Blog

With this Nightcafe-created image of Santa Claus' "cloud service" I'd like to wish you all Merry Christmas!

It seems AI took the cloud-part very literally. Totally understandable. How would one draw such an abstract concept.

Last weekend, I had the chance of visiting Superfest 2024. It's an eSports event organized by Supercell. Championship of three games were played:

1. Clash of Clans World Championship Finals
2. Clash Royale Leagure World Finals
3. Brawl Stars World Finals

When entering the event, lounge:

Sunday finals schedule poster:

Saturday game of Clash of Clans. STMN players Darkstar, Fluxxy, Ninj, Synthé and VAD Hawk playing against Millesime MG players KingsMan, Natchoa, Teemper, TryHard and Max:

Sunday game of Clash Royale from lounge, two players from SKCalalas Sub vs Ryley. Ryley became 2nd:

Brawl Stars champions HMBLE players Symantec, BosS and Lukii after their victory:

Well organized event. I wish I would have understood the games bit better. Those games are pretty unknown to me.
Still: GG!

My employer opted to host a meetup. As they needed somebody to give a presentation there, obviously, I stepped up.

Thanks for all the participants!

For those interested, my presentation on Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence.

On 26th of September, PostgreSQL Global Development Group announced the release of version 17.

Here is an easy one: Can you guess at which point I made the upgrade?

The slope is a maintenance break. Datadog wasn't measuring HTTP-performance while I was tinkering to make the actual upgrade.

What worries me is the performance being itsy-bitsy worse with version 17. Graph is smooth as silk. However, crunching the numbers to smooth the zig-zag, 16 seems to have better performance on average. Difference isn't big, but it is there. Maybe I'm missing a new setting to improve cache performance or something?

I''ve been way too busy with my dayjob to do any blogging nor system maintenance.

Ever since S9y 2.4.0 update, my blog has been in a disarray. This has been a tough one for me as I'd love to run my system with much better quality.

Ultimately I had to find the required time and do tons of maintenance to get out of the sad state.

Mending activities completed:

• Changed hosting provider to Hetzner
• Rented a much beefier VM for the system
• Changed host CPU:
  • manufacturer from Intel to ?
  • architecture from AMD64 into ARMv8
  • generation from Pentium 4 into something very new
• Upgraded OS into Oracle Linux 9
• Upgraded DB into PostgreSQL 16
• Allocated more RAM for web server
• Tightened up security even more
• Made Google Search happier
• ... fixeds a ton of bugs in Brownpaper skin

Qualys SSL Report still ranks this site as A+ having HTTP/2. Netcraft Site report still ranks this site into better half of top-1-Million in The World.

Now everything should be so much better. Now this AI-generated image portrays a fixed computer system:

I've been really busy working with number of things other than my daily job. This, unfortunately, translates into not much time to do any blogging.

One of the things I've been tinkering with is generative AI. The buzzword you keep bumping into everywhere. A really good example of what AI can do for you is to improve my non-existing artistic talent. The above image is generated with Nightcafe. Go like it there!

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!