RyJones

Correct

I've been to Kyiv five times to deliver aid via help99.co, and I've spent many, many hours with Europeans driving trucks from Tallinn to Kyiv.

The people volunteering and driving know Europe is at war. They all say nobody else where they live realizes this.

It's frustrating.

We just had a couple surfaces.

I was working on a semantic web parser engine tool.

1: This one isn't about open source, but: the guy that said this and that about how 64 bit ARM was never going to happen? We were working on exactly that at the time.

2: One of my test rigs (not for 64 bit, just AllJoyn): https://www.flickr.com/photos/88509406@N00/53897032602

3: later evolution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/88509406@N00/53898288044

We were working on Windows on ARM for the Surface tablets (funny story: I worked in the office of the CTO of Microsoft in 2008? 2009? and we had a couple of the original Surfaces. Cool machines to demo) and we had a couple of the tablets. We needed like 20 to do testing. We were able to get a couple more. I think the chargeback was on the order of $50k each.

None of them were the same. One of the best engineers I ever worked with, who I'll call Bill, had to reverse-engineer how to JTAG each one to re-flash them, since each tablet was slightly different and undocumented.

Bill was one of the guys in the late 90s, early 2000s that was cracking satellite cards for fun. He also reverse engineered a bunch of CANBUS stuff for another product group. Good times.

Anyways, we all knew it sucked.

One of my friends, Matt, owned Seattle's Metrix Create:Space. He had a pick and place and a problem: Qualcomm had nice chips, but he couldn't buy them on tape, and he couldn't get data sheets.

The CEO of QCA? QCE? Don't remember. Was coming up to Seattle to rub elbows; there was to be a Q&A session afterwards. I told my friend Joe that if none of the employees would ask any hard questions, I would. They didn't and I did: you talk about open source, you talk about how important getting hardware into the world is, but my pal Matt can't get open data sheets or parts on tape. WHO DO I TALK TO?

He gave me someone, after many weeks of going around, they pointed me to the multi-thousand dollar IoT dev kits as the best option. Minimum order was like 1000 units.

OK. One OEM (I don't remember who, they make TVs and the like) took our BSP and just... sent it out. To millions of devices. Tens of millions of devices. However many TVs there are.

We had just added a TURN implementation to AllJoyn and set up a dev server. Not literally a small machine under someone's desk, but basically that. Maybe a two vCPU VM.

The DDoS was _very_ distributed. The DNS requests knocked Qualcomm off the air.

So we made that an opt-in compile-time feature for all BSPs going forward.

I used to explain Qualcomm as a navy of lawyers and a dinghy of developers.

I spent SO MUCH TIME getting legal review to publish code.

One of my favorite battles was someone out there in the wild took the Microsoft boilerplate MIDL (MIT 2.0) and stripped the headers, licensing them as GPL. So our boilerplate MIDL files suddenly got ducked and we couldn't ship them any more.

Unless we had someone rewrite them.

I could tell you a long, boring story about that; however, it would be long, and boring.

from your keyboard to GabeN's ears. I've spent a lot of dollars supporting my local startup; it was mostly wasted.

As a multi-year sponsor for your work, our open-source community really appreciates the work.

I have been getting added to spam repos and orgs several times a day for weeks. it's annoying

me, 13 years ago, a contractor at Qualcomm: how will QCE compete against Arduino?

the then-CEO in a rare f2f in Seattle: oh that's a toy

me, today: God speed, you crazy diamonds; I'm glad you cashed out, you are doomed.

Japan is mostly Instagram, line, WhatsApp, telegram, in that order, for me.

For business comms drop instagram and move WhatsApp to first.

For Singapore it seems LinkedIn messages are the go to IM for business.

Europe p2p: telegram number one by a huge margin, then WhatsApp. B2b: WhatsApp, period.

I had a lot of offers for wicker.com. In 98? 99? some guy asked what I wanted, and I said give me something interesting so I have a good story to tell.

He offered a 1544 Dante, which I accepted. His gig was auctioning estates and his wife imported and sold wicker.

Yes, my recent (last 10 or so years) experiences have gone from being shocked at seeing full-size F250s in Amsterdam (!) to no more raised eyebrows. I've driven from Tallinn to Kyiv five times over the last year, and I've seen plenty of American vehicles. I know in Ukraine it's popular to kit bash imported wrecked US cars into something drivable, and I've seen plenty of full-size Dodge and Ford pickups on the roads in Poland.

On 13 June 2025, I took a picture of a Honda with dealership plate frame from Bellevue Honda in Tallinn. I imagine many of the vehicles in Holland and Germany are owned by US military folks, but they can't all be.

I saw the post on DF and bought it through the App Store. Nice tool! I have about 4TB of small-ish SQLite DBs and this is great for cracking them open and looking around.

Yes. I have a lot of long, boring stories about exactly this.

If you want to see what Honda emits: https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141f...

116/117/118/119 were just like that: rotations and reflections of each other. So confusing!

Tell me you have never shot a rifle for score, without saying you haven't.

You can be accurate, precise, or both.

Said clock may be precise, but not accurate.

I hope this spreads to the EU; Warsaw security is so slow: everyone taking off belts and handing them through the metal detector, taking off shoes.

I used to listen every week.

As I got older, the content got less interesting.

I think Ira is a hoopty frood; however, Ira lost touch with "American Life" like 20 years ago.

You can also spot houses and cars with high dollar alarms and ir cameras. Under night vision they are very obvious. It’s like looking at a light show

I listened to Dr Demento on WMHD for so many formative years. A titan!

if you had a thread in MSMAIL, and cc: MSPAGER, anyone on the thread with a pager would get a page from the thread.

Yup, that’s me.

I re-wrote MSPAGER for Exchange. Hoo boy what a hack that was! A VB3 app running as a service, essentially. I don't know if you remember romeo and juliet; those were PCs pulled from pc-recycle by a co-worker to serve install images.

Probably. A lot of people really loved MSMAIL; not so much Exchange.

I have more long, boring stories about projects there, but that’s for another day