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jdboyd

1,052 karma · joined July 28, 2010

http://blog.jdboyd.net/

jdboyd@boydtechnicalsolutions.com for professional inquiries.

jdboyd@jdboyd.net to find me more broadly.

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jdboyd··on Installing and using HP-UX 9
What are they replacing it with?
jdboyd··on Qt Creator 18 Released
Qt Creator is reasonably nice. I believe that qmake is deprecated now though in favour of CMake.
jdboyd··on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres
While I appreciate the Postgres for everything point of view, and most of the times I use other things it could fit in Postgres, there are two areas that keep me using RabbitMQ, Redis, or a something like Elastic.

First, I frequently use Celery and Celery doesn't support using Postgres as a broker. It seems like it should, but I guess no one has stepped up to write that. So, when I use Celery, I end up also using Redis or RabbitMQ.

Second, if I need mqtt clients coming in from the internet at large, I don't feel comfortable exposing Postgres to that. Also, I'd rather use the mqtt ecosystem of libraries rather than having all of those devices talk Postgres directly.

Third, sometimes I want a size constrained memory only database or a database that automatically expires untouched records, and for either of those I usually use Redis. For these two tasks I use Redis. I imagine that it would be worth making a reusable set of stored procedures to accomplish the auto-expiring of unused records, but I haven't implemented it. I have no idea how to make Postgres be memory memory only with a constrained memory side.

jdboyd··on You already have a Git server
It wasn't obscure before GitHub.

Still, I like the online browser, and pr workflow.

jdboyd··on StageConnect: Behringer protocol is open source
I agree that 15m is somewhat short, but I think this is intended to offer a lower cost offering, but be an alternative the the other networks they already support.

I for one am eager for audio networking standards to become more accessible. My biggest hopes would probably have been for a control plane protocol for AES67 to gain critical mass and force Dante and Ravenna to support it, but in the mean time this could be a nice alternative for some use cases as well.

jdboyd··on StageConnect: Behringer protocol is open source
> These aren’t complex proprietary standards,

They aren't proprietary, but they are complex standards, and sometimes somewhat incomplete. AES67, for instance, is somewhat crippled by not having a control plane (for that you need AES70, not well supported, or various NMOS standards). AVB requires special network switches.

Behringer doesn't really refuse to support standards. They offer Dante and MADI cards for their X32 and Wing mixers. They have AES50 built in as well. I think StageConnect and UltraNet are intended to be a cheaper/simpler/more limited alternative for people who don't need the full physical range and flexibility of Dante.

jdboyd··on StageConnect: Behringer protocol is open source
These days they are mostly cloning old, usually discontinued, products. Two examples are the Roland 303 or Klon Centaur. One product that isn't exactly discontinued is Neve is continuing to sell 1073 and 33609 derived products, but they certainly aren't selling the original 1073 anymore, and their 33609 design is over 40 years old. I don't morally they have any room to complain about people cloning their old designs, nor that morally should anyone feel bad about taking decades old historic designs from another company and making a version of it that is improved or more accessible.

I'm aware that in the past they were accused of cloning more current products, but the only example I could remember was FCB1010 supposedly being a clone of the Roland FC-300 (MIDI pedal board with 2 expression pedals). There certainly is a visual similarity between the two that seems very questionable. I don't think that the Roland FC-300 was particularly innovative. I know that Mackie sued about the MX-8000 being a clone, but I'll note they did lose that lawsuit. I don't there was also a lawsuit in the 90s about the Aphex Aural Exciter Type C, but I can't say that I know the details of that. Both of those lawsuits are definitely from a time when Behringer's quality seemed to be a lot lower, so there are definately ways the company has improved in the last 30 years.

jdboyd··on StageConnect: Behringer protocol is open source
StageConnect is a connection to transmit 32 uncompressed audio-channels via a single XLR cable. StageConnect is based on A2B, the Automotive Audio Bus (A2B).
jdboyd··on NFS at 40 – Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System
Some NFS, lots of SMB, lots of sftp, some nextcloud, some s3. I wish that TrueNAS made webdav more of a first class service.
jdboyd··on A Millennial's DVD Collection: I'm Returning to Physical Discs – NN/G
Why isn't there more love for Bluray? Often the price difference is negligible.
jdboyd··on I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory
The author addresses the BBA and says he didn't use it because the game was built without networking sorry, so having that in would have been harder.
jdboyd··on Native ACME support comes to Nginx
Proxmox is not a hypervisor. It is a Linux distribution. As such it has a web server, kvm, zfs, and many other pieces. Maybe the acme client is built in to the web server. Maybe the acme client is built into their custom management software. Maybe they're just scripting around certbot.

I do tend to find that I need multiple services with tls on the same machine, such as a web server and RabbitMQ, or postfix and dovecot. I don't know how having every program have its own acme client would end up working out. That seems like it could be a mess. On the other hand, I have been having trouble getting them all to take updated certificates correctly without me manually restarting services after cert bots cron job does an update.

jdboyd··on What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
Part of the problem though with saying SQLite instead of XML is a lot of things would lend themselves to XML in SQLite.
jdboyd··on What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
What he listed as the first improvement, "Replace ZIP with SQLite" would certainly apply to the other ODF formats.

He advocates breaking the XML into smaller pieces in SQLite. I suppose making each slide a new XML record could make sense. Moving over to spreadsheets, I don't know how ODF does it now, but making each sheet a separate XML could make sense.

Thinking about Write documents, I wonder what a good smaller unit would be. I think one XML per page would be too fine a granularity. You could consider one record per chapter. I doubt one record per paragraph would make sense, but it could be fun to try different ideas.

jdboyd··on What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
Are the typical Synology, Qnap, or TrueNAS devices with default Linux, macOS and Windows clients going to be set up correctly by default? If any of the typical things someone is likely to setup following wizards in a home or small office is likely to result in lock not working correctly for SQLite, then it is fair for them to warn against using it on a network file system.

As an application format, you don't generally expect people to be editing an ODF file at the same time though, so network locking doesn't really disqualify it for use as a document format.

jdboyd··on A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
In my part of PA there are 3 in the process of going in nearby. I think the largest of the 3 is "only" 828 megawatts though. One of the others is supposed to be 300MW, and I'm not sure about the 3rd. There is another group talking about 3 more campuses with a combined power budget of 1.3GW about 55 miles from here. But then while we don't have cheap land, we do have nuclear and hydroelectric in the area, so I guess the makes it attractive.
jdboyd··on A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
In m
jdboyd··on I'll only buy devices with GrapheneOS
The OnePlus One was my favorite phone to hold ever, but it was sadly let down in software reliability due to the the melt down in the relationship with Cyanogen.
jdboyd··on Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
https://github.com/liquidmetal-dev/flintlock

Appears to be trying just what you ask.

jdboyd··on I'll only buy devices with GrapheneOS
The problem with GrapheneOS as a way to protest what Google is doing with Android is that you have to buy a Google Android device to be able to use it. Buying a Google device to be able to protest what Google is doing with their Google devices seems counter productive.

I don't know how good /e/OS is, but at least there is a place to get it factory loaded on cell phones and install it on phone brands other than Google.

And then there is Lineage OS, which I've had good luck using the extend the life of phones in the past. I haven't tried it since Play Integrity started being such an important feature, but I suppose that just pushes one to be even more open source on their Lineage device. I've been wanting to try Lineage again, but I misplaced the phone I want to try it on.

jdboyd··on Ask HN: Non-Smart TV Recommendations?
Increasingly zero smart features isn't one of the features of commercial displays. For instance, a lot of Samsungs want (but not require, as far as I know) you to use their VXT content and remote management system, including a mobile app to control calibration and they still run Tizen, like their consumer TVs. LG appears to be similar. NEC might be better about this by making the smarts an optional module. Hopefully all will be less onerous in their implementation of twiddling you with their smart features, but it is hard to get away from even in commercial displays now.
jdboyd··on Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites?
I use a self hosted book manager. To be honest it is effectively write only memory. I assume it is still being written to the DB, but browsing them has been broken for a long time. I assume that I can fix this if I really need to find a bookmark, but so far it has been a few years. Yet, if I don't bookmark it, I just have a terrible time letting go of tabs that I think I'd like to follow up on some month/year in the future.
jdboyd··on Framework Desktop is a mash-up of a regular desktop PC and the Mac Studio
The case doesn't have an expansion slot, but if you order just the ITX motherboard there is an x4 slot. Since it isn't an open ended slot though, the question is where to find a PCIe 4.0 x4 card. You can certainly find 10gig cards that will fit. While the math works for performance, there don't seem to be anyone making 25gbit ethernet cards in x4 though.
jdboyd··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 6.16
After the volunteer turmoil of recent months, I'm very happy to see that this project is able to continue.
jdboyd··on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
Google seems to suggest that the secret to fast travel in Helsinki is to take public transit.
jdboyd··on Claude Code new limits – Important updates to your Max account usage limits
I think that is a common use case. If you run the containers at the same time, it sounds to me like you will just run into the usage limits more quickly.
jdboyd··on PEP 773 – A Python Installation Manager for Windows
At this point I like to use uv for installing my python binaries.
jdboyd··on Basically Everyone Should Be Avoiding Docker
I don't like Docker, but I do like the idea of containers, and have since I moved from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10. These days I frequently use podman and sometimes use lxc. Ignoring the development workstation benefits, I like using containers to bundle (almost) all the configuration elements together, limit resources that one service can take (I know you can do that with cgroups as well), and isolate configurations from each other.
jdboyd··on Anthropic wins fair use victory for AI – but still in trouble for stealing books
Yes
jdboyd··on Switching Pip to Uv in a Dockerized Flask / Django App
What originally convinced me to try uv was the promise of faster container builds, and it certainly delivered on that.

As someone who usually used platform pythons, despite advise against that, uv is now what got me to finally stop doing so.

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