allan_wind

- HEADLINE: thunderbolt, amt firmware loader

- DESCRIPTION: The last laptop that I bought from Lenovo had a thunderbolt port, and I had to use that port to get 3 x 4k monitors to work. The hardware shipping with non-functional firmware. The only way to upgrade the firmware was by booting Windows. I was not sure if there were other devices with old firmware, so I spent hours waiting for a full OS upgrade. Dell was working on a thunderbolt firmware loader at the time, not sure if they released it by now.

Similar situation with the AMI firmware security issues (CVE-2017-5689). The only way to upgrade (afaik) is by running a particular windows installer.

It seems really dumb having to buy a throw-away drive just to be able to boot windows to upgrade firmware. Obviously, I understand this at the feet of the hardware vendor. I was going to suggest pre-installed Debian, but Lenovo will ruin that with pre-installed crapware.

- DISTRIBUTION: stable

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: entrepreneur

Is the concept of a release still important? OpenBSD did away with the CDs for instance, so what is the value of calling a tag for a particular set of packages (versions) a release?

The only time I cared was when I installed from scratch on a new computer (too much hazle to mirror and existing drive and figure out how to switch from bios to efi etc), and last time, stable did not support my hardware, testing and nightly did not work due to being in transit to release. In other words the lack of any suitable installer meant I was forced to use another distribution (Ubuntu).

I have tried both testing and unstable and both broke for me at inconvenient times, usually I was not the first to notice, and with some effort usually able to find a fix or work-around. Stable plus backports work well, although as a rule, you are stuck on old packages unless (at least the way I use it) explicitly upgrade a particular package. It is configuration that I have to manually sync between machines.

Other than varnish (3rd party repo which is going away I believe) I have no issues with automated (i.e apt-cron) updates for many years.

What I would love to see is a rolling release that is non-breaking. If something breaks, roll that particular package back. I don't know what the particular mechanism that would be, but the ticket system (which is a wealth of data) could be an input along with local configuration.

Push upgrades. With stable, security fixes, is a feed, but it would nice if I don't need to jury-rig something myself to minimize my exposure window. With rolling releases, it would be nice to get that faster (or if you prefer delayed by a configurable amount).

attic <https://attic-backup.org/> encrypts data in transit via ssh, deduplicate and encrypt data at rest. I have come to appreciate both how easy it is to restore data, and the control you have over pruning which backups are kept around. You either need to be able to install attic on the remote host, or be able to mount the file system (i.e. fuse).

rss2email

No.

I wrote a small Rails project a while back and along with it small non-Rails utility that made used a couple of generic modules (mail, config). Both the Rails project and the utility bit-rotted faster than anything anything that I ever written. Ruby, the language, is pleasant, and you can write beautiful, terse, expressive code. Functional constructs are nice, etc. Soured me on Ruby, I am afraid. I liked Perl too, and Ruby is not that different.

Python... I don't care for the significant whites space. lambda is crippled because it has to fit into a single line, tertiary operator is weird, and compressions reads backwards to me. Haskell has the same problem. It is nice how you can start with a class, then wrap attribute access later. Writing a simple new style class is verbose. The version 2 to 3 was rough, not sure if it's done by now. There is a lot of libraries, some parts of the standard library are nice.

JavaScript to me is mess with classes being bolted on, different ways to build an object, different ways to handle errors, different ways to handle callbacks. The write it once and run it either in browser and server ignores that version differences (i.e. what is the crappiest browser you have to support), and in general that environment is different. node.js with the async is an interesting experiment. To me it becomes difficult to read and reason about. To me, it was surprisingly difficult, to write a small sync util in node.js. There is a metric ton of libraries. I quite like JavaScript, but to me its becoming complex (as in C++) instead of burning off the bad parts (as in C). The language will be around "forever" due to the web, so that is what I use if possible.

Ergonomics is very personal. I rest my palm on the CST trackball so my wrist is in a (near) neutral position and fingers are positioned with easy access to the controls. I manipulate the ball itself with my pointer and two other middle fingers usually with the phalanges proximales part.

I bought a pair of wireless Logitech trackballs for home and work. Both died at about the same time, and when the warranty replacements died (for a total of 4) I switched to Clear Superior Technology.

You may have given up prematurely. It took me a month or so to get used to it. I used the Kinesis Freestyle before, still expensive, but lasted me for years and years.

I wonder if consumers will just tune out at some point, and if at some point artist will come up with an alternative organization that just cut the labels out of the loop.

/Allan