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It's funny how fast you stop paying much attention to your car or sofa. First you spend reasonable amount of money on it. Then they just exist as everyday items. Then, slowly but surely, there is the urge: Should I get a new one?

Exactly the same thing happens with your PC. Maybe one of those precious resources starts running out, SSD or RAM. Maybe CPU or GPU starts feeling bit slow. Then you remember how good everything was when you first got the thing. Yup, the urge is there. Must obtain new.

Roughly five years ago, I was doing my PC on Twitch. As Larpdog doesn't stream anymore, no public appearances this time. I did assemble a new rig, though.

During those years, things have evolved. This happens all the time.

• EATX is a real thing, see Wikipedia for ATX info
  • The fact that both cases and motherboard are sold is a big deal.
  • This is not a real standard!
• CPU is LGA1700
  • Back in the days, I thought 1200 pins connecting my CPU to motherboard was a lot.
• DDR-5
  • Having slight overclock on DDR-4 made it pretty fast.
  • Now slowest DDR-5 begins way above OCd DDR-4.
• PCIe is 5.0
  • I don't own any extension cards supporting 5.0. Good thing 4.0 and 3.0 cards work ok.
  • M.2 NMVe with 5.0 is generally available.
• Every single case has a plexi-glass side
  • What! Why? For what purpose!!
  • If I wanted to see into my PC, I'd also wanted to see into my own stomach and would install plexiglass 6-pack into myself.
  • Well. I don't want either. Stupid idea!
• There are almost no USB-connectors in cases
  • There used to be. Plenty of those connectors.
• Motherboard box contains coded messages in swag

I ordered the first case I found without ridiculous see-through side. It is from Swedish manufacturer Fractal, Meshify 2. The entire case is steel mesh. Like full of tiny holes. It's bad if you'd spill Pepsi into it, but it's good for ventilation.
This is what Republic of Games mobo box has in it, some swag with a message:

The first thing I had to do is put 25°07'29.5"N 121°28'15.6"E into Google Maps. It results in this link: https://goo.gl/maps/diiBipMcFfz5oBgz7

Ah! Those coordinates point to Asus headquarters in Taiwan. It was a nice gift. Also, it was a fun "spy game" trying to figure out what those numbers translate into. 👍

I/O performance of M.2 is satisfactory:

Those ATTO Benchmark results are very good! I'm happy with my investment.

This is a solid PC for my next 5-year period. I know I will upgrade the GPU in next couple years. At the moment, my existing ATI does a fine job running Dead Island 2.

Year 2022 wasn't especially good.

Entire globe had been suffering from COVID-19 for way too long. At that point a greedy old man started a war to gain more land area into his ridiculous dictatorship. There are not many more stupid things than that. Everybody loses on such move. Everybody.

Hopefully 2023 will be a better one!

As summer past time, this year I did some travelling in Europe, aka. Euro tour. It would look like this:

Pics from London, Paris and Amsterdam:

Note to City of Paris authorities:
I did post a copyrighted picture of Eiffel tower in night lighting.

Pics from a souvenir:

That's a Ducktrix which I found from Amsterdam Duck Store. Apparently this rubber duck is suffering from a System Failure, or at least that's what the text says.

I've taken a pause from blogging, lots of things happening on the other side of the blog. Been doing tons of coding and maintaining my systems. Aaaand playing GT7:

I've played Gran Turismo since version 1 on PSX, so I wasn't about to skip this one on my PS5. Actually, the point where I bought PS2, PS3 and PS4 were when a new GT was released.

Quite many of my projects are in a much more stable position and I think there is now more time to tell them about here. Let's see.

That's it. I've done IRCing.

Since 1993 I was there pretty much all the time. Initially on and off, but somewhere around -95 I discovered GNU Screen and its capability of detaching from the terminal allowing me to persist on the LUT's HP-UX perpetually. Thus, I had one IRC screen running all the time.

No more. In 2021 there is nobody there anymore to chat with. I'm turning off the lights after 28 years of service. I've shut down my Eggdrop bots and be on my way.

Thank you! Goodbye! Godspeed!

Seven years ago I moved to a new house with FTTH. Actually it was one of the criteria I had for a new place. It needs to have fiber-connection. I had cable-TV -Internet for 11 years before that and I was fed up with all the problems a shared medium has.

Today, we're here:

Last month my Telco, Elisa Finland, made 1 Gig connection available in this region and me being me, there is no real option for not getting it. I had no issues with previous one, connection wasn't slow or buggy, but faster IS better. Price is actually 8€ cheaper than my previous 250 Mbit connection. To make this absolutely clear: I'm paying 42€ / month for above connection.

To verify result, same with Python-based testing speedtest-cli --server 22669:

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Elisa Oyj (62.248.128.0)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Retrieving information for the selected server...
Hosted by Elisa Oyj (Helsinki) [204.66 km]: 4.433 ms
Testing download speed.....................
Download: 860.23 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed.......................
Upload: 382.10 Mbit/s

Nice. Huh!

... or any (un)social media activity.

IMHO the mentioned "social" media isn't. There are statistics and research to establish the un-social aspect of it. Dopamin-loop in your brain keeps feeding regular doses to make person's behaviour addicted to an activity and keep the person leeching for more material. This very effectively disconnects people from the real world and makes the dive deeper into the rabbit hole of (un)social media.

What most of the dopamin-dosed viewer of any published material keep ignoring is the peak-of-an-iceberg -phenomenon. What I mean is a random visitor gets to see something amazingly cool. A video or picture depicting something that's very impressive and assume that person's life consists of a series of such events. Also humans tend to compare. What that random visitor does next is compares the amazing thing to his/hers own "dull" personal life, which does not consist of a such imaginary sequence of wonderful events. Imaginary, because reality is always harsh. As most of the time we don't know the real story, it is possible for 15 seconds of video footage to take months or preparation, numerous failures, reasonable amounts of money and a lot of effort to happen.

An example of harsh reality, the story of me trying to get a wonderful piece of tech-blogging published.

I started tinkering with a Raspberry Pi 4B. That's something I've planned for a while, ordered some parts and most probably will publish the actual story of the success later. Current status of the project is, well planned, underway, but nowhere near finished.

What happened was for the console output of the Linux to look like this:

That's "interesting" at best. Broken to say the least.

For debugging of this, I rebooted the Raspi into previous Linux kernel of 5.8 and ta-daa! Everything was working again. Most of you are running Raspian, which has Linux 5.4. As I have the energy to burn into hating all of those crappy debians and ubuntus, my obvious choice is a Fedora Linux Workstation AArch64-build.

To clarify the naming: ARM build of Fedora Linux is a community driven effort, it is not run by Red Hat, Inc. nor The Fedora Project.

Ok, enough name/org -talk, back to Raspi.
When in a Linux graphics go that wrong, I always disable the graphical boot in Plymouth splash-screen. Running plymouth-set-default-theme details --rebuild-initrd will do the trick of displaying all-text at the boot. However, it did not fix the problem on my display. Next I had a string of attempts doing all kinds of Kernel parameter tinkering, especially with deactivating Frame Buffer, learning all I could from KMS or Kernel Mode Setting, attempting to build Raspberry Pi's userland utilities to gain insight of EDID-information just to realize they'll never build on a 64-bit Linux, failing with nomodeset and vga=0 as Kernel Parameters to solve the problem. No matter what I told the kernel, display would fail. Every. Single. Time.

It hit me quite late in troubleshooting. While observing the sequence of boot-process, during early stages of boot everything worked and display was un-garbled. Then later when Feodra was starting system services everything fell. Obviously something funny happened with GPU-driver of Broadcom BCM2711 -chip of VideoCore 4, aka. vc4 in that particular Linux-build when the driver was loaded. Creating file /etc/modprobe.d/vc4-blacklist.conf with contents of blacklist vc4 to prevent VideoCore4 driver from ever loading did solve the issue! Yay! Finally found the problem.

All of this took several hours, I'd say 4-5 hours straight work. What happened next was surprising. Now that I had the problem isolated into GPU-driver, on IRC's #fedora-arm -channel, people said vc4 HDMI-output was a known problem and was already fixed in Linux 5.11. Dumbfounded by this answer, I insisted version 5.10 of being the latest and 5.11 lacking availability. They insisted back. Couple hours before me asking, 5.11 was deployed into mirrors sites for everybody to receive. This happened while I was investigating failing and investigating more.

dnf update, reboot and pooof. Problem was gone!

There is no real story here. In pursuit of getting the thing fixed, it fixed itself by time. All I had to do is wait (which obviously I did not do). Failure after failure, but no juicy story on how to fix the HDMI-output. On a typical scenario, this type of story would not get published. No sane person would shine any light on a failure and time wasted.

However, this is what most of us do with computers. Fail, retry and attempt to get results. No glory, just hard work.

As I don't have too many projects on my hands during this COVID-19 ridden year, I decided to go for an ultimate time-sink of AoC 2020.

For the curious, here are my stats:

      ----Part 1-----   ----Part 2-----
Day       Time   Rank       Time   Rank
 23   03:35:13   5086          -      -
 19   09:53:13   8934   09:53:26   5961
 18   03:08:25   6521   04:04:25   6063
 17   16:12:13  16057   16:12:23  15108
 16   03:01:21   9251   03:52:53   6641
 15   02:14:07   8224   02:16:33   6855
 14   02:54:23   8940   03:52:58   7359
 13   04:20:46  13423   06:15:57   7818
 12   04:26:10  12452   04:55:22  10616
 11   02:34:45   9354   03:22:14   8110
 10   02:46:44  15237   04:17:26  10408
  9   01:52:12  11970   02:13:22  11396
  8   01:49:09  12056   03:06:07  12907
  7   04:12:28  14520   04:12:38  11238
  6   03:30:29  17152   03:46:03  16033
  5   04:28:02  18252   05:15:07  19367
  4   02:17:40  14478   02:38:02  10416
  3   02:41:11  16008   02:53:35  15164
  2   04:30:05  23597   04:37:14  21925
  1       >24h  77025       >24h  72031

My weapon-of-choice was Python. I'm a fan of IntelliJ, so I wrote my code with that.

As you can see, I didn't complete all of them. It's mostly about time required to complete the latter ones. As an example 19 took way too many hours in a Saturday, I chose to opt out at that point. I did have time to complete first part of 23.

1-9 were really trivial ones. Task in 7 was really badly worded, but after couple of failures manageable. 10 was very tricky for the optimization requirement. It is possible to populate an entire tree, but it is so heavy on resources and time-consuming, going for the math was the better way. 11 and anything after it was beyond trivial. 13 was a huge math problem and it took a while to solve. 17 was a 3D game-of-life (a 2D GoL was done in 11 already) and required really careful work. 18 involved solving reverse polish notation calculations and I considered that as rather easy. Then came 19 which involves parsing a set of rules, but given references to other rules, the approach becomes tricky and tangled soon. I completed it and decided it would take too much of my daily hours to complete any subsequent tasks. However, for 23 I did spend couple minutes just to realize my approach was badly optimized for any large set of data. At that point I churned.

Initially I did enjoy the tasks, but when the complexity ramped up I was torn. I didn't want to not do it just because the was complexity, but on the other hand writing code to be discarded for hours wasn't the best use of my time while Chrismas was nearing. At that point I didn't enjoy the tasks anymore, they were more like chores I "had" to do.

Next year, the AoC will probably be arranged as it has been since 2015. I may not participate on that one.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

Hyvää Joulua!

Btw. as the maps by Jakub Marian are so cool, here is an another one:

Full attribution to his work. Go see the originals at https://jakubmarian.com/merry-christmas-in-european-languages-map/ and https://jakubmarian.com/christmas-gift-bringers-of-europe/. Mr. Marian fully deserves all the possible credit for permission to use his material with attribution and also for the really cool stuff he has made. Check it out yourself!

To test my new GoPro, I published a track of some bicycling into Jälki.fi.

GPS-track is at https://jalki.fi/routes/4070-tyyskan-rantareitti-2020-09-24.

4K video is at https://youtu.be/TUIbstiFisE.

Every summer I tend to do some construction work. By construction, I don't mean writing software or fiddling around with computers. By this I actually mean the act of building something from timber and bricks by attaching stuff together with screws and nails to form something new. Any person who owns property knows there is always something needing fixing, facelift or demolition. Also, anybody who has taken such a venture will also know how you can sink your time and money while at it. In case you didn't get the hint: what I'm trying to do here is explain my absence of blogging.

This year, I tore down the back terrace and re-built it. While at it (btw. its not completed yet), I found number of analogies with software engineering. Initially I had a perfectly good back terrace which (almost) served its purpose. It wasn't perfectly architected nor implemented, it was kinda thrown together like your basic PHP-website. It kinda worked, but there were a few kinks here and there. And to be absolutely clear: I didn't architect nor implement the original one. I just happened to be there, use it and eventually alter the original spec.

On moving in, I ordered really nice glassing to the terrace. Everything worked fine for many years and I was happy. This same thing happens with your really cheap hosting provider, years pass by and eventually it will the hit the fan. When it happens, you're left alone without any kind of support wondering what happened and how you're going to fix the site. I found out that by adding the terrace glassing, I had altered the requirements. Now there existed an implicit requirement for the terrace to stay level, as in not move. At all. Any minuscule movement will be ... well ... not good for your glassing making the glasses not slide in their assigned rails as well as originally intended. Exactly like your cheap website, I had no idea how the entire thing was architected. And any new requirements would de-rail the implementation (in this case: literally) making reality hit me into forehead (in this case: literally). During those years of successful living the terrace had moved and sunk a bit into soft sand. Not much, but enough for the glassings to mis-fit.

Upon realizing this, there was no real alternative. Old design had to go and new one needed to be made. Like in a software project, I begun by investigating what was implemented. In construction you would read this as: removing already constructed materials enough to be able to determine how the terrace was founded and how it was put together. In software engineering investigation is always easier and less intrusive leaving no gaping holes to structure. In this project I simply took a crowbar and let it rip. Also, during re-thinking period I came up with completely new requirements. Obviously I didn't want the thing to be sinking nor moving, I also wanted to have the bottom rails of the glassing on top of something hard instead of wood. Any organic material, like wood, has the tendency to twist, warp, shrink, expand and rot. When talking about millimeter accuracy of a glassing, that's not an optimal attribute in a construction material. Experience has shown, that when wood does all of the mentioned things, it does it in the wrong way making your life miserable. So, no more wood. More bricks.

This is what it nearly looked like in the beginning and how it looks like now (I'm skipping the in-between pics simply because they're boring):

Now everything is back and my new spec has been implemented. During the process of demolition, I yanked out couple of kilos of rusty nails:

Personally, I don't use much nails, not even with a nail gun. My prefenrece, when it makes sense, is always to attach everything with a screw and I think equal amount of screws have been put into appropriate places to hold the thing tightly together.

Moving foward, I obviously want to complete the new terrace extension. Also, I'd love to get back to computer. Blogging, Snowrunner and such.

Summer. Always lots of things to do. Building new deck to backyard. Finally got the motorcycle back to road. Some Snowrunner. Some coding. Lots of reading.

While reading, I bumped into something.

I'll second Mr. Hawkes' opinion. This is my message to all of us during these times of polarization. World leaders all over the Globe are boosting their own popularity by dividing nations to "us" and "them". Not cool. There is no us nor them, there is only we. Everybody needs to burst their own bubble and LISTEN to what others are saying. It's ok to disagree.

22nd June 2020 letters to Editor courtesy of The Times.

Credits to Annamari Sipilä for bringing this up in her column.

Today I'm celebrating. A number of reasons to pop the cork from a bottle of champagne.

1. I cut my corporate AmEx half
2. I'm having a sip from this "open source of water"
3. I'm having number of sips from from the bubbly one and wait for next Tuesday!

Since the inception of this blog back in January 2013, my weapon-of-choice has been CentOS Linux. When looking at the release chart @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#Latest_version_information it becomes obvious this is the 3rd major version of CentOS I'm running my blog on. In 2013 only version 6 was available, I must have upgraded into version 7 during 2014, and now 2019 I'm running on version 8. Given how RedHat and their organization(s) operate, the base Linux for my system is Fedora 28. See Fedora Project releases from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases.

The only motivation for me to upgrade is technology. RHEL/CentOS almost never upgrade their component versions. They do back-port any security patches even if authors of the original ones give up on their obsoleted stuff. RedHat does not. For people loving things how they are, that's a good thing. For people like me, its not that good.

Absolutely necessary things I had earlier, but lost and again have:

• HTTP/2
  • For how and why this differs from HTTP/1.1 everybody else is still using, dive into Mr. Curl's book http2 explained. Its freely available @ https://http2-explained.haxx.se/content/en/
• TLS 1.3
  • TLS versions 1 and 1.1 have been obsoleted. That leaves TLS 1.2 as the almost-only viable secure protocol.
  • Obvious disclaimer for TLS 1.3: As of writing, it is still experimental. In reality not so much. Chrome and Firefox (among other platforms) support TLS 1.3 fully.
  • Cloudflare's Head of Research Nick Sullivan is a known 1.3 enthusiast. Read his thoughts @ https://blog.cloudflare.com/rfc-8446-aka-tls-1-3/.

Other highlights:

• PHP 7.3
  • My blog software runs on PHP. I upgraded 7.2, but am too scared to go for 7.4 yet.
• Native dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 networking. This is courtesy of my service provider.
• TLS 1.2 configured to not support any CBC-ciphers, for details see Why did TLS 1.3 drop AES-CBC? as an example
  • Inspiration for this taken from Cipherli.st and Security/Server Side TLS on Mozilla wiki.
  • Apologies for anybody using IE 11 on Windows Phone 8.1, or Safari versions 6-8 on iOS 6-9/OS X 10.9 or 10.10. You won't see this text as your devices/operating systems won't support my reasonably secure settings.
  • For everybody else: Congratulations on having a decently secure device to do your Internet browsing with.
• tmux
  • Terminal multiplexer, https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki
  • Most of you just SSH into a server and be happy with it. I almost always run my sessions trough something that will keep my work safe if a disconnection occurs. To my surprise I keep bumping into sysadmins who don't either know about this or don't see this as a necessary approach.
  • I've ran GNU Screen for over 25 years now. Not anymore. Uff!
• nftables (https://wiki.nftables.org/), courtesy of RHEL 8 / CentOS 8
  • the new packet classification framework that replaces the existing {ip,ip6,arp,eb}_tables infrastructure
  • I've ran IPchains / IPtables for 21 years now. Not anymore. Arf!

Qualsys report on my blog now:

Nice!

Next up: CentOS Stream.
A new attempt to allow change of software versions. This will effectively detach CentOS from RHEL and gear it towards Fedora. This enables CentOS to get newer software as a rolling release Linux-distro, but keep the changes not-so-aggressive.
I won't run this yet on my blog server. This is so new at this point, but I'll have it running on a devel-box.
 

Two years ago I was forced to move my blog out of my own co-located server due to hardware failure. At the time moving to Microsoft Azure cloud made all the sense. Today, I'm not running from Azure anymore.

At the point, I had been working closely with AWS for serveral years, so going there didn't make any sense from learning perspective. As I wanted to properly learn Azure, I went there with my hobby.

Regret is a strong word. I don't regret that decision, but almost do. For those two years I was struggling with performance. PostgreSQL DB was running as a service (Azure Database for PostgreSQL), so it didn't eat those precious resources from my virtual machine. My VM was a DS1 v2, so it was the obvious bottleneck. Going for a bigger one for a hobby in Azure didn't make any sense costwise.

Personally those years helped a lot. I've been working with Azure projects over the recent year and even gained certification for that. The previous experience gained from running my blog, obviously, was beneficial. All that being said, it's time to move on.

My new hosting provider is a small Finnish one providing affordable VMs packing reasonable punch for buck. I still have IPv6 and all the fancy stuff. At the time of writing, I don't have HTTP/2, but I'm working with that. The most important thing is: there is more power. The blog response times are much better now.

If you feel something is off, please drop me a comment!