📝 Updated rss feeds
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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<rss version='2.0' xmlns:lj='http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/1.0/' xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
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<channel>
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<title>Petter Reinholdtsen</title>
|
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<description></description>
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<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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<atom:link href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
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<item>
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<title>Managing and using ONVIF IP cameras with Linux</title>
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<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html</link>
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<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html</guid>
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<pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2022 12:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
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<description><p>Recently I have been looking at how to control and collect data
|
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from a handful IP cameras using Linux. I both wanted to change their
|
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settings and to make their imagery available via a free software
|
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service under my control. Here is a summary of the tools I found.</p>
|
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|
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<p>First I had to identify the cameras and their protocols. As far as
|
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I could tell, they were using some SOAP looking protocol and their
|
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internal web server seem to only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer
|
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with some proprietary binary plugin, which in these days of course is
|
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a security disaster and also made it impossible for me to use the
|
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camera web interface. Luckily I discovered that the SOAP looking
|
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protocol is actually following <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">the
|
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ONVIF specification</a>, which seem to be supported by a lot of IP
|
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cameras these days.</p>
|
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|
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<p>Once the protocol was identified, I was able to find what appear to
|
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be the most popular way to configure ONVIF cameras, the free software
|
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Windows tool named
|
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<a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/">ONVIF Device
|
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Manager</a>. Lacking any other options at the time, I tried
|
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unsuccessfully to get it running using Wine, but was missing a dotnet
|
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40 library and I found no way around it to run it on Linux.</p>
|
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|
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<p>The next tool I found to configure the cameras were a non-free Linux Qt
|
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client <a href="https://www.lingodigit.com/onvif_nvcdemo.html">ONVIF
|
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Device Tool</a>. I did not like its terms of use, so did not spend
|
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much time on it.</p>
|
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|
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<p>To collect the video and make it available in a web interface, I
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found the Zoneminder tool in Debian. A recent version was able to
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automatically detect and configure ONVIF devices, so I could use it to
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set up motion detection in and collection of the camera output. I had
|
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initial problems getting the ONVIF autodetection to work, as both
|
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Firefox and Chromium <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1001188">refused
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the inter-tab communication</a> being used by the Zoneminder web
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pages, but managed to get konqueror to work. Apparently the "Enhanced
|
||||
Tracking Protection" in Firefox cause the problem. I ended up
|
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upgrading to the Bookworm edition of Zoneminder in the process to try
|
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to fix the issue, and believe the problem might be solved now.</p>
|
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|
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<p>In the process I came across the nice Linux GUI tool
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<a href="https://gitlab.com/caspermeijn/onvifviewer/">ONVIF Viewer</a>
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allowing me to preview the camera output and validate the login
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passwords required. Sadly its author has grown tired of maintaining
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the software, so it might not see any future updates. Which is sad,
|
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as the viewer is sightly unstable and the picture tend to lock up.
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Note, this lockup might be due to limitations in the cameras and not
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the viewer implementation. I suspect the camera is only able to
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provide pictures to one client at the time, and the Zoneminder feed
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might interfere with the GUI viewer. I have
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<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1000820">asked for the tool to be
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included in Debian</a>.</p>
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<p>Finally, I found what appear to be very nice Linux free software
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replacement for the Windows tool, named
|
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<a href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">libonvif</a>. It
|
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provide a C library to talk to ONVIF devices as well as a command line
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and GUI tool using the library. Using the GUI tool I was able to change
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the admin passwords and update other settings of the cameras. I have
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<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1021980">asked for the package to be
|
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included in Debian</a>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
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|
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<p><strong>Update 2022-10-20</strong>: Since my initial publication of
|
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this text, I got several suggestions for more free software Linux
|
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tools. There is <a href="https://github.com/quatanium/python-onvif">a
|
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ONVIF python library</a> (already
|
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<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/824240">requested into Debian</a>) and
|
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<a href="https://github.com/FalkTannhaeuser/python-onvif-zeep">a python 3
|
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fork</a> using a different SOAP dependency. There is also
|
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<a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/onvif/">support for
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ONVIF in Home Assistant</a>, and there is an alternative to Zoneminder
|
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called <a href="https://www.shinobi.video/">Shinobi</a>. The latter
|
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two are not included in Debian either. I have not tested any of these
|
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so far.</p>
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</description>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator's Handbook</title>
|
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<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html</link>
|
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<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html</guid>
|
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<pubDate>Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
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<description><p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
|
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<p>(The picture is of the previous edition.)</p>
|
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|
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<p>Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of
|
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the "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
|
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Handbook</a>" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The
|
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english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the
|
||||
translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one
|
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way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster
|
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edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%. The
|
||||
complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has
|
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been published in several languages over the years. The translations
|
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are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue. The
|
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last time I checked, it complete text was available in English,
|
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Norwegian Bokmål, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish.
|
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In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan,
|
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Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
|
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Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish,
|
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Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The translation is conducted on
|
||||
<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
|
||||
hosted weblate project page</a>. Prospective translators are
|
||||
recommeded to subscribe to
|
||||
<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
|
||||
translators mailing list</a> and should also check out
|
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<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
|
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contributors</a>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I am one of the Norwegian Bokmål translators of this book, and we
|
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have just started. Your contribution is most welcome.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
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|
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<item>
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<title>Automatic LinuxCNC servo PID tuning?</title>
|
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<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Sat, 16 Jul 2022 22:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the
|
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>
|
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller">PID
|
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controller</a>, I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values
|
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that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is. It
|
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proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded
|
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in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X
|
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and Y to move accurately and reliably. But while climbing up this
|
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rather steep learning curve, I discovered that some motor control
|
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systems are able to tune their PID controllers. I got the impression
|
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from the documentation that LinuxCNC were not. This proved to be not
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true</p>
|
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|
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<p>The LinuxCNC
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<a href="http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/pid.9.html">pid
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component</a> is the recommended PID controller to use. It uses eight
|
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constants <tt>Pgain</tt>, <tt>Igain</tt>, <tt>Dgain</tt>,
|
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<tt>bias</tt>, <tt>FF0</tt>, <tt>FF1</tt>, <tt>FF2</tt> and
|
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<tt>FF3</tt> to calculate the output value based on current and wanted
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state, and all of these need to have a sensible value for the
|
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controller to behave properly. Note, there are even more values
|
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involved, theser are just the most important ones. In my case I need
|
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the X, Y and Z axes to follow the requested path with little error.
|
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This has proved quite a challenge for someone who have never tuned a
|
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PID controller before, but there is at least some help to be found.
|
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|
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<p>I discovered that included in LinuxCNC was this old PID component
|
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at_pid claiming to have auto tuning capabilities. Sadly it had been
|
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neglected since 2011, and could not be used as a plug in replacement
|
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for the default pid component. One would have to rewriting the
|
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LinuxCNC HAL setup to test at_pid. This was rather sad, when I wanted
|
||||
to quickly test auto tuning to see if it did a better job than me at
|
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figuring out good P, I and D values to use.</p>
|
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|
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<p>I decided to have a look if the situation could be improved. This
|
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involved trying to understand the code and history of the pid and
|
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at_pid components. Apparently they had a common ancestor, as code
|
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structure, comments and variable names were quite close to each other.
|
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Sadly this was not reflected in the git history, making it hard to
|
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figure out what really happened. My guess is that the author of
|
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<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/at_pid.c">at_pid.c</a>
|
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took a version of
|
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<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/pid.c">pid.c</a>,
|
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rewrote it to follow the structure he wished pid.c to have, then added
|
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support for auto tuning and finally got it included into the LinuxCNC
|
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repository. The restructuring and lack of early history made it
|
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harder to figure out which part of the code were relevant to the auto
|
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tuning, and which part of the code needed to be updated to work the
|
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same way as the current pid.c implementation. I started by trying to
|
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isolate relevant changes in pid.c, and applying them to at_pid.c. My
|
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aim was to make sure the at_pid component could replace the pid
|
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component with a simple change in the HAL setup loadrt line, without
|
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having to "rewire" the rest of the HAL configuration. After a few
|
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hours following this approach, I had learned quite a lot about the
|
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code structure of both components, while concluding I was heading down
|
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the wrong rabbit hole, and should get back to the surface and find a
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different path.</p>
|
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<p>For the second attempt, I decided to throw away all the PID control
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related part of the original at_pid.c, and instead isolate and lift
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the auto tuning part of the code and inject it into a copy of pid.c.
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This ensured compatibility with the current pid component, while
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adding auto tuning as a run time option. To make it easier to identify
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the relevant parts in the future, I wrapped all the auto tuning code
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with '#ifdef AUTO_TUNER'. The end result behave just like the current
|
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pid component by default, as that part of the code is identical. The
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<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/1820">end result
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entered the LinuxCNC master branch</a> a few days ago.</p>
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|
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<p>To enable auto tuning, one need to set a few HAL pins in the PID
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component. The most important ones are <tt>tune-effort</tt>,
|
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<tt>tune-mode</tt> and <tt>tune-start</tt>. But lets take a step
|
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back, and see what the auto tuning code will do. I do not know the
|
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mathematical foundation of the at_pid algorithm, but from observation
|
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I can tell that the algorithm will, when enabled, produce a square
|
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wave pattern centered around the <tt>bias</tt> value on the output pin
|
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of the PID controller. This can be seen using the HAL Scope provided
|
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by LinuxCNC. In my case, this is translated into voltage (+-10V) sent
|
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to the motor controller, which in turn is translated into motor speed.
|
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So at_pid will ask the motor to move the axis back and forth. The
|
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number of cycles in the pattern is controlled by the
|
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<tt>tune-cycles</tt> pin, and the extremes of the wave pattern is
|
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controlled by the <tt>tune-effort</tt> pin. Of course, trying to
|
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change the direction of a physical object instantly (as in going
|
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directly from a positive voltage to the equivalent negative voltage)
|
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do not change velocity instantly, and it take some time for the object
|
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to slow down and move in the opposite direction. This result in a
|
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more smooth movement wave form, as the axis in question were vibrating
|
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back and forth. When the axis reached the target speed in the
|
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opposing direction, the auto tuner change direction again. After
|
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several of these changes, the average time delay between the 'peaks'
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and 'valleys' of this movement graph is then used to calculate
|
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proposed values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain, and insert them into the
|
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HAL model to use by the pid controller. The auto tuned settings are
|
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not great, but htye work a lot better than the values I had been able
|
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to cook up on my own, at least for the horizontal X and Y axis. But I
|
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had to use very small <tt>tune-effort<tt> values, as my motor
|
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controllers error out if the voltage change too quickly. I've been
|
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less lucky with the Z axis, which is moving a heavy object up and
|
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down, and seem to confuse the algorithm. The Z axis movement became a
|
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lot better when I introduced a <tt>bias</tt> value to counter the
|
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gravitational drag, but I will have to work a lot more on the Z axis
|
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PID values.</p>
|
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|
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<p>Armed with this knowledge, it is time to look at how to do the
|
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tuning. Lets say the HAL configuration in question load the PID
|
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component for X, Y and Z like this:</p>
|
||||
|
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<blockquote><pre>
|
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loadrt pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
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</pre></blockquote>
|
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|
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<p>Armed with the new and improved at_pid component, the new line will
|
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look like this:</p>
|
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|
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<blockquote><pre>
|
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loadrt at_pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
|
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</pre></blockquote>
|
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|
||||
<p>The rest of the HAL setup can stay the same. This work because the
|
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components are referenced by name. If the component had used count=3
|
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instead, all use of pid.# had to be changed to at_pid.#.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>To start tuning the X axis, move the axis to the middle of its
|
||||
range, to make sure it do not hit anything when it start moving back
|
||||
and forth. Next, set the <tt>tune-effort</tt> to a low number in the
|
||||
output range. I used 0.1 as my initial value. Next, assign 1 to the
|
||||
<tt>tune-mode</tt> value. Note, this will disable the pid controlling
|
||||
part and feed 0 to the output pin, which in my case initially caused a
|
||||
lot of drift. In my case it proved to be a good idea with X and Y to
|
||||
tune the motor driver to make sure 0 voltage stopped the motor
|
||||
rotation. On the other hand, for the Z axis this proved to be a bad
|
||||
idea, so it will depend on your setup. It might help to set the
|
||||
<tt>bias</tt> value to a output value that reduce or eliminate the
|
||||
axis drift. Finally, after setting <tt>tune-mode</tt>, set
|
||||
<tt>tune-start</tt> to 1 to activate the auto tuning. If all go well,
|
||||
your axis will vibrate for a few seconds and when it is done, new
|
||||
values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain will be active. To test them,
|
||||
change <tt>tune-mode</tt> back to 0. Note that this might cause the
|
||||
machine to suddenly jerk as it bring the axis back to its commanded
|
||||
position, which it might have drifted away from during tuning. To
|
||||
summarize with some halcmd lines:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-effort 0.1
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-mode 1
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-start 1
|
||||
# wait for the tuning to complete
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-mode 0
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>After doing this task quite a few times while trying to figure out
|
||||
how to properly tune the PID controllers on the machine in, I decided
|
||||
to figure out if this process could be automated, and wrote a script
|
||||
to do the entire tuning process from power on. The end result will
|
||||
ensure the machine is powered on and ready to run, home all axis if it
|
||||
is not already done, check that the extra tuning pins are available,
|
||||
move the axis to its mid point, run the auto tuning and re-enable the
|
||||
pid controller when it is done. It can be run several times. Check
|
||||
out the
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/SebKuzminsky/MazakVQC1540/blob/bon-dev/scripts/run-auto-pid-tuner">run-auto-pid-tuner</a>
|
||||
script on github if you want to learn how it is done.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>My hope is that this little adventure can inspire someone who know
|
||||
more about motor PID controller tuning can implement even better
|
||||
algorithms for automatic PID tuning in LinuxCNC, making life easier
|
||||
for both me and all the others that want to use LinuxCNC but lack the
|
||||
in depth knowledge needed to tune PID controllers well.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>My free software activity of late (2022)</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_free_software_activity_of_late__2022_.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_free_software_activity_of_late__2022_.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jun 2022 14:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>I guess it is time to bring some light on the various free software
|
||||
and open culture activities and projects I have worked on or been
|
||||
involved in the last year and a half.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>First, lets mention the book
|
||||
<a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/">releases I managed to
|
||||
publish</a>. The Cory Doctorow book "Hvordan knuse
|
||||
overvåkningskapitalismen" argue that it is not the magic machine
|
||||
learning of the big technology companies that causes the surveillance
|
||||
capitalism to thrive, it is the lack of trust busting to enforce
|
||||
existing anti-monopoly laws. I also published a family of
|
||||
dictionaries for machinists, one sorted on the English words, one
|
||||
sorted on the Norwegian and the last sorted on the North Sámi words.
|
||||
A bit on the back burner but not forgotten is the Debian
|
||||
Administrators Handbook, where a new edition is being worked on. I
|
||||
have not spent as much time as I want to help bring it to completion,
|
||||
but hope I will get more spare time to look at it before the end of
|
||||
the year.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>With my Debian had I have spent time on several projects, both
|
||||
updating existing packages, helping to bring in new packages and
|
||||
working with upstream projects to try to get them ready to go into
|
||||
Debian. The list is rather long, and I will only mention my own
|
||||
isenkram, openmotor, vlc bittorrent plugin, xprintidle, norwegian
|
||||
letter style for latex, bs1770gain, and recordmydesktop. In addition
|
||||
to these I have sponsored several packages into Debian, like audmes.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The last year I have looked at several infrastructure projects for
|
||||
collecting meter data and video surveillance recordings. This include
|
||||
several ONVIF related tools like onvifviewer and zoneminder as well as
|
||||
rtl-433, wmbusmeters and rtl-wmbus.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>In parallel with this I have looked at fabrication related free
|
||||
software solutions like pycam and LinuxCNC. The latter recently
|
||||
gained improved translation support using po4a and weblate, which was
|
||||
a harder nut to crack that I had anticipated when I started.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Several hours have been spent translating free software to
|
||||
Norwegian Bokmål on the Weblate hosted service. Do not have a
|
||||
complete list, but you will find my contributions in at least gnucash,
|
||||
minetest and po4a.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I also spent quite some time on the Norwegian archiving specification
|
||||
Noark 5, and its companion project Nikita implementing the API
|
||||
specification for Noark 5.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Recently I have been looking into free software tools to do company
|
||||
accounting here in Norway., which present an interesting mix between
|
||||
law, rules, regulations, format specifications and API interfaces.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I guess I should also mention the Norwegian community driven
|
||||
government interfacing projects Mimes Brønn and Fiksgatami, which have
|
||||
ended up in a kind of limbo while the future of the projects is being
|
||||
worked out.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>These are just a few of the projects I have been involved it, and
|
||||
would like to give more visibility. I'll stop here to avoid delaying
|
||||
this post.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>LinuxCNC translators life just got a bit easier</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Fri, 3 Jun 2022 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a> system, I
|
||||
proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for
|
||||
translators. The original system consisted of independently written
|
||||
documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track
|
||||
changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to
|
||||
know how much was left to translated. By using
|
||||
<a href="https://po4a.org/">the po4a system</a> to generate POT and PO
|
||||
files from the English documentation, this can be improved. A small
|
||||
team of LinuxCNC contributors got together and today our labour
|
||||
finally payed off. Since a few hours ago, it is now possible to
|
||||
translate <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/linuxcnc/">the
|
||||
LinuxCNC documentation on Weblate</a>, alongside the program itself.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The effort to migrate the documentation to use po4a has been both
|
||||
slow and frustrating. I am very happy we finally made it.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2022 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
|
||||
located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
|
||||
not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
|
||||
information that I would like). The
|
||||
<a href="https://support.lenovo.com/no/en/search?query=thinkpad firmware bios upgrade iso&SearchType=Customer search&searchLocation=Masthead">download
|
||||
from Lenovo</a> is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
|
||||
when all I got available is a USB memory stick. I tried booting the
|
||||
ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work. But genisoimage came to
|
||||
the rescue.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<P>The geteltorito program in
|
||||
<a href="http://tracker.debian.org/cdrkit">the genisoimage binary
|
||||
package</a> is able to convert the bootable ISO image to a bootable
|
||||
USB stick using a simple command line recipe, which I then can write
|
||||
to the most recently inserted USB stick:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
geteltorito -o usbstick.img lenovo-firmware.iso
|
||||
sudo dd bs=10M if=usbstick.img of=$(ls -tr /dev/sd?|tail -1)
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This USB stick booted the firmware upgrader just fine, and in a few
|
||||
minutes my machine had the latest and greatest BIOS firmware in place.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Playing and encoding AV1 in Debian Bullseye</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Playing_and_encoding_AV1_in_Debian_Bullseye.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Playing_and_encoding_AV1_in_Debian_Bullseye.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Sat, 16 Apr 2022 08:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Inspired by the recent news of
|
||||
<a href="https://slashdot.org/story/22/04/03/2039219/intel-beats-amd-and-nvidia-with-arc-gpus-full-av1-support">AV1
|
||||
hardware encoding support from Intel</a>, I decided to look into
|
||||
the state of AV1 on Linux today. AV1 is a
|
||||
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160618103850/http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free
|
||||
and open standard</a> as defined by Digistan without any royalty
|
||||
payment requirement, unlike its much used competitor encoding
|
||||
H.264. While looking, I came across an 5 year
|
||||
<a href="https://askubuntu.com/questions/1061908/how-to-encode-and-playback-video-with-the-av1-codec-on-bionic-beaver-18-04">old
|
||||
question on askubuntu.com</a> which in turn inspired me to check out
|
||||
how things are in Debian Stable regarding AV1. The test file listed
|
||||
in the question (askubuntu_test_aom.mp4) did not exist any more, so I
|
||||
tracked down a different set of test files on
|
||||
<a href="https://av1.webmfiles.org/">av1.webmfiles.org</a> to test them
|
||||
with the various video tools I had installed on my machine. I was
|
||||
happy to discover that AV1 decoding and playback worked with almost
|
||||
every tool I tested:
|
||||
|
||||
<table align="center">
|
||||
<tr><td>mediainfo</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>dragonplayer</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>ffmpeg / ffplay</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>gnome-mplayer</td> <td>fail</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>mplayer</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>mpv</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>parole</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>vlc</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>firefox</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>chromium</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>AV1 encoding is available in Debian Stable from the aom-tools
|
||||
version 1.0.0.errata1-3 package, using the aomenc tool. The encoding
|
||||
using the package in Debian Stable is quite slow, with the frame rate
|
||||
for my 10 second test video at around 0.25 fps. My 10 second video
|
||||
test took 16 minutes and 11 seconds on my test machine.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I tested by first running ffmpeg and then aomenc using the recipe
|
||||
provided by the askubuntu recipe above. I had to remove the
|
||||
'--row-mt=1' option, as it was not supported in my 1.0.0 version. The
|
||||
encoding only used a single thread, according to <tt>top</tt>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
ffmpeg -i some-old-video.ogv -t 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p video.y4m
|
||||
aomenc --fps=24/1 -u 0 --codec=av1 --target-bitrate=1000 \
|
||||
--lag-in-frames=25 --auto-alt-ref=1 -t 24 --cpu-used=8 \
|
||||
--tile-columns=2 --tile-rows=2 -o output.webm video.y4m
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As version 1.0.0 currently have several
|
||||
<a href="https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/aom">unsolved
|
||||
security issues in Debian Stable</a>, and to see if the recent
|
||||
backport <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/aom">provided in
|
||||
Debian</a> is any quicker, I ran <tt>apt -t bullseye-backports install
|
||||
aom-tools</tt> to fetch the backported version and re-encoded the
|
||||
video using the latest version. This time the '--row-mt=1' option
|
||||
worked, and the encoding was done in 46 seconds with a frame rate of
|
||||
around 5.22 fps. This time it seem to be using all my four cores to
|
||||
encode. Encoding speed is still too low for streaming and real time,
|
||||
which would require frame rates above 25 fps, but might be good enough
|
||||
for offline encoding.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I am very happy to see AV1 playback working so well with the
|
||||
default tools in Debian Stable. I hope the encoding situation improve
|
||||
too, allowing even a slow old computer like my 10 year old laptop to
|
||||
be used for encoding.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Få en slutt på Digitale utslipp</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/F__en_slutt_p__Digitale_utslipp.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/F__en_slutt_p__Digitale_utslipp.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Mar 2022 22:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>På onsdag sendte jeg følgende epost til Utdanningsetaten i Oslo
|
||||
kommune (UDE). Fikk beskjed om at min henvendelse har saksnummer
|
||||
22/7559-1 i den
|
||||
<a href="https://www.oslo.kommune.no/etater-foretak-og-ombud/utdanningsetaten/postjournal-utdanningsetaten/">offentlige
|
||||
postjournalen til UDE</a>. Jeg er spent på hva slags respons jeg får.
|
||||
Mistenker jo de fleste som sprer sine nettsideleseres
|
||||
personopplysninger til utlandet ikke har tenkt så nøye igjennom hva de
|
||||
gjør, og at det er håp om at de tenker seg litt nøyere om hvis de blir
|
||||
klar over problemstillingen. Vet du noen som burde få tilsvarede
|
||||
beskjed og spørsmål? Kanskje du kan sende dem en epost. Hvis alle
|
||||
bidrar blir det kanskje litt bedre.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>To: postmottak (at) osloskolen.no
|
||||
<br>Subject: Digitale utslipp fra osloskolens nettsider</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Hei.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Jeg ser at osloskolens nettsider har digitale utslipp av
|
||||
personopplysninger til Google, Facebook og andre, blant annet omtalt
|
||||
på &lt;URL: <a href="https://aktuelt.osloskolen.no/personvernerklaring-for-osloskolen/informasjonskapsler/">https://aktuelt.osloskolen.no/personvernerklaring-for-osloskolen/informasjonskapsler/</a>
|
||||
>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>&lt;URL: <a href="https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/">https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/</a> > kan være et nyttig verktøy for å holde øye med utslippsomfanget på ulike sider.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Kanskje det er en ide å gjøre noe med det, jamfør &lt;URL: <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/debatt-det-enkleste-tiltaket-er-a-skru-av-google-analytics/517378">https://www.digi.no/artikler/debatt-det-enkleste-tiltaket-er-a-skru-av-google-analytics/517378</a> >?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Et alternativ til Google Analytics kan være en lokalt installert
|
||||
utgave av &lt;URL:
|
||||
<a href="https://matomo.org/">https://matomo.org/</a> >. Den og flere
|
||||
andre alternativer kan finnes via
|
||||
&lt;URL: <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sverige-vil-skrote-amerikansk-skytjeneste-her-er-alternativene/516223?key=5QsV0wRG">https://www.digi.no/artikler/sverige-vil-skrote-amerikansk-skytjeneste-her-er-alternativene/516223?key=5QsV0wRG</a> >
|
||||
på bakgrunn av at svenske myndigheter har innsett at dagens praksis
|
||||
nok er både lite lur og ulovlig. Der henger Norge litt etter, men
|
||||
osloskolen har her mulighet til å være litt i forkant. :)</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Fint om dere kan gi beskjed hvilket saksnummer denne henvendelsen får i
|
||||
offentlig postjournal når den er mottatt.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
</p>Flere og flere innser at slik spredning av personopplysninger er
|
||||
ugreit. Det har pågått i mange år. Ser jeg blogget
|
||||
<a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Det_er_jo_makta_som_er_mest_s_rbar_ved_massiv_overv_kning_av_Internett.html">første
|
||||
gang om Google Analytics i 2013</a> og
|
||||
<a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Snurpenot_overv_kning_av_sensitiv_personinformasjon.html">analyserte
|
||||
omfanget i 2015</a>, men det er et langt lerret å bleke.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Som vanlig, hvis du bruker Bitcoin og ønsker å vise din støtte til
|
||||
det jeg driver med, setter jeg pris på om du sender Bitcoin-donasjoner
|
||||
til min adresse
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.
|
||||
Merk, betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Publish Hargassner wood chip boiler state to MQTT</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Publish_Hargassner_wood_chip_boiler_state_to_MQTT.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Publish_Hargassner_wood_chip_boiler_state_to_MQTT.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Sat, 12 Mar 2022 06:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Recently I had a look at a
|
||||
<a href="https://www.hargassner.at/">Hargassner</a>
|
||||
<a href="https://www.hargassner.at/en/products/wood-chip-boiler.html">wood
|
||||
chip boiler</a>, and what kind of free software can be used to monitor
|
||||
and control it. The boiler can be connected to some cloud service via
|
||||
what the producer call an Internet Gateway, which seem to be a
|
||||
computer connecting to the boiler and passing the information gathered
|
||||
to the cloud. I discovered the boiler controller got an IP address on
|
||||
the local network and listen on TCP port 23 to provide status
|
||||
information as a text line of numbers. It also provide a HTTP server
|
||||
listening on port 80, but I have not yet figured out what it can do
|
||||
beside return an error code.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>If I am to believe various free software implementations talking to
|
||||
such boiler, the interpretation of the line of numbers differ between
|
||||
type of boiler and software version on the boiler. By comparing the
|
||||
list of numbers on the front panel of the boiler with the numbers
|
||||
returned via TCP, I have been able to figure out several of the
|
||||
numbers, but there are a lot left to understand. I've located several
|
||||
temperature measurements and hours running values, as well as oxygen
|
||||
measurements and counters.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
I decided to write a simple parser in Python for the values I figured
|
||||
out so far, and a simple MQTT injector publishing both the interpreted
|
||||
and the unknown values on a MQTT bus to make collecting and graphing
|
||||
simpler. The end result is available from the
|
||||
<a href="https://gitlab.com/petterreinholdtsen/hargassner2mqtt">hargassner2mqtt
|
||||
project page</a> on gitlab. I very much welcome patches extending the
|
||||
parser to understand more values, boiler types and software versions.
|
||||
I do not really expect very few free software developers got their
|
||||
hands on such unit to experiment, but it would be fun if others too find
|
||||
this project useful.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Run your industrial metal working machine using Debian?</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Wed, 2 Mar 2022 18:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>After many months of hard work by the good people involved in
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>, the
|
||||
system was accepted Sunday
|
||||
<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linuxcnc">into Debian</a>.
|
||||
Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from
|
||||
<a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=linuxcnc">its
|
||||
popularity-contest numbers</a> that people have been reporting its use
|
||||
since 2012. <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/">Its project site</a> might
|
||||
be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting
|
||||
via Tor.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering? Perhaps a
|
||||
Wikipedia quote is in place?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
"LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
|
||||
machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
|
||||
cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
|
||||
joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
|
||||
several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
|
||||
interactive development)."
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>It can even control 3D printers. And even though the Wikipedia
|
||||
page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel
|
||||
features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features
|
||||
provided by the Debian kernel.
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/linuxcnc/linuxcnc">The source code</a> is
|
||||
available from Github. The last few months I've been involved in the
|
||||
translation setup for the program and documentation. Translators are
|
||||
most welcome to
|
||||
<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/linuxcnc/">join the
|
||||
effort</a> using Weblate.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
</channel>
|
||||
</rss>
|
||||
BIN
newsboat/newsboat/cache.db
Normal file
BIN
newsboat/newsboat/cache.db
Normal file
Binary file not shown.
14
newsboat/newsboat/history.cmdline
Normal file
14
newsboat/newsboat/history.cmdline
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
|
|||
2
|
||||
q
|
||||
19
|
||||
3
|
||||
3
|
||||
q
|
||||
3
|
||||
3
|
||||
3
|
||||
q
|
||||
3
|
||||
3
|
||||
3
|
||||
3
|
||||
29768
newsboat/newsboat/rss/0pointer.rss
Normal file
29768
newsboat/newsboat/rss/0pointer.rss
Normal file
File diff suppressed because it is too large
Load diff
657
newsboat/newsboat/rss/VYPJXZwH.rss
Normal file
657
newsboat/newsboat/rss/VYPJXZwH.rss
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,657 @@
|
|||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0"
|
||||
xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
|
||||
xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
|
||||
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
|
||||
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
|
||||
xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
|
||||
xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
|
||||
|
||||
xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss"
|
||||
xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
|
||||
>
|
||||
|
||||
<channel>
|
||||
<title>Joel on Software</title>
|
||||
<atom:link href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com</link>
|
||||
<description></description>
|
||||
<lastBuildDate>Tue, 01 Feb 2022 21:24:23 +0000</lastBuildDate>
|
||||
<language>en-US</language>
|
||||
<sy:updatePeriod>
|
||||
hourly </sy:updatePeriod>
|
||||
<sy:updateFrequency>
|
||||
1 </sy:updateFrequency>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<image>
|
||||
<url>https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/11969842.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1</url>
|
||||
<title>Joel on Software</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com</link>
|
||||
<width>32</width>
|
||||
<height>32</height>
|
||||
</image>
|
||||
<site xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">119105578</site> <item>
|
||||
<title>Making the web better. With blocks!</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/01/27/making-the-web-better-with-blocks/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Jan 2022 17:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3906</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long… <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/01/27/making-the-web-better-with-blocks/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"Making the web better. With blocks!"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of <em>blocks</em>. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can insert into this page:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/wordpressblocks.png?resize=260%2C573&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3908" width="260" height="573" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/wordpressblocks.png?resize=465%2C1024&ssl=1 465w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/wordpressblocks.png?resize=136%2C300&ssl=1 136w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/wordpressblocks.png?w=676&ssl=1 676w" sizes="(max-width: 260px) 100vw, 260px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This kind of “insert block” user interface concept is showing up in almost every blogging tool, web editor, note-taking app, and content management system. People like it and it makes sense. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>We have seem to have standardized on one thing: the <strong>/</strong> key to insert a new block. Everything else, though, is completely proprietary and non-standard. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Until now, every app that wants blocks has to implement them from scratch. Want a calendar block? Some kind of fancy Kanban board? Something to embed image galleries? Code it up yourself, buddy.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As a result of the non-standardization of blocks, our end-users suffer. If someone is using my blog engine, they can only use those blocks that I had time to implement. Those blocks may be pretty basic or incomplete. Users might want to use a fancier block that they saw in WordPress or Medium or Notion, but my editor doesn’t have it. Blocks can’t be shared or moved around very easily, and our users are limited to the features and capabilities that we had time to re-implement.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>To fix this, we’re going to create a protocol called the <a href="https://blockprotocol.org">Block Protocol</a>. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>It’s open, free, non-proprietary, we want it to be everywhere on the web. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>It’s just a protocol that embedding applications can use to embed blocks. Any block can be used in any embedding application if they all follow the protocol.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Our hope is that this will make life much easier for app developers to support a huge variety of block types. At the same time, anyone can develop a block once and have it work in any blog platform, note-taking app, or content management system. It is all 100% free, open, and any sample code we develop showing how to use the protocol will be open-source.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>We’ve released a very early draft of the Block Protocol, and we’ve started building some very simple blocks and a simple editor that can host them.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-style-default"><img loading="lazy" width="730" height="485" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_1-v2.png?resize=730%2C485&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3923" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_1-v2.png?resize=1024%2C680&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_1-v2.png?resize=300%2C199&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_1-v2.png?resize=768%2C510&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_1-v2.png?w=1200&ssl=1 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>We’re hoping to foster an open source community that creates a huge open source library of amazing blocks:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-style-default"><img loading="lazy" width="730" height="333" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_2-v2.png?resize=730%2C333&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3924" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_2-v2.png?resize=1024%2C467&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_2-v2.png?resize=300%2C137&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_2-v2.png?resize=768%2C350&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bp_illustration_2-v2.png?w=1200&ssl=1 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>What can be a block? </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<ul><li>Anything that makes sense in a document: a paragraph, list, table, diagram, or a kanban board. </li><li>Anything that makes sense on the web: an order form, a calendar, a video.</li><li>Anything that lets you interact with structured or typed data: I’ll get to that in a minute.</li></ul>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>If you work on any kind of editor—be it a blogging tool, a note-taking app, a content management system, or anything like that—you should allow your users to embed blocks that conform to the Block Protocol. This way you can write the embedding code once and immediately make your editor able to embed a rich variety of block types with no extra work on your part.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>If you work on any kind of custom data type that might make sense to embed in web pages, you should support the Block Protocol. That way anybody with a hosting application that supports the protocol can embed your custom data type.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Because it’s all 100% open, we hope that the Block Protocol will become a web standard and commonly used across the Internet.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>That will mean that common block types, from paragraphs and lists to images and videos, will get better and better. But it will also mean that some esoteric block types will be embeddable anywhere. Want to create a block that shows the Great Circle routing for a flight between two airports? Write the code for the block once and it can be embedded anywhere. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Oh, and <strong>one more thing</strong>. Blocks can be highly structured, that is, they can have types. That means that they magically become machine-readable without screen scraping. For example, if you want to create an event block to represent an event on a calendar, you will be able to specify a <em>schema</em> that describes the event data type in a standard way. That way tools like calendars can instantly parse and understand web pages that contain your event block, reliably.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Over time, it will mean that anyone can easy publish complex, typed data sets on the web that are automatically machine-readable without extra work. (Have you ever seen one of those websites where there’s a link to “download the data set in .XLS format”? Yeah, say goodbye to that.)</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p><strong>We’re going public with this very early in the development process</strong> because we need a lot of help! </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Everything we have so far is version 0.1. It’s simple and not very good yet and going to need some iteration before it has the hope of truly being a useful web protocol. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This is an open protocol, free and non-proprietary, and it’s going to make the open web much better if widely adopted, so we need to start getting people involved early, giving us feedback, and building new things!</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p><a href="https://blockprotocol.org">Go read more about the Block Protocol now!</a></p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3906</post-id> </item>
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Kinda a big announcement</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announcement/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jun 2021 16:36:19 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3810</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before… <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announcement/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"Kinda a big announcement"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete that it was impossible to find anyone who knew enough to work on it. And yet they still have this old COM code base, and they still have one old programmer holding onto their job by being the only human left on the planet with a brain big enough to manually manage multithreaded objects. I remember that COM was like Gödels Theorem: it seemed important, and you could understand it all long enough to pass an exam, but ultimately it is mostly just a demonstration of how far human intelligence can be made to stretch under extreme duress.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>And, <em>bubbeleh</em>, if there is one thing we have learned, it’s that the things that make it <em>easier</em> on your brain are the things that matter.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1.jpg?resize=256%2C192&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3822" width="256" height="192" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1152&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1536&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63890965609__42347879-1BEE-4AD0-B24F-289733D844C1-scaled.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 256px) 100vw, 256px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure></div>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Programming changes slowly. Really slowly.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Since I learned to code forty years ago, one thing that has mostly, <em>mostly</em>, changed about programming is that most developers no longer have to manage their own memory. Even getting that going took a long long time.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I took a few stupid years trying to be the CEO of a growing company during which I didn’t have time to code, and when I came back to web programming, after a break of about 10 years, I found Node, React, and other goodies, which are, don’t get me wrong, amazing? Really really great? But I also found that it took approximately the same amount of work to make a CRUD web app as it always has, and that there were some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Where are the flying cars?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The biggest problem is that developers of programming tools love to add things and hate to take things away. So things get harder and harder and more and more complex because there are more and more ways to do the same thing, each has pros and cons, and you are likely to spend as much time just figuring out which “rich text editor” to use as you are to implement it.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>(Bill Gates, 1990: “How many f*cking programmers in this company are working on rich text editors?!”)</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992.jpg?resize=256%2C192&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3816" width="256" height="192" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1152&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1536&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_7992-scaled.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 256px) 100vw, 256px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure></div>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>So, in this world of slow, gradual change and alleged improvement, one thing did change literally overnight, or, to be precise, on September 15, 2008, which was when <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/">Stack Overflow launched</a>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Six-to-eight weeks before that, Stack Overflow was only an idea. (*Actually Jeff started development in April). Six-to-eight weeks after that, it was a standard part of every developer’s toolkit: something they used every day. Something <em>had</em> changed about programming, and changed very fast: the way developers learned and got help and taught each other.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>For many years, I was able to coast by telling delightful little stories about our incredible growth numbers, about the pay web site we made obsolete, and even about that one time when a Major Computer Book Publisher threatened to BURY US and launched their own Q&A platform, which turned out to be more of a Scoff Generator than a Q&A platform, but actually now almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire <em>wall</em> of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Stack Overflow got to be pretty big as a business. The company grew faster than any individual’s skills at managing companies, especially mine, so a lot of the business team has changed over, and we now have a really world-class, experienced team that is doing much better than us founders. We’ve done incredible work building a recruiting platform for great developers, a “reach and relevance” platform for getting developers excited about your products, and, most importantly, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/teams">Stack Overflow for Teams</a>, which is growing so quickly that soon every developer in the world will be using the power of Stack Overflow to get help with their own code base, not just common languages and libraries. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="730" height="548" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender.jpg?resize=730%2C548&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3819" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1152&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1536&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/64308401762__1F48CB72-2FC2-4F18-9337-91AEB9E491C7.fullsizerender-scaled.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>And yeah, the one thing I made sure of was that everyone that came into the company understood exactly why Stack Overflow works, and what is important to the developers that it is by and for. So while we haven’t always been perfect, we have kept true to our mission, and the current leadership is just as committed to the vision of Stack Overflow as the founders are.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining <a href="https://www.prosus.com">Prosus</a>. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here">hire excellent people</a>. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-video"><video controls src="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63017985094__5783FDD0-E895-4A7F-BB5A-A1CD6B6C9DCF.mov"></video></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I’ve been out of the day-to-day for a while now. Together with David Wilkinson, I’m helping to build <a href="https://hash.ai">HASH</a>. HASH makes it easy to build powerful simulations and make better decisions. As we worked on that, we discovered that too much of the data that you might need to run simulations needs to be fixed up before you can use it. That’s because data is often published on the web, using page description languages that are more concerned with formatting and consumption by humans. They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864.jpg?resize=288%2C512&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3820" width="288" height="512" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864-scaled.jpg?resize=576%2C1024&ssl=1 576w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864-scaled.jpg?resize=169%2C300&ssl=1 169w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C1365&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864-scaled.jpg?resize=864%2C1536&ssl=1 864w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864-scaled.jpg?resize=1152%2C2048&ssl=1 1152w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C2133&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/D88FF351-904A-4C36-94C7-0C27D9BEF864-scaled.jpg?w=1440&ssl=1 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 288px) 100vw, 288px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure></div>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>We think we have an interesting way to fix this. If it works, we’ll change the web as quickly and completely as Stack Overflow changed programming. But it’s kind of ambitious and maybe a little too GRAND. If you are interested in joining that crazy journey, do reach out. The whole thing is going to be open source, so just hang on, and we’ll have something up on GitHub for you to play with.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>See you soon!</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p></p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<enclosure url="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/63017985094__5783FDD0-E895-4A7F-BB5A-A1CD6B6C9DCF.mov" length="1226132" type="video/quicktime" />
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3810</post-id> </item>
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2020/06/18/hash-a-free-online-platform-for-modeling-the-world/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2020 14:12:25 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3701</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them. <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2020/06/18/hash-a-free-online-platform-for-modeling-the-world/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Sometimes when you’re trying to figure out the way the world works, basic math is enough to get you going. If we increase the hot water flow by <em>x</em>, the temperature of the mixture goes up by <em>y</em>. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Sometimes you’re working on something that’s just too complicated for that, and you can’t even begin to guess how the inputs affect the outputs. At the warehouse, everything seems to go fine when you have less than four employees, but when you hit five employees, they get in each others’ way so much that the fifth employee effectively does no additional work.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="730" height="512" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/5ec6e31a68c106c99a6c6836.gif?resize=730%2C512&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3702" data-recalc-dims="1"/></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>You may not understand the relationship between the number of employees and the throughput of the warehouse, but you definitely know what everybody is doing. If you can imagine writing a little bit of JavaScript code to simulate the behavior of each of your workers, you can run a simulation and see what actually happens. You can tweak the parameters and the rules the employees follow to see how it would help, and you can really gain some traction understanding, and then solving, very complex problems.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>That’s what <a href="https://hash.ai/">hash.ai</a> is all about. Read David’s <a href="https://hash.ai/about/mission">launch blog post</a>, then try building your own simulations!</p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3701</post-id> </item>
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/12/05/so-hows-that-retirement-thing-going-anyway/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Dec 2019 22:51:39 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3635</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow. I’m still going on some customer calls… <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/12/05/so-hows-that-retirement-thing-going-anyway/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo/">new CEO of Stack Overflow</a>. I’m still going on some customer calls and have a weekly meeting with him, but I have freed up a lot of time. I’m also really enjoying discovering just how little I knew about running medium-sized companies, as I watch Prashanth rearrange everything—for the better. It’s really satisfying to realize that the best possible outcome for me is if he proves what a bad CEO I was by doing a much better job running the company.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Even though I live in Manhattan’s premier NORC (“Naturally Occurring Retirement Community,”) I’m thinking of this time as a <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/03/18/more-on-sabbaticals/">sabbatical</a>, not retirement. And in fact I’m really, really busy, and, in the interest of deflecting a million questions about what I’m doing nowadays, thought I’d update my long-suffering readers here.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="2560" height="1920" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?fit=730%2C548&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3636" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1152&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1536&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_9590-scaled.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" /><figcaption>This adorable little fella, Cooper, is two. If your web app needs a mascot, apply within. </figcaption></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I’m chairman of three companies. You probably know all about Stack Overflow so I’ll skip ahead. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Fog Creek Software has been renamed <a href="https://glitch.com/">Glitch</a>, “the friendly community for building the web.” Under CEO <a href="http://anildash.com/">Anil Dash</a>, they have grown to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20683018/glitch-2-5-million-apps-code-remix-anil-dash">millions of apps</a> and raised a decent <a href="https://glitch.com/culture/glitch-raises-30m-series-a-round-from-tiger-global/">round of money</a> to accelerate that growth. I think that in every era there has to be some kind of simplified programming environment for the quiet majority of developers who don’t need fancy administration features for their code, like git branches or multistep deployment processes; they just want to write code and have it run. Glitch is aimed at those developers.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The third company, <a href="https://hash.ai/">HASH</a>, is still kind of under the radar right now, although today they put a whole bunch of words up on their website so I guess I can give you a preview. HASH is building an open source platform for doing simulations. It’s a great way to model problems where you have some idea of how every agent is supposed to behave, but you don’t really know what all that is going to add up to.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>For example, suppose you’re a city planner and you want to model traffic so that you can make a case for a new bus line. You can, sort of, pretend that every bus takes 50 cars off the road, but that’s not going to work unless you can find 50 commuters who will all decide to take your new bus line… and the way they decide is that they check if the bus is actually going to save them time and money over just driving. This is a case where you can actually simulate the behavior of every “agent” in your model, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City-building_game">Cities: Skylines</a> does, and figure out the results. Then you can try thousands or millions of different potential bus routes and see which ones actually reduce traffic. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This kind of modeling is incredibly computationally intensive, but it works even when you don’t have a closed-form formula for how bus lines impact traffic, or, in general, how individual agents’ behavior affects overall outcomes. This kind of tool will be incredibly useful in far-ranging problems, like epidemiology, econometrics, urban planning, finance, political science, and a lot of other areas which are not really amenable to closed-form modeling or common “AI” techniques. (I love putting AI in “scare” “quotes”. There are a lot of startups out there trying to train machine learning models with way too little data. Sometimes the models they create just reproduce the bad decision making of the humans they are trained on. In many cases a model with simulated agents running a white box algorithm is going to be superior). </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Ok, so those are the three companies I’m still working on in some way or another. That still leaves me with a couple of free days every week which I’m actually using to work on some electronics projects. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="2560" height="828" src="https://i1.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?fit=730%2C236&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3639" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C97&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C331&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C249&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C497&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C663&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C388&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_7374-scaled.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" /></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>In particular, I’m really into pixel-addressable RGB LEDs, like those WS2812b and APA102-type things. Right now I’m <a href="https://blinkylights.blog/">working</a> on designing a circuit board that connects a Teensy 3.2 controller, which can drive up to 4416 LEDs at a high frame rate, to a WizNET Ethernet adapter, and then creating some software which can be used to distribute 4416 pixels worth of data to each Teensy over a TCP-IP network in hopes of creating huge installations with hundreds of thousands of pixels. If that made any sense at all, you’re probably already a member of the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/LEDSAREAWESOME/">LEDs ARE AWESOME</a> Facebook group and you probably think I’m dumb. If that doesn’t make any sense, rest assured that I am probably not going to burn down the apartment because I am very careful with the soldering iron almost every time. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" width="730" height="548" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?resize=730%2C548&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3642" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1152&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1536&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/img_7185-scaled.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p></p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3635</post-id> </item>
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Welcome, Prashanth!</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2019 14:00:17 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3612</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who… <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"Welcome, Prashanth!"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Last March, I <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/">shared</a> that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly. This is not something I’m particularly good at, and I thought it was time to bring on more experienced leadership.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The Board of Directors nominated a search committee and we went through almost 200 candidates. It speaks to how well respected a company Stack Overflow is that we found ourselves in the rare position of having plenty of highly qualified executives who were excited about the opportunity. Nevertheless, one of them really stood out, and we are pleased to let you know that we have selected Prashanth Chandrasekar as our next CEO. His first day will be October 1st.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Prashanth was born in Bangalore, India, the city with the highest number of Stack Overflow users in the world, one of the global capitals for software developers writing the script for the future. He started out as a software engineer before moving over to management. He has a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Maine, a Masters in Engineering Management from Cornell, and an MBA from Harvard. He worked at Capgemini as a management consultant and Barclays as an investment banker in their technology group before joining Rackspace in San Antonio, Texas.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>At Rackspace, Prashanth really proved his mettle, creating from scratch a completely new business unit inside the company, the <a href="https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public">Global Managed Public Clouds Business</a>. This group serves companies around the world who need help running on AWS, Azure, Google, and so on. Under his leadership, Rackspace successfully pivoted from a leading managed hosting company to a cloud services company. And he did this while working with developers both inside Rackspace and outside, so he understands our vision of “writing the script for the future” better than anyone I’ve met.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This is an exciting time for Stack Overflow, and we have some big goals for the year ahead. We want to make Stack Overflow more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming. And we want to make it possible for knowledge workers everywhere to use Stack Overflow to get answers to the proprietary questions that are specific to their organizations and teams. We’re doing great work and making great progress in these areas, and I’m confident that Prashanth has some great ideas about how to move forward faster on all our goals.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As you know, I’m keeping my job as Chairman of the Board, so I’ll continue to be closely involved. Being Stack Overflow’s CEO has been an honor, and I can’t wait to see the things the team accomplishes in the year ahead. This will be a great new chapter for Stack Overflow.<br></p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3612</post-id> </item>
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>The next CEO of Stack Overflow</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2019 14:00:53 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[Stack Overflow]]></category>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3535</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"The next CEO of Stack Overflow"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Big news! We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Stack Overflow has been around for more than a decade. As I look back, it’s really amazing how far it has come. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Only six months after we had launched Stack Overflow, my co-founder Jeff Atwood and I were invited to speak at a Microsoft conference for developers in Las Vegas. We were there, I think, to demonstrate that you could use their latest ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster. (In fact .NET has been a huge, unmitigated success for us, but you kids go ahead and have fun with whatever platform you want mkay? They’re all great, or, at least, above-average).</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>It was a giant conference, held at the Venetian Hotel. This hotel was so big that other <em>hotels</em> stay there when they go on vacation. The main ballroom was the size of, approximately, Ireland. I later learned there were 5,000 developers in that room.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I thought it would be a fun thing to ask the developers in the room how many of them had visited Stack Overflow. As I remember, Jeff was very much against this idea. “Joel,” he said, “That is going to be embarrassing and humiliating. Nobody is going to raise their hand.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Well, I asked it anyway. And we were both surprised to see about one-third of the hands go up. We were really making an impact! That felt really good.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Anyway, I tried that trick again whenever I spoke to a large audience. It doesn’t work anymore. Today, audiences just laugh. It’s like asking, “Does anyone use gravity? Raise your hand if you use gravity.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" width="4032" height="3024" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?fit=730%2C548&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3538" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?w=4032&ssl=1 4032w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_9111.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" /></figure>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Where are we at after 11 years? Practically every developer in the world uses Stack Overflow. Including the Stack Exchange network of 174 sites, we have over 100 million monthly visitors. Every month, over 125,000 wonderful people write answers. According to Alexa, <a href="https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com">stackoverflow.com is one of the top 50 websites in the world</a>. (That’s without even counting the Stack Exchange network, which is almost as big.) And every time I see a developer write code, they’ve got Stack Overflow open in one of their browser windows. Oh and—hey!—we do not make you sign up or pay to see the answers.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The company has been growing, too. Today we are profitable. We have almost 300 amazing employees worldwide and booked $70m in revenue last year. We have talent, advertising, and software products. The SaaS products (Stack Overflow for <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/teams">Teams</a> and <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/enterprise">Enterprise</a>) are growing at <em>200% a year</em>. That speaks to the fact that we’ve recruited an incredibly talented team that has produced such fantastic results. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>But, we have a lot of work ahead of us, and it’s going to take a different type of leader to get us through that work. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The type of people Stack Overflow serves has changed, and now, as a part of the developer ecosystem, we have a responsibility to create an online community that is far more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming of newcomers.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>In the decade or so since Stack Overflow started, the number of people employed as software developers <a href="https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2019/data-on-display/projections-evaluation.htm?view_full">grew by 64%</a> in the US alone. The field is going to keep growing everywhere in the world, and the demand for great software developers far outstrips supply. So a big challenge for Stack Overflow is welcoming those new developers into the fold. As I’ve <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-maddening-rules/">written</a>:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.</p><p>I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-are-writing-the-script-for-the-future/">write the script for the future</a>. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier.</p></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The world has started taking a closer look at tech, and understanding that software and the internet are not just tools; they are shaping the future of society. Big tech companies are struggling with their place in the world. Stack Overflow is situated at the right place to be influential in how that future develops, and that is going to take a new type of leader.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright is-resized"><img loading="lazy" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5949.jpg?fit=730%2C973&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-3539" width="182" height="243" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5949.jpg?w=3024&ssl=1 3024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5949.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5949.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5949.jpg?resize=1200%2C1600&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5949.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5949.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 182px) 100vw, 182px" /><figcaption>new dog, too</figcaption></figure></div>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>It will not be easy to find a CEO who is the right person to lead that mission. We will, no doubt, hire one of those fancy executive headhunters to help us in the search. But, hey, this is Stack Overflow. If there’s one thing I have learned by now, it’s that there’s always someone in the community who can answer the questions I can’t. </p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>So we decided to put this announcement out there in hopes of finding great candidates that might have been under the radar. We’re especially focused on identifying candidates from under-represented groups, and making sure that every candidate we consider is deeply committed to making our company and community more welcoming, diverse, and inclusive.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Over the years, Fog Creek Software created several incredible hits and many wonderful memories along the way. It is great to watch Trello (under Michael Pryor) and Glitch (under Anil Dash) growing into enormously valuable, successful, and influential products with dedicated leaders who took these products much further than I ever could have, and personally I’m excited to see where Stack Overflow can go and turn my attention to the next thing.<br></p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3535</post-id> </item>
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Announcing Stack Overflow for Teams</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-overflow-for-teams/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Thu, 03 May 2018 12:58:25 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[Stack Overflow]]></category>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3411</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[New product: Stack Overflow for Teams lets you direct questions to members of your own team, company, or organization. <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-overflow-for-teams/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"Announcing Stack Overflow for Teams"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Hey, we have a new thing for you today!</p>
|
||||
<p>Today’s new thing is called <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/teams">Stack Overflow for Teams</a>. It lets you set up a private place on Stack Overflow where you can ask questions that will only be visible to members of your team, company, or organization. It is a paid service, but it’s not expensive.</p>
|
||||
<p>I meet people who use Stack Overflow every single day, but a lot of them tell me they have never needed to post their own question. “All the questions are already answered!” they say. Mission accomplished, I guess!</p>
|
||||
<p>Still, when I think about what questions developers have every day, only the ones that have to do with public stuff can be asked on Stack Overflow. Maybe you don’t have a question about Python or Android… maybe you want to ask something about your team’s own code base!</p>
|
||||
<p>That’s the idea behind Stack Overflow Teams.</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?ssl=1"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-3424 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?resize=730%2C255&ssl=1" alt="Helicopters" width="730" height="255" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?resize=1024%2C357&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?resize=300%2C104&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?resize=768%2C267&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?resize=1200%2C418&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Helicopters.png?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
|
||||
<p>Quick background: every development team since the beginning of time has been trying to figure out how to get institutional knowledge out of people’s heads and into written, searchable form where everyone can find it. Like new members of the team. And old members of the team working on new parts of the code. And people who forgot what they did three years ago and now have questions about <em>their own code</em>.</p>
|
||||
<p>For a while developers thought wikis might be the solution. Anyone who has used a wiki for this purpose has probably discovered that not very much knowledge actually makes it into the wiki, and what does is not particularly useful, doesn’t get updated, and honestly it just feels like a bunch of homework to write a bunch of wiki documentation about your code when you don’t know if it will ever help anyone.</p>
|
||||
<p>Another solution being sold today is the idea of having some kind of online IRC-style chat rooms, and hoping that by searching those chat archives, you can find “institutional knowledge.” Ha ha ha! Even if that works, all you really find is the history of some conversation people had. It might have clues but it’s not knowledge.</p>
|
||||
<p>But you know what does work? A Q&A system. Like Stack Overflow.</p>
|
||||
<p>Why? Because unlike wikis, you don’t write documentation in the hopes that one day it might help someone. You answer questions that are going to help someone <em>immediately.</em> And you can stop answering the minute you get the green checkmark that shows that you solved their problem.</p>
|
||||
<p>And unlike chatrooms, searching actually works. It finds you a question and its answers, not a conversation-captured-in-amber.</p>
|
||||
<p>This is why Stack Overflow worked so much better on the public internet than the previous generation of discussion forums, and we think that it will work for all the same reasons with teams’ <em>proprietary</em> questions and answers.</p>
|
||||
<p>When you join a team, you’ll see your team’s private questions right on <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/">stackoverflow.com</a> (although they actually live in a separate database for security). Your teams are listed in the left hand navbar.</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams1.png?ssl=1"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-3417 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams1.png?resize=730%2C584&ssl=1" alt="Screen Shot" width="730" height="584" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams1.png?w=943&ssl=1 943w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams1.png?resize=300%2C240&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams1.png?resize=768%2C614&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
|
||||
<p>Everything else works pretty much … like you would expect. When you ask a question, you can direct it to your team or to the whole world. The UI makes it very clear whether you are posting publicly or privately. If you are asking a question of your team, there’s a <em>Notify</em> field so you can type the names of some people who might be able to answer the question, and they’ll hear about it right away.</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams2.png?ssl=1"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-3418 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams2.png?resize=730%2C744&ssl=1" alt="Screen shot" width="730" height="744" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams2.png?w=859&ssl=1 859w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams2.png?resize=294%2C300&ssl=1 294w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Teams2.png?resize=768%2C783&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
|
||||
<p>When you search, you can search everywhere, or just within your team. You can set up tags that are specific to your team, too.</p>
|
||||
<p>The pricing is designed to be “no-brainer” pricing, starting at just $10 per month for the first ten users.</p>
|
||||
<p>I think <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/teams">Stack Overflow for Teams</a> is going to be almost as important to developers’ daily work as public Stack Overflow. It brings Stack Overflow’s uniquely powerful system to every developer question, not just the things that can be discussed in public. You can stop asking your teammates questions in email (where they help nobody else) or in chatrooms (where they are impossible to find) and start building your own private knowledge base to document your code and answer future teammates’ questions before they have them.</p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3411</post-id> </item>
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Strange and maddening rules</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-maddening-rules/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Apr 2018 14:42:45 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3282</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[There's this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work. <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-maddening-rules/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"Strange and maddening rules"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work, line by line, what you expected to see, what you saw instead, etc. Developers who try this report that the very act of explaining the problem in detail to an inanimate object often helps them find the solution.</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/308564/stack-exchange-has-been-taken-over-by-a-rubber-duck"><img loading="lazy" class="size-large aligncenter" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ef/StackExchange_Rubber_Duck_Avatar_April_Fools_2018.png" alt="Stack Overflow April Fools Joke 2018" width="270" height="270" /></a>This is one of many tricks to solving programming problems on your own. Another trick is <a href="http://markheath.net/post/effective-debugging-with-divide-and-conquer">divide and conquer debugging</a>. You can’t study a thousand lines of code to find the one bug. But you can divide them in half and quickly figure out if the problem happens in the first half or the second half. Keep doing this five or six times and you’ll pinpoint the single line of code with the problem.</p>
|
||||
<p>It’s interesting, with this in mind, to read <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet?tab=profile">Jon Skeet’s</a> checklist for <a href="https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2012/11/24/stack-overflow-question-checklist/">writing the perfect question</a>. One of the questions Jon asks is “Have you read the whole question to yourself carefully, to make sure it makes sense and contains enough information for someone coming to it without any of the context that you already know?” That is essentially the Rubber Duck Test. Another question is “If your question includes code, have you written it as a short but complete program?” Emphasis on the <em>short</em>—that is essentially a test of whether or not you tried divide and conquer.</p>
|
||||
<p>What Jon’s checklist can do, in the best of worlds, is to help people try the things that experienced programmers may have already tried, before they ask for help.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sadly, not everybody finds his checklist. Maybe they found it and they don’t care. They’re having an urgent problem with code; they heard that Stack Overflow could help them; and they don’t have time to read some nerd’s complicated protocol for requesting help.</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?ssl=1"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-3352" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?resize=730%2C411&ssl=1" alt="" width="730" height="411" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?resize=1200%2C675&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NYC.png?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
|
||||
<p>One of the frequent debates about Stack Overflow is whether the site needs to be open to questions from programming novices.</p>
|
||||
<p>When Jeff and I were talking about the initial design of Stack Overflow, I told him about this popular Usenet group for the C programming language in the 1980s. It was called <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.c">comp.lang.c.</a></p>
|
||||
<p>C is a simple and limited programming language. <a href="http://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git">You can get a C compiler that fits in 100K.</a> So, when you make a discussion group about C, you quickly run out of things to talk about.</p>
|
||||
<p>Also. In the 1990s, C was a common language for undergraduates who were learning programming. And, in fact, said undergraduates would have <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.lang.c/spolsky%7Csort:date/comp.lang.c/BKhAacGNtZI/GLSW-QG_O3MJ">very basic problems</a> in C. And they might show up on comp.lang.c asking their questions.</p>
|
||||
<p>And the old-timers on comp.lang.c were bored. <i>So</i> bored. Bored of the undergraduates showing up every September wondering why they can’t return a local char array from a function et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Every damn September.</p>
|
||||
<p>The old timers invented the concept of FAQs. They used them to say “please don’t ask things that have been asked before, ever, in the history of Usenet” which honestly meant that the only questions they really wanted to see were so bizarre and so esoteric that they were really enormously boring to 99% of working C programmers. The newsgroup languished because it catered only to the few people that had been there for a decade.</p>
|
||||
<p>Jeff and I talked about this. What did we think of newbie questions?</p>
|
||||
<p>We decided that newbies had to be welcome. Nothing was too “beginner” to be a reasonable question on Stack Overflow… as long as you did some homework before asking the question.</p>
|
||||
<p>We understood that this might mean that some of the more advanced people might grow bored with duplicate, simple questions, and move on. We thought that was fine: Stack Overflow doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment. You’re welcome to get bored and move on if you think that the newbies keep asking why they can’t return local char arrays (“but it works for me!”) and you would rather devote the remaining short years of your life to something more productive, like sorting your record albums.</p>
|
||||
<p>The mere fact that you are a newbie doesn’t mean that your question doesn’t belong on Stack Overflow. To prove the point, I asked “<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo">How do you move the turtle in Logo</a>,” hoping to leave behind evidence that the site designers wanted to allow absolute beginners.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, this caused a lot of brouhaha, but not because the question was too easy. The real problem there was that I was asking the question in bad faith. Jeff Atwood <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158289/why-is-the-how-to-move-the-turtle-in-logo-question-closed#comment457933_158334">explained</a> it: “Simple is fine. No effort and research is not.” (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_disrupt_Wikipedia_to_illustrate_a_point">Also this</a>.)</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?ssl=1"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-3355" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?resize=730%2C411&ssl=1" alt="" width="730" height="411" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?resize=1200%2C675&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StBarts.png?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
|
||||
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To novices, the long bureaucratic rigmarole associated with asking your first question on Stack Overflow can feel either completely unnecessary, or just plain weird. It’s like Burning Man. You just want to go to a nice glittery dance party in the desert, but the Burning People are yammering on about their goddamn </span><a href="https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">10 principles</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and “radical self-expression” and so on and so forth, and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">therefore</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> after washing your dishes you must carefully save the dirty dishwater like a cherished relic and remove every drop of it from the Playa, bringing it home with you, in your check-in luggage if necessary. Every community has lots of rules and when you join the community they either seem strange and delightful or, if you’re just desperately trying to get some code to work, they are strange and maddening.</span></p>
|
||||
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A lot of the rules that are important to make Burning Man successful are seemingly arbitrary, but they’re still necessary. The US Bureau of Land Management which makes the desert available for Burning Man requires that no contaminated water be poured out on the ground because the clay dirt doesn’t really absorb it so well and it can introduce all kinds of disease and whatnot, but who cares because Burning Man simply will not be allowed to continue if the participants don’t pack out their used water.</span></p>
|
||||
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Similarly for Stack Overflow. We don’t allow, say, questions that are too broad (“How do I make a program?”). Our general rule is that if the correct length of an answer is </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">a whole book </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">you are asking too much. These questions feel like showing up on a medical website and saying something like “I think my kidney has been hurting. How can I remove it?” It’s crazy—and incidentally, insulting to the people who spent ten years in training learning to be surgeons.</span></p>
|
||||
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.</span></p>
|
||||
<p>I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-are-writing-the-script-for-the-future/">write the script for the future</a>. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier.</p>
|
||||
<p>We’re planning a lot of work in this area for the next year. We can’t change everybody and we can’t force people to be nice. But I think we can improve some aspects of the Stack Overflow user interface to encourage better behavior, for example, we could improve the prompts we provide on the “Ask Question” page, and we could provide more tools for community moderation of comments where the snark currently runs unchecked.</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?ssl=1"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-3364" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?resize=730%2C548&ssl=1" alt="" width="730" height="548" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2016-09-10-21.38.14-1.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
|
||||
<p>We’re also working on new features that will let you direct your questions to a private, smaller group of people on your own team, which may bring some of the friendly neighborhood feel to the big city of Stack Overflow.</p>
|
||||
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Even as we try to make Stack Overflow more friendly, our primary consideration at Stack Overflow has been to build the world’s greatest resource for software developers. The average programmer, in the world, has been helped by Stack Overflow 340 times. That’s the real end-game here. There are other resources for learning to program and getting help, but there’s only one site in the world that developers trust this much, and that is worth preserving—the programming equivalent to the Library of Congress.</span></p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
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|
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|
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|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3282</post-id> </item>
|
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<item>
|
||||
<title>A Dusting of Gamification</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/13/gamification/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Fri, 13 Apr 2018 13:40:21 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3260</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[I had to think for a minute to realize that Stack Overflow has “gamification" too. Not a ton. Maybe a dusting of gamification, most of it around reputation. <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/13/gamification/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"A Dusting of Gamification"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>[This is the second in a series of posts about Stack Overflow. The first one is <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/">The Stack Overflow Age</a>.]</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Around 2010 the success of Stack Overflow had led us into some conversations with VCs, who wanted to invest.</p>
|
||||
<p><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-3273" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-09-12.54.00.jpg?resize=500%2C667&ssl=1" alt="at the Getty" width="500" height="667" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-09-12.54.00.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-09-12.54.00.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-09-12.54.00.jpg?resize=1200%2C1600&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-09-12.54.00.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-09-12.54.00.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></p>
|
||||
<p>The firm that eventually invested in us, <a href="https://www.usv.com/">Union Square Ventures</a>, told us that they were so excited by the power of gamification that they were only investing in companies that incorporated some kind of game play.</p>
|
||||
<p>For example, Foursquare. Remember Foursquare? It was all about making your normal post-NYU life of going to ramen noodle places and dive bars into a fun game that incidentally generated wads of data for marketers. Or Duolingo, which is a fun app with flash cards that teaches you foreign languages. Those were other USV investments from that time period.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the time, I had to think for a minute to realize that Stack Overflow has “gamification” too. Not a ton. Maybe a <em>dusting</em> of gamification, most of it around reputation.</p>
|
||||
<p>Stack Overflow reputation started as a very simple score. The original idea was just that you would get 10 points when your answers were upvoted. Upvotes do two things. They get the most useful answers to the top, signaling that other developers who saw this answer thought it was good. They also send the person who wrote the answer a real signal that their efforts helped someone. This can be incredibly motivating.</p>
|
||||
<p>You would lose points if your questions were downvoted, but you actually only lose 2 points. We didn’t want to punish you so much as we wanted to show other people that your answer was wrong. And to avoid abuse, we actually make you <em>pay</em> one reputation point to downvote somebody, so you better really mean it. That was pretty much the whole system.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, this wasn’t an original idea. It was originally inspired by Reddit Karma, which started out as an integer that appeared in parentheses after your handle. If you posted something that got upvoted, your karma went up as a “reward.” That was it. Karma <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/collaborative-filtering-comparing-reddits-karma-system-to-digg/">didn’t do a single thing</a> but still served as a system for reward and punishment.</p>
|
||||
<p>What reputation and karma do is send a message that this is a community with norms, it’s not just a place to type words onto the internet. (That would be 4chan.) We don’t really exist for the purpose of letting you exercise your freedom of speech. You can get your freedom of speech somewhere else. Our goal is to get the best answers to questions. All the voting makes it clear that we have standards, that some posts are better than others, and that the community itself has some norms about what’s good and bad that they express through the vote.</p>
|
||||
<p>It’s not a perfect system (more on the problems in a minute), but it’s a reasonable first approximation.</p>
|
||||
<p>By the way, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the creators of Reddit, were themselves inspired by a more primitive karma system, on Slashdot. This system had real-world implications. You didn’t get karma so that other people could see your karma; you got karma so that the system knew you weren’t a spammer. If a lot of your posts had been flagged for abuse, your karma would go down and you might lose posting or moderation privileges. But you weren’t really supposed to show off your high karma. “Don’t worry too much about it; it’s just an integer in a database,” Slashdot told us.</p>
|
||||
<p>To be honest, it was initially surprising to me that you could just print a number after people’s handles and they would feel rewarded. Look at me! Look at my four digit number! But it does drive a tremendous amount of good behavior. Even people who aren’t participating in the system (by working to earn reputation) buy into it (e.g., by respecting high-reputation users for their demonstrated knowledge and helpfulness).</p>
|
||||
<p>But there’s still something of a mystery here, which is why earning “magic internet points” is appealing to anyone.</p>
|
||||
<p>I think the answer is that it’s nice to know that you’ve made a difference. You toil away in the hot kitchen all day and when you serve dinner it’s nice to hear a compliment or two. If somebody compliments you on the extra effort you put into making radish roses, you’re going to be very happy.</p>
|
||||
<p>This is a part of a greater human need: to make an impact on the world, and to know that you’re contributing and being appreciated for it. Stack Overflow’s reputation system serves to recognize that you’re a human being and we are super thankful for your contribution.</p>
|
||||
<p><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-3276 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-11-13.46.38.jpg?resize=730%2C548&ssl=1" alt="in Utah" width="730" height="548" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-11-13.46.38.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-11-13.46.38.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-11-13.46.38.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-11-13.46.38.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-11-13.46.38.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-01-11-13.46.38.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></p>
|
||||
<p>That said, there is a dark side to gamification. It’s not 100% awesome.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first problem we noticed is that it’s very nice to get an upvote, but getting a downvote feels like a slap in the face. Especially if you don’t understand why you got the downvote, or if you don’t agree. Stack Overflow’s voting has made many people unhappy over the years, and there are probably loads of people who felt unwelcome and who don’t participate in Stack Overflow as a result. (Here’s an old blog post explaining <a href="https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/">why we didn’t just eliminate downvotes</a>).</p>
|
||||
<p>There’s another problem, which is that, to the extent that the gamification in Stack Overflow makes the site feel less inclusive and welcoming to many people, it is disproportionately off-putting to programmers from underrepresented groups. While Stack Overflow does have many amazing, high reputation contributors who are women or minorities, we’ve also heard from too many who were apprehensive about participating.</p>
|
||||
<p>These are big problems. There’s a lot more we can and will say about that over the next few months, and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us trying to make Stack Overflow a more inclusive and diverse place so we can improve the important service that it provides to developers everywhere.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gamification can shape behavior. It can guide you to do certain things in certain ways, and it can encourage certain behaviors. But it’s a very weak force. You can’t do that much with gamification. You certainly can’t get people to do something that they’re not interested in doing, anyway. I’ve heard a lot of crazy business plans that are pinning rather too high hopes on gamification as a way of getting people to go along with some crazy scheme that the people won’t want to go along with. Nobody’s going to learn French just to get the Duolingo points. But if you are learning French, and you are using Duolingo, you might make an effort to open the app every day just to keep your streak going.</p>
|
||||
<p>I’ve got more posts coming! The next one will be about the obsessive way Stack Overflow was designed for the artifact, in other words, we optimized everything to create amazing results for developers with problems arriving from Google, not just to answer questions that people typed into our site.</p>
|
||||
<p> </p>
|
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]]></content:encoded>
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|
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|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3260</post-id> </item>
|
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<item>
|
||||
<title>The Stack Overflow Age</title>
|
||||
<link>https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/</link>
|
||||
|
||||
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Spolsky]]></dc:creator>
|
||||
<pubDate>Fri, 06 Apr 2018 13:32:10 +0000</pubDate>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[Stack Overflow]]></category>
|
||||
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/?p=3246</guid>
|
||||
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way. <span class="read-more"><a class="more-link" href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/" rel="bookmark">Read more <span class="screen-reader-text">"The Stack Overflow Age"</span></a></span>]]></description>
|
||||
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Hi, everyone! A lot of stuff has happened since I was writing all those blog posts about Aeron chairs 18 years ago. Some of those blog posts are old enough to go to college.</p>
|
||||
<p>And, also: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/">Stack Overflow</a> will be ten years old soon! Wow! So I thought it would be cool to get the old band back together for a little reunion tour over the next few weeks. I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way. With some perspective, it’s clearer now what we did right and what we messed up, so I’ll try to cover the good and the bad over a series of blog posts.</p>
|
||||
<p>And, also: we’re just a few weeks away from launching Stack Overflow Teams, the biggest upgrade to Stack Overflow ever, so that’s going to be really cool. I’ll get to that in a future blog post!</p>
|
||||
<p>Today is chapter one. I want to talk a little bit about what it was like for developers before Stack Overflow, the problem that Stack Overflow tried to solve, and early origins.</p>
|
||||
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5567.jpg?ssl=1"><img loading="lazy" class="alignright wp-image-3253 size-medium" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5567.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1" alt="" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5567.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5567.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5567.jpg?resize=1200%2C1600&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5567.jpg?w=1460&ssl=1 1460w, https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5567.jpg?w=2190&ssl=1 2190w" sizes="(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a>In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called <a href="https://today.duke.edu/2010/05/usenet.html">Usenet</a> which created primitive online discussion forums. When programmers had problems with their code, they could ask a question on a Usenet forum. (They were technically called newsgroups, not forums (even though they had nothing to do with news. (You couldn’t even get news on Usenet.)))</p>
|
||||
<p>As soon as the world wide web became a thing, Usenet was immediately technically obsolete. We programmers started asking about our problems on various web-based forums, of which there were thousands.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of the biggest such forums was called Experts Exchange. The first version of Experts Exchange was not successful financially. Apparently they went bankrupt in 2001. Eventually new owners bought the assets and resurrected the site with a clever business model: charging money to read answers.</p>
|
||||
<p>This actually fixed the business, which started making money, but it caused some problems.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first problem was that programmers with problems would search on Google, not on Experts Exchange. And Google only knows about free, open websites, not websites that you have to pay to access. So EE did a bamboozle: when the Google Robot came by, they showed it the full question and its answers. But when regular people went to the same page, they saw the answers were scrambled, with instructions to pay (I think it was about $250 a year) to see the results. Most programmers couldn’t be bothered.</p>
|
||||
<p>The second problem was that EE let you get a free membership if you answered a certain number of questions. As it turned out, the people who were most desperate for free memberships were not exactly the best programmers in the world, and they wrote low quality answers to questions just to get those free memberships. And the quality of answers on the site went down.</p>
|
||||
<p>For a long time (at least five years, I think) programmers would constantly come across EE in the Google search results, try to click on them, discover that it was a pay site, grumble, and just go back to Google and try to find an answer for free.</p>
|
||||
<p>And I kept thinking, how hard is it to run a discussion forum on the Internet? For fudge sake, I had written one in Visual Basic in a weekend. (Not kidding, actually. Yeah I know that I am always saying “I could do that in a weekend in Visual Basic” when developers tell me some feature is going to take a year. This is why). So I was confident that it was only a matter of time before one of the 9,000,000 smart programmers in the world decided to route around this EE damage and make a free forum.</p>
|
||||
<p>You know what? Nobody ever did. I kept waiting.</p>
|
||||
<p>Another thing I wrote in a weekend (well, to be precise: a fortnight (shut up, I’m telling this lie)) was a <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/05/introducing-jobsjoelonsoftwarecom/">job listing board for this blog</a>. And in the first month of running that job board I think we sold about $90,000 of job listings. Huzzah! And then I thought, wow, if we smashed these ideas together—replace Experts Exchange with a free site, and pay for it with job listings—we could undo the damage to the internet and let developers get work done again.</p>
|
||||
<p>I kept thinking “Man, this is so obvious, somebody is going to do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And they never did.</p>
|
||||
<p>And I went to one of the programmers at Fog Creek, and explained my idea, and he was like “yeah yeah sounds like a great idea, but I really like working on FogBugz.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And more time went by.</p>
|
||||
<p>And eventually, early in 2008, a developer/blogger named <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/">Jeff Atwood</a> called me up, and said, “Hey Joel, I’m thinking of quitting my day job to be a Pro Blogger; you’re a blogger: what do you think?”</p>
|
||||
<p>And I said, “Jeff, I’ve got a better idea” and I told him about the idea to combine the job listings with the Q&A site for developers, and, it took more than a weekend, but eventually I convinced him. We started talking about all the ways our Q&A site would be amazing. Jeff started working on the code in April 2008, recruited two other programmers to join him (Geoff and Jarrod, who are still here), and the three of them heroically launched what became Stack Overflow in September 2008.</p>
|
||||
<p> </p>
|
||||
<p><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter" src="https://i0.wp.com/i.stack.imgur.com/GjnH9.png?resize=427%2C446&ssl=1" alt="The original Stack Overflow" width="427" height="446" data-recalc-dims="1" /></p>
|
||||
<p> </p>
|
||||
<p>And thus began the Stack Overflow Age.</p>
|
||||
<p>Stack Overflow was better because it was free, but it had a ton of other “innovations” (which I put in quotes because we stole them from other Internet pioneers) which made it a much, much better site for getting answers to programming questions.</p>
|
||||
<p>We wanted the whole thing to be a fun game, with incentives to answer questions, so we had a reputation system. The more you answer, the more reputation you earn. The reputation idea had been seen before on sites like Slashdot and Reddit.</p>
|
||||
<p>As you earn reputation, you also earn moderation privileges on the site. So the site actually moderates itself, which is pretty cool.</p>
|
||||
<p>Instead of putting all the Java programmers in one little forum and all the C++ programmers in another, we dumped everyone together and just let them tag their questions. This idea was stolen from <a href="https://www.flickr.com/">flickr</a> (remember flickr?) who, I think, stole it from del.icio.us (now gone)—who knows, anyway, the point is, tags were the new hotness and made Stack Overflow work great.</p>
|
||||
<p>Most importantly, we realized that each question is asked by one person but the answers are seen by thousands of people who found it through a search. So we decided to optimize everything to be useful for the thousands, not the individual. We literally have 1000 visitors for every person who asks a question. That’s why we sort the answers by votes. It’s also why we optimize for questions and answers that will be helpful to other people, later.</p>
|
||||
<p>Interestingly, when Jeff and I started Stack Overflow, we didn’t really care if it was a business and we didn’t need it to be a big profitable success. We created it because the internet sucked for programmers and we needed to make it better. We thought the job listings would pay the bills, and we’d fix the internet, and that was all we cared about and it’s what motivated us to work so hard.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of course, it turned out a lot bigger than we thought it would. The company today has 250 employees, is profitable, and has made it possible for millions of people to learn how to code and to deal with the new, super-complicated world of APIs and frameworks that we live in. But we just wanted to fix the internet.</p>
|
||||
<p>I have met a lot of people who started businesses because they wanted to start a business. <a href="http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec03/">Paul Graham calls this “Playing House.”</a> And they didn’t really care what the business did; they just wanted to “be entrepreneurs.” Which is weird, because being an entrepreneur really sucks. It’s really hard to get through all the extraordinary difficulty, pain, and stress of starting a company if you’re not super, super motivated to solve a problem for the world.</p>
|
||||
<p>The entrepreneurs who succeed do so because it is incredibly important to them a thing exist in the world, and it does not exist, so they work like crazy until it does. When we started Stack Overflow we didn’t expect it to be a big business; we just wanted there to be someplace where developers could get help to daily problems, while showing off how smart they were helping other developers.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ok, that’s chapter one. I’ve got a lot more to talk about. In the next installment, I’ll talk more about <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/13/gamification/">how Stack Overflow’s light dusting of gamification made it really take off.</a></p>
|
||||
]]></content:encoded>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3246</post-id> </item>
|
||||
</channel>
|
||||
</rss>
|
||||
422
newsboat/newsboat/rss/ewontfix.rss
Normal file
422
newsboat/newsboat/rss/ewontfix.rss
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,422 @@
|
|||
<?xml version="1.0"?>
|
||||
<rss version="2.0">
|
||||
<channel>
|
||||
<title>EWONTFIX</title>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com</link>
|
||||
<description>A blog about bugs</description>
|
||||
<language>en</language>
|
||||
<item><title>The worst of time64 breakage</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/19</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/19</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>15 Feb 2020 19:25:16 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>In preparing to release musl 1.2.0, I worked with distro maintainers
|
||||
from <a href="https://www.adelielinux.org/">Adélie Linux</a> and
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/YoeDistro">Yoe</a> to find serious application
|
||||
compatibility problems users would hit when upgrading, so that we
|
||||
could have patches ready and reduce user frustration with the upgrade.
|
||||
Here are some of the findings.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>By far the most dangerous type of app compatibility issue we found was
|
||||
in Berkeley DB 5.x, which defines its own wrong version of the
|
||||
<code>timespec</code> struct to pass to <code>clock_gettime</code>:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<pre><code>typedef struct {
|
||||
time_t tv_sec; /* seconds */
|
||||
#ifdef HAVE_MIXED_SIZE_ADDRESSING
|
||||
</code></pre>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>32-bit x86 Position Independent Code - It's that bad</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/18</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/18</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>15 Apr 2015 03:23:06 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Let's start by looking at a simple C function to be compiled as
|
||||
position-independent code (i.e. <code>-fPIC</code>, for use in a shared library):</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<pre><code>void bar(void);
|
||||
|
||||
void foo(void)
|
||||
{
|
||||
bar();
|
||||
}
|
||||
</code></pre>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>And now, what GCC compiles it to (listing 2):</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<pre><code>foo:
|
||||
pushl %ebx
|
||||
</code></pre>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Multi-threaded setxid on Linux</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/17</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/17</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>15 Jan 2015 16:12:00 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<h4>Background</h4>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Linux has a legacy of treating threads like processes that share
|
||||
memory. The situation was a lot worse about 15 years ago, but it's
|
||||
still far from perfect. Despite lots of fixes to the way signals,
|
||||
process termination and replacement via <code>execve</code>, etc. are handled to
|
||||
make threads behave like threads, plenty of ugly remnants of the idea
|
||||
that "threads are just processes sharing memory" remain; the big areas
|
||||
are:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li>Scheduling properties</li>
|
||||
<li>Resource limits</li>
|
||||
<li>Permissions</li>
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Open race-condition bugs in glibc</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/16</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/16</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>06 Mar 2014 19:10:09 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>As part of the freeze announcement for
|
||||
<a href="http://www.musl-libc.org">musl</a> 1.0, we mentioned longstanding open
|
||||
race condition bugs in glibc. Shortly after the <a href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYyMzM">announcement went out
|
||||
on
|
||||
Phoronix</a>,
|
||||
I got a request for details on which bugs we were referring to, so I
|
||||
put together a list.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The most critical (in my opinion) open race bugs are the ones <a href="http://ewontfix.com/2/">I
|
||||
described on this blog</a> back in 2012; they are
|
||||
reported in glibc issue 12683:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li><a href="https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12683">Bug 12683 - Race conditions in pthread
|
||||
cancellation</a>
|
||||
...</li>
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Systemd has 6 service startup notification types, and they're all wrong</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/15</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/15</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>27 Feb 2014 04:14:26 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>In my last post, <a href="../14">Broken by design: systemd</a>, I covered
|
||||
technical aspects of systemd <em>outside its domain of specialization</em>
|
||||
that make it a poor choice for the future of the Linux userspace's
|
||||
init system. Since then, it's come to my attention as a result of <a href="https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2014-02/msg00707.html">a
|
||||
thread on the glibc development
|
||||
list</a> that
|
||||
systemd can't even get things right in its own problem domain: service
|
||||
supervision.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Per the
|
||||
<a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.service.html">manual</a>,
|
||||
systemd has the following 6 "types" that can be used in a service file
|
||||
to control how systemd will supervise the service (daemon):</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Broken by design: systemd</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/14</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/14</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>09 Feb 2014 19:56:09 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Recently the topic of systemd has come up quite a bit in various
|
||||
communities in which I'm involved, including the
|
||||
<a href="http://www.musl-libc.org">musl</a> IRC channel and <a href="http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2014-February/080405.html">on the Busybox
|
||||
mailing
|
||||
list</a>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>While the attitude towards systemd in these communities is largely
|
||||
negative, much of what I've seen has been either dismissable by folks
|
||||
in different circles as mere conservatism, or tempered by an idea that
|
||||
despite its flaws, "the design is sound". This latter view comes with
|
||||
the notion that systemd's flaws are fixable without scrapping it or
|
||||
otherwise incurring major costs, and therefore not a major obstacle to
|
||||
adopting systemd.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Incorrect configure checks for availability of functions</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/13</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/13</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>14 Aug 2013 00:35:06 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>The short version: using functions without prototypes is dangerous,
|
||||
and bad configure script recipes directly encourage this practice.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>One of the most basic and important checks configure scripts perform
|
||||
is checking for the availability of library functions (either in the
|
||||
standard library or third-party libraries) that are optional, present
|
||||
only in certain versions, wrongly missing on some systems, and so on.
|
||||
In a sense, this is the main purpose of having a configure script, and
|
||||
one would think this kind of check would be hard to get wrong.
|
||||
Unfortunately, these checks are not only possible to get wrong,
|
||||
they're <em>usually</em> wrong, especially in GNU software or other software
|
||||
using gnulib.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The basic problem is that most configure scripts check only for the
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Breakincludes</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/12</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/12</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>04 Jul 2013 16:46:23 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>A little-known part of GCC's build process is a script called
|
||||
"fixincludes", or <code>fixinc.sh</code>. Purportedly, the purpose of this script
|
||||
is to fix "non-ANSI system header files" which GCC "cannot compile".
|
||||
This description seems to correspond roughly to the original intended
|
||||
purpose of fixincludes, but the scope of what it does has since
|
||||
ballooned into all sorts of unrelated changes. Let's look at the first
|
||||
few rules in fixincludes' <code>inclhack.def</code>:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li><p>Changing AIX's <code>_LARGE_FILES</code> redirection of <code>open</code> to <code>open64</code>,
|
||||
etc. to use GCC's <code>__asm__</code> keyword rather than <code>#define</code>, as the
|
||||
latter breaks C++.</p></li>
|
||||
<li><p>Exposing the <code>long double</code> math functions in math.h on Mac OS
|
||||
10.3.9, which inexplicably omitted declarations for them.
|
||||
...</p></li>
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>NULL considered harmful</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/11</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/11</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>04 Jul 2013 03:25:02 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>The C and C++ languages define the macro <code>NULL</code>, widely taught as the
|
||||
correct way to write a literal null pointer. The motivations for using
|
||||
<code>NULL</code> are well-meaning; largely they come down to fact that it
|
||||
documents the intent, much like how a macro named <code>FALSE</code> might better
|
||||
document boolean intent than a literal <code>0</code> would do. Unfortunately,
|
||||
use of the <code>NULL</code> macro without fully understanding it can lead to
|
||||
subtle bugs and portability issues, some of which are difficult for
|
||||
compilers and static analysis tools to diagnose.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Despite it being superceded by the 2011 standard, I'm going to quote
|
||||
C99 because it's what I'm most familar with, and I suspect most
|
||||
readers are in the same situation. 7.17 specifies the <code>NULL</code> macro as:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>NULL
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Non-invasive printf debugging</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/10</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/10</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>12 Dec 2012 16:09:05 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>This post is not about any particular bug or bad programming practice,
|
||||
just a new “printf debugging” technique I came up with.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Often when tracking down a bug, it’s useful to add extra output to
|
||||
track the state of the program in the moments leading up to the crash
|
||||
or incorrect behavior, aka “printf debugging”. However, this technique
|
||||
is “invasive” in the sense that it interleaves unwanted data into the
|
||||
program output. Using <code>stderr</code> instead of <code>stdout</code> can alleviate the
|
||||
problem to some extent, but when you’re inserting the debugging code
|
||||
into a widely-used library (in my case, <code>libc.so</code>) or a shell, even
|
||||
having unwanted output on <code>stderr</code> can be a problem.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>A previous approach I had used was sending the output to an arbitrary
|
||||
high file descriptor instead of <code>stdout</code> or <code>stderr</code>. For example,
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Stubborn and ignorant use of int where size_t is needed</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/9</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/9</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>25 Oct 2012 23:48:02 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>What’s wrong with this C function?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<pre><code>char *my_strchr(char *s, int c)
|
||||
{
|
||||
int i;
|
||||
for (i=0; s[i]!=c; i++)
|
||||
if (!s[i]) return 0;
|
||||
return &s[i];
|
||||
}
|
||||
</code></pre>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Unless its interface contract requires that the caller pass a string
|
||||
no longer than <code>INT_MAX</code>, it can invoke undefined behavior due to
|
||||
integer overflow, most likely resulting in a crash. Even if you change
|
||||
the type to <code>unsigned</code> instead of <code>int</code> to avoid the signed overflow
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Unexpected observability of lock states</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/8</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/8</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>25 Oct 2012 03:20:38 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>This post is going to be the first that’s about one of my own bugs, in
|
||||
<a href="http://www.musl-libc.org">musl</a>. For a long time, I’ve had certain
|
||||
stdio functions such as <code>feof</code> and <code>ferror</code> forgoing any locking, and
|
||||
simply relying on the fact that, per the memory model that’s assumed,
|
||||
reading the associated flags is safe without any locks. The issue with
|
||||
doing this is that, while it’s <em>safe</em>, it’s not <em>correct</em>; it leads to
|
||||
observably incorrect behavior in some cases.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Per POSIX,</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>All functions that reference ( FILE *) objects shall behave as if
|
||||
they use flockfile() and funlockfile() internally to obtain
|
||||
ownership of these ( FILE *) objects.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>vfork considered dangerous</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/7</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/7</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>21 Oct 2012 21:20:22 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Traditional unix systems had a <code>vfork</code> function, which works like
|
||||
<code>fork</code>, but without creating a new virtual address space; the parent
|
||||
and child run in the same address space. Unlike with <code>pthread_create</code>,
|
||||
where the new thread runs on its own stack, <code>vfork</code> behaves like
|
||||
<code>fork</code> and “returns twice”, once in the child and once in the parent.
|
||||
This seems impossible, since the parent and child would clobber one
|
||||
another’s stacks, but a clever trick saves the day: the parent process
|
||||
is suspended until the child performs <code>exec</code> or <code>_exit</code>, breaking the
|
||||
shared-memory-space relation between the two processes.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><code>vfork</code> was omitted from POSIX and modern standards because it’s
|
||||
difficult to use; the original specification for the function left it
|
||||
undefined to do basically <em>anything</em> except <code>exec</code> or <code>_exit</code> after
|
||||
<code>vfork</code> in the child. However, many systems (including Linux) still
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>AS + DC = AC</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/6</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/6</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>15 Oct 2012 00:24:57 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Where A.S. are asynchronous signals, D.C. is deferred cancellation,
|
||||
and A.C. is asynchronous cancellation. In <a href="/5">the previous post</a>, I
|
||||
discussed asychronous versus deferred cancellation in POSIX threads,
|
||||
and issues that make it hard to use asynchronous cancellation well. I
|
||||
also mentioned that there are almost no functions which are
|
||||
async-cancel-safe. What if you want to cheat and get the behavior of
|
||||
asynchronous cancellation, but without having to follow the rules?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Enter asynchronous signals. Particularly, I’m thinking of signals sent
|
||||
to a specific thread using <code>pthread_kill</code>, but really the signal could
|
||||
be coming from another source like pressing the interrupt or quit key
|
||||
on a terminal.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Suppose the main flow of excution in a thread uses only
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Asynchronous cancellation pitfalls</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/5</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/5</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>07 Oct 2012 04:24 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>In the past few posts, I’ve introduced <em>thread cancellation</em> and some
|
||||
of the implementation and application usage difficulties in making
|
||||
cancellation robust. One topic I haven’t yet touched on is
|
||||
asynchronous cancellation. POSIX threads support two cancellation
|
||||
types: asynchronous and deferred. The latter, deferred cancellation,
|
||||
is the default, whereby a cancellation request is only acted upon
|
||||
immediately if the thread to be cancelled is suspended at a
|
||||
cancellation point, and otherwise remains pending until the next call
|
||||
to a cancellation point.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The other option, asynchronous cancellation, allows (but does not
|
||||
require) the implementation to act on cancellation requests at any
|
||||
time. This obviously has the potential, to leave data in a horribly
|
||||
inconsistent state, so rules are imposed; the application cannot call
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Updates on close, EINTR, & cancellation</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/4</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/4</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>03 Oct 2012 00:05 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Last week I took the time to file a report with the Austin Group
|
||||
(responsible for POSIX) about the <code>close</code> issue. It
|
||||
is <a href="http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=614">Issue #614</a>, and it
|
||||
turns out the problem was already solved by fixing the specification
|
||||
of <code>close</code> when interrupted by a signal. Whew. I thought that latter
|
||||
would be a lot more controversial and harder to get fixed</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Some basic history on the issue: Apparently, there was a historical
|
||||
disagreement over the behavior of <code>close</code> when interrupted by a
|
||||
signal. Some implementations (e.g. HPUX) had it leave the file
|
||||
descriptor open when returning with EINTR; others (Linux, AIX) closed
|
||||
it unconditionally, but returned with EINTR if a signal arrived while
|
||||
close() was interrupted before returning. This ambiguity was
|
||||
acceptable for single-threaded applications, which could just
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>To overcommit or not to overcommit</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/3</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/3</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>23 Sep 2012 01:43 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p><a href="http://www.etalabs.net/overcommit.html">I’ve written in the past</a> on
|
||||
the topic of overcommit, which depending on your perspective, is
|
||||
either a feature of Linux and some other kernels, or a bug left over
|
||||
from a time when folks didn’t know how to do virtual memory accounting
|
||||
properly. I’m a serious proponent of strict commit accounting
|
||||
(opposite of overcommit), but for this article, I want to look at the
|
||||
state of the software ecosystem and how it often leaves us
|
||||
overcommit-enabled Linux systems being more failproof than their
|
||||
strict-accounting brothers and sisters.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The idea of strict commit accounting is that <code>malloc</code> never reports
|
||||
success only to let your program crash when you actually try to use
|
||||
the memory. If the kernel cannot ensure that there’s no possible
|
||||
sequence of paging events that would cause it to run out of physical
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Thread cancellation and resource leaks</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/2</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/2</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>21 Sep 2012 02:00 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>In a multi-threaded C program where threads share address space and
|
||||
may be operating on shared objects as long as they use the proper
|
||||
synchronization tools, it’s unsafe to asynchronously kill an
|
||||
individual thread without killing the whole process. Stale locks may
|
||||
be left behind and data being modified under those locks may be in an
|
||||
inconsistent state. This includes even internal heap management
|
||||
structures used by <code>malloc</code>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As such, the POSIX threads standard does not even offer a mechanism
|
||||
for forcible termination of individual threads. Instead, it offers
|
||||
<em>thread cancellation</em>, a mechanism by which early termination of a
|
||||
thread whose work is no longer needed can be negotiated in such a way
|
||||
that the thread to be cancelled cleans up any shared state and/or
|
||||
private resources it may be using before it terminates.
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
<item><title>Introducing EWONTFIX</title>
|
||||
<guid>https://ewontfix.com/1</guid>
|
||||
<link>https://ewontfix.com/1</link>
|
||||
<pubDate>22 Sep 2012 22:47 GMT</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><![CDATA[
|
||||
<p>Welcome to EWONTFIX, a blog about, well, bugs. Especially longstanding
|
||||
unfixed ones in C code for Linux or Unix-like systems. The idea for
|
||||
this blog grew out of conversations during the development of <a href="http://www.musl-libc.org">musl
|
||||
libc</a>. Aside from the fact that longstanding
|
||||
bugs in glibc were one of the original motivations for musl, it turns
|
||||
out that developing a libc leads to spending a lot of time building
|
||||
and testing applications. And in the process of testing, one ends up
|
||||
reading a lot of source. And a lot of source is appallingly bad.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Most low-quality source code just isn’t that interesting to write
|
||||
about. It’s more just a matter of identifying the problems, submitting
|
||||
them to bug trackers, and following up until somebody fixes things.
|
||||
However there are also a good deal of cases where buggy code <em>is</em>
|
||||
interesting to discuss. These fall mostly under two major categories:
|
||||
...</p>
|
||||
]]></description></item>
|
||||
</channel></rss>
|
||||
677
newsboat/newsboat/rss/skolelinux.rss
Normal file
677
newsboat/newsboat/rss/skolelinux.rss
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,677 @@
|
|||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
<rss version='2.0' xmlns:lj='http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/1.0/' xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
|
||||
<channel>
|
||||
<title>Petter Reinholdtsen</title>
|
||||
<description></description>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
|
||||
<atom:link href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Managing and using ONVIF IP cameras with Linux</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2022 12:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Recently I have been looking at how to control and collect data
|
||||
from a handful IP cameras using Linux. I both wanted to change their
|
||||
settings and to make their imagery available via a free software
|
||||
service under my control. Here is a summary of the tools I found.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>First I had to identify the cameras and their protocols. As far as
|
||||
I could tell, they were using some SOAP looking protocol and their
|
||||
internal web server seem to only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer
|
||||
with some proprietary binary plugin, which in these days of course is
|
||||
a security disaster and also made it impossible for me to use the
|
||||
camera web interface. Luckily I discovered that the SOAP looking
|
||||
protocol is actually following <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">the
|
||||
ONVIF specification</a>, which seem to be supported by a lot of IP
|
||||
cameras these days.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Once the protocol was identified, I was able to find what appear to
|
||||
be the most popular way to configure ONVIF cameras, the free software
|
||||
Windows tool named
|
||||
<a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/">ONVIF Device
|
||||
Manager</a>. Lacking any other options at the time, I tried
|
||||
unsuccessfully to get it running using Wine, but was missing a dotnet
|
||||
40 library and I found no way around it to run it on Linux.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The next tool I found to configure the cameras were a non-free Linux Qt
|
||||
client <a href="https://www.lingodigit.com/onvif_nvcdemo.html">ONVIF
|
||||
Device Tool</a>. I did not like its terms of use, so did not spend
|
||||
much time on it.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>To collect the video and make it available in a web interface, I
|
||||
found the Zoneminder tool in Debian. A recent version was able to
|
||||
automatically detect and configure ONVIF devices, so I could use it to
|
||||
set up motion detection in and collection of the camera output. I had
|
||||
initial problems getting the ONVIF autodetection to work, as both
|
||||
Firefox and Chromium <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1001188">refused
|
||||
the inter-tab communication</a> being used by the Zoneminder web
|
||||
pages, but managed to get konqueror to work. Apparently the "Enhanced
|
||||
Tracking Protection" in Firefox cause the problem. I ended up
|
||||
upgrading to the Bookworm edition of Zoneminder in the process to try
|
||||
to fix the issue, and believe the problem might be solved now.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>In the process I came across the nice Linux GUI tool
|
||||
<a href="https://gitlab.com/caspermeijn/onvifviewer/">ONVIF Viewer</a>
|
||||
allowing me to preview the camera output and validate the login
|
||||
passwords required. Sadly its author has grown tired of maintaining
|
||||
the software, so it might not see any future updates. Which is sad,
|
||||
as the viewer is sightly unstable and the picture tend to lock up.
|
||||
Note, this lockup might be due to limitations in the cameras and not
|
||||
the viewer implementation. I suspect the camera is only able to
|
||||
provide pictures to one client at the time, and the Zoneminder feed
|
||||
might interfere with the GUI viewer. I have
|
||||
<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1000820">asked for the tool to be
|
||||
included in Debian</a>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Finally, I found what appear to be very nice Linux free software
|
||||
replacement for the Windows tool, named
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">libonvif</a>. It
|
||||
provide a C library to talk to ONVIF devices as well as a command line
|
||||
and GUI tool using the library. Using the GUI tool I was able to change
|
||||
the admin passwords and update other settings of the cameras. I have
|
||||
<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1021980">asked for the package to be
|
||||
included in Debian</a>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><strong>Update 2022-10-20</strong>: Since my initial publication of
|
||||
this text, I got several suggestions for more free software Linux
|
||||
tools. There is <a href="https://github.com/quatanium/python-onvif">a
|
||||
ONVIF python library</a> (already
|
||||
<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/824240">requested into Debian</a>) and
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/FalkTannhaeuser/python-onvif-zeep">a python 3
|
||||
fork</a> using a different SOAP dependency. There is also
|
||||
<a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/onvif/">support for
|
||||
ONVIF in Home Assistant</a>, and there is an alternative to Zoneminder
|
||||
called <a href="https://www.shinobi.video/">Shinobi</a>. The latter
|
||||
two are not included in Debian either. I have not tested any of these
|
||||
so far.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator's Handbook</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>(The picture is of the previous edition.)</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of
|
||||
the "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
|
||||
Handbook</a>" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The
|
||||
english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the
|
||||
translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one
|
||||
way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster
|
||||
edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%. The
|
||||
complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has
|
||||
been published in several languages over the years. The translations
|
||||
are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue. The
|
||||
last time I checked, it complete text was available in English,
|
||||
Norwegian Bokmål, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish.
|
||||
In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan,
|
||||
Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
|
||||
Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish,
|
||||
Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The translation is conducted on
|
||||
<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
|
||||
hosted weblate project page</a>. Prospective translators are
|
||||
recommeded to subscribe to
|
||||
<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
|
||||
translators mailing list</a> and should also check out
|
||||
<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
|
||||
contributors</a>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I am one of the Norwegian Bokmål translators of this book, and we
|
||||
have just started. Your contribution is most welcome.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Automatic LinuxCNC servo PID tuning?</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Sat, 16 Jul 2022 22:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller">PID
|
||||
controller</a>, I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values
|
||||
that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is. It
|
||||
proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded
|
||||
in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X
|
||||
and Y to move accurately and reliably. But while climbing up this
|
||||
rather steep learning curve, I discovered that some motor control
|
||||
systems are able to tune their PID controllers. I got the impression
|
||||
from the documentation that LinuxCNC were not. This proved to be not
|
||||
true</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The LinuxCNC
|
||||
<a href="http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/pid.9.html">pid
|
||||
component</a> is the recommended PID controller to use. It uses eight
|
||||
constants <tt>Pgain</tt>, <tt>Igain</tt>, <tt>Dgain</tt>,
|
||||
<tt>bias</tt>, <tt>FF0</tt>, <tt>FF1</tt>, <tt>FF2</tt> and
|
||||
<tt>FF3</tt> to calculate the output value based on current and wanted
|
||||
state, and all of these need to have a sensible value for the
|
||||
controller to behave properly. Note, there are even more values
|
||||
involved, theser are just the most important ones. In my case I need
|
||||
the X, Y and Z axes to follow the requested path with little error.
|
||||
This has proved quite a challenge for someone who have never tuned a
|
||||
PID controller before, but there is at least some help to be found.
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I discovered that included in LinuxCNC was this old PID component
|
||||
at_pid claiming to have auto tuning capabilities. Sadly it had been
|
||||
neglected since 2011, and could not be used as a plug in replacement
|
||||
for the default pid component. One would have to rewriting the
|
||||
LinuxCNC HAL setup to test at_pid. This was rather sad, when I wanted
|
||||
to quickly test auto tuning to see if it did a better job than me at
|
||||
figuring out good P, I and D values to use.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I decided to have a look if the situation could be improved. This
|
||||
involved trying to understand the code and history of the pid and
|
||||
at_pid components. Apparently they had a common ancestor, as code
|
||||
structure, comments and variable names were quite close to each other.
|
||||
Sadly this was not reflected in the git history, making it hard to
|
||||
figure out what really happened. My guess is that the author of
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/at_pid.c">at_pid.c</a>
|
||||
took a version of
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/pid.c">pid.c</a>,
|
||||
rewrote it to follow the structure he wished pid.c to have, then added
|
||||
support for auto tuning and finally got it included into the LinuxCNC
|
||||
repository. The restructuring and lack of early history made it
|
||||
harder to figure out which part of the code were relevant to the auto
|
||||
tuning, and which part of the code needed to be updated to work the
|
||||
same way as the current pid.c implementation. I started by trying to
|
||||
isolate relevant changes in pid.c, and applying them to at_pid.c. My
|
||||
aim was to make sure the at_pid component could replace the pid
|
||||
component with a simple change in the HAL setup loadrt line, without
|
||||
having to "rewire" the rest of the HAL configuration. After a few
|
||||
hours following this approach, I had learned quite a lot about the
|
||||
code structure of both components, while concluding I was heading down
|
||||
the wrong rabbit hole, and should get back to the surface and find a
|
||||
different path.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>For the second attempt, I decided to throw away all the PID control
|
||||
related part of the original at_pid.c, and instead isolate and lift
|
||||
the auto tuning part of the code and inject it into a copy of pid.c.
|
||||
This ensured compatibility with the current pid component, while
|
||||
adding auto tuning as a run time option. To make it easier to identify
|
||||
the relevant parts in the future, I wrapped all the auto tuning code
|
||||
with '#ifdef AUTO_TUNER'. The end result behave just like the current
|
||||
pid component by default, as that part of the code is identical. The
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/1820">end result
|
||||
entered the LinuxCNC master branch</a> a few days ago.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>To enable auto tuning, one need to set a few HAL pins in the PID
|
||||
component. The most important ones are <tt>tune-effort</tt>,
|
||||
<tt>tune-mode</tt> and <tt>tune-start</tt>. But lets take a step
|
||||
back, and see what the auto tuning code will do. I do not know the
|
||||
mathematical foundation of the at_pid algorithm, but from observation
|
||||
I can tell that the algorithm will, when enabled, produce a square
|
||||
wave pattern centered around the <tt>bias</tt> value on the output pin
|
||||
of the PID controller. This can be seen using the HAL Scope provided
|
||||
by LinuxCNC. In my case, this is translated into voltage (+-10V) sent
|
||||
to the motor controller, which in turn is translated into motor speed.
|
||||
So at_pid will ask the motor to move the axis back and forth. The
|
||||
number of cycles in the pattern is controlled by the
|
||||
<tt>tune-cycles</tt> pin, and the extremes of the wave pattern is
|
||||
controlled by the <tt>tune-effort</tt> pin. Of course, trying to
|
||||
change the direction of a physical object instantly (as in going
|
||||
directly from a positive voltage to the equivalent negative voltage)
|
||||
do not change velocity instantly, and it take some time for the object
|
||||
to slow down and move in the opposite direction. This result in a
|
||||
more smooth movement wave form, as the axis in question were vibrating
|
||||
back and forth. When the axis reached the target speed in the
|
||||
opposing direction, the auto tuner change direction again. After
|
||||
several of these changes, the average time delay between the 'peaks'
|
||||
and 'valleys' of this movement graph is then used to calculate
|
||||
proposed values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain, and insert them into the
|
||||
HAL model to use by the pid controller. The auto tuned settings are
|
||||
not great, but htye work a lot better than the values I had been able
|
||||
to cook up on my own, at least for the horizontal X and Y axis. But I
|
||||
had to use very small <tt>tune-effort<tt> values, as my motor
|
||||
controllers error out if the voltage change too quickly. I've been
|
||||
less lucky with the Z axis, which is moving a heavy object up and
|
||||
down, and seem to confuse the algorithm. The Z axis movement became a
|
||||
lot better when I introduced a <tt>bias</tt> value to counter the
|
||||
gravitational drag, but I will have to work a lot more on the Z axis
|
||||
PID values.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Armed with this knowledge, it is time to look at how to do the
|
||||
tuning. Lets say the HAL configuration in question load the PID
|
||||
component for X, Y and Z like this:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
loadrt pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Armed with the new and improved at_pid component, the new line will
|
||||
look like this:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
loadrt at_pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The rest of the HAL setup can stay the same. This work because the
|
||||
components are referenced by name. If the component had used count=3
|
||||
instead, all use of pid.# had to be changed to at_pid.#.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>To start tuning the X axis, move the axis to the middle of its
|
||||
range, to make sure it do not hit anything when it start moving back
|
||||
and forth. Next, set the <tt>tune-effort</tt> to a low number in the
|
||||
output range. I used 0.1 as my initial value. Next, assign 1 to the
|
||||
<tt>tune-mode</tt> value. Note, this will disable the pid controlling
|
||||
part and feed 0 to the output pin, which in my case initially caused a
|
||||
lot of drift. In my case it proved to be a good idea with X and Y to
|
||||
tune the motor driver to make sure 0 voltage stopped the motor
|
||||
rotation. On the other hand, for the Z axis this proved to be a bad
|
||||
idea, so it will depend on your setup. It might help to set the
|
||||
<tt>bias</tt> value to a output value that reduce or eliminate the
|
||||
axis drift. Finally, after setting <tt>tune-mode</tt>, set
|
||||
<tt>tune-start</tt> to 1 to activate the auto tuning. If all go well,
|
||||
your axis will vibrate for a few seconds and when it is done, new
|
||||
values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain will be active. To test them,
|
||||
change <tt>tune-mode</tt> back to 0. Note that this might cause the
|
||||
machine to suddenly jerk as it bring the axis back to its commanded
|
||||
position, which it might have drifted away from during tuning. To
|
||||
summarize with some halcmd lines:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-effort 0.1
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-mode 1
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-start 1
|
||||
# wait for the tuning to complete
|
||||
setp pid.x.tune-mode 0
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>After doing this task quite a few times while trying to figure out
|
||||
how to properly tune the PID controllers on the machine in, I decided
|
||||
to figure out if this process could be automated, and wrote a script
|
||||
to do the entire tuning process from power on. The end result will
|
||||
ensure the machine is powered on and ready to run, home all axis if it
|
||||
is not already done, check that the extra tuning pins are available,
|
||||
move the axis to its mid point, run the auto tuning and re-enable the
|
||||
pid controller when it is done. It can be run several times. Check
|
||||
out the
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/SebKuzminsky/MazakVQC1540/blob/bon-dev/scripts/run-auto-pid-tuner">run-auto-pid-tuner</a>
|
||||
script on github if you want to learn how it is done.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>My hope is that this little adventure can inspire someone who know
|
||||
more about motor PID controller tuning can implement even better
|
||||
algorithms for automatic PID tuning in LinuxCNC, making life easier
|
||||
for both me and all the others that want to use LinuxCNC but lack the
|
||||
in depth knowledge needed to tune PID controllers well.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>My free software activity of late (2022)</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_free_software_activity_of_late__2022_.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_free_software_activity_of_late__2022_.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jun 2022 14:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>I guess it is time to bring some light on the various free software
|
||||
and open culture activities and projects I have worked on or been
|
||||
involved in the last year and a half.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>First, lets mention the book
|
||||
<a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/">releases I managed to
|
||||
publish</a>. The Cory Doctorow book "Hvordan knuse
|
||||
overvåkningskapitalismen" argue that it is not the magic machine
|
||||
learning of the big technology companies that causes the surveillance
|
||||
capitalism to thrive, it is the lack of trust busting to enforce
|
||||
existing anti-monopoly laws. I also published a family of
|
||||
dictionaries for machinists, one sorted on the English words, one
|
||||
sorted on the Norwegian and the last sorted on the North Sámi words.
|
||||
A bit on the back burner but not forgotten is the Debian
|
||||
Administrators Handbook, where a new edition is being worked on. I
|
||||
have not spent as much time as I want to help bring it to completion,
|
||||
but hope I will get more spare time to look at it before the end of
|
||||
the year.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>With my Debian had I have spent time on several projects, both
|
||||
updating existing packages, helping to bring in new packages and
|
||||
working with upstream projects to try to get them ready to go into
|
||||
Debian. The list is rather long, and I will only mention my own
|
||||
isenkram, openmotor, vlc bittorrent plugin, xprintidle, norwegian
|
||||
letter style for latex, bs1770gain, and recordmydesktop. In addition
|
||||
to these I have sponsored several packages into Debian, like audmes.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The last year I have looked at several infrastructure projects for
|
||||
collecting meter data and video surveillance recordings. This include
|
||||
several ONVIF related tools like onvifviewer and zoneminder as well as
|
||||
rtl-433, wmbusmeters and rtl-wmbus.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>In parallel with this I have looked at fabrication related free
|
||||
software solutions like pycam and LinuxCNC. The latter recently
|
||||
gained improved translation support using po4a and weblate, which was
|
||||
a harder nut to crack that I had anticipated when I started.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Several hours have been spent translating free software to
|
||||
Norwegian Bokmål on the Weblate hosted service. Do not have a
|
||||
complete list, but you will find my contributions in at least gnucash,
|
||||
minetest and po4a.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I also spent quite some time on the Norwegian archiving specification
|
||||
Noark 5, and its companion project Nikita implementing the API
|
||||
specification for Noark 5.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Recently I have been looking into free software tools to do company
|
||||
accounting here in Norway., which present an interesting mix between
|
||||
law, rules, regulations, format specifications and API interfaces.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I guess I should also mention the Norwegian community driven
|
||||
government interfacing projects Mimes Brønn and Fiksgatami, which have
|
||||
ended up in a kind of limbo while the future of the projects is being
|
||||
worked out.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>These are just a few of the projects I have been involved it, and
|
||||
would like to give more visibility. I'll stop here to avoid delaying
|
||||
this post.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>LinuxCNC translators life just got a bit easier</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Fri, 3 Jun 2022 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a> system, I
|
||||
proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for
|
||||
translators. The original system consisted of independently written
|
||||
documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track
|
||||
changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to
|
||||
know how much was left to translated. By using
|
||||
<a href="https://po4a.org/">the po4a system</a> to generate POT and PO
|
||||
files from the English documentation, this can be improved. A small
|
||||
team of LinuxCNC contributors got together and today our labour
|
||||
finally payed off. Since a few hours ago, it is now possible to
|
||||
translate <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/linuxcnc/">the
|
||||
LinuxCNC documentation on Weblate</a>, alongside the program itself.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The effort to migrate the documentation to use po4a has been both
|
||||
slow and frustrating. I am very happy we finally made it.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2022 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
|
||||
located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
|
||||
not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
|
||||
information that I would like). The
|
||||
<a href="https://support.lenovo.com/no/en/search?query=thinkpad firmware bios upgrade iso&SearchType=Customer search&searchLocation=Masthead">download
|
||||
from Lenovo</a> is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
|
||||
when all I got available is a USB memory stick. I tried booting the
|
||||
ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work. But genisoimage came to
|
||||
the rescue.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<P>The geteltorito program in
|
||||
<a href="http://tracker.debian.org/cdrkit">the genisoimage binary
|
||||
package</a> is able to convert the bootable ISO image to a bootable
|
||||
USB stick using a simple command line recipe, which I then can write
|
||||
to the most recently inserted USB stick:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
geteltorito -o usbstick.img lenovo-firmware.iso
|
||||
sudo dd bs=10M if=usbstick.img of=$(ls -tr /dev/sd?|tail -1)
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This USB stick booted the firmware upgrader just fine, and in a few
|
||||
minutes my machine had the latest and greatest BIOS firmware in place.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Playing and encoding AV1 in Debian Bullseye</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Playing_and_encoding_AV1_in_Debian_Bullseye.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Playing_and_encoding_AV1_in_Debian_Bullseye.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Sat, 16 Apr 2022 08:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Inspired by the recent news of
|
||||
<a href="https://slashdot.org/story/22/04/03/2039219/intel-beats-amd-and-nvidia-with-arc-gpus-full-av1-support">AV1
|
||||
hardware encoding support from Intel</a>, I decided to look into
|
||||
the state of AV1 on Linux today. AV1 is a
|
||||
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160618103850/http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free
|
||||
and open standard</a> as defined by Digistan without any royalty
|
||||
payment requirement, unlike its much used competitor encoding
|
||||
H.264. While looking, I came across an 5 year
|
||||
<a href="https://askubuntu.com/questions/1061908/how-to-encode-and-playback-video-with-the-av1-codec-on-bionic-beaver-18-04">old
|
||||
question on askubuntu.com</a> which in turn inspired me to check out
|
||||
how things are in Debian Stable regarding AV1. The test file listed
|
||||
in the question (askubuntu_test_aom.mp4) did not exist any more, so I
|
||||
tracked down a different set of test files on
|
||||
<a href="https://av1.webmfiles.org/">av1.webmfiles.org</a> to test them
|
||||
with the various video tools I had installed on my machine. I was
|
||||
happy to discover that AV1 decoding and playback worked with almost
|
||||
every tool I tested:
|
||||
|
||||
<table align="center">
|
||||
<tr><td>mediainfo</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>dragonplayer</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>ffmpeg / ffplay</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>gnome-mplayer</td> <td>fail</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>mplayer</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>mpv</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>parole</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>vlc</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>firefox</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td>chromium</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>AV1 encoding is available in Debian Stable from the aom-tools
|
||||
version 1.0.0.errata1-3 package, using the aomenc tool. The encoding
|
||||
using the package in Debian Stable is quite slow, with the frame rate
|
||||
for my 10 second test video at around 0.25 fps. My 10 second video
|
||||
test took 16 minutes and 11 seconds on my test machine.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I tested by first running ffmpeg and then aomenc using the recipe
|
||||
provided by the askubuntu recipe above. I had to remove the
|
||||
'--row-mt=1' option, as it was not supported in my 1.0.0 version. The
|
||||
encoding only used a single thread, according to <tt>top</tt>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote><pre>
|
||||
ffmpeg -i some-old-video.ogv -t 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p video.y4m
|
||||
aomenc --fps=24/1 -u 0 --codec=av1 --target-bitrate=1000 \
|
||||
--lag-in-frames=25 --auto-alt-ref=1 -t 24 --cpu-used=8 \
|
||||
--tile-columns=2 --tile-rows=2 -o output.webm video.y4m
|
||||
</pre></blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As version 1.0.0 currently have several
|
||||
<a href="https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/aom">unsolved
|
||||
security issues in Debian Stable</a>, and to see if the recent
|
||||
backport <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/aom">provided in
|
||||
Debian</a> is any quicker, I ran <tt>apt -t bullseye-backports install
|
||||
aom-tools</tt> to fetch the backported version and re-encoded the
|
||||
video using the latest version. This time the '--row-mt=1' option
|
||||
worked, and the encoding was done in 46 seconds with a frame rate of
|
||||
around 5.22 fps. This time it seem to be using all my four cores to
|
||||
encode. Encoding speed is still too low for streaming and real time,
|
||||
which would require frame rates above 25 fps, but might be good enough
|
||||
for offline encoding.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I am very happy to see AV1 playback working so well with the
|
||||
default tools in Debian Stable. I hope the encoding situation improve
|
||||
too, allowing even a slow old computer like my 10 year old laptop to
|
||||
be used for encoding.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Få en slutt på Digitale utslipp</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/F__en_slutt_p__Digitale_utslipp.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/F__en_slutt_p__Digitale_utslipp.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Mar 2022 22:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>På onsdag sendte jeg følgende epost til Utdanningsetaten i Oslo
|
||||
kommune (UDE). Fikk beskjed om at min henvendelse har saksnummer
|
||||
22/7559-1 i den
|
||||
<a href="https://www.oslo.kommune.no/etater-foretak-og-ombud/utdanningsetaten/postjournal-utdanningsetaten/">offentlige
|
||||
postjournalen til UDE</a>. Jeg er spent på hva slags respons jeg får.
|
||||
Mistenker jo de fleste som sprer sine nettsideleseres
|
||||
personopplysninger til utlandet ikke har tenkt så nøye igjennom hva de
|
||||
gjør, og at det er håp om at de tenker seg litt nøyere om hvis de blir
|
||||
klar over problemstillingen. Vet du noen som burde få tilsvarede
|
||||
beskjed og spørsmål? Kanskje du kan sende dem en epost. Hvis alle
|
||||
bidrar blir det kanskje litt bedre.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>To: postmottak (at) osloskolen.no
|
||||
<br>Subject: Digitale utslipp fra osloskolens nettsider</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Hei.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Jeg ser at osloskolens nettsider har digitale utslipp av
|
||||
personopplysninger til Google, Facebook og andre, blant annet omtalt
|
||||
på &lt;URL: <a href="https://aktuelt.osloskolen.no/personvernerklaring-for-osloskolen/informasjonskapsler/">https://aktuelt.osloskolen.no/personvernerklaring-for-osloskolen/informasjonskapsler/</a>
|
||||
>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>&lt;URL: <a href="https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/">https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/</a> > kan være et nyttig verktøy for å holde øye med utslippsomfanget på ulike sider.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Kanskje det er en ide å gjøre noe med det, jamfør &lt;URL: <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/debatt-det-enkleste-tiltaket-er-a-skru-av-google-analytics/517378">https://www.digi.no/artikler/debatt-det-enkleste-tiltaket-er-a-skru-av-google-analytics/517378</a> >?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Et alternativ til Google Analytics kan være en lokalt installert
|
||||
utgave av &lt;URL:
|
||||
<a href="https://matomo.org/">https://matomo.org/</a> >. Den og flere
|
||||
andre alternativer kan finnes via
|
||||
&lt;URL: <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sverige-vil-skrote-amerikansk-skytjeneste-her-er-alternativene/516223?key=5QsV0wRG">https://www.digi.no/artikler/sverige-vil-skrote-amerikansk-skytjeneste-her-er-alternativene/516223?key=5QsV0wRG</a> >
|
||||
på bakgrunn av at svenske myndigheter har innsett at dagens praksis
|
||||
nok er både lite lur og ulovlig. Der henger Norge litt etter, men
|
||||
osloskolen har her mulighet til å være litt i forkant. :)</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Fint om dere kan gi beskjed hvilket saksnummer denne henvendelsen får i
|
||||
offentlig postjournal når den er mottatt.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
</p>Flere og flere innser at slik spredning av personopplysninger er
|
||||
ugreit. Det har pågått i mange år. Ser jeg blogget
|
||||
<a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Det_er_jo_makta_som_er_mest_s_rbar_ved_massiv_overv_kning_av_Internett.html">første
|
||||
gang om Google Analytics i 2013</a> og
|
||||
<a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Snurpenot_overv_kning_av_sensitiv_personinformasjon.html">analyserte
|
||||
omfanget i 2015</a>, men det er et langt lerret å bleke.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Som vanlig, hvis du bruker Bitcoin og ønsker å vise din støtte til
|
||||
det jeg driver med, setter jeg pris på om du sender Bitcoin-donasjoner
|
||||
til min adresse
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.
|
||||
Merk, betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Publish Hargassner wood chip boiler state to MQTT</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Publish_Hargassner_wood_chip_boiler_state_to_MQTT.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Publish_Hargassner_wood_chip_boiler_state_to_MQTT.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Sat, 12 Mar 2022 06:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>Recently I had a look at a
|
||||
<a href="https://www.hargassner.at/">Hargassner</a>
|
||||
<a href="https://www.hargassner.at/en/products/wood-chip-boiler.html">wood
|
||||
chip boiler</a>, and what kind of free software can be used to monitor
|
||||
and control it. The boiler can be connected to some cloud service via
|
||||
what the producer call an Internet Gateway, which seem to be a
|
||||
computer connecting to the boiler and passing the information gathered
|
||||
to the cloud. I discovered the boiler controller got an IP address on
|
||||
the local network and listen on TCP port 23 to provide status
|
||||
information as a text line of numbers. It also provide a HTTP server
|
||||
listening on port 80, but I have not yet figured out what it can do
|
||||
beside return an error code.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>If I am to believe various free software implementations talking to
|
||||
such boiler, the interpretation of the line of numbers differ between
|
||||
type of boiler and software version on the boiler. By comparing the
|
||||
list of numbers on the front panel of the boiler with the numbers
|
||||
returned via TCP, I have been able to figure out several of the
|
||||
numbers, but there are a lot left to understand. I've located several
|
||||
temperature measurements and hours running values, as well as oxygen
|
||||
measurements and counters.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
I decided to write a simple parser in Python for the values I figured
|
||||
out so far, and a simple MQTT injector publishing both the interpreted
|
||||
and the unknown values on a MQTT bus to make collecting and graphing
|
||||
simpler. The end result is available from the
|
||||
<a href="https://gitlab.com/petterreinholdtsen/hargassner2mqtt">hargassner2mqtt
|
||||
project page</a> on gitlab. I very much welcome patches extending the
|
||||
parser to understand more values, boiler types and software versions.
|
||||
I do not really expect very few free software developers got their
|
||||
hands on such unit to experiment, but it would be fun if others too find
|
||||
this project useful.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
<item>
|
||||
<title>Run your industrial metal working machine using Debian?</title>
|
||||
<link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html</link>
|
||||
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html</guid>
|
||||
<pubDate>Wed, 2 Mar 2022 18:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
|
||||
<description><p>After many months of hard work by the good people involved in
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>, the
|
||||
system was accepted Sunday
|
||||
<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linuxcnc">into Debian</a>.
|
||||
Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from
|
||||
<a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=linuxcnc">its
|
||||
popularity-contest numbers</a> that people have been reporting its use
|
||||
since 2012. <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/">Its project site</a> might
|
||||
be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting
|
||||
via Tor.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering? Perhaps a
|
||||
Wikipedia quote is in place?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
"LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
|
||||
machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
|
||||
cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
|
||||
joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
|
||||
several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
|
||||
interactive development)."
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>It can even control 3D printers. And even though the Wikipedia
|
||||
page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel
|
||||
features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features
|
||||
provided by the Debian kernel.
|
||||
<a href="https://github.com/linuxcnc/linuxcnc">The source code</a> is
|
||||
available from Github. The last few months I've been involved in the
|
||||
translation setup for the program and documentation. Translators are
|
||||
most welcome to
|
||||
<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/linuxcnc/">join the
|
||||
effort</a> using Weblate.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
|
||||
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
|
||||
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
|
||||
</description>
|
||||
</item>
|
||||
|
||||
</channel>
|
||||
</rss>
|
||||
13
newsboat/newsboat/urls
Normal file
13
newsboat/newsboat/urls
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
|
|||
https://feeds.feedburner.com/tom-preston-werner
|
||||
https://unixsheikh.com/feed.rss
|
||||
https://www.alexblackie.com/feed.xml
|
||||
https://jvns.ca/atom.xml
|
||||
https://gabmus.org/index.xml
|
||||
https://www.wilfred.me.uk/rss.xml
|
||||
https://interrupt.memfault.com/feed.xml
|
||||
https://www.brain-dump.org/index.xml
|
||||
https://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml
|
||||
file://./rss/VYPJXZwH.rss
|
||||
file://./rss/ewontfix.rss
|
||||
file://./rss/0pointer.rss
|
||||
file://./rss/skolelinux.rss
|
||||
Loading…
Add table
Add a link
Reference in a new issue