I was unaware of Debian’s extrepo command…| www.madebymikal.com
…and its actually a pretty neat idea!| Made by Mikal
I’m getting really into reading second hand science fiction from the 1950s onward. I read a few (but nowhere near all) of the Foundation series as a child, and I remember liking them a lot. Stolen from Wikipedia as well as other online sources, here is a list of the books in The Foundation series in Asimov’s suggested reading order…| Made by Mikal
I spent a lot of last year trying to understand why companies treated the employees they rely on for success so poorly — The Man Who Broke Capitalism; Lights Out; The Idea Factory; AI Snake Oil; Leaders Eat Last; and so on are all part of that journey. At the time I was a bit fixated […]| Made by Mikal
Please note: this post is a re-write of a previous post about my Vevor weather station that failed after a few months because of ineffective weather seals on the outdoor unit. Given the poor warranty service from Vevor, I instead went and bought a weather station from a local retailer. In my case a Jaycar […]| Made by Mikal
I’ve read this book a few times, but honestly the Foundation TV series has left me with a new enthusiasm to re-read some Asimov stuff. I have previously read the entire extended multi-author series, and honestly a fair few of them sucked — especially the ones by other authors — so this time I have the luxury of being a bit more picky. Worse, Asimov remixed the robot stories several times into various volumes, and it can be quite confusing. The Complete Robot contains all the robot stor...| Made by Mikal
I’ve been thinking a bit about training at work recently, largely in the context of having spent the last twenty years working for US technology companies. I think effectively all of these companies made a pretty big mistake — they viewed training of employees as a perk much like vacation, book budgets, or t-shirts. They […]| Made by Mikal
Andy Pavlo of the CMU Database Group is well known for saying that while NoSQL databases acquire cyclical popularity, all databases eventually iterate back to a SQL interface — it happened with MongoDB and Google’s BigTable for example.| Made by Mikal
…even if none of my friends seem to think so. I’ve been off on a bit of a tangent recently. Its a slow burn tangent, that I am pretty sure was kicked off by this Geek Narrator podcast episode about the design of Turbo Puffer with Simon Eskildsen: The basic idea is that you can […]| Made by Mikal
For the last couple of years I have been working on a SPICE protocol native proxy called Kerbside. The basic idea is to be able to provide SPICE Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) consoles to users from cloud platforms such as Shaken Fist, OpenStack, or oVirt. Think Citrix, but for Open Source cloud platforms. SPICE is attractive here because it has some features that other more common VDI protocols like VNC don’t have — good cut and paste support, USB device pass-through, multiple monitor s...| Made by Mikal
This book is a history of the Bell Labs run by AT&T for much of the 20th century. These are the labs which produced many of the things I use day to day — Unix and the C programming language for example, although this book focuses on other people present at the lab, and a bit earlier than the Unix people. Unix, a history and a memoir for example is set in the same location but later in time.| Made by Mikal
I’ve been using virtio-serial for communications between Linux hypervisors and guest virtual machines for ages. Lots of other people do it to — the qemu guest agent for example is implemented like this. In fact, I think that’s where I got my original thoughts on the matter from. However, virtio-serial is actually fairly terrible to write against as a programming model, because you’re left to do all the multiplexing of various requests down the channel and surely there’s something be...| Made by Mikal
Noting that the Intel 4004 was normally sold as a chip set called the Intel MCS-4, the standard clock circuit used appears to be this (from this PDF, kindly provided by this vendor of MCS-4 test boards):| Made by Mikal
Disclaimer: despite what people seem to assume when you buy a mechanical keyboard, I am not a keyboard fetishist. I’ve been using Microsoft Sculpts for over a decade because of historical repetition injury issues, and with Microsoft discontinuing the Sculpt and the new manufacturer taking their time taking over, all I want is a keyboard which is like a Sculpt, except where I haven’t worn out the space bar. I will then go back to thinking approximately never about keyboards.| Made by Mikal
This book continues the story of General Electric in the period after that covered by The Man Who Broke Capitalism, thus presenting an opportunity to validate if Jack Welch really was the bad guy while also learning more about where Welchism took General Electric in the longer term. This book is very readable, with nice short chapters — for example it introduces Welch as a character, but does not dwell on his time at General Electric more than is necessary.| Made by Mikal