggs.
  
  If you think that brioche is an extravagance and not an essential item in a time of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, well, when it comes to gluten-free bread my choices come down to brioche which is indistinguishable from the real thing and what appears to be compressed distressed recycled leftover hamster bedding.
  
  So yes, brioche matters.
  
  Anyway, things seem to be returning slowly to normal.  No toilet paper that I could see, but that did come with my delivery so no problems there.  Hand wipes, tissues, paper towels, all back in stock. 
  
  No issues with food at all except that I couldn't find the gluten-free lamingtons.  My favourite ice cream was on sale half price, so I picked up some of that.
  
  There is a shortage of soap of all kinds.  What are you people doing, eating it?  I mean, my shower wash smells like vanilla custard so I understand the temptation, but don't.
  
  Only seven new cases of WBSDP reported here in NSW yesterday, but it's the Easter long weekend and testing rates are down.  Still, it looks like locking everybody up in tiny little glass boxes and dousing them with bleach did the trick.
  
  
  
• Speaking of toilet paper, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast covered the ongoing shortage in their latest episode.  It's not just panic buying and hoarding that's causing the problem; there is a genuine shortage.
  
  That's because there are two entirely different toilet paper supply chains - consumer and commercial.  Different products made to different standards from different raw materials and shipped by different distributors.  And right now nobody is using the commercial stuff, so it's just sitting on the loading dock while the consumer-focused companies scramble to keep up.
  
  That will change, but it could take another month for the commercial production lines to completely switch over.  Meanwhile, poop less.
  
  
  
• Time machine landed in the wrong era?  Need a current map of Europe?  Got you covered.
  
  
  
  
  More here.  (DevianTart)
  
  Did you ever notice that the Sea of Marmara looks like an angry possum?
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Comet Lake S processors will deliver less performance than AMD's current lineup while costing more.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A winning combination.  Just not for Intel.
  
  
  
• Also, about those Intel TDP figures: The 65W 10-core  i9-10900F will draw 224W at full load unless it catches fire first.  (WCCFTech)
  
  224W is significantly more than 65W.
  
  The 16-core Ryzen 3950X is rated at 105W TDP but can peak at 146W.  But that's 40%, not 240%.
  
  
  
• This guy ownes 46 F/A-18 Hornets.  (The Drive)
  
  Bet he doesn't have much trouble with the local Home Owners Association.  At least, not twice.
  
  
  
• Don't update that MacBook!  (Tom's Guide)
  
  If you've already bricked your MacBook with Catalina, you may be able to recover by booting into recovery mode and running the first aid thingy.  I hope so, because all the Apple stores are shut and Louis Rossman is just one guy.
  
  
  
• Turbo Pascal 3 is smaller than the touch command on MacOS Lion.  (Programming in the Twenty-First Century)
  
  I'm happy to report that touch on MacOS whatever the hell version I'm running, let's call it Caracal - touch on MacOS Caracal has slimmed down and is now only 60% of the size of Turbo Pascal 3.
  
  The touch command sets the date on a file to the current time.  Turbo Pascal 3 is a complete IDE and compiler.
  
  
  
• Bootstrap is dropping support for Internet Explorer with version 5, due out this year.  (ZDNet)
  
  In fact, if the rollout is anything like Bootstrap 4, the main thing it will drop support for is all your existing code.
  
  
  
• No, 5G doesn't cause Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.  (MSN)
  
  If they'd actually call it by its real name rather than tiptoeing around it, maybe people would understand that it's a death plague caused by people in Wuhan eating bat soup.
  
  
  
• What part of "opt-in" is too complicated for you to understand, Mozilla?  (Mozilla)
  
  Oh look, there's a bullet point saying that if you opt out they will actually respect that.  I SHOULD BLOODY WELL THINK SO.
  
  
  
• Just how bad is the FISA debacle?  (Lawfare)
  
  Bad enough that even people who still claim that the Russia Collusion hoax wasn't politically motivated think it's bad.
  
  
  
• John Conway (mathematician and creator of the Game of Life - no, the other one) and Stirling Moss have passed away.
  
  
  
• It's true, a Google search for "can i feed my dinosaur ramen" returns no results.
  
  
  
  AnimeLab has this one tagged as Slice of Life.  Correct.

The Media Can Die in a Fire

Anime Music Video of the Day

Louis Rossman Saves a Macbook Video of the Day

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Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 13 2020 03:49 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 13 2020 07:49 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, April 14 2020 10:48 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2020 02:01 PM (Iwkd4)

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Tech News

• Terabytes of data are trucking about happily both at home and at work.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I need 10Gb Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have that for all the new servers at work, but the public internet connection is still 1Gb and is the bottleneck right now.
  
  But then, that's all we have on the old servers, so upgrading it on the other end wouldn't help a whole lot.
  
  
  
• Ooh, these things support snapshots per shared folder.  So if I have another accident like I did with Dropbox I can just click a button and restore it all.
  
  Having it per folder is great because some of them will have a lot of churn and others will be static, or just grow steadily.  Snapshots take up no extra room if all you're doing is adding files.  But if you do decide to delete files you'll find that you don't get any disk space back...
  
  
  
• Here's a USB 2.5GbE adaptor getting put through its paces.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Seems to work as advertised.  And the Synology units each have dual 1GbE ports with channel bonding.
  
  Only problem then is an extreme shortage of 2.5GbE switches at PixyLab.
  
  
  
• Another review of the Asus G14 and its Ryzen 9 4900HS.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's Ian Cutress at AnandTech, though, so it's worth reading if you're interested in either this laptop or the chip that powers it.
  
  
  
• Putting Linux to work on the Asus G14.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It, um, did not go terribly well.  The problem is the dual graphics (IGP and Nvidia) aren't properly supported and you end up with the battery life of dedicated graphics and the graphics acceleration of no graphics at all - 2FPS in DOTA2 at the menu.
  
  If you're looking for a Linux laptop, this is probably not the safest bet right now.
  
  
  
• IBM is theatening free COBOL training.  (Input)
  
  Offering.  Offering free COBOL training.  Yes, that's what I meant.
  
  
  
• China's Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A gets reviewed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a joint venture between Via and the Shanghai Municipal Government.  It's an 8 core 64-bit x86 CPU, built on a 16nm process.
  
  It has integrated graphics, but it gets absolutely creamed by a Core i5 7400, so the less said about that the better.
  
  With all eight cores going, it outruns an Athlon 220GE - a dual-core Ryzen APU - by about 8%, while using only 150% more power.
  
  On the other hand, the article presents a long list of benchmarks that the chip runs succesfully - which means that it works and is compatible with Intel and AMD, which is a signficant feat even if performance is basically meh.
  
  And it probably gets more FPS than an Asus Zephyrus G14 runing DOTA2 on Ubuntu 20.04.
  
  
  

• Those Synology units that landed rather abruptly on my doorstep a week ago are now up and running.  16TB of effective RAID-5 or 6 storage each, updated all the way to DSM 6.2.2.  
  
  Two of the arrays had failed drives and ended up in RAID-5, but I have a couple of spares and may fix that before I start actually using them.
  
  They're not a particularly powerful model - dual core Atom CPUs and 1GB RAM - but for file storage that will mostly be accessed over WiFi that's not a problem.
  
  Only remaining problem is that it will take a week or so to copy all my data across.
  
  
  
• Here's something that might help there: 800 Gigabit Ethernet.  (AnandTech)
  
  That would cut it down from a week to about ten minutes, yes.  I'm not sure what an 800 Gb network card would plug into, though; that needs PCIe 6.0 levels of bandwidth.
  
  Interesting note in the article is that a 16-port 400GbE switch from Cisco costs around $11,000.  That's not a lot for that much bandwidth, really.  That's a core switch for hundreds of servers on 10GbE, which would collectively cost a large multiple of $11,000.
  
  
  
• Micron has introduced QLC flash into the place it least belongs: The datacenter.  Unless they haven't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Basically, these are targeted at high performance hard disks - the 10K and 15K RPM models that some people are still clinging to.  A drop-in replacement can deliver two orders of magnitude better random read performance.
  
  A random I/O workload that could run on a disk drive at all isn't enough to wear out a modern SSD, not even QLC, so this is probably safe.
  
  
  
• That seems to be about it.  All quiet on the Western Front.  And all the other fronts.
  
  
  

1 "I'm not sure what an 800 Gb network card would plug into, though; that needs PCIe 6.0 levels of bandwidth."
Epyc board(s) with a 5-slot bridge.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 11:14 PM (Iwkd4)

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• Got Threadripper servers #2 and #3 deployed today.  Working names are Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
  
  This weekend will be a clusterfest - LXD, GlusterFS, Percona XtraDB, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ.  Plus a new Ethereum node, PostgreSQL, GitLab, Traefik, and Minio.
  
  
  
• Also got a delivery slot before the toilet paper went out stock again.  It's for Sunday, which is sooner than I need, but I'll take it.  (Some other items went out of stock while I was clicking refresh, including the very nice gluten free brioche, but I'll live.)
  
  
  
• You are seeking a technological solution to a social problem.  (TechDirt)
• 
  Stop it.
  
  
  
• Yeah, great, private Facebook groups are noted for their strict HIPAA compliance.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Australia's NBN is looking at millimetre wavelengths for fixed wireless internet.  (ZDNet)
  
  This range - from around 25 to 30 GHz - is unattractive to for mobile phones but offers a lot of potential for things that don't move around quite so much.  If all the bandwidth is allocated for a given area, aggregate transfer speeds would exceed 100Gbps.  This makes it far superior to satellite for providing broadband internet to the home in semi-rural areas.
  
  
  
• Google has made Stadia free for the next two months.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This will delay Stadia's inevitable demise by at least a week.
  
  
  
• Windows file explorer is getting WSL integration.  (The Verge)
  
  Good.  When I need that I tend to create folders the Windows side recognises and then symlink them into the WSL environment.  That works seamlessly.  The other direction.... Not so much.

Tweet of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 01:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 10 2020 01:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 05:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, April 10 2020 09:03 AM (LMsTt)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 09 2020 01:37 PM (Iwkd4)

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Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 11 2020 06:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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• I downloaded Nim and installed it on WSL and compiled a trivial test application and...  It worked.  Completely painless.  Compiles in roughly a second, most of which is spent loading the compiler because WSL is kind of slow at initialising binaries.
  
  The compiled size for a trivial app that just reads some text from the user and responds is 90K.  75K stripped, 41K upxed.  (upxed binaries don't work on WSL1 though.)
  
  That's pretty acceptable; I'll rewrite my Crystal system monitoring agent in Nim and see how it goes with a simple real-world app (it needs, for example, HTTPS support).  On advantage I'm hoping to see from the C back-end is a smarter linker than Crystal has.
  
  The problem with using either one seriously at my day job is the state of the MongoDB drivers, since we have many terabytes of MongoDB databases we aren't about to migrate.
  
  Both come with MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers, and Elasticsearch is a REST API and therefore not a problem, but we need solid MongoDB support.
  
  Update: With the HTTPClient and SSL libraries pulled in - and working, since I had it actually download this page - the binary is 287K in full or 97K stripped and upxed.  That is entirely acceptable.  It's an order of magnitude smaller than the Crystal equivalent.
  
  Update Two: Wait, is that really a static binary? My usual test is to drop it on a horribly out-of-date Linux box and see if it still works, but I just turned off all of those.
  
  The documentation suggests that Nim builds static libraries by default, but that's awfully small if it's really pulled in OpenSSL.  I suspect that it might be "static except for OpenSSL" or some such nonsense.  But then, that's pretty much what Crystal does on Mac.
  
  
  
• Replace the innards of your Gamecube with a Ryzen 3200G-based Gamecube emulator.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because why not?
  
  
  
• So in what sense is OpenVMS open?  (Legacy OS)
  
  The final hobbyist licenses for OpenVMS will expire at the end of 2021.
  
  
  
• A look at the Xeon 5220R.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Wait, didn't we just do that one?  Oh, that was the 6226R?  Okay.
  
  This is a 24 core Xeon at a sharply reduced price compared to last year, as Intel struggles to find a way to compete with AMD.  And mostly fails, to be brutally honest.  It's beaten soundly by the 24 core Epyc 7402, and in many cases, by the 16 core Epyc 7302.
  
  Where the 6-series supports up to four sockets, the 5-series only supports the more common two.  Although the 6226R also only supports two sockets, so there's not a huge difference here.
  
  In short, it's a much more cost-effective chip from Intel if you're stuck with Intel.  If you're not stuck with Intel and don't need a ton of RAM per sever, there are faster better cheaper options.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 09 2020 01:05 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 09 2020 02:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 09 2020 03:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 09 2020 04:20 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 09 2020 09:36 AM (PiXy!)

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