Tuesday, March 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 March 2021

Turn Of The Tide Edition

Tech News

  • That crazy Aussie sheila has returned.




  • There are currently zero 3060Ti, 3070, 3080, or even 3090 cards available in Australia, as far as I can tell.  Oh, wait, there's a couple of 3090s now.  And one 3060 non-Ti for a thousand bucks.  Click the In Stock filter at the top to watch everything disappear.

    There are, however, 6700XTs and 6900XTs in stock.  Marked up around 50%, but in stock.

    There is a supply of prebuilt systems with most cards from both Nvidia and AMD.  Just not the cards by themselves.


  • Is the ship still stuck?  (IsTheShipStillStuck.com)

    No.

    What a relief.


  • Looks like we have a checksum error in one block in one index on one table in a 6TB database.  This reveals itself by crashing MongoDB in the replicas.

    Turns out I can delete that table.  We don't need all the history; it's been kept in case we something went wrong and we needed to reprocess it.  If it's causing problems, it can simply be yeeted.  I don't need to fix it.

    Update: MongoDB bug?  Found another affected database.  ZFS has logged no errors.  I've updated to the latest point release of 4.2 for now; I'll upgrade to 4.4 later.

    Update 2: Nasty bad table deleted.  12TB of archived data vanished into the ether never to bother me at 2AM again. 

    That's the raw size of the records; the database and filesystem are both compressed so a database containing a table containing 12TB of data plus many other tables plus indexes is less than half that size in total.

    The fun part was getting the cluster working long enough to delete the table that was breaking the cluster in the first place; otherwise I'd have had to revert to a single node and then configure the cluster again from the beginning.


  • One open source developer politely informed another open source developer that his code was released using an incompatible license, being released under the MIT license when it included code licensed under GPL.

    The second open source developer kindly thanked the first, removed the mis-licensed version of his code from GitHub, and re-released it under GPL.

    And broke 577,148 projects.  (The Register)

    Someone is having a worse day than me.  Lots of someones, probably.

    The code that caused all this?  A database of common MIMEtypes.  It may not even be protected by copyright, let alone GPL restrictions.


  • Feeling left out, Node.js discovered a vulnerability in....  That's ridiculous.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Turns out the netmask package, downloaded 238 million times and used by 278,000 other projects, does the right thing and everyone else is insane.

    If you point your browser at 127.0.0.1, that's localhost.  If you point it at 0127.0.0.1, that's something completely different - it's interpreted as octal.  What idiot thought that was a good...  Oh.  The IETF.  


  • PHP got compromised.  (Phoronix)

    Not only did their Git server get hacked over the weekend, the hackers actually introduced two vulnerabilities into the code.

    The PHP Project immediately shut down their server and has redeployed to GitHub.


  • I have cows, sheeps, one chicken, no pigs (he escaped, probably off to watch the Haachama stream), a cat, and every possible dye colour except brown.

    I watched a stream where Risu spent about 90 minutes wandering about the Holoserver looking for brown wool for her Korone doll.  Turns out they didn't have any at the time, since the only way to make brown dye is to find a jungle biome and retrieve cocoa pods.  Brown sheep also occur naturally, but they're the rarest colour.

    The only way to create green dye - and then lime and cyan - is to find a desert biome and harvest a cactus, but once you find a desert biome locating a cactus takes about three seconds.  Finding cocoa pods in a jungle is a little harder.

    You only need two pods, though.  Even one would do.  Once you have the pod, you dye a sheep, turning it brown.  Since brown dye doesn't mix with any other colour, 50% of that sheep's offspring with any other sheep will also be brown.  If you breed a red sheep with a yellow sheep, by contrast, you can get red, yellow, or orange sheeplets.


Tunnel Boring Video of the Day


I was wondering if this was even possible.  Turns out yes, but it's just a wee bit complicated.


Disclaimer: Maybe two corrupt indexes.  Why only on the replica though?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:29 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 749 words, total size 6 kb.

1 Treating numbers with leading zeroes as octal is normal in CS.  It's the same as the 0x and 0b prefixes.
It's surprising, certainly, if you're not old enough to know about it but you'd break all sorts of things, probably right down to C, if you stopped doing it.  Don't forget Unix file permissions are written in octal.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 30 2021 12:56 AM (eqaFC)

2 "Brown sheep also occur naturally, but they're the rarest colour."
Second-rarest, probably.  Sometimes you'll find pink ones naturally.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 30 2021 12:57 AM (eqaFC)

3 I'm sure 0-prefix octal made sense in 1973, but this isn't the first time someone's had an unpleasant surprise.  The same bug was found in curl not too long ago.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:07 AM (PiXy!)

4 Actually, no, I don't think it ever made sense.  0x, sure, because that's not a number.  0b, same.  0 by itself?  Terrible idea.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:08 AM (PiXy!)

5 The octal interpretation is really bad for IP addresses, because it's common to zero-pad them to the same length for sorting and comparison. I've seen a lot of code that canonicalizes addresses like 192.168.64.17 to 192.168.064.017; a surprise base-conversion would be really unpleasant.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:30 AM (ZlYZd)

6 I'm pretty used to the octal convention, but it's a pile of bad idea outside of some very specific contexts.  Even in unix file modes it's just a shorthand that shouldn't be allowed to leak out into the rest of the world.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:51 AM (LADmw)

7 I should've said--I agree the use of octal is not really good (and it trips people up all sorts of places.  IIRC Javascript will silently treat a number with a leading zero as octal) but the convention has been around so long it would probably take a ridiculously-large effort to root it out from everywhere.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 30 2021 02:16 AM (eqaFC)

8 Yeah, this is one of those unexpected but officially specified behaviours that are basically impossible to fix.  You can't even get people to agree on what a fix would be.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 30 2021 11:20 AM (PiXy!)

9 Yeah, it's like the tabs-in-Makefiles thing.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 30 2021 12:44 PM (eqaFC)

10 Once you have the pod, you dye a sheep, turning it brown.  Since brown dye doesn't mix with any other colour, 50% of that sheep's offspring with any other sheep will also be brown.
Dyes that seep into your DNA. Seems safe.

Posted by: mikeski at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:30 PM (xPMPM)

11 Rick C - "I can't change it now, I have a dozen people using it!"

mikeski - Recombinant sheep.  What could possibly go wrong?  I mean, all animals in Minecraft are hermaphroditic anyway, and chickens are parthenogenetic.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:56 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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