Wednesday 20th March 2019: 8.35pm. So I was complaining last day about how my new Threadripper workstation didn't seem much faster. Today I compiled the entire work codebase. What took over two hours on the Ivy Bridge workstation now takes fifteen minutes! Which is pretty impressive, really.
…
Tuesday 19th March 2019: 4.36pm. You may remember that I pulled the trigger on a new workstation to replace my six year old Ivy Bridge one:
- Sixteen core AMD Threadripper 2950x @ 3.5Ghz, turbo 4.5Ghz.
- 32Gb of DDR4-3200 RAM @ 64Gb/sec 75Gb/sec.
- 512Gb Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD @ 3.1Gb/sec
I spent no less than thirteen - yes, thirteen - hours yesterday during the public holiday pulling out the old system, and putting in the new.
…
Wednesday 6th March 2019: 9.01pm. Just pulled the trigger on the guts of a new workstation to replace my six year old Ivy Bridge workstation:- Four core Intel i7-3770K @ 3.9Ghz ("overclocked" to turbo always on).- 16Gb of DDR3-1600 RAM @ 21Gb/sec.... with this instead:- Sixteen core AMD Threadripper 2950x @ 3.5Ghz, turbo 4.5Ghz.- 32Gb of DDR4-3200 RAM @ 64Gb/sec.So four times the CPU cores and three times the memory bandwidth.
…
Wednesday 27th February 2019: 9.21pm. Link shared: https://scrapy.org/ Been making good progress on other todo task like items other than wifi routers :). I've been slowly writing https://scrapy.org/ plugins to scrape http://www.nedprod.com's content into a https://gohugo.io/ generated website. Scrapy is a great tool, highly recommended. Once I've converted all that Microsoft FrontPage 1998-era HTML, I can then finish my migration away from Google+ and all megacorp social media who resell my information onto 100% wholly owned and maintained by me social networking based on ActivityPub.
…
Monday 18th February 2019: 10.02pm. Picked up an old Netgear R6220 2x2 11ac router with nasty cheap Mediatek chipset off eBay for €30 including postage. OpenWRT went onto it surprisingly easy, and now it's a second Wifi AP in my house solving the wifi blackspot in my bedroom, and more importantly, the toilet.OpenWRT has come so very far in the last few years. Easy to install, easy to configure with a lovely GUI, performance doesn't suck like it used to either.
…
Tuesday 12th February 2019: 6.59pm. Location: 52.133541107177734,-8.647699356079102. Celebrating the new employment!
…
Tuesday 12th February 2019: 4.09pm. Link shared: http://maystreet.com/ I am pleased to announce that earlier today, I joined Maystreet Inc, a Fintech next generation capital markets platform delivering low-latency connectivity & high-precision data to banks, brokers, etc. This will be a long term gig for me, I expect to be with them for some years building out some very cutting edge technologies which deliver significant competitive advantage. I am extremely glad to not have to return to working in Dublin onsite, a year of that was more than enough.
…
Friday 8th February 2019: 9.56pm. Link shared: https://openwrt.org/ Last night I completely replaced the proprietary firmware on the house wifi router (the excellent value 3x3 11ac Archer C7 that just about everybody techie uses for their home wifi) with https://openwrt.org/. Why? The proprietary firmware was actually not awful, but my phone kept losing signal when I'm on the toilet, and it began to bug me that I can't do things like increase the transmit power, or use all of the 5Ghz frequencies available.
…
Friday 1st February 2019: 3.24pm. Link shared: http://www.fsij.org/doc-gnuk/ After three hours carved out to "get it done already", finally got my cheap USB gnuk OpenPGP dongles purchased last August (!) to implement ed25519 on-device crypto for GnuPG and Putty SSH on Windows. That means that (a) I cycled all my encryption keys, which was becoming pressing since I last did so in 2016 (b) even I have no idea what my new encryption keys are, nor can I nor anybody else ever know, because all my encryption is now done 100% on the USB dongle (c) even a nation state actor could now take over my desktop PC, and they still couldn't get into any of my other computers from that PC.
…
Tuesday 22nd January 2019: 1.34pm. Link shared: https://conference.accu.org/2019/sessions.html#XElsewhereMemory ACCU 2019 schedule just went up. My final C++ conference talk for the foreseeable future is linked, after this there will be no more attending conferences for me. It is on Elsewhere Memory, and will be the most speculative conference talk I have ever given, musing on the possible future of all computing everywhere. I'll be taking the ideas presented here to the C and C++ standards committee later this year.
…