Re: [GTALUG] Freedom and Graphene

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 18:41, Evan Leibovitch via talk 
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> It's 2020 and a long time since Shaw bought Wind Mobile and renamed it to
> Freedom. So I wonder if it's worth another look. Prices are as always
> aggressive but questions remain about speed and coverage.
>
> The reason I want a new phone plan is because I'm experimenting with a new
> phone on which I've just installed GrapheneOS; more than just another
> Android ROM, it's touted as being one of the most privacy-focused phones
> one can have. Google-free, of course, beyond what's in AOSP, and two
> different app stores to replace Google Play.
>
> Does anyone here have experience with either Freedom Mobile or GrapheneOS?
> Any answers are much appreciated. If there's interest I'll be happy to talk
> about my experiences with GrapheneOS at a future GTALUG meeting.
>

I have been on Wind/Freedom for a good number of years now; I had made an
abortive attempt quite a while back, and initially gave up, as I grabbed a
SIM card, and did a walkaround at my office, only to discover that the
instant I walked in the front door of the office building, all reception
disappeared.  At that point, apparently the nearby towers were in such a
location that reception was entirely blocked within the building.

A couple of years later, I retried with better success (they had been busy
adding more and better cellular towers in the interim), and have been
pleased enough with them since.  There's sections of the 401 between cities
where one must piggyback onto other carriers, but that's been livable for
my purposes.  Dodgy reception used to be a thing; seems to have improved.

I had never heard of GrapheneOS; interesting that it *only* runs on
recent-ish Google Pixel phones.  As the battery on my OP5 starts to age, I
suspect I'll be looking at a Pixel in the not too distant future, certainly
of interest to hear what's up with alternative phone "firmware" these days,
particularly as it's difficult for them to keep up with hardware
evolution.  CM and LineageOS had history of supporting lots of devices;
Lineage has been hurting in that regard 
They used to support a wide variety of Samsung, but no models later than
about 2017 have been supported, no LG past about 2016, and such.  If
there's reason to expect better from GrapheneOS, that would sure be nice.
(That tells you some of the kinds of questions I'd hope might get answered
;-) )
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[GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] AGM Board Vote Notes

[Christopher Browne via talk]

** AGM Board Vote Notes
   In view of our "remote operation," the usual voting processes that
   take place in person cannot function, hence the following
   procedures.

*** Voting via email
   The voting process will be done via email, starting on October 13th
   at 9:30pm EDT, and completing October 29th, 9:30pm EDT.

   In view of there having been a near absent attendance record, one
   of the board members has been released, therefore opening a seat
   for a one year term.  Hence, there will be 3 board seats open, two
   for two year terms, and one for a one year term.

   Candidates will be asked to express their preference between the 1
   and 2 year terms, so we will have two slates of candidates for the
   respective terms.

   Ballots will be sent to v...@gtlug.org, and should consist of the
   following:
   - 2 Year Board Term :: Candidate 1
   - 2 Year Board Term :: Candidate 2
   - 1 Year Board Term :: Candidate 3

   As mentioned, votes should be submitted by GTALUG members via email
   to v...@gtalug.org.

*** Count Procedure
   Votes sent to the GTALUG v...@gtalug.org address will be forwarded
   to the Returning Officer, and the official count will take place
   October 29th after 9:30pm EDT.

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Re: [GTALUG] Notes for September meeting are up

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 at 14:15, Gordon Chillcott via talk 
wrote:

> I see you didn't talk about the election procedure | process | schedule |
> Rules of Procedure | whatever that we discussed.Also missing in here is
> the mention of the Third Seat.
>
> I'm wondering how much of this you want to spring on them later?
>
Yeah, I need to do some writing on that before releasing it.

I'll aim at having a draft to the ops group Friday some time.
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[GTALUG] Notes for September meeting are up

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Busyness kept me from posting this sooner :-(

https://linuxdatabases.info/blog/?p=260
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[GTALUG] Meeting should be on, but not yet :-(

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Due to confusion, our Jitsi server isn't up right now, and our Usual
Suspects for Zoom addresses haven't responded yet...

However, hopefully the following zoom address
https://zoom.us/j/6476576575 may function enough to get us going...
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[GTALUG] Seeding of some September discussion ideas

[Christopher Browne via talk]

The September "etherpad" has been seeded with things that I saw this month
that struck me as interesting...
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/gtalug-september

Please, by all means, add more
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[GTALUG] Dice Keys

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Here's a cool thing I saw recently...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/08/dicekeys.html

The intention of this parallels the various Bitcoin "Solid Steel Passphrase
Wallet" items that were popular a year or so ago
(See https://www.toughgadget.com/bitcoin-crypto-metal-recovery-seed-wallets/,
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/wallets/steel/ )

It's a case for a set of 25 dice that looks like a Boggle game set; it will
generate and "record" what ought to be a Sooper Seekrut key as would be
used for things like:
 - master key for password manager
 - U2F key for 2 Factor Authentication
 - Secret key for cryptocurrency wallet

By being a set of dice with a nice plastic box to hold them securely, this
is not vulnerable to various threats common to electronic devices:
 - EMP (for those highly worried about nuclear devices)
 - Water damage

Of course, if all your disk drives get toasted, there might not be any data
left to decrypt or systems to connect to.  And plastic will melt away or
burn when exposed to fire...

But it's pretty cool, I'm tempted to grab a set.

There's a web app: https://dicekeys.app/

It appears that this application, embedded in a single JavaScript file,
runs locally, inside your browser, so that usual criticisms about it being
a giant security vulnerability of sharing your key with their web site
seems like it mightn't apply.  How to confirm in an authoritative way that
nothing is *actually* shared seems like the fun security question.
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[GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG Membership In These COVID-19 Times

[Christopher Browne via talk]

In most years, membership has been handled via comparatively informal
in-person processes, and those that wish to support GTALUG via
membership would (broadly) follow the following steps:

- Grab a membership form (that Chris passed out)
- Try to pass Chris a $20 bill, whereupon Chris would say "take it
  back, and give it to me once you fill in the form"
- Fill in the form, and hand it to Chris along with payment
- Chris returns a few minutes later with a membership card

As GTALUG is meeting virtually, these days, this process cannot occur
as described.

For those wishing to support GTALUG via membership, two routes are
suggested:

 - The Cheque is In The Mail :: Send a payment via Canada Post.
 - Interac eTransfer :: Send funds from your bank to ours

To ensure that membership has been addressed for voting at the 2020
AGM on October 13th, it is imperative to handle this earlier than
that, as mail can take several days for delivery.  Alas, either way,
this imposes more bureaucracy and some more cost than we have been
accustomed to.

 - Payment via check using Canada Post :: In this case, please send a
  cheque, made out to "GTALUG", in the amount of $20, along with
  the identification information indicated below, and please send
  to the following address:

   GTALUG
   914-10 Carabob Court
   Toronto, ON M1T 3N5

 - Interac eTransfer :: In this case, three pieces of information are
  critical, and must be shared both with your bank as well as with
  GTALUG.
   - Recipient :: The recipient email address is members...@gtalug.org
   - Security Question :: The content of this is not too important;
"Random Value" or "Sooper Sekrut Data" are fine values.
   - Security Answer :: It is suggested that a random value be used.
For instance, 215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee is a value I
got from passing 1K of data from /dev/random through md5sum,
and that is a decent mechanism to get a relatively unguessable
password.  (Of course, since many people have seen that
specific value, 215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee, it would not
be a good choice.)  This security answer also needs to be
emailed to the members...@gtalug.org address in order for us
to receive the payment.
 - Common information :: Whichever of the above mechanisms is used for
  payment, please email the following membership information to
  members...@gtalug.org.  Note that by longstanding policy, we do
  not pass your information on to outside organizations.
  - Name :: Your preferred name
  - Email :: Your preferred email address (if using Interac
 eTransfer, it's best to use the same address, so we
 know which email address to associate each security
 answer with)
  - Address :: If you are comfortable providing such
  - Security Answer :: If eTransfer is used, we need the Security
   Answer in order to actually receive funds

*** Generating a random value, the Linux way
Here is a script that repeatedly takes 1K of random data from
/dev/random, and turns it into an md5 checksum to ensure that the
value is human readable and not too long.
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=2 status=none |
md5sum; done
215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee  -
4f8f0e3a2944c857ebc3a7a776659134  -
1a52010a29ef3b2446d532ba389f65cb  -
84e6b072e2661fc88b3a7b1ed1ce5873  -
ef3f10a8b634760691e2ae53a0952707  -
#+END_EXAMPLE
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[GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] AGM and Call for Candidates

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Hear ye!  Hear ye!  This is a Call for Candidates for the GTALUG
Board.

October 13th is GTALUG's Annual General Meeting, our tiny piece of
"political pageantry."

There are two seats opening, for 2 year terms (2020-2022).

Please consider running for the board, and keep in mind the following.

There are two formal qualifications that candidates need to satisfy:
 - Must be a GTALUG member in good standing
 - Must not have any undischarged bankruptcy

It is also important to be able to be available most months for
Board/Operations meetings where we plan GTALUG meetings and
activities.  These meetings normally take place on the Monday evening
following the regular Tuesday meeting.  These days, this takes place
on-line, using Jitsi.

This is not an extraordinarily huge burden, but it does mean that
there are 48 meetings (counting both "second Tuesday" and "the
following Monday") where we hope to see you, and we hope to see you
most of the time.

Board members are involved in and support the following activities.
 - Finding speakers for our monthly presentations
 - Operating our internet infrastructure (website and mailing lists)
 - Organizing and running our annual Linux in the Park picnic (in less
   pandemic-stricken times)
 - Our involvement as a member organization of ICANN

If you are interested, we'd appreciate it very much if you can submit
your intention to run to the email address: board at gtalug.org

The incumbents whose previous terms are expiring are:
- Chris Browne
- Alex Volkov

Potential Candidates are welcome to announce their intention all the
way up to the day of the AGM itself.
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[GTALUG] Blockchain, the solution to nothing

[Christopher Browne via talk]

https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/86714927310-8f431cae

I found it particularly hilarious when the writer of the article asked the
maker of the childrens' aid app if he had noticed that the app didn't
actually need blockchain at all.

"That's right."

But the punch line was even better...

Isn't it strange that you won all these awards despite not really using
blockchain?

"We keep trying to tell people, but it doesn’t seem to stick. You’re
calling me about it again now … ”
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Re: [GTALUG] Mozilla XUL is dead

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2020 at 12:10, Russell Reiter  wrote:

> Not specifically XUL related but I find this quick read interesting. It
> seems that API's used for managing IoT endpoints are coming under ever
> increasing threat of attack from botnets during the pandemic and probably
> from now on.
>
>
> https://www.cequence.ai/blog/tales-from-the-front-lines-attackers-on-lockdown-focus-on-apis/
>
>

Not XUL-related, but I can see why you'd go there.

Yeah, if internal application APIs can cross network boundaries, then
they'll make nice targets for security attacks.

And the "XUL-like" aspect is that it's easy for these APIs to emerge, get
used in applications, head out onto the InterWebz, and then moulder away,
not being upgraded based on modern security exploits (e.g. - if there's any
crypto in XUL, it's easily plausible for its design to be circa 1997, when
XUL came about, and certainly wouldn't have fixes for exploits post-2017,
when it started getting deprecated).

I suppose that's much the same problem as with Flash.  Much hated, but much
used, and people kept needing to run it even well after it got deprecated.

The more that APIs are auto-generated, such that the programmers might not
even be aware that anything *is* getting generated, yeah, I see that making
for good targets for those looking for vulnerabilities.
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[GTALUG] Mozilla XUL is dead

[Christopher Browne via talk]

https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/

Pretty interesting article on how Firefox has been evolving over the last
15-ish years.

I remember when Wrox Press asked me if I knew of anyone that knew about
XUL, because their "hype wagon" thought that XUL was the next big thing,
and they wanted a book on that.  And it was, though after a fashion much
smaller than I expect Wrox was imagining.

XUL and XPCOM (which is kinda like COM, which was Microsoft's fork of DCE's
DCOM, which was an extendible API system kinda like CORBA...) are now being
actively deprecated.  A pain in the neck to anyone that had devoted a lot
of resources to XUL, but probably not something others care about terribly
much.

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Re: [GTALUG] MathML Support on the Internet

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2020 at 17:15, Howard Gibson via talk 
wrote:

>I brought this up at our last meeting and we discussed it.
>
>Officially, you can insert equations into your website using MathML.
> Unfortunately, Google Chrome does not support this, so it does not work.  I
> uploaded my MathML page to my website, and you can try it out.
>
>http://rev/~howard/hgibson2/MathML.html
>

A URL that seems to work better for those of us outside your network ;-) is
this one:
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson/MathML.html

I'll note that the browsers I had handy were Firefox and Chrome; I concur
with your comments on the handling of the quadratic equation.

Those results are not extraordinarily surprising.  The one I'd wonder about
is Safari; I would assume it doesn't support it.

There is an interesting list of browser support for MathML.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML

Apparently, at one time Opera *did* support it.  The set of other browsers
that do have support are largely Mozilla derivatives.  (e.g. - ones like
Camino, Galeon, Netscape (which was where Mozilla came from)).

The one other interesting one (in being "not like the others") is Amaya.
https://www.w3.org/Amaya/I'm quite surprised that they had a release as
recently as 2012; I hadn't seen that one in YEARS!!! :-)
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[GTALUG] Drafty Etherpad for August meeting

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I have seeded it with a bunch of things I saw over the last month that
seemed interesting.

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/gtalug-august

- There have been some "asks" about what to consider using as Keybase got
bought out
  - Keybase did a bunch of things, so there's no one straightforward answer
to that

- There's a guy at U(T) that blogs about sysadmin matters, and so I tossed
in some leading questions

- It's August.  There's yet another reimplementation of grep :-), this time
in C++

- There have been ongoing conversations about building Pi desktops.  That
seems like an interesting thing to collect some information on.

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[GTALUG] SPI holding 2020 board election

[Christopher Browne via talk]

SPI are the parent organization that supports Debian, amongst other
projects.

http://spi-inc.org/corporate/votes/2020-board-election/
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[GTALUG] Interesting CI tool: Laminar

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I have been doing some amount of Continuous Integration work lately; that's
certainly one of the popular things these days.

It has been changing; once upon a time, our folks at work adopted
QuickBuild, which still periodically helps us to run out of disk space ;-)
  More recently, Jenkins and and Travis CI grew popular particularly in
Linux-based environments.  The latest and greatest is that GitHub and
GitLab have "CI" offerings allowing you to write voluminous amounts of YAML
that tend to deploy Docker and/or Kubernetes components to set up test
environments.

Then came today's Link of Interest...   (Sourced from Leah Kirchen's blog;
see https://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/2020-07-12 )

https://laminar.ohwg.net/docs.html

Laminar tries to do CI somewhat simpler, and in more of a "Unix flavour",
rather than filling up on XML and YAML remappings of stuff.  Unlike a lot
of these CI tools, it tries NOT to keep infinite gobs of artifacts around,
which probably makes it less popular with disk manufacturers ;-)
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Re: [GTALUG] Bash does-directory-exist question

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Fri, 10 Jul 2020 at 09:39, Giles Orr via talk  wrote:

> The worst case I've seen is 'git', and this is what's brought me back
> to this puzzle. If you're in a directory and you 'git rm' the last
> file in the directory, 'git' will helpfully delete the directory as
> well.  Never mind that you're still in the directory, and are now in
> the very confusing position of being in a non-existent directory.
>

Huh.  I just experienced this situation for (as far as I can tell) the
very first time about 1/2h ago.  I was in a directory, did a merge
that got rid of the only file in $PWD, and found myself in that
somewhat odd place.

I wasn't overly confused at it; I realized that a broadly reasonable
thing was happening.   But yeah, it was strange.

I was in zsh rather than bash; that made little difference in the
matter.  I had a strange looking prompt, but all resolved fine.
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[GTALUG] OpenWRT Upgrade

[Christopher Browne via talk]

There is a new version of OpenWRT, version 19.07; apparently this was
released almost 2 months ago.

If you're running OpenWRT on your router, the new version has security
fixes and such, so it's worth considering an upgrade.

https://openwrt.org/releases/19.07/notes-19.07.3

I did so; it led to about a 2 minute Internet outage since my OpenWRT
router manages my DSL connection.  It came back fine, I have seen very few
visible changes.
When I logged in, and looked at my wireless networks, it indicated a need
to make a change or two to configuration, which all seemed to work fine.
I added an AC wireless network, which I think is the new, keen thing, which
probably I didn't have in use before?

Apparently it now supports WPA3, that'll need more configuration to
activate, and I'm not sure I care to do so.  (That's perhaps a good
question for next Q?)
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[GTALUG] More conferences online

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Rust has been of interest to some; there are a number of upcoming
conferences, pretty well all being operated online.  Some free, some
definitely not.
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/06/10/event-lineup-update.html

There are fewer conferences evident for the Go language community; what's
upcoming seems to be in way further flung locations...
https://confs.tech/golang

PyCon 2020 was back in April; I'm not sure how much of the material has
been published as video streams and such...
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[GTALUG] EtherPad for June Meeting "Cooked"

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I did a bit of editing to turn the shared Etherpad into notes much like
last month...
https://linuxdatabases.info/blog/?p=240

Thanks again for all that came to the meeting; I personally found that
Jitsi sounded better than any of the other videoconferencing systems I have
been using lately.  It would probably be a good idea to get more feedback
on that to help guide choices for upcoming meetings.
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Re: [GTALUG] JSON Standard for SQL Thoughts

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 at 17:23, Nicholas Krause via talk 
wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I'm aware a few people here keep up more with certain database trends
> then me including Chris Browne. I'm aware of the newest standard of
> SQL supporting JSON.  Does anyone have any thoughts on this or how
> it may affect things going forward in the database world.
>
> Postresql supported operators before but seems their moving to the
> current SQL standard implementation, last I checked.


The PostgreSQL JSON types had been getting some pretty positive
attention, and with what got drawn into JSONB around the 9.5 days
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/functions-json.html
made it pretty attractive in ways that XML never got to.

JSONB was interesting in that it compresses material and provides
indexing inside the JSON document, so you can have functional
indexes on parts of the content, as well as GIN indexes

Sensible use of it shouldn't make all the usual relational bits go
away; tis best to define a table that has JSON with some mix
of JSON and other stuff.

ntdb=# create table our_users( user_id serial primary key);
CREATE TABLE
ntdb=#
ntdb=# create table message_encoded_json (
ntdb(#   id serial primary key,
ntdb(#   user_id integer not null references our_users(user_id) on delete
restrict,
ntdb(#   created_on timestamptz default now(),
ntdb(#   json_blob jsonb
ntdb(# );
CREATE TABLE
ntdb=# create index msg_gin on message_encoded_json using gin (json_blob
jsonb_ops);
CREATE INDEX
ntdb=# create index msg_gin2 on message_encoded_json using gin (json_blob
jsonb_path_ops);
CREATE INDEX

I'm not at all sure which of those indexes are preferable; that hasn't made
it into my
knowledge.

The above is the sort of pattern that makes sense; if there's a wild bundle
of stuff that
might go into a table of billing transactions, you'd still have ordinary
traditional attributes
like a transaction ID, transaction types, and dates in the lifecycle that
are pretty
universal.

I think I was in one of Oleg Bartunov's talks on their own "jsonpath" query
language,
possibly this one https://www.pgcon.org/2019/schedule/events/1274.en.html

The query system for JSON bits seemed pretty brain-melty; remembering what
little sets of characters going together searched for whatever seemed
painfully
similar to, oh, say, APL.

https://github.com/obartunov/sqljsondoc/blob/master/README.jsonpath.md
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[GTALUG] BSDCan 2020 this week

[Christopher Browne via talk]

https://www.bsdcan.org/2020/

The BSD folk are holding their annual conference that is normally in Ottawa
this week via video conferencing.

Talks are on Friday and Saturday, tutorials on Wednesday and Thursday.

Some of the sessions are mighty specific to particular flavours of BSD, but
there is doubtless some material that will be of interest to us.  Some
highlights include...

- There's a session on "homelabs" which is about the concept of building a
stack of servers at home for running experiments.  A lot of the hardware
issues will be pretty platform independent.

- Warner Losh is doing a piece on the History of Unix, which is likely
quite interesting.

- Toronto local Andrew Cagney is doing a talk on Libreswan which I am
pretty sure has some developers on this list :-)

And we have had well-received talks from Jim Mercer at GTALUG where he
explained merits of some of the differing development practices on FreeBSD;
there are definitely useful things to be learned from the BSD folk.
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Re: [GTALUG] Continuing Printer Woes

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, 1 Jun 2020 at 09:26, Peter King via talk  wrote:

> Sad days when people who voluntarily use Linux and are tech-savvy just
> give up on printing -- printing! -- because it isn't worth the effort.
> There shouldn't *be* any effort by now; it's 2020, for goodness sakes.
>

I guess I'm surprised a bit by this; my experiences have some parallels
and non-parallels...

Once upon a time, I did really scary printer hacking, had a project where
I built a component that would put bitmaps of peoples' signatures into
documents in a print queue so that printed reports would have the
Lovely Signatures.  There was a step weirder; one of the print queues
went to a fax machine, as the task was sending price sheets out to
customers (with the Lovely Signature at the bottom).  That was, like
circa 1992.

At that time, interoperability with printers and Linux was very much
fraught with troubles.  Those were the days of WinModems and
WinPrinters where Microsoft was trying to capture market by
making sure that lots of devices would ONLY talk to Windows(tm)

Then, some time in the 20-oughts, (after 2000), I encountered CUPS
and had the "breath of fresh air" of it being pretty much dead easy to
configure printer usage on Linux.  Each time I have gotten a new PC
at work has been a point in time where I configured CUPS to talk to
a couple of our printers.

And my reaction, of late, has been, "It Just Works(tm)"   After the
old scar tissue from the '90s, it has been just totally easy.   I kinda
suspect I have had things Dialed To Easy, in view that what I'm
inevitably connecting to are networked printers that were to a degree
selected to be simple for our varied platform staff (a few Windows,
quite a lot of MacOS, and quite a lot of Linux) to connect to, so
that I'm not treading any ground that's new to anyone local.

But I had gotten myself accustomed to the impression that
"with CUPS, It Just Works(tm)", so colour me surprised.

Has Microsoft pushed back to try to get WinPrinters back to be a
thing?  I'm curious as to what may have worsened in the last few
years.
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[GTALUG] Somewhat edited copy of EtherPad

[Christopher Browne via talk]

https://linuxdatabases.info/blog/?p=233

I turned the EtherPad of notes from last night's meeting into OrgMode, and
then that into HTML, and just published it on my blog.  That may be a more
readable form, perhaps...

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Re: [GTALUG] Actual ttyS0 MIA

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 17:46, Scott Allen via talk  wrote:

> On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 17:30, Karen Lewellen via talk 
> wrote:
> > for example if the program would talk to a serial device on com 4, how
> > would you  achieve the same  goal  via a USB to serial adapter?
>
> Under Linux, serial ports are named as "files" under the /dev
> directory, usually starting with tty. Real serial ports are usually
> name ttySx (with x being a number. USB serial ports are usually named
> ttyUSBx, or sometimes ttyACMx if it identifies as a modem type device.
>
> However, there are ways to give a device any name you like based on
> its model, manufacturer, serial number or other identifying parameters
> that the device provides.
>

This is something where Once Upon a Time, things were very different.

These days, device names are generated dynamically in /dev when a
device comes online.

Once Upon a Time, if you added a serial port, there would not be a
device in /dev until you ran /bin/mknod with suitable arguments to put
it there.  I recall having to do so back when I did an upgrade to add a
fast UART (14550 or 16550 I think); the new serial port did not appear
automatically like it would today.

Here is a wikipedia page with some of the relevant history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_file#Naming_conventions

My mention of /bin/mknod dates back to the days before Linux 2.3, when
dinosaurs roamed the earth :-)

In 2.3.6, a first edition of dynamic device naming appeared, loosely based
on Solaris conventions (so my memory tells me).  That was when the
fighting began, in many ways not unlike the fights surrounding systemd,
and for some of the same reasons.

The old-timers knew that they knew better what they wanted their devices
names to be than some newfangled mechanism written by some arrogant
upstart.  That's where the fighting occurs.  (With systemd and with the
Gooch devfs implementation from around the year 2000.)

Of course, there are also reasonable arguments as to why the operating
system should be managing more of this for us.  They actually are common
reasons: we WANT some automation of managing devices because, with
modern buses like USB, and network devices, we now plug in new devices
frequently, and would like them to just work.

devfs was a service for handling the automatic attachment of devices to
file nodes in /dev

systemd is at least partly about having policies for attaching devices to
software services so that USB drives are accessible to users once plugged in
and so network services appear at appropriate times too.

The notion of using /bin/mknod to manually manage where devices go seems
very quaint in 2020.  In 2001, that was very much a present fight between
people with varying positions on the matter.

It's an interesting, albeit somewhat off-topic question, how FreeDOS handles
this.  I don't think FreeDOS went through the "devfs" evolutionary process
which covered a LOT of kinds of devices on Linux.

I'd expect FreeDOS to do one of two things:
a) Number the ports physically (by some measure) so you need to pick
COM1, COM2, COM3, and perhaps guess which is which
b) Offer some command loosely similar to /bin/mknod to let you configure COM
ports.

A web search finds a thread on an HP web site:
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Operating-Systems-and-Recovery/RS232-Serial-Communications-via-FreeDOS-is-not-working/td-p/6585759

The parts of that which seem informative point at FreeDOS having a
command/program called MODE that seems to be how you configure COM ports.

Here is a link to MODE, which I think might be helpful.
http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Mode
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Re: [GTALUG] Linux servers attacked!

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 11:01, James Knott via talk  wrote:

> On 2020-05-10 10:05 AM, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
> > Blackberry == QNX these days
>
> Didn't they move to Android a few years back, at least for some models?
>

Yep.  In 2016, they contracted out building of phones to TCL.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13088362/blackberry-stop-making-phones

(I always somewhat double-take when I see anything branded TCL, for the
obvious reason!)

The deal with TCL ends this August, so it's not evident that they'll have
any hardware
offerings anymore.

The Playbook was interesting in this regard; the kernel was QNX, but it had
an Android
layer, and that would have been an interesting take on "doing Android" in
the marketplace;
I don't think that strategy made it to any of the phone offerings.

I'm wrong on that, it turns out; "Blackberry 10" was indeed QNX
underneath...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_10
There were around a dozen phones released (some not actually released) on
"Blackberry 10" between 2013 and 2015, and later editions did indeed have
an
Android "runtime" to allow running some Android apps.  So I suppose we could
say it's both a dessert wax, and a floor topping ;-)
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[GTALUG] BSDCan session on "homelabs" tomorrow (May 5)

[Christopher Browne via talk]

The "homelabs" concept is about having your own lab infrastructure, well,
at home :-)

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/
The Reddit "wiki" https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/wiki/index has a lot of
interesting material on this...

(From twitter)
Reminder: The live recording of my @BSDCan 
Panel on Homelabs is tomorrow at 2pm Eastern (18:00 UTC) https://
live.freebsd.org/BSDCan/homelab/ 
Please join the chatroom and ask your questions.

They'll certainly have a BSD-flavoured conversation, so it wouldn't do to
be a jerk and try to refocus on Linux, but I'm sure lots of what is
discussed by the panel will involve things like hardware and software
choices that aren't the OS.
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[GTALUG] European ACM Lisp Conference today

[Christopher Browne via talk]

This isn't necessarily everyone's cup of tea (I'm too busy today to follow
it!) but there's a broader thing...

Today and tomorrow is the European Lisp Symposium, which was to be held in
Zurich.  Obviously, in person conferences aren't especially happening just
now ;-)

https://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/2020/index.html

They're publishing video streams on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/elsconf

There are probably some talks that would be of some interest to some of us
(note that Debian includes packages for innumerable Lisp dialects,
doubtless dozens and dozens, including  major Common Lisps like SBCL,
CMUCL, CLISP, ECL, GCL, and dozens of Scheme variants), but I'll bet it's
pretty much an edge case for us.

The bigger point is that there are a lot of conferences out there that have
decided to "self-isolate" and operate via video and/or videoconferencing.
There are doubtless plenty that have some material of interest.

It looks like a lot of it is leading to public publishing of material,
which curiously means that we may have *BETTER* access than we would ever
have under normal circumstances.

At the sorta wild end, and properly outside GTALUG's ambit, WORLDCON, the
World Science Fiction Convention, was to be in Middle Earth, I mean, New
Zealand.  Vanishingly few people would be likely to fly all the way there.
It will be "virtual," with the result that I imagine there will be
participants that would never have considered going to NZ in person.

Closer to home, and of way more relevance, I'm on the program committee for
PGCon, the PostgreSQL conference, normally in Ottawa, May 26-29.  Dan is
presumably very busy right now trying to collect videos and determine video
publishing and videoconferencing strategy.   https://www.pgcon.org/2020/

Also potentially of interest is BSDCan, operated by similar folk (I'm not
on any committees) which is June 5 and 6; see https://www.bsdcan.org/2020/
It will presumably use very much the same methodologies as PGCon.
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[GTALUG] Where to look for user logs, config and such

[Christopher Browne via talk]

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

$HOME/.config
$HOME/.local

Those are promising places to look for X logs

(|N/A:default)cbbrowne@cbbrowne2 ~> find -name "*X*.log" -type f
./.local/share/xorg/Xorg.1.log
./.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log

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[GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG: COVID-19 Impact

[Christopher Browne via talk]

The ongoing COVID-19 problem has made it impossible to hold
our monthly meetings at Ryerson.

Our meetings are held at Ryerson University; the University has
declared [1] that, to help diminish the spread of the virus, they are
eliminating all discretionary activities on (and off) campus until May
1, 2020.  GTALUG certainly falls in the "discretionary activity"
category, therefore we do not have availability of that space.  It is,
of course, entirely likely that the May 1 date will shift as the situation
evolves.

Further, the Ontario Government has banned getting together in
groups of 50 or more [2] (it would be no surprise for that to go down
further), and in view of the risks of the virus, it would not be at all
responsible for GTALUG to attempt to shift to other locations;
that would not fit well with the "social and physical distancing"
concept in use to try to diminish spread of the virus.

We are trying to see what we can do about alternative mechanisms, so
that discussions may take place online.  The mailing list remains
active, of course; we hope to see more ideas emerge over the next
couple of weeks.

[1]
https://www.ryerson.ca/news-events/news/2020/03/president-mohamed-lachemi-announces-universitys-plans-to-deal-with-covid-19/
[2] https://www.ontario.ca/page/2019-novel-coronavirus
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Re: [GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG: COVID-19 Impact

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, 26 Mar 2020 at 14:42, Rouben via talk  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Long-time lurker here.
>
> I’d be happy to provide virtual hosting for GTA LUG proceedings and
> meetings via Zoom or MS Teams. I work at UofT and I believe I can get GTA
> LUG meetings hosted on our infrastructure.
>
> Alternatively, if we can get sponsored (or have other means/resources
> available) we could organize a free/libre based solution to hold virtual
> meetings.
>
> Thoughts?
>

Evan has already weighed in with availability of a Zoom 'room', which the
board has used a fair bit for board meetings, but it's surely a fine thing
to have options.

Our last board meeting we used the "libre" option, Jitsi, for which Alex
has set up a VM.  Alex seems to be proposing to spin up an instance of
that.  I suggest getting in on the conversation about that.

To my mind, having more possible solutions is better than having fewer,
although we'll need to pick something specific pretty soon :-).
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Re: [GTALUG] Miracast

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2020 at 12:46, Ivan Avery Frey via talk 
wrote:

> Last evening we ran into problems projecting the presenter's slides onto
> the room's monitor.
>
> The Wikipedia entry on Miracast claims Google dropped support for Miracast
> with Android 6 (Marshmallow)
>

That's very strange.

I did my January presentation using my phone via Miracast, and I haven't
had a version upgrade lately; my
OnePlus 5 was on version 9 / Pi  throughout.  (Note that after the meeting,
someone, probably Ivan,
rebooted the monitor, at which point I suddenly *was* projecting my phone
screen to the monitor.
That wasn't an utter surprise; I was trying to do so ;-)! )

It seems as though we need some alternative handling, as we're running into
the trouble that
people are bringing laptops with newly discovered interfaces (I think this
time it was USB-C)
for which we had no adaptor available.

I'm not quite sure what the best alternative is; lurking in my head is to
pull out a ChromeCast
(that speaks HDMI, and can be plugged into a USB port), in the hopes that
we could push
slides over to this.   Supposedly works...  <
https://venturebeat.com/2015/06/11/google-slides-now-lets-you-stream-your-presentation-to-your-tv-via-chromecast-and-airplay/
>

Alternately, maybe a Raspberry Pi could do an apropos job, but it needs to
NOT need a lot of setup
to be "A/V-friendly."
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Re: [GTALUG] server question

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2020 at 12:16, James Knott via talk  wrote:

> On 2020-01-22 12:05 PM, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> > I tend to use .lan for my local dns names.
>
> I have my own registered domain, so that's what I use.
>

Big "+1" on that...

I use a local subset of a TLD I own.  There is NO risk of some surprise
happening as a consequence of ICANN delegating a new TLD.

I seem to recall there being a problem when the new gTLDs came along where
printers (HP, most likely) started pinging at outside names because "that
would never happen" wound up happening.

It sure would be nice if ICANN or IETF were to declare a TLD or three as
being the TLD equivalent to "non-routable local private IPs" like
192.168.*.*, but this hasn't happened.
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[GTALUG] End of independent web browsers

[Christopher Browne via talk]

The material takes somewhat extreme position, but it's curious that there
are only 3 "content decryption modules" out there, Widevine (Google),
Fairplay (Apple) and PlayReady (Microsoft), all of the vendors having
expressed some reluctance to license to small fry.  (Apple being
uninterested in sublicensing.)

https://boingboing.net/2020/01/08/rip-open-web-platform.html
https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

Google seems, marginally, the "good guys" here, licensing their CDM to
various web browsers we know, but I'd not assume too much "goodness.". It's
not good to need to be so dependent upon their good graces.a

I'd never heard of these three technology names until today.
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[GTALUG] Text of my slides

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Chris’ Intro to Kubernetes
Christopher Browne
GTALUG, January 2020

The Agenda
A wee intro to k8s (because kubernetes is really long to type!)
Some major components
A progression of service evolution
Chris’ crazy batch jobs, and my challenges
Some useful tools

k8s
Originally a Google project called “Borg”
It’s all about orchestrating the running of services in containers
The “Borg” metaphor…
Robotic services, lots of them, with sub- and sub-sub-services.
Launched automatically.  Relaunched on failure.
Spread across a series of Borg Kubes.  If one Kube blows up, there’s more!
Kubernetes is a Greek word meaning “helmsman” or “pilot”; the one that
steers a ship
It uses Docker (usually); it’s the “opposite side”

Major Components
Starts with a Container system
Docker, containerd, cri-o, rtklet, frakti, AWS Firecracker, gVisor, …
Alternatives claim to be faster or more secure… are they???
Etcd - distributed key/value store for configuration
DNS server - automatically managing hostnames inside the cluster
Kube Proxy - maintains network rules so outside hosts can get at
services inside the cluster

Less Visible Components
Kube API server - used to control node activities
Kube scheduler - launches and destroys Pods
Node controller - monitors each node (am I alive?)
Replication Controller - add/drop Pods based on policy
Endpoint Controller - connects Pods to form Services
Visible or not, the Real Point of Kubernetes is to have the clusters
self-monitoring and self-administering.

A Progression of Sorts of Services
Pods - a set of related containers sharing storage + IP
Multiple containers so you add extra services via extra containers
Use fluentd to aggregate collect logs, forward to ElasticSearch
CronJob so a process runs periodically
Job (run the thing once, more or less)
DaemonSet (so each node has an instance of a service pod)
ReplicationController - obsolesced
ReplicaSet - obsolesced
Deployment defining a ReplicaSet
StatefulSet (needs stable network or storage)


More Sophisticated Services
Operators (think: “system operators”)
PostgreSQL Operator
Deploy multiple replica nodes (sync and async replication)
Run backups using pgBackRest (including to S3)
Automated failover via distributed consensus subsystem
Automated recovery based on replicas or backups
Component for managing users and permissions
Capability to scale up by cloning DB clusters
Sets up pgBouncer for connection pooling
Includes health monitoring
componentshttps://github.com/operator-framework/awesome-operators

Yaml, Yaml Everywhere
Manifests about how the pods in your services are configured, are
written in YAML
Configuration to pass to the pods, also YAML
You are in a maze of twisty YAMLs, all nearly the same…
I think I want an engine for generating YAML way more automatically
(you’ll see why later…)
Well, that’s why they have Helm - http://helm.sh
Lots of systems use the Go language system for templating {{- if
(.Files.Glob “myfile.conf”) }} {{ (.Files.Glob “myfile.conf”).AsConfig
| indent 2 }}

Configuration Pains
Some things are painful…
Twisty maze of YAML, Almost the same…
Environment Variable Overlay  Don’t call a config element PGPORT or
PGHOST or PGDATABASE
It’s kinda like running within a cron job...

My Job Journey
The stuff I build tends to be shell scripts running SQL queries
Not a great fit for being an “endpoint” or a “service”
Best fit appears to be k8s “Jobs”
I have activities split into a series of job steps that pretty much
need to be run serially, one after another
The “best fit” isn’t to run a bunch of k8s Jobs, either
No dependency system provided
No indication that this is an area to expect much evolution
So, I wrote 2 shell scripts as a “batch job controller”

Receives a list of job steps to be run, JOBSTEPS
Verifies that the steps are all valid (abort if not)
Iterates across the steps in JOBSTEPS, in order:
echo “start $step” > $LAUNCHMARKFILE
Poll, waiting for the step to indicate it is done via seeing “done” in
$JOBSTATEFILE
job-controller.sh gets run by 1 container in the Job pod, logging as it goes

Run-controller.sh Job-controller.sh

Batch-job.sh Job-runner.sh
There are a couple dozen containers, one per job step.   Each runs
via: job-runner.sh my-step-name [immediate]
job-launcher function in batch-job.sh:
Grabs configuration, turns it into a set of environment variable values
Wait Loop; watch until $LAUNCHMARKFILE contains  “start my-step-name”,
It’s my turn now :-)
Run the logic for this job step
echo “done” > $JOBSTATEFILE to launch the next step


A little Column A, a Little Column B...
This Job pod has (at the moment) 22 containers
Boy, that’s a lotta YAML!!!
That’s a lotta containers!!!
Some aspects are pretty clean
Each job step gets its own distinct STDOUT logging
It’s easy to identify which step is which
At any given time, only one container is busy; others are lazy
There’s only one Pod
There’s only one container definition, used by all 22 containers
Using one Pod means all the containers have easy 

Re: [GTALUG] Rust intro

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 12:07 PM Tom Low-Shang via talk 
wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 02:05:13AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
> wrote:
> > I don't know anything about General Assembly but they are hosting a
> > "Practical Introduction to Rust"
> ...
> >
> > It is given by a Blad Filippov of Mozilla
> >
> > Preparation:
> >
> >   "Bring a laptop with a code editor installed. Bonus points for
> >   installing the Rust toolchain: https://rustup.rs/;
> >
> > I'm going to go.  I assume that the text editor I use qualifies as a
> code
> > editor.
>
> I'm interested in your thoughts on Rust if you attended the talk.
>
> I'm currently learning Rust the old fashioned hacker way (from books and
> other people's code :)). My biggest mistake was trying to use Rust with
> SDL2 to display some graphics. My head still hurts from banging it into
> a wall called 'lifetimes'.  :)
>
> (Sorry for the topic necromancy. :))
>

I just saw a presentation on a somewhat C-centric approach...

http://cliffle.com/p/dangerust/

Learning Rust the "Dangerous Way", starting with how to do C-like things,
and then draw back towards "rustacean" ways.

>
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[GTALUG] LLVM talk slides

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I have put the slides that we weren't able to see at the December meeting
up on GitLab at the following link...

https://gitlab.com/gtalug/board-meetings/blob/master/uploads/Introduction%20to%20LLVM.pptx

It's possible Alex may shift that to a better place, but that should at
least make them accessible.
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Re: [GTALUG] Cloud Based versus Openness

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, 3 Dec 2019 at 14:39, o1bigtenor via talk  wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 4:24 PM Christopher Browne via talk
>  wrote:
> >
> > "Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud"
> >
> > Here's an interesting rabbit-hole for those that are interested in data
> archival.
> > https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/11/20/local-first-software/
> >
> Thank you for a most interesting connection.
>
> hopefully not inappropriate but perhaps I'm allowed a question - - -
> hopefully for
> debate and/or instruction (I am not a dev).
>
> A distance into the blog post there is a metric on local first
> 'software' - - - the
> development tools assessment is quite - - - negative - - - are there
> perhaps
> a combination of tools that might be even better than this 'Couch DB'
> for developing
> something like web tools?
>

CouchDB is an interesting choice in that:
a) It's pretty "web compliant" in how it works
   That is, its various commands fit in pretty exactly with HTTP commands,
so it's going to be easier to arrive at an easy fit wrapping it into web
operations than most other options
b) It includes within it a multi-master replicating system so that it copes
fairly well out of the box with the potential for somewhat conflict-y
updates to the data.

On the face of it, that makes it a promising first idea to do what they
were trying to do.  Other options aren't likely to be easier to reason
about.

Doing better won't be particularly trivial.  But there's certainly
potential to use other tools; people will easily be fans of their favoured
tools.
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[GTALUG] Cloud Based versus Openness

[Christopher Browne via talk]

"Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud"

Here's an interesting rabbit-hole for those that are interested in data
archival.
https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/11/20/local-first-software/

It heads out to a flurry of pretty interesting third party links.   What
immediately gripped me as interesting was a set of Library of Congress
recommendations on "archival " data formats:
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/moving.html

Their choices are interesting, and not too surprising.
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Re: [GTALUG] 480GB SSD for $60?

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Sun, Sep 22, 2019, 10:51 AM William Park via talk 
wrote:

> What's going on in SSD market?
>
> https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=179_1088_id=139711
>

Surprising in the moment, but not super surprising...

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/uncategorised/ssds-getting-cheaper-2019-05/

The graph presented there suggests prices should be falling quickly about
now.

There can surely be some local price drops, with numerous plausible root
causes...

- suppose a would be PC customer lost a contract causing a localized
surplus of components

- suppose an SSD production line ran some spare shifts

Various sorts of logistical errors could lead to this.

And with prices tending to fall, not seeming too surprising on aggregate.
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[GTALUG] Docker-based Mail Server

[Christopher Browne via talk]

A colleague at work (in the US) found that his ISP was going to outsource
his email to Microsoft and charge $25/month for that.  He poked around, and
found his own personal "outsourcing" in the form of the following...
https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver

Explained further here: https://tvi.al/simple-mail-server-with-docker/
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Re: [GTALUG] For Chris: Commodore BASIC as a scripting language

[Christopher Browne via talk]

-ish

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:07 PM Clifford Ilkay via talk 
wrote:

> . I find the Elixir/Erlang stack the most interesting of the lot.
>

That does seem interesting.

Is there a pretty tiny runtime for Erlang?

I do recall someone doing a Kickstarter for a Pi-like board specifically
attuned to Erlang use, makes plenty of sense with 32 bits of address space,
but less so on highly constrained systems (e.g. 8bit)

>
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Re: [GTALUG] For Chris: Commodore BASIC as a scripting language

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2019 at 13:33, James Knott via talk  wrote:

> On 2019-08-14 01:24 PM, Christopher Browne via talk wrote:
> > Oh, the good times of doing matrix calculations in Grade 12 "Computer
> > Science"...
>
> Back in my Gr 12 computer programming class, we learned Fortran and used
> pencil mark cards for our programs.  The teacher would then take our
> cards down to the board office, to compile them.  As long as they
> compiled, they were OK.  They could have been complete garbage programs,
> but as long as they compiled...  ;-)
>

We did something like that in Gr 11, only the mark cards produced some form
of mainframe-based BASIC code.  We put the decks into a box, similar
story...

It was somewhat sensitive to quality of pencil marks, and an insufficiently
darkened cell would turn out badly for the program :-(.  When one fellow in
the class was enough of an entitled twit (has anyone ever gained anything
from telling the class how high their IQ was???) his decks got occasionally
defaced, or cards swapped.
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Re: [GTALUG] For Chris: Commodore BASIC as a scripting language

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2019 at 22:18, Stewart Russell via talk 
wrote:

> This is not a place of honour:.
>
> https://github.com/mist64/cbmbasic
>
> Go do some damage!
>

My first assumption had been that this wouldn't have any access out into
the filesystem.

Oh, my, given that it does allow opening files, you could indeed do some
"real" tasks with this.  And do some real damage!

I don't want to think about looping through files, but it could reasonably
be used to process a file!

cbbrowne@cbbrowne2 ~/G/c/test> cat fileio.bas

   130 master?
10 OPEN 1,1,1,"TEST.DAT"
20 PRINT#1, 1234
30 PRINT#1, "Hello"
40 CLOSE 1

50 OPEN 2,1,0,"TEST.DAT"
60 INPUT#2, A
70 INPUT#2, I$
80 CLOSE 2

90 PRINT A
100 PRINT I$

The prime number sieve (which does not capture primes into an array, hence
never speeds up searches by avoiding dividing by non-primes) is
surprisingly fast, all given, finding the first 11302 primes in about 11
seconds.

I'm with Hugh on being disappointed not to have the Waterloo "structured
BASIC" extensions.

That said, I hated Structured BASIC at the time; it prevented me from
handing in assignments on tiny slips of paper, which inevitably led to the
teacher losing my assignment because the piece of paper fell out when he
was shuffling papers.  Oh, the good times of doing matrix calculations in
Grade 12 "Computer Science"...
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Re: [GTALUG] Ryzen 3000 CPUs vs Linux

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2019 at 12:14, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk 
wrote:

> Here's the commit that lets systemd survive the AMD rdrand bug.  The
> comments are interesting too.
>
> <
> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/12536/commits/1c53d4a070edbec8ad2d384ba0014d0eb6bae077
> >
>

This sure seems to point at rdrand being a scary feature to consider using.

I imagine that it would be better to access /dev/urandom or /dev/random,
and have those facilities mix rdrand in somewhat, if possible.
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[GTALUG] Table Drapes

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Some old-timers may recall the "golden old days" when there used to be
quasi-Linux-related conferences in large quantities, including in Toronto.
We once had tables at IT360 and Linux World Canada and such.  (This is
going back YEARS!!!)

Well, we still have a set or two of black drapes that we would drape around
the generic folding tables in order to make for an attractive "booth look."

Well, said drapes have not been used since 2008, and they recently came to
visit me.

I'm not particularly keen on storing them, and in view that there's no
longer so many conferences, there is little likelihood of them being used
much in the next 11 years.

If anyone could make use of them, I would be pleased to help them get to
such a place.  I haven't poked hard at the box full of drapes; I could get
measurements if there is interest.
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Re: [GTALUG] Screen vs Tmux

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 3:42 PM Giles Orr via talk  wrote:

> tmux - more modern, less crufty.
>

Screen still supports RS-232 input, so there are some extra use cases it
covers, that matter not to 99% of us.

Screen is GNU licensed, tmux is BSD licensed, again, mattering to probably
1% of us.

The package for tmux is about 1/2 the size of that for Screen (Debian Sid,
amd64), while installed, it's 2/3 the size.  Possibly smaller in memory
footprint; that's a difference of more practical value.

On modern systems, that difference may not much matter either.

I used to use Screen, shifted to tmux perhaps 8 or so years ago, and
haven't had any complaints.

I think it's a bit easier to write scripts to manipulate tmux environments
(which is not unlike what Giles noted about the scripting language of
Screen).

There's also a likelihood that there are more people still working on tmux.

None of these factors point at dominant arguments, just at small possible
advantages.

>
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[GTALUG] A find alternative: fselect

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Having recently been at a database conference, somewhere along the line,
someone pointed out this tool, "fselect", which is basically what you get
if you take /usr/bin/find, and change it to have a command line that looks
like SQL rather than the odd-ish find arguments:

https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect

$ fselect path, size from ~/Downloads where size gt 30mb order by size desc
limit 25
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/flyway-commandline-4.0.3-linux-x64.tar.gz
 53991744
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/HP41C.pdf  53174535
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/Tai chi/WuDang sword.mp3   44784426
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/civic-manual-2019.PDF  42192497
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/HP-41CXOwnersManualVol1.pdf39603314

Hmm.  Looks like there's some crud I might want to get rid of, and a few
calculator manuals :-)

FYI, fselect is written in Rust, and has a goodly number of ("painfully
large number of") dependencies, quasi-self-managed via the Rust-oriented
dependency tool, Cargo.

The dependency description is pretty commendable; it is pretty decently
self-descriptive.  See:
https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect/blob/master/Cargo.toml

Using fselect to search for things is, I suppose, my experiment of the
month.  Will see how it grows on me.

The output is intended to be human readable moreso than machine readable.
(That said, how many of us still use /usr/bin/find to generate input for
cpio???)
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Re: [GTALUG] war story: fixing an LCD TV

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 10:19, Lennart Sorensen via talk 
wrote:

> On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 11:29:08AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
> wrote:
> > Something manufactured in China with a "Motorola" brand (owned by
> > Lenovo, an RoC company) may seem like a safer bet than one with a
> > "Umidigi" or "Doogee" brand.  Remember when Motorola was a US company?
> > When they had their own important microprocessors (6800, 68000, etc.)?
>
> I wonder how many pieces Motorola split into.  Microprocessors was split
> off and I think was renamed freescale, then NXP took over.  Qualcomm tried
> to get NXP but was not allowed.  Their cell phones went to Google and
> then Lenovo.  Their enterprise stuff (wifi and logistics management
> devices) went to Zebra, and then they sold the wifi part to Extreme
> Networks.  Plenty of other bits went in who knows what direction.
>

I own a few shares (and loved getting annual reports back in the Iridium
project days where the company had a major Space Division), so got some
notices of things.  I had a few shares of Freescale at one point...

Having share holdings didn't lead to getting all that much knowledge about
the "spinning" :-(  Your list is more complete than what I was aware of.
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[GTALUG] Question Fodder: Bcache Filesystem

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I just saw a report of corruption problems with bcache in conjunction with
GCC 9, and realized I had never actually heard of bcache before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcache
- a layer in the kernel for using fast storage (e.g. - NAND, SSD) as a
cache for spinning rust

That's pretty cool; I don't have enough lurking SSD/NAND to have that be of
*too* much interest.  But wait, they kept working on it, so there's a
filesystem...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcachefs
- a COW (Copy On Write) filesystem running atop BCache that has the modern
stuff people seem to like such as snapshotting, encryption, checksums,
compression (ala ZFS, Btrfs)

Here's the corruption reference:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203573
And some more diagnosis here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1708315

Sounds like it may be the wrong moment in time to be adopting
BCache-related stuff ;-)

Has anyone been poking at this sort of stuff?  A *lng* time ago, I used
to follow ReiserFS pretty closely, back when that project was a technical
matter, as opposed to being (rather properly!) overshadowed by a murder
investigation :-(
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Re: [GTALUG] Debian BSP presentation video

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Thanks very much for setting that up.

I was wishing I could go, but had inevitable roadblocks :-(
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Re: [GTALUG] Right to Repair Info Session Mon. Apr. 15

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Thanks for following up further, Karen.

I wonder if you can look into more precisely where they're meeting on April
15th?  It's less evident than it perhaps ought to be.

It appears they are holding it at the CSI Annex, at 720 Bathurst, but a
browse of events on the CSI website doesn't list it.  Which is a bit
confusing.
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Re: [GTALUG] Western Digital's open source RISC-V core

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 at 15:30, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk 
wrote:

> I assume that you can put this on a FPGA, as Chris Tyler talked about on
> Tuesday.  I haven't checked this.  I think that it is in verilog, but I'm
> not sure.
> 
>
> There's also an emulator:
> 
>
> I have no idea if there is MMU support in the core (needed for reasonable
> Linux).
>

If you search at AliExpress.com, for "risc-v", a whole lineup of options
pop up, all FPGA boards of one sort or another.

For instance, one called "Liche Tang", and another that's a Xilinx FPGA
(that Chris mentioned at the meeting), specifically, in the Artix-7 series,
the XC7A35T and XC7A50T processors, the first with around "35K cells" and
the other with around "50K cells".

A couple of reviews out there of the "Liche Tang":
- https://justanotherelectronicsblog.com/?p=470
-
https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/09/04/licheetang-anlogic-eg4s20-fpga-board-targets-risc-v-development/

I think it's the Liche Tang that Chris was referencing when he mentioned a
"$17 board".  AliExpress sells it for $31 CAD; I'm not sure where to get it
for $17, and that might be $17 USD.

The justanotherelectronicsblog.com link has considerable useful detail for
the likes of us, pointing to Verilog code repos, development tools, and
quite a bit of other relevant stuff should one spend $17/$31 and want to
play with it.

The one thing it seems to be missing that I wish it had was Ethernet.  I
imagine that could be a Bit of Verilog Away, though that somehow feels like
an oversimplification.  (Opencores.org has a whole bunch of Ethernet
implementations!  Thanks for the pointer, Kevin!)

There's a bit of a world of "and now what to do about a distribution?"
after that; that would be absolutely on point here.  The notion of a little
RISC-V chip running a Linux from Scratch using S6 and MUSL seems
interesting as a substrate to run more stuff on...
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Re: [GTALUG] Boeing India software engineers

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2019 at 11:53, Alex Volkov via talk  wrote:
> Okay everyone,
>
> I believe this discussion is moved way off-topic and I don't think
> anyone would change anyone else mind at this point.
>
> So we should leave it at that.

Yes, please.

Quoting from the rules about this list...

"Particularly for this list:

- Don't be the guy on the soapbox,
- Try to stay out of political, social, or religious issues,"

This is certainly a political argument, therefore something we are to
"try to stay out of."

Individuals may not *think* they're saying things intended to be
racist, but that doesn't prevent those things from nevertheless being
perceived as such, and that's a decidedly woeful road to PLEASE NOT
head down.  Explaining why it wasn't is enormously unlikely to help.
In national scandal news, the Prime Minister is having little success
with his recent attempts to explain his situation, and he has
professional staff doubtless trying to help.  For those of us without
helpful staff, good luck

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Re: [GTALUG] Where are we eating this evening? EOM

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:18 PM Christopher Browne  wrote:

> Not Kabul Express; they're busy renovating.
>
> I'm at Laziz Curry Kitchen a block further
>

It's cheap, and pretty generic Indian food, would not be quick to return.

I notice TacoRito  and Hurry Curry on the opposite side of the Ryerson
building on Mutual St, worth a try

>
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Re: [GTALUG] Where are we eating this evening? EOM

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Not Kabul Express; they're busy renovating.

I'm at Laziz Curry Kitchen a block further
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Re: [GTALUG] Pain points in debian release process.

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 14:40, Alex Volkov (A Valued Subscriber) via
talk  wrote:
>
> Hey Sergio,
>
> I just found the email from Samuel in my inbox -- it looked like a debian 
> mailing list announcement, so I moved it to 'read later' pile. I'm sorry 
> about that.
>
> This sounds like a great idea, I'm going to reply to you and Samuel off list.

Once you arrive at something, please be sure to make sure it is
mentioned on-list, as others are doubtless going to be interested.  (I
am, for instance.)

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Re: [GTALUG] Microsoft open sources Windows Calculator

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Sun, Mar 10, 2019, 8:10 AM James Knott via talk  wrote:

> On 03/09/2019 05:18 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> > Surely next will be MS Office!
>
> I'm still waiting on EDLIN.  ;-)
>

Oh indeed!!!

It would be interesting to compare code and functionality to ed...

Has anyone else noticed that there is now a book on mastering ed, by
Michael Lucas?  I sorta want a copy of that ;-)
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Re: [GTALUG] IP mystery

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 at 15:06, Darryl Moore via talk  wrote:
>
> Thanks for that. I see it there. WTF? Any idea why I don't see it with
> ifconfig?

Heh.  Because ifconfig is really old, and apparently no longer maintained.

http://inai.de/2008/02/19

Mind you, I see that after the 15-ish years of hiatus, some changes
have gone in somewhat recently:

net-tools (1.60+git20161116.90da8a0-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  After 15 years without upstream development, net-tools is being worked on
  again, fixing many long-standing issues.

  The bad news is that the output of many commands has changed, and it is sure
  to break scripts that relied on parsing it.

  If you have customs scripts that use any of these commands, please make sure
  they still work after this upgrade:

netstat, ifconfig, ipmaddr, iptunnel, mii-tool, nameif, plipconfig, rarp,
route, slattach, arp.

  Apologies in advance for the trouble that this may cause, but maintaining a
  separate version of net-tools just to keep the old format is something I am
  not able to do.

 -- Mart_n Ferrari   Mon, 26 Dec 2016 05:29:25 +


[Note:  My fingers know to use ifconfig, not ip ;-) ]


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Re: [GTALUG] Hacklab Toronto - Moving Crowd Fund

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2019 at 11:16, Scott Sullivan via talk  wrote:
> Howdy Folks,
>
> Hacklab Toronto has been a great friend to the GTALUG community. We had
> over lap of member of our community. The last few GTALUG Linux in Parks
> have been hosted by them. GTALUG's board and volunteers have used it as
> meeting space. Hacklab has co-hosted some of our out-of-cycle guest
> spearks (last years bash talk). Many of you have found treasures, or
> divested yourself of junk at the Junk Independence Days.
>
> We've been forced to move out of 5 year home due to long term
> construction that will the leave building uninhabitable until completed.
>
> Hacklab has found a new permanent home and we're looking for assistance
> in funding the work to make the space function for our needs.
>
> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/hacklab-to-is-moving-again/x/2472524#/
>
> w/ Hacklab Member Hat on, and GTALUG president hat off.

With my GTALUG hat on, "big thumbs up!"

I'm very thankful for the hosting of GTALUG things that Hacklab Toronto has
helped with over the years.

I'm happy to commend that people consider helping out with their transition
to the new location.
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Re: [GTALUG] Software to draw illustrations?

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 12:52 AM William Park via talk  Hi all,
>
> What software do people use to draw illustrations that you'd see in
> textbooks or presentations?  Eg. data structure, high school math, block
> diagrams, etc.  I mean, I see them, but I don't know how to create them.
>

I almost inevitably head to GraphViz
https://www.graphviz.org/

That does the layout automatically.

>
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Re: [GTALUG] video: Benno Rice on "The Tragedy of systed"

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 at 16:18, o1bigtenor via talk  wrote:
> I appreciated this talk a lot. Made my wife sit through it to grin!
> He showed what was good AND what was bad about it and also
> lightly poked at the less than positive way it was introduced. What
> was impressive was that he could use humor in most interesting
> ways and yet wasn't denigrative in the process. Helped me to
> 'understand' things a bit better although I still am not clear on
> whether to move further into systemd or not.

The other interesting thing I recently watched that was rather
interesting was the following...

Is It Time to Rewrite the Operating System in Rust?
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/os-rust

His eventual thesis was that while there are interesting things about
this, there's too much already vested/invested in drivers and such for
it to be terribly worthwhile.

He observed that the notion that gave him "cold sweats" was the
thought of having to rewrite ZFS (he's a Solaris developer at whatever
Joyent is now) in Rust.

He points at 4 concepts, of which 3 would make sense:

1.  One could rewrite the OS in Rust, but that is an extraordinarily
large project

2.  It might be attractive to add some hooks so that *new* modules
that get added in are written in Rust.  I'm using Remacs these days,
which is gradually, function by function, getting rewritten into Rust.
Ooh, "git pull"; apparently (reverse) got implemented today.  Perhaps
the *next* nifty new filesystem would have improved type safety and
such.

3.  Reimplement parts of user space.  The conspicuous relevant
observation made in the talk was that he wouldn't have done SystemD in
C, but rather in Rust.  (Perhaps he might reimplement SMF in Rust;
that's the Solaris thing...)  Reimplementing individual services that
run in user space isn't nearly as scary as #1.  Doing one command at a
time shouldn't scare us too much; I don't care too much what language
is used to implement /usr/bin/cat

4.  Reimplement firmware.  Which is a surprisingly scary area that we
don't play with terribly much.  I reboot systems sufficiently rarely
that this perhaps oughtn't be valuable to me; improving firmware is
nevertheless a thing, and I'm a bit scared of what's out there.

> When it comes to containers - - - well I got royally burned by them suckers
> about a year ago so whilst I think that they're a great idea the 
> implementation
> needs to be different than lxd before I'm going to touch the idea again.
> (LXD itself isn't the largest part of the problem. Its LXD has chosen to
> rely upon snapd and both have embraced the concept of the programmer
> knowing everything and the users being idiots that don't know how to
> keep a system up to date. If I had the skills I would be working on forking
> LXD - - - its a great idea.)

What "blandly" scares me about containers is that they might represent
a way of bundling up our 2038 bugs and preserving them until they
cause the world to cascade down in burning ashes in 2038.

I'm definitely a bit scared at the notion that containers let us keep
"bad old stuff" around in pretty bad ways.  Every time I see an error
message like the following one, I worry about containerization...
-
Deprecated Gradle features were used in this build, making it
incompatible with Gradle 6.0.
Use '--warning-mode all' to show the individual deprecation warnings.
See 
https://docs.gradle.org/5.0-rc-3/userguide/command_line_interface.html#sec:command_line_warnings
-

That Gradle complaint obviously isn't actually about a
containerization problem; it's a low grade compatibility problem (that
I don't understand, because I really don't know Gradle, a Java-based
build tool very intimately).

Nobody has any incentive to fix whatever the problem is, and
"container world" seems to be pretty rife with "oh, there was a little
problem that we'll just ignore because it doesn't much matter today."

The notion in "Dockerworld" of having minimal containers where you
don't have a lot of extra crap that you're packing into the containers
is appealing, but I'm not sure how under control this is.

What does it mean to "keep system up to date?"  There's just enough
philosophical oddness to that that I'm left sufficiently off-put by it
all.

In a containerized world, I'll bet SystemD isn't the best application
for managing things, because it's rather centred on being process 1,
and a horde of containers has a horde of process 1's.  You need a
distributed service manager, and I'm not sure we have that just yet.
There's *lots* of interesting research to be done in that area, no
doubt!
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Re: [GTALUG] video: Benno Rice on "The Tragedy of systed"

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, Feb 7, 2019, 6:13 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk  I think that this is pretty interesting:
>
> 
>

Interesting indeed.

It's sad, the "culture of contempt" that has grown up in this particular
place, and the speaker captures quite well the dangers and ironies.

In his culture (BSD), their risk is of...

- laughing at the foolish Linux people
- we're still using OUR init, come join us to stay in the past
- launchd is pretty cool, tho it's proprietary Apple and doesn't solve as
many problems as SystemD

Partly, SystemD suffers a cultural problem because Lennart isn't as, I
don't know, charismatic, as would have been useful.

I suspect that it's a good candidate for being written in a safer language
than C; there's a rich and troublesome "culture of contempt" there, too,
alas.

- there's a culture of "it's better because I know how to write safe C"
- also, one of concomitant contempt for C++
- Go and Rust are new and cool, and wonderful due to being new kids on the
block...

I was pleased at how he got to the description of problems being solved;
there truly are substantive problems, that matter, not addressed by
previous tools.

Personally, I see that SystemD attacks problems we need to get solved.  I
have experienced some minor problems in dealing with it, but nothing that
seems remotely worthy of the opprobrium thrown at it.

There's a social problem that sides seem not to be successfully listening
to others.

>
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Re: [GTALUG] video: Benno Rice on "The Tragedy of systed"

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, Feb 7, 2019, 6:13 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk  I think that this is pretty interesting:
>
> 
>

Interesting indeed.

It's sad, the "culture of contempt" that has grown up in this particular
place, and the speaker captures quite well the dangers and ironies.

In his culture (BSD), their risk is of...

- laughing at the foolish Linux people
- we're still using OUR init, come join us to stay in the past
- launchd is pretty cool, tho it's proprietary Apple and doesn't solve as
many problems as SystemD

Partly, SystemD suffers a cultural problem because Lennart isn't as, I
don't know, charismatic, as would have been useful.

I suspect that it's a good candidate for being written in a safer language
than C; there's a rich and troublesome "culture of contempt" there, too,
alas.

- there's a culture of "it's better because I know how to write safe C"
- also, one of concomitant contempt for C++ (some overlap there)
- another group involves the notion that Go and Rust are new and cool, and
wonderful due to being new kids on the block...

I was pleased at how he got to the description of problems being solved;
there truly are substantive problems, that matter, not addressed by
previous tools.

Personally, I see that SystemD attacks problems we need to get solved.  I
have experienced some minor problems in dealing with it, but nothing that
seems remotely worthy of the opprobrium thrown at it.

There's a social problem that sides seem not to be successfully listening
to others.

It gets illustrated nicely by the resignations of Debian team members after
SystemD integration, where (quoting wikipedia):

"All four justified their decision on the public Debian mailing list and in
personal blogs with their exposure to extraordinary stress-levels related
to ongoing disputes on systemd integration within the Debian and
open-source community that rendered regular maintenance virtually
impossible."   That's something of an attempt to fold all of their reasons
together, but I think there's still some truth to it.  Culture of contempt,
indeed.

>
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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for Someone to Answer some Question

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 12:39 PM Kevin Cozens via talk 
wrote:

> On 2019-01-17 11:54 a.m., Christopher Browne via talk wrote:
> > I'd be a bit reluctant to look at something belonging to Oracle; as
> well, I'd
> > regard Berkeley DB as being fairly heavyweight in this area.
>
> Would NoSQL be an option?
>

I wouldn't think so.

NoSQL is the name of a JavaScript-based database
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nosql
specifically intended to be integrated into node.js server applications.

>
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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for Someone to Answer some Question

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2019 at 07:46, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk
 wrote:
> BerkelyDB might be another option for storing an enbedded application's
> non-volatile data.
>
> BerkelyDB is now owned by Oracle, but I believe there is an open-source
> version available) BerkelyDB could be more performant than SQLite and
> also could have a smaller footprint. In complexity, BerkelyDB would fit
> between SQLite and parsing the embedded app's non-volatile date out of a
> file(s) in the barebones filesystem.
>
> I myself an considering migrating a PostgreSQL database (used by a
> PHP-based website app) to (an open source version of) BerkelyDB, because
> of the BerkelyDB claim that it requires "zero administration". If true,
> this "zero administration" feature sounds to me like a great fit for an
> embedded app..

I'd be a bit reluctant to look at something belonging to Oracle; as well, I'd
regard Berkeley DB as being fairly heavyweight in this area. as it has
several storage managers/access methods, as well as a lock manager
to support multi-user access.

By the time you pay for that 'weight', I think you're most of the way to
being able to justify SQLite.

Here's a free form list of things I imagine are looking at...
- Constant DB (CDB) uses perfect hashing to establish a
  quickly-readable database; it has only two operations:
   - Create
   - Read
  Note the absence of a 'write' operation; data is not to be modified...
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdb_(software)
  http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/doc/cdbinternals/index.html
  http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/doc/cdbinternals/pycdb.py.html
  http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/tinycdb.html
  There are a couple of implementations (original one by the controversial
  Daniel J Bernstein, with somewhat controversial license terms)
- Worth looking at benchmarks.  Here's one for some of the classic kvp stores
  http://qdbm.sourceforge.net/benchmark.pdf
- It looks like a lot of the "cool kids these days" have been using
  Tokyo Cabinet, and apparently Kyoto Cabinet is intended as a successor
  https://fallabs.com/kyotocabinet/

- Looking at it a bit systematically, there's clearly lots of
key/value pair databases:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key-value_database

Closest to home, local developer Ozan Ygit wrote sdbm as a rewrite of ndbm
some years ago.
http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/sdbm.bun
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Re: [GTALUG] Invitation to a Debian Bug Squashing Party in Montreal

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Sat, 29 Dec 2018 at 20:53, Znoteer via talk  wrote:
> I've been lurking on this list since slightly before DebConf17 last year
> (well, soon two years ago :) to which I wanted to invite you all.

Thanks; I had considered it; other things got in the way at the time, so
I was sadly unable to make it.  It is very kind for you to point out these
events, thank you!

> It's a weekend affair, so we're hoping to see people come from out of town
> for the 19th and 20th of January.  Is there is a Debian community within
> GTALUG that might consider coming?  Maybe you can car pool or get a cheap
> bus or Via Rail ticket.  Maybe even a cheap flight...  Don't forget that the
> Debian Project is willing to reimburse up to the Canadian equivalent of USD 
> $100
> of expenses for qualified contributors to attend BSPs.

I'd consider it, as I'm a Debian user, and it's certainly a good thing to:
a) Give something back,
b) Help with roadblocks to the new release

Alas, that's a week when I can't leave town, so have to give 'regrets'.

Also, I think I'd rather do Montreal in the summer.  My cold weather gear
has withered over the years since we don't get actually cold weather here
in Toronto ;-)

I'm slightly surprised that there's not enough people to do a BSP here
in Toronto; there ought to be interested folk here too.  I'll bet there's
some interesting process involved.
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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for Lighting Talks for January's meeting on Linux Distros!

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I'd like to hear a bit about the "new kid on the block," Alpine Linux.

This is in heavy use by Docker folk; the general idea of it was to
establish a small distribution without a lot of "cruft" that's suitable as
a container OS.

They made some interesting choices:
- Used to use uClibc as its libc, now uses musl, both being smaller and
simpler than glibc
- uses OpenRC as its init system
- well, of course, they created their own package management system...
- has some supposed hardening of the kernel
- I find it interesting that a Linux kernel is around 3MB in size, but
there are something like 130MB of kernel modules, which seems a bit
ridiculous

Threat or offer ;-) is that I could prep a bit of material about Alpine,
covering what I was interested in discovering; if someone has experience
with it, that would be better than whatever I'd blather about ;-)
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[GTALUG] Unix approaching 50

[Christopher Browne via talk]

As Unix approaches its 50th anniversary, some folks have assembled a
site where you can access amazing simulations of the early days...

This has simulations of various editions of Unix, including, it would
appear, "version 0," aka UNICS

https://unix50.org/

SDF Public Access UNIX System presents ...

   /~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/
   /~/~ H Y S T E R I C A L ~ U N I X ~ S Y S T E M S ~/~/
   /~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/

[a]  UNICS (Version Zero)   PDP-7   Summer   1969
[c]  Fifth Edition UNIX PDP-11/40   June 1974
[d]  Sixth Edition UNIX PDP-11/45   May  1975
[e]  Seventh Edition UNIX   PDP-11/70   January  1979
[f]  Research UNIX 8VAX-11/780   1981
[g]  AT UNIX System III   PDP-11/70   Fall 1982
[h]  AT UNIX System V PDP-11/701983
[i]  AT UNIX System V 3b2/400  1984
[j]  2.11 BSD   PDP-11/70   January  1991

[q]  QUIT (and run away in fear!)
User contributed tutorials are at https://sdf.org/?tutorials

Also worth consulting include...
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
https://lwn.net/Articles/725297/
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Re: [GTALUG] good deal on netbook; war story: putting Fedora on it

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 22:53, William Park via talk  wrote:
> Just curious... Where/how do you use these little computers?  I mean,
> $300 here, $200 there, $100 upgrade, $50 ram, $25 microSD, etc. they all
> add up.

I have been carrying around a Chromebook running Linux-y bits via Crouton
for 3.5+ years now; it's coming towards the end of its lifespan, and only
cost me a bit past $200, with no extras adding up.

Quoting my own email from 2015-03-15 on this list...

"I'm liking my Samsung ARM-based Chromebook well enough; I'm running
Debian "in behind" via the Crouton layer, which has been working fine.
I'll bet that by the time I care for something more, there will be a
newer model with more storage, memory, and CPU than I presently have."

It's 2018, and the reason I'm looking for something newer mostly has to do
with the fact that such a cheap laptop has a fairly fragile case, so it's
beginning to age a bit ungracefully.  That something newer has
greater capacity is fine.
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Re: [GTALUG] Backups with Bacula

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 at 13:01, Tony Fernandez via talk  wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I just recently joined your group and was hoping for some insight or advise 
> on building a backup solution.
>
> My question is related to Bacula on FreeNAS. I hope it's ok that I ask if not 
> I understand.
>
> ==Background==
> We run a mixed environment (Windows and Linux). I've been slowly moving 
> services that we run over to Linux wherever possible however I've run into an 
> issue with our existing backup server. It is a Microsoft product. I'm not 
> looking for help on it, instead I am looking for advise on using bacula.
>
> I've configured Bacula and have it working successfully and I like how I can 
> deploy agents onto my servers to handle backups. I love the distributed 
> achitecture.
>
> So my question: I'd like to use FreeNAS as our StorageDaemon (sd) going 
> forward. I'd also like to do remote offsite backups by either rsyncing files 
> over to a remote server or by getting FreeNAS to backup to an external HDD 
> that I rotate weekly.
>
> ==Questions==
> Does anyone see any issues with this?
> What do you think about the HDD rotation?


Bacula has always seemed to be one of the good options out there, and
running it on FreeNAS is certainly well supported.

There's nothing obviously wrong with your approach to rsync to a
remote place or copy to external HDD for rotation.

Madison Kelly did a talk on something akin back in 2004; Madison was
the first person I heard that particularly "championed" using
USB-connected HDDs as a backup medium at the time that tape drives
were only just starting to get supplanted as a backup medium.

Since then, that direction has become somewhere in between "viable"
and "preferable."  And it now looks like tape drives are pretty rarely
used anymore, as rarity has made it difficult for vendors to boost
capacity as quickly as is the case for disk drives.  *Everyone* wants
bigger HDDs.  (Well, we're starting to glimpse a place where solid
state drives are getting sufficiently large and cheap that a lot of
computer systems now prefer SSD, and we may see HDDs go somewhat down
the road that tape drives have...)

Rotating the HDDs so that they do get spun up fairly regularly is a good idea.
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Re: [GTALUG] Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of the GRUB documentation

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 9:16 AM Giles Orr via talk  wrote:

> I've finally released a document I've been working on for a while:
>
> "Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of
> the GRUB documentation" ( https://www.gilesorr.com/grubdsl/ )
>

Thanks indeed!

Pretty awesome to have more documentation for this mysterious area.

I'm not sure it'll lead to me doing fanciful things with grub, but, well,
possibly... ;-)
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[GTALUG] Software Heritage - collecting source code

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Interesting thing seen recently...

"The long term goal of the Software Heritage initiative is to collect
all publicly available software in source code form together with its
development history, replicate it massively to ensure its
preservation, and share it with everyone who needs it. The Software
Heritage archive is growing over time as we crawl new source code from
software projects and development forges. We will incrementally
release archive search and browse functionalities — as of now you can
check whether source code you care about is already present in the
archive or not."

A goodly set of "our stuff" is thereby archived...

https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/search/?q=gtalug

People have been worried about GitHub having been acquired by
Microsoft; this sort of thing is part of what can be, to some extent,
a protection against that.

On the other hand, I'll bet this runs afoul of GRDP, and might run
afoul of "right to be forgotten" laws that are starting to emerge.
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[GTALUG] Google Alternatives

[Christopher Browne via talk]

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives/

I don't know that it's all wonderful stuff, but it's always a good thing to
have alternatives to choose from.

Many of these offer some choices that would involve similar preference
metrics to what we might like ..
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Re: [GTALUG] dh key exchange question.

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 at 16:30, Karen Lewellen via talk  wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> Thanks for that information.
> I would feel better though if  the same problem was not happening
> practically everywhere else.
> i can check my list, I believe, but imagine it will take someone skilled
> in compiling to update anything.
> Meaning I will need to either find that skill, or move our office hosting
> services  somewhere equal to dreamhost but less paranoid.
> Thanks again,

Unfortunately, I suspect that "less paranoid" isn't the right answer.

Older algorithms (and variants) are being deprecated because weaknesses
have been found in them.

In this particular case, the "group 1" Diffie Hellman algorithm was discovered
to have vulnerability to a particular class of attacks called "Logjam".
https://weakdh.org/
That web site points to some of the research work from 2015.

OpenSSH documentation references this:
https://www.openssh.com/legacy.html

They describe the opposite scenario to what you are experiencing; they
indicate the situation where a server is willing to accept
diffie-hellman-group1-sha1, where the client, being on a newer version
of OpenSSH, refuses to offer that.  If that was the situation you were
experiencing, you could change the configuration of your SSH client to
accept lower-grade forms of encryption.

Unfortunately, for your purposes, it appears likely that what has
happened is that dreamhost has upgraded to a more recent version of
OpenSSH, and has taken the recommendation by the developers that
deprecated algorithms should not be accepted.  In principle, dreamhost
could change their OpenSSH configuration to accept use of
diffie-hellman-group1-sha1, but I expect that they would be reluctant
to do this.

I work in an area where we have a lot of Java-based applications; we
wind up having regular efforts to ensure that applications are ported
to newer versions of Java for much the same reason, because the older
crypto algorithms supported by SSL libraries are being deprecated
because weaknesses have been found.  It's not good enough to suppress
paranoia; organizations that ignore the weaknesses wind up getting
bitten by attackers that use these weaknesses to steal data, often
including users' passwords.  It's really no fun to need to announce
that all the customers need to change their passwords because they
have gotten stolen.

I appreciate that it may be challenging to keep up with the
cryptographic "arms race"; unfortunately, the world is a sufficiently
hostile place that there seems to be no way around this.  You need to
be prepared to update your ssh keys often enough to keep up with
changes in SSH.

Feel sorry for those using SSL for web server applications; Giles Orr
did a talk a few months back that made it clear that keeping up with
crypto changes is a messy and thankless task.
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Re: [GTALUG] Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, 17 Sep 2018 at 11:37, Dhaval Giani via talk  wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 3:11 AM Russell Reiter  wrote:
>> The Poettering hit man story is four years old. It didn't stop him from his 
>> own rant, they are after all just words.
>>
> They are just words for you. But you ignore a phone call from an unknown 
> number. And then you listen to voicemail, and it a voicemail threatening to 
> kill you because of systemd, at that point in time, it has stopped being mere 
> words. Yes, 4 yrs old. Has it stopped having impact? No.

It bothers me that it occurs to people to do this sort of thing.

Free software has this; SF fandom has this; I'm sure it exists in
plenty of places.

> I am just going to ignore the last bit. I bring up systemd, because it is 
> quite a bit my baby as well. I take every attack on it personally (rightly or 
> wrongly, and that is my problem, not _yours, as you have quite pointed out 
> later on in your email). Which quite brings to my point, you have folks who 
> are directly impacted by your words. Am I right in defending my baby? Am I 
> right in getting defensive about it? Am I right in not being able to separate 
> out the project from the person? These are all personal questions.

With regards to systemd, I'm not quite sure what to think.

I keep hearing troublesome things about scope creep and about
Poettering; what I can't tell is whether the troubling things are
being made up by the sorts of people whose edge cases include calling
in death threats, or just what.

Personally, I think I'm more or less with Torvalds; there certainly
seem to be some good things about systemd; the "good old init scripts"
needed to become something better.

I step back to the analysis process that Debian did when they took the
(rather controversial step) of adopting systemd; I was reasonably
satisfied by the analysis at the time, that they made the best
decision available.  (Here's a pointer into the debate material:
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem)

I'm not sure how open the project is; it's always difficult to tell
from outside.  For sure, given that they've got evil monkeys outside
flinging poo, they can't just accept anything offered, as someone's
sure to fling in commits intended to cause trouble.

My own evidences...

- I have written a few service files; it has mostly not been terribly painful.

- I found it remarkable how long it took for service files to get
integrated into debian for ISC DHCPD, so apparently some things can be
problematic.

- I found it a pain when I wanted to force BIND9 to use IPv4, and
managing the configuration for that seemed to involve some fight
between BIND maintainers and systemd maintainers.

 I have to call my own situations a bit of a mixed bag.  Nothing
indicating systemd as being a full on disaster, but it's not without
some pains in the neck.

> All that matters is, everything people say, has an impact, and a result. You 
> might call it illogical (in your opinion), but it has happened. There have 
> been times where I felt I could participate in discussions and talk about it.
>
> Spectre/Meltdown was one such. I talked about the importance of it, and it 
> was immediately shot down as corporate conspiracy. Of course, we are still 
> dealing with the fallout. What is my relation with this? For the last many 
> months, I have been part of the response force for my employer to deal with 
> the intel flaws. But feeling (note the word) attacked, doesn't make me feel 
> inclined to share. Certainly not my loss.

That one's sufficiently hard to get a grasp on that I'm not surprised
that some would head straight down conspiracy road; it's way easier to
rant than to understand a difficult problem.

And of course, that means you're getting insults flung at you, which
is understandably no fun.
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Re: [GTALUG] Checking for DNSSEC

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Thanks, Gord!

The one thing of interest that I noted in the "DNS Check"
(https://zonemaster.iis.se) for GTALUG.org was that our DNS hosting
via Gandi has perhaps insufficient diversity.  To wit, there are
several warnings similar to "All nameservers in the delegation have
IPv4 addresses in the same AS (29169)."

I don't think we'd win much by adding an extra delegation separate
from Gandi (e.g. - adding an extra nameserver elsewhere) in practice,
given that we only have one server anyways.  That would likely require
we publish our DNS information in a more complex fashion, essentially
duplicating all changes, and I think that would lead to the risk of us

But it seems to me as though Gandi would be able to help their
customers if they had one of their nameservers be located somewhere
else than inside ASN 29169.

FYI, Firefox complains about the Verisign verifier
(https://dnssec-analyzer.verisignlabs.com/) being insecure due to
using Symantec signatures.

I wonder if we should consider setting up gtalug.org to use DNSSEC;
that's a question to consider at an Ops meeting some time...
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Re: [GTALUG] Which Distro is Best for Running a ZFS-on-Linux Fileserver.

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 2:27 PM right.maple.nut via talk 
wrote:

>
> Hello All,
>
> Like the Subject Line says, I'm setting up a ZFS File Server for my Home
> Network.
>
> Given that I will have to go to the trouble of setting up the Distro and
> Migrating the Linux Install to ZFS Root, I don't want to have to do this
> too many times.
>
> So, which Distro are the favourite for Running ZFS-on-Linux?
>
> Also, is there such a thing as a Linux Distro that is smart enough to give
> you a choice if you are willing to use non-GPL'ed code in the Installer, so
> that I can just Install Directly on a ZFS Pool?
>

I think that if I were certain I wanted a ZFS machine on my network, I'd
look into one of the Illumos variants, most likely OmniOS.
https://omniosce.org/

That is a fork of Solaris, which is where ZFS is really native.

All the other implementations of ZFS are ports, and likely a bit less
satisfactory.

That obviously isn't Linux.  But it shouldn't be ridiculously unfamiliar.

>
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Re: [GTALUG] System Monitor / sysmon

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 6:10 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk 
wrote:

>
> Thanks for the research!
>
> I want a stupid GUI program.  sar is a command-line tool, I think.


I do recall sar...  Definitely one of the classic tools for analyzing disk
activity.  It's probably worth some learning curve to attempt it.

I have never gotten terribly deep with any of these tools.

If there's something modern and either
A) brainless easy, or
B) deeply better
That would be awesome to know of.

sar and iostat are the ones I always remember.

I seem to recall sar being a bit risky to use as it might induce a fair bit
of I/O load itself.
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Re: [GTALUG] OpenWRT 18.06 Released

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Nice, thanks for pointing that out!

I just did the upgrade on my Archer C7 v2 (there are apparently now up
to v7, perhaps not all actually available), went quite painlessly.

It shifts from a version 3 Linux kernel to 4.9.111, which is
presumably wildly newer.

I see differences in the web UI that aren't highly significant but
suggestive that the UI was touched.

It would be kind of nice to know the scope of change from v15 to v18;
the detailed changelog is between the release and a v18 release
candidate, so missing a LOT of changes!
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Re: [GTALUG] GRUB's DSL and looping

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2018 at 14:14, Lennart Sorensen via talk  wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 02:09:00PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> > I don't think that's documented anywhere, and it doesn't strike me as being
> > in any way obvious.
>
> Well it's vaguely documented in that the module has a description.
> And it is totally not obvious that a module could change such behaviour
> in the first place.

Is there some place to push a documentation patch for that?

It's managed at Savannah, so there's a git repo, and it sure seems a
neat idea to augment it...

git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/grub.git

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Re: [GTALUG] looking for a tool to transform table relationships

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Fri, 20 Jul 2018 at 13:42, Alex Volkov via talk  wrote:
>
> Hey Everyone,
>
> I'm looking for a tool to transform (possibly migrate) data from one
> postgres db to another.
>
> I have two postgres databases -- old (not normalized) has all the data
> and new (normalized with some major schema changes) has no data.
>
> The new db has more tables and table relationship structured
> differently, some data residing in old db is in text column in csv
> format, whereas in new database it's a separate table, and so on.
>
> I've been thinking of writing a script that would just transform data
> from one format to the other, but before writing a bunch of code that's
> going to be run exactly once, I'm wondering if there a tool out there
> which I can use to express one-way transformation rules for these databases.


I have done this a few times ;-)

The first time, it was pretty much "scripts manipulating text files"...

These days, I seek to get the data out in some sort of "logical form",
where, as much as possible, internal details such as object IDs get
thrown out, and the data then gets loaded into some tables, and then
cleansed and loaded into the target schema.

Often, what happens is that the data files represent data that I
receive from someone else (that used to operate a domain name
registry...), and so the notion of using dblink isn't ever in my head.

But then, in effect, the data flows...

- Loaded into raw_this, and raw_that, and raw_other...

- Some cleansing is done to make sure that invalid data is
fixed or thrown out, giving me tables cleansed_this, cleansed_that,
cleansed_other...

Finally, the data from the "cleansed" tables gets loaded into the
new schema essentially via a series of INSERT statements.

By having that intermediate stage, you have some ability to
audit the data, to know that all the data loaded was in good
form, or to have specific identification of data discarded because
it was bad., or to identify all the data that got modified to
clean it up (e.g. - I have lots of postal addresses, so have to
clean up country codes and the like).

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[GTALUG] Dinner options for July 10th

[Christopher Browne via talk]

There hasn't yet been any discussion...

- Kabul Express is a pretty good "backstop" option if we don't arrive
at anything else

- Aura Foodcourt seems to be falling to near-nothing; perhaps closed already?

- There was a rather spicy Pakistani place a bit further east on
Dundas that we tried last year; it's a bit of a walk, but perhaps???

- I'll note that several Ramen places have been mentioned; I like the
idea, abstractly, but they tend to be way too noisy and crowded for
our crowd.  Kinton, Guu, Hokkaido all come to mind :-(

- We have done Blaze Pizza; it was a bit crowded for our crowd, but perhaps...

I'm bringing this up so that we at least know we need to decide
something; I'm avoiding having a decision so that perhaps ideas bubble
in by tomorrow :-)

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Re: [GTALUG] OK, food where?

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Hugh and I were planning a research outing, alas he's unavailable
tonight, so we'll need to
arrive at something separately.

- Food Court at Aura has fallen to precipitously small size; looks
like it's about to
  disappear

- We were trying to find variety over Kabul Express, but that's not a bad option

- Where was it that the other set of people went last month?  Perhaps that place
  is plausible?
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Re: [GTALUG] Last month, Hugh suggested Kaiju and the other food court places at Shops at Aurora

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, 8 May 2018 at 16:37, David Collier-Brown via talk 
wrote:

> What do people think?

Fine by me, tiz a plawn!  :-)

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Re: [GTALUG] Crontab versioning

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Thu, 3 May 2018 at 10:45, Alex Beamish via talk  wrote:

> I'm developing scripts that get run by crontab, so I'm in there making
updates fairly regularly. I would love to be able to document the changes,
so I'm wondering if there a usual and customary technique to version
crontabs?

> Ideally there would be some sort of hook around 'crontab -e', but failing
that, I'd have the output of 'crontab -l' (run regularly by cron?) go to a
versioned file. Plan B sounds a bit hokey to me.

Some years back, I built a bit of infrastructure for this.

We didn't have git at the time (heh, AIX was involved.  It's always quite
the chase to get things running on AIX! ;-) )

I did a combination of push *and* pull on my crontabs:

a) I had tooling (integrated using cfengine 2, which tells you how far
back! ;-) ) to add desired entries into files.  So I used this to modify a
copy of the crontab to make sure that the copy included Stuff I Wanted.

This represents the "push"; have a way to push things in.

But my push was into a *copy*, not the real file...

b) Also, nice to have a "pull"

If git had been an option, I'd have taken the present contents of crontab,
exported via "crontab -l", stow that in git, as a preface to step a).

instead, I'd pull the present contents, see if it was different from the
latest recorded version, and if so, rename the previous one to mark when it
was obsolesced.

Then rewrite via a), and use "crontab < authoritative_new_version" to
update cron on the new schedule.

If one uses an SCM, then that changes a few steps, but not in any huge way.

In these modern days, it probably isn't "cfagent+script", but rather "git +
ansible/salt/..."

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Re: [GTALUG] The usual pre-meeting question... and answer, I suspect

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2018 at 16:06, David Thornton via talk 
wrote:

> I did kinton ramen with scott a couple of weeks ago.
>
> Wus gud
>
>
There's one in my neighbourhood; agreed, it's pretty good.

The frequent problem with Ramen places is that they often seem to expect
tables to be filled/reserved, which isn't entirely compatible with how our
folk "slouch in gradually" :-(

How was the busyness of Kinton?  It could be several kinds of good, and yet
somewhat incompatible :-(

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Re: [GTALUG] GnuPG/PGP key signing parties

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2018 at 13:39, Antonio Sun via talk  wrote:

> I checked https://gtalug.org/, and it was definitely on 13 April before,
> as I did copy & paste.
>
> I guess somebody changed it afterwards.
>
>
Yep, we had a typo, fixed when I noticed it.

I expect it's also what's propagating to the iCal file; not sure yet how to
get that to update itself.

Pretty sure it's in this script <
https://github.com/gtalug/website/blob/master/website.py>

Actually, looking at , it *is* updated to
2017-04-10.  Why my calendar still thinks it's on the 13th isn't the fault
of what the web site is publishing anymore...

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Re: [GTALUG] Onavo VPN: Facebook wants your privacy

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2018 at 11:33, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk 
wrote:

> Onavo is a VPN feature that Facebook offers.
>
> It turns out that Facebook spies on this VPN traffic.  And, once
> installed, spies on your traffic even if the VPN is turned off!
>
> Wow.
>
> I don't think that it works on Linux (except Android Linux).
>
> <
> https://www.findvpn.com/facebook-onavo-vpn-collects-user-data-even-when-it-is-disabled/
> >
> <
> https://gizmodo.com/do-not-i-repeat-do-not-download-onavo-facebook-s-vam-1822937825
> >
> <
> https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-its-data-tracking-onavo-vpn-within-its-main-mobile-app/
> >
>
> (My daughter pointed this out to me.)
>

Lovely.

On the happier end of the spectrum, Firefox has an extension to combat
Facebook data collection.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/

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[GTALUG] Dinner plans before tonight's meeting

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I'll be heading to Kabul Express which is just around the corner from the
George Vari building
https://wiki.gtalug.org/pre-meeting_dinner#kabul_express



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Re: [GTALUG] Hello and GnuPG/PGP key signing parties

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On 9 March 2018 at 20:56, Rouben via talk  wrote:
> Hello everyone!
>
> I’m a newbie to this list. The name is Rouben Tchakhmakhtchian; I’ve been a
> Linux user since about 1998 (dabbled with it a bit before that). I’m
> currently working at UofT in IT, and am still a die-hard open source
> enthusiast.
>
> I was wondering, does the GTALUG community still organize GPG key signing
> events? If not, I would also like to know how much interest there would be
> in such an event.
>
> Thanks in advance, and my apologies if this is an FAQ type post. I’d be
> happy to RTFM if you kindly point me in the right direction. :)
>
> Cheers and have a great weekend!

It's not something that happens terribly frequently; a lot of people have
over the years gotten their favoured keys signed, so there's not a
continuous call for more.

That said, someone did send out a note a couple or three weeks ago
expressing interest, and it's certainly something that we could take a
little while discussing and doing at our next meeting this coming
Tuesday.

People interested in getting keys signed should bring paper copies
of their signatures to enable exchange.

It may also be worth visiting BigLumber.com that collects keys of
people interested in doing key exchanges.

http://biglumber.com/x/web?sl=97

Some of the material there is pretty old, but I recognize some likely
names...
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Re: [GTALUG] Feb. 13, 2018 Dinner Location?

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On 13 February 2018 at 16:47, Ivan Avery Frey via talk  wrote:
> Where are we meeting tonight for dinner?

I think I'll be heading to Kabul Express...

https://wiki.gtalug.org/pre-meeting_dinner#kabul_express

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Re: [GTALUG] 'file' maintainer? (or fun with PIE and magic)

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I just sent Ian a note; hopefully his email isn't also down, as his
web site seems to be...

If he contacts you asking more, that's great!
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Re: [GTALUG] Increasing interest in the Go language

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On 2 February 2018 at 16:35, William Park via talk  wrote:
> You should be comparing Swift (iOS) with Ketlin (Android).  I'm leaning
> towards Ketlin, just I can't afford Apple.  We'll see what Google will
> do with Go.

Seems to me that these represent somewhat different courses...

Swift and Ketlin are primarily targeted at deploying frameworks for
deploying mobile applications on iOS and Android devices.

That's a meaningful set of purposes, but that's enormously different from
the deployment of server applications.

Go has gotten particularly popular for server application deployment in
the form of the Docker infrastructure where the typical user of Docker
has little reason to actually care what language Docker was written in,
just that it works decently well.

Myles' example upthread is a pretty good example of what Go is good
at; in a page or two of code, he produced an application (that I observe
does NOT have zillions of framework dependencies) that is reasonably
terse, reasonably easy to understand even if you don't know Go, and
which does a useful task without needing a huge amount of boilerplate
code.

The examples DCB has presented recently fit into the same category;
it sounds to me like Go made it reasonably easy to build terse apps
that didn't involve thousands of lines of references to framework
dependencies and such.

We've got some small projects getting deployed in Go at my work;
I should probably consider redoing some things I wrote in C in Go,
in the hopes that it's easier to deploy.  (That said, the latest thing
in C has actually served its purpose, and likely doesn't get run
again :-( )

The other language that I'd find it interesting to compare, to this end,
would be Rust.  It has some "easy library inclusion" helpers, and a
decent set of decently maintained libraries.

I imagine that "cryptocoinmarketcap.rs" (Myles' app, in Rust) would
be pretty near in size to the ~50 lines in Go and Python.

I'll observe that Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, is now working at
Apple, on Swift.    So there's plenty
of "full circle" to be found :-)
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Re: [GTALUG] a niggle about parallel

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On 30 January 2018 at 17:58, David Collier-Brown via talk
 wrote:
> On 30/01/18 05:06 PM, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 03:49:54PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> The Sun T series looked very interesting to me when it came out.  It
>>> looked to me as if the market didn't take note.  Perhaps too many had
>>> already written Sun off -- at least to the extent of using their
>>> hardware for new purposes.  Also Sun's cost structure for marketing
>>> and sales was probably a big drag.
>>
>> Most developers were totally unprepared for parallel computing at
>> the time.  So most people couldn't write software to take advantage of
>> the chips.
>
>
> That was true of the non-Sun experimental architectures, like the Intel 432
> and various VLIW machines. The Sun T machines ran ordinary SPARC code
> without any changes or recompiling.
>
> It very definitely wasn't for applications that already parallelized. Our
> customers didn't have such things! Hadoop was almost unknown to them then.
>
> I suspect Sun had already fallen off too many people's radar, and the
> performance improvement didn't change anyone's  minds.

We had a talk on this back in 2008; Russell Crook talked about T1, Rock,
Niagara and such...

https://github.com/gtalug/legacy-wiki-extract/blob/master/legacy-pages-processed/meetings-2008-07.html

I remember the talk; fascinating stuff.

They could already see some "writing on the wall;" sales were suffering pretty
badly at the time.

A Niagara box sounded to be around $50K at the time, which is a dose both
of too little *and* too much.

It was "too little" in that that wasn't enough money to cover "high
touch" support
where it would make sense for Sun to fly in an engineer to help people tune
their systems.

And it was "too much" because people were starting to get accustomed to
buying multiprocessor IA-32 boxes (and possibly X86-64; memory
isn't serving me...) that were rather less than that.  Maybe the Niagara is
better and faster, but it's expensive to prove that if you wanted to
spend $10K...

The Rock-based servers were apparently still in the million$ of dollar range,
but those were getting much more difficult to sell, as people could do a lot
of useful things with $10K boxes...
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Re: [GTALUG] How to go fast without speculating... maybe

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On 30 January 2018 at 18:04, David Collier-Brown via talk
 wrote:
> On 29/01/18 09:32 PM, William Park via talk wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 09:17:20PM -0500, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
>>>
>>> My benchmark for processor success is: Does several of
>>> Asus,Supermicro,Tyan,Gigabyte et al make a motherboard for this CPU.
>>
>> I second this.  If I can't buy it, then I don't care.  This is true for
>> cars and computer.
>
>
> Ditto: Unobtanium isn't very useful (;-))
>
> The sparc laptop I used to have was deliberately designed to fit on a board
> that was identical to a Dell product. When the screen died it was swapped
> for a Dell part. Ditto the battery, when it got wimpy.

I recalling seeing the SPARC and Alpha laptops at conferences; while that
was pretty cool, they were ultra-pricey, and yes, indeed, pretty much
"unobtanium."

I was pretty happy when I found I could buy a Chrome laptop running ARM;
I have never done a full switch over running "full blown Linux on it";
it remains
as a Chromebook installation, albeit with Crouton on top (which is
very likable).

I'm not aware of a MIPS-based laptop (which isn't a proof of nonexistence); it
was a nice second-best that there are plenty of routers running MIPS.  I wish
that the Cavium MIPS/Octeon had gotten more deployed; being able to have
a server with a bunch of them aboard would be pretty useful.

A desktop is nice; so also are servers...

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Re: [GTALUG] Dinner in the usual place?

[Christopher Browne via talk]

On 12 December 2017 at 16:59, David Collier-Brown via talk
 wrote:
> The last few times it was Kabul Express, are we headed there tonight?

Evan asked similar on Telegram; I think we're turning Kabul Express
into a habit ;-)
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Re: [GTALUG] Programming languages (in comparison?) - -was Learn Swift for Apple/iOS. Learn ??? for Google/Android.

[Christopher Browne via talk]

I would judge that an unjust characterization of Rust...

Web browsers these days pretty much all suffer from memory "leak" issues,
much of which falls from the proliferation of web sites that make prolific
use of (often horribly coded) JavaScript that draw in all sorts of cruddy
code, intentionally surveiling their users.

Don't blame Mozilla for the evils of (say) The Verge or Facebook...

Back to Rust, Mozilla started with a pretty horrid code base in the C++
code inherited from Netscape that they have been "chasing" ever since.
They started out a big step "behind" in that they began with the burden of
needing to drop out Motif GUI code and had to fill that hole with
something, which turned out to be GTK.  That was a big task, and there were
lots of messes in the codebase as a result

The point of Rust is surely not "oh, they're idiots and the language should
be roundly ignored"; rather, Mozilla correctly recognized that their code
base had a lot of memory leak problems, and decided to adopt a language
designed to directly attack such problems.

Integration of Rust code into deployed versions of Firefox only took place
in the last couple of months, and it is worth noting that people are
observing considerable improvement in the speed of Firefox in these
versions.  That points towards your conclusion being quite wrongly placed.

This does not by any means imply that you *must* use Rust, just that the
reasons you're pointing at are not excellent reasons to ignore it.
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Re: [GTALUG] IBM Mainframe and z/OS

[Christopher Browne via talk]

When I was at American Airlines/Sabre, a goodly set of their crucial
systems were running on TSO, on zSeries hardware (which tended to have
other names at that time; 3090s and S/390s, I think; it was never
clear to me what specific hardware I was ever connected to).

There'd be a goodly mixture of the following technologies:
 - Lots of the software was written in COBOL
 - PL/1 was also used fairly heavily

Storage would have a mixture mostly of three things:
a) Raw storage, in the form of block-oriented files
b) IMS databases
c) DB2 databases

The habit was to have code and storage pretty strictly disconnected;
apps in PL/1 or COBOL would get attached to storage mostly via JCL
scripts, and something that UNIX folk should find interesting about
this is that many of the options of /usr/bin/dd correspond pretty
directly to the shapes of commands in JCL.

It's easy enough to find COBOL compilers to run on Linux; PL/1 is a
mite more difficult.  If you were to want to figure out how to write
PL/1 code, I'd suggest looking into the SIMH Multics emulator; it runs
a full PL/1 implementation (albeit in an MIT flavour that's a bit
different from what IBM hawked).   http://ringzero.wikidot.com/start

I'm not sure that there are useful free implementations of equivalents
to IMS or JCL.  You'd not get a "free" implementation of DB2.

I'm also not sure that "tooling around" with the bits of this that are
available in 'gratis' form would make great preparation for using the
real thing.  The apps I got exposed to were all ones that integrated
together the combination of (compiler + data storage + scripting)
pretty tightly, and it doesn't seem to me that you can easily run
enough "for free" to learn crucial lessons on how it works.

Something crucial that would be missing would be database integration.
The mapping of COBOL/PL/1 data structures onto SQL was a special
sublanguage defined by IBM as extensions to those languages.

That would also parallel that I'm not sure that playing with "libre"
variants of APL would get you to a place where you'd be attractive to
the (dwindling) shops that might still be deploying IBM APL2 or Dyalog
APL software on mainframes.

That said, if you did some "hacking away" with one of the J or K
clones such as Kona (https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona.git), that
might well be close enough to "real K" to be of interest to K shops
(which do seem to exist).  But J headed to ASCII; it's not EBCDIC.
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[GTALUG] Dinner pre-meeting?

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Two thoughts present themselves to me...

1.  Food Court @ Aura?

I hear one of the kiosks has closed, so this option may be on borrowed
time; perhaps good to give it a shot before it disappears?

2.  Kabul Express we have done several times recently; it's a pretty
good idea regardless...

-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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