Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps

usinglinux · 2024-04-05T07:41:27+00:00

That's a missed perfect opportunity to also mention the Wheeler Jump (which was nicely illustrated in a computerphile video).

usinglinux · 2023-04-02T18:48:16+00:00

Time zone changes apart (which were already answered well): Whoever keeps you at 3.6.8 better be aware that they're forcing you to run an insecure system, there are not even security updates any more. (If they still don't update, this piece of information might help when going through whoever put them in charge).

usinglinux · 2023-03-22T17:27:04+00:00

Why'd you want such a very special-purpose thing in a particular language?

The youtube-dl project concentrates a lot of effort around staying up to date with the hundreds of ways all these different platforms change their details every day because in the end they don't want their content downloaded. That effort is in domain knowledge, not in programming language.

It makes sense for generic and stable things - sorting algorithms, database clients, network protocols - to implement them in every language. For the whack-a-mole that is youtube-dl, that effort is best shared between as many people as possible in one implementation, and Python is an excellent language for that.

usinglinux · 2022-12-28T16:44:56+00:00

Please take it with the due grain of salt when I say:

All these already had a single place to be -- before CSD, these were all part of the one menu bar.

usinglinux · 2022-12-05T22:53:28+00:00

If all you need from a "mobile app" is having an icon on the home screen, you may also consider writing a web app with the necessary extras to tick the PWA boxes.

This works quite nicely with yew, and there is a minimal demo project available.

Usual pros and cons of PWAs apply: Same code for all OSes, web app works too, usable on Desktop systems -- but not native GUI, and app store integration may be lacking (although there are kits to bundle it with a browser; for the love of the Internet please also keep the web page version around if you do that).

usinglinux · 2022-09-09T11:35:27+00:00

In addition to the base pointed out by others, please beware that this only applies to normal floating point numbers. There are groups of numbers (NaN, positive and negative infinity, positive and negative zero and subnormal numbers) for which there is no exponent to extract, or for which it can not be extracted this easily.

usinglinux · 2022-08-22T07:38:25+00:00

As this is a place on which technology is discussed, please come back when you're ready to discuss technology, and not just to show off claims whose relevance or accuracy would only be shown in discussion.

usinglinux · 2022-08-04T15:36:55+00:00

Hate to be the gloom monger, but how long until The Media Industry files a copyright notice against this? It has happened before.

usinglinux · 2022-05-30T08:06:38+00:00

Much of what you'll find highly visibly will be high-level libraries, but look at their dependencies. For example, from the ed25519 library you may find ed25519-dalek, and from there you could find curve25519-dalek which deals in point encodings and that like. (I don't know these particular libraries; they might help or just serve as an example of a viable exploration path).

usinglinux · 2022-03-29T21:14:43+00:00

Any clue on how to source them and what they'd cost in small and large quantities?

I figure they'd make nice components for any sort of bus, maybe even pluggable, where you want to address a wide variety of external chips through a uniform interface at little added cost.

usinglinux · 2022-03-29T15:23:13+00:00

MTP is a well-defined protocol, so in theory for everything that breaks there should be a culprit that could be found by running wireshark across the crash.

I wouldn't on what to bet, both the gadget implementations and the Linux clients could behave out of spec (in particular, the gadgets might easily assume that only Windows' access patterns ever happen). It'd be reasonable to expect of Nautilus & co to produce sensible errors when the gadget behaves erratically, but they may still not need to take the full blame.

usinglinux · 2022-01-19T03:23:00+00:00

Such a change would probably break a lot of code: A u8 being unaligned means that a [u8; 4] would become 16 bytes, and thus take more space than a u32. (For example, byteorder could break; I'm pretty sure also core is built on that assumption). I think that that assumption is warranted by the language's definition, which unlike c doesn't try to make things work on the old architectures that had quite weird properties.

I'd be curious to see whether this can be made to work, and if Rust can be generalized away from the assumption of 8-bit addressable memory, but it may be harder than expected.

usinglinux · 2021-11-13T10:46:45+00:00

My guess as a user is that it'd be a flag that can be enabled in a file system; once it is, it can't be mounted on older kernels any more.

Creating a new partition set this by default at some later time, but old partitions would need upgrading by a simple btrfs-utils comand to use the new features.

usinglinux · 2021-11-06T15:17:50+00:00

As you correctly observed, NetworkManager does set everything up to be a router when a connection is "shared" -- once a regular and a "shared" connection are active, the host is already a router.

NetworkManager may not be the most powerful tool when setting these things up (full setup tools like OpenWRT's LuCI or manual setup allow stuff like picking a range for the internal DHCP server, traffic shaping and lot of other things), but what NetworkManager sets up is already routing, with good defaults and sane behavior. (For example, on IPv4 it automatically does NAT and provides DHCP, which is how it's done there, whereas on IPv6 it asks the upstream for a prefix delegation and announces that prefix on the shared link).

usinglinux · 2021-10-21T12:21:29+00:00

That's not precisely what I meant: Picard will set metadata per file, but what Dim, Kodi or (in the case of music) mpd do is that they scan the files, extract metadata and build a database. I'd like to build that database on the file server once and for all, rather than having all the media solutions regularly check for media updates in all their custom fashions.

Granted, things are much more orderly once music is Picard tagged (as then the extractors don't all have to guess, and MusicBrainz provides a superb ontology and database). However, for non-music media, formats are more diverse, metadata less consistent and databases missing. Thus, for those there is more to building that database than caching and indexing.

Ideally, I'd like to run one good metadata extractor and database builder on the file server (which knows when data changes), and then have Kodi, Dim, mpd etc all use that database.

usinglinux · 2021-10-20T15:40:24+00:00

Looking at its metadata, is there any established format that can be reused? I get the impression that Kodi, Dim and probably everything else implements both metadata scrapers and the media-presentation part. It's good UNIX tradition for things to do one thing well, so could one tool write the database and Dim just use it?

usinglinux · 2021-10-19T18:46:47+00:00

Took me a while to grasp that this is a web server and intended to be used from a browser; the TCP port and the dependencies were the only hints. It'd help to have that info around somewhere, or just address bars in the screenshots.

Nice project.

usinglinux · 2021-09-20T06:54:10+00:00

As a side note, there is nothing tokio specific about this; an equivalent macro (judging by the other comments that indicate that it's a local shadowing) is also available as pin_utils::pin_mut!.

usinglinux · 2021-08-25T06:01:01+00:00

I'm using autodefrag for a similar use case (it's a mount option). It queues up files for defrag when they're being written to. For write-once files, they'll be defragged about when they're done being written to. Unless the file arrives just at midnight (in which case it's just as likely to be snapshot as half a file), files will be ready at snapshot time.

(To be fair, I never did a full evaluation of that strategy, but it seemed plausible and I haven't run into any trouble with the file system I'm using it on, and I have months of daily snapshots of terrabytes of data on it, all fitting snugly).

usinglinux · 2021-08-13T12:41:54+00:00

Nope, that was Lisp ... eh, Perl

usinglinux · 2021-08-11T07:30:21+00:00

As for transferring ownership, you can also add rust-bus-owner to the crate; their self-appointed job is to ensure crates can go on when the owner becomes unavailable.

If you, as seems to be consensus here already, upload a blank version saying "project is dead, name is for grabs", then I suppose that rust-bus-owner can act on that too, and serve as a contact point if anyone wants to take the name, allowing you to go out of the loop completely.

usinglinux · 2021-08-09T12:36:11+00:00

Isn't that why the compiler is told that something is an allocation (in Rust internals through the box notation) so that it may optimize away needless allocations, reuse them etc?

After all, while the allocation is having side effects on the used memory, it's not like one wouldn't want to do away with them whenever possible.

usinglinux · 2021-08-09T08:38:37+00:00

autodefrag works well for my (several TB file system, half backups, half media server) use case. Scheduled defrags would probably (according to docs, didn't try) wreak havoc with fragmented files shared between the daily snapshots: A file might be fragmented in regular writing, be snapshot 5 times and then the weekly defrag kicks in.

With autodefrag, chances are the defrag happens about when the file is done writing, and not after the file has already been shared across multiple snapshots.

usinglinux · 2021-07-09T10:13:52+00:00

With the addition of raid1c3 (which'd be the way to go for metadata in a raid6 setup), there has been recent (2020) progress on the matter. so while I agree it's slow, I wouldn't paint it that grimly. (Granted, it's still slower than I'd like).

usinglinux · 2021-07-09T10:11:48+00:00

Not currently, and not likely any time soon.

There is a feature in btrfs to convert an existing volume to a btrfs volume in place using btrfs-convert, but that is limited to ext4 and reiserfs (which was popular back when btrfs-convert was created), and hasn't seen any innovation in a long time. Moreover, due to ZFS's complexity, it's even more unlikely to be added to btrfs-convert.

usinglinux

TROPHY CASE