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dimman

172 karma · joined January 24, 2014

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dimman··on Making my first embedded Linux system
Welcome to the world of embedded! :)

As for the SPI flash size: they are almost always given in Mbit, so 16Mbit is 2MB hence the confusion if I were to guess. You would be looking for a 128Mbit one to get 16MB.

Nice work and keep on tinkering!

dimman··on Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60
Imagine Parker Schnabel borrowing one of these for a season, that’d be something.
dimman··on Curl 8.0.0
Kind of makes you think that the subject at hand is quite complex in its nature, thus untrained people might do best to steer away until properly trained.
dimman··on In 2019 RX470 were $70, RX580 $100
Not necessarily more than any other card. As long as it's been running within component specs (especially temperatures), I wouldn't be worried.

It's obviously been running fine under high loads, so why would it just decide to stop working fine?

I think the major issue is that many cards have been running outside of specs for a long time. High loads tends to increase the risk of that, so the problem lies in figuring out the case for the card you're interested in.

dimman··on My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
As someone who used this feature every single day, for every single text input on the phone: I 100% agree.

The replacement method works, but it is indeed subpar. It annoys me that my 3 generation newer phone is a downgrade in this regard, but I can live with it.

dimman··on What they don't teach you about sockets
Sure, but from a "high level" or "sockets" perspective, especially as a beginner it shouldn't be something you need to care about. A bit simplified, the basic stuff you need to know is:

1) UDP uses packages/messages which may or may not reach its destination. If it reaches its destination the data is intact. Normally connectionless.

2) TCP is a stream protocol. There is no package/message boundary unless you create it yourself (my tip is to do a simple binary TLV (type length value) protocol using say a fixed 4 byte header). Requires a connection to be setup first.

3) Network byte order - really important to read about.

4) Nagles algorithm (TCP_NODELAY) and SO_KEEPALIVE - those are a couple of things to read about.

5) Start with the simple select() approach to handle the socket activity.

You can then go ahead and get more advanced by doing nonblocking I/O or do blocking I/O with each client in its own thread, figuring out pros and cons for your use case. You can add SSL/TLS on top of your TCP connection etc.

EDIT: The SO_KEEPALIVE part is perhaps least important thing to start reading about. I'm a bit biased due to NAT traversal problems as I wrote a secure remote access solution for a major company several years back, utilising STUN/TURN servers, public key authentication (basically certificate pinning), TLS etc.

dimman··on What they don't teach you about sockets
Interesting read. I’m quite curious of where all the initial misperceptions about sockets comes from.

I can highly recommend Beej’s guide to network programming: https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

That together with Linux/BSD man pages should be everything needed, some great documentation there.

dimman··on Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL (2018)
I think there's a confusion of terms, there's a big difference between 'deprecated' and 'obsolete'. They sure can be deprecated, which can be read as "not recommended for use and _may_ be removed in a future release", but that doesn't mean it has been removed/made obsolete.
dimman··on USB Cheat Sheet
Thanks. Nit-picking here but ground is usually abbreviated GND, not GRD.
dimman··on DirectX 12 applications no longer working on 4th gen Intel processor graphics
So DX12 support has not been deprecated in newer drivers (as the page states), it has actually been completely removed.
dimman··on Flying Only with the Heat of the Sun
Oh noes, not longer working hours…
dimman··on Amazon had sales income of €44bn in Europe in 2020 but paid no corporation tax
Not a loss but a cost/expense. A loss is, to put it simple, when money in - money out < 0. Without having looked it up, I would imagine that most of his wealth is tied to amazon stock.
dimman··on LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
I guess most of these are consequences of trying to solve problems that doesn’t really exist.
dimman··on IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration
I’d assume it’s a ”typo” as well. Most likely it’s not the same person hiring and writing the job ad. So a qualified guess would be that a character got lost during communication/translation.
dimman··on EU lawmakers snub Apple's pleas, vote to push for charging cable standard
I did. The springs wearing out very much means bad contact at the contact points, we do agree there. However the receiver end with gold plated contacts points do also wear out. I’ve yet to see anything pointing towards springs wearing out before the gold plated areas (that is being worn by friction each insertion/removal) do.

I’ve got a Lightning cable with worn out gold plated contact points, the springs in the phone are perfectly fine.

My point being that without some reliable statistics pointing to springs being way more susceptible to wear than gold plated contact points, it doesn’t make any difference.

(FWIW: I currently work with factory equipment for PCB production testing and bad contact due to oxidation and wear is a much bigger issue than springs going bad, but that’s just my experience.)

dimman··on EU lawmakers snub Apple's pleas, vote to push for charging cable standard
Your statement would make more sense if USB-C somehow magically would be immune to wear, but it’s not.
dimman··on Help me ask why you didn't just
”ssh?”
dimman··on Software Updates
I guess what we see is in part due to the transition towards more and more ”highlevel”. Now don’t get me wrong here, ”high level” in general is supposed to make life easier for developers, more rapid development and for corporate a better ROI. The downside is that it requires less understanding of the underlaying foundations (it hides it on purpose) from the developers/engineers.

Now I’m not saying that ”high level engineers” are less engineers than others, but it’s not surprising that we’re moving in the direction we’re moving. It’s by design.

(Now this doesn’t explain everything, far from it, but IMO it’s why we see an image writer weighting in on 300MB compared to a C/C++ version at <1MB)

dimman··on My Hardest Bug to Debug (2018)
Long story short: Unexpected OpenSSL hard crashes in our application. Turns out our HW was reporting support for unaligned access where as it was actually disabled in CPU due to buggy hw (arm platform).
dimman··on Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
Ubununtu, hilarious typo
dimman··on Redesigning GitHub Repository Page
Seems like management arrived after solving problem 4, which resulted in 7+ new problems.
dimman··on A small notebook for a system administrator
Small change proposal for the UART<->USB bridge: make Vio selectable between 3.3V/5V
dimman··on OpenSSL versioning and license changes
>Does this mean 3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.1.0 and 3.1.1 will all be ABI/API compatible?

Just to clarify (given my assumption that semver apply): 3.1.0 might contain new features compared to 3.0.z, those won’t be backported, but code written/compiled against 3.0.0 will continue to work fine on 3.y.z

dimman··on Linux – The beginning of the end?
I just want to reiterate what glandium wrote in a comment further down:

"He didn't step down. He's taking a break. It's not the first time he takes a break either. Let's not be too alarmist."

dimman··on They’re Falsely Accused of Shoplifting, but Retailers Demand Penalties
What’s wrong with America? So crazy out of proportion; an alledged $25 theft may result in police officers arrest you in your home, getting handcuffed, forced into ”prison” jumpsuit etc. On top of that, stores are allowed to put lawyers on hunting cash from people no matter if they’ve been proven guilty or not by the justice system. And they don’t care, nor need to care?

Where’s the sanity and human decency??

dimman··on Why not program right?
I think the phrase you’re looking for is: good enough.
dimman··on Quake III Arena GPL Source Release (2012)
Use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment and you will never have any problems using whatever tab width you want (except for potentially exceeding 80 char line length if you care about that. IMO that's secondary compared to the pros.)
dimman··on Why SQLite Does Not Use Git
Fortunately for us C programmers then that not everyone has come to their senses.
dimman··on Tell HN: 17 years on the same game
Some 20+ years later we still play QuakeWorld :)

https://quakeworld.nu

https://quake.world (discord)

dimman··on C for All
"Without continued development of the language, C will be unable to cope with the needs of modern programming problems and programmers; as a result, it will fade into disuse. Considering the large body of existing C code and programmers, there is significant impetus to ensure C is transformed into a modern programming language."

Really? Lots of C code written today is written using C89/C90 or C99 std. I think if it's something that history tought us it is that C does _not_ need to be transformed into something else or we would already be happily using this "something else" today.

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