Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 29, 2023
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=> ↺ Bombadillo
The other day I started poking at the old code I had for drawing stuff on the screen my keyboard has built into it. I'd had a basic, control the pixel with some buttons and it'll leave a trail, but I'd left it with a bug preventing sleeps less than a second. Which made it really annoying to fiddle with. I figured that out and promptly threw most of it out anyway. Then I wanted to be able to use the screen as a tiny display that could do terminal stuff. Using some of the code from #g15stats and #hackvr_term I was able to get a program, which I named #g15term, that let me pipe stuff from stdin to the screen. Which works good enough for me. (While writing this, I found that menelkir wrote their own thing named g15term. I should probably pick a different name.)
=> All Software is Made for the First Time
One of the things I like about working as a developer is that all of the problems are being solved for the first time. Outside of the realm of writing software for educational purposes, very rarely is a piece of software written to do exactly the same job as an existing program; the client will just go download the existing one instead. The marginal cost of distributing software is so small that it doesn't even come close to even a few hours of dev time. This means that the majority of devs are working on interesting, novel problems; very little development work is grunt work. It makes everything more interesting for sure.
There are some downsides, though. Most pressingly, it is very difficult to know how long any given task will take. It is very often the case that it is impossible to say whether a bug can be fixed in just a couple of hours or will take a few weeks or more. This is inevitabling creates some friction between the developer team and the rest of the org who, somewhat rightfully, demand more concrete timelines.
=> Disk failure
This week I had ran into a proper disk failure, which was an interesting experience. This was actually the first time I've had to deal with a failing disk in a RAID1 array and I don't recall encountering other disk failures with BTRFS before this one either.
But yeah, I keep a RAID1 array of 2 hard drives for storing my livestream VODs. It started out as my general video production array back when I was still doing YouTube, but these days it pretty much just stores livestreams I've done over the years.
=> Players creating quests for players
This machine is almost 30 years old (and it's still working!), yet it runs a current version of OpenBSD, even software that I wrote for my usual workstation. I like this a lot. Judging by the performance of this old machine, I might not need to replace my current workstation (which is already over a decade old) for another 10 or maybe 20 years ... ? Crazy.
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