New Blog updAtes 2k23

It’s selling like hotcakes!

I know this blog has been awfully quiet lately and I felt like I should follow up, so here we are.

2022 has been a very busy year for me. I worked on a few projects mixing some old and new technologies: R, CouchDB, MATLAB, Ruby, C and C++, the STM32 development environment without the HAL and the PiGPIO library, Dear ImGui and Qt. Right now I’m working on:

• Lecture materials for the Embedded Systems course(s);
• Control software for an existing mobile platform called CoderBot, written in C. Available here;
• A Qt application written in C++ for a Development Process laboratory course;
• A port of Raytracing in One Weekend to plain C99. Somewhat slow-going but available here.

All of this, compounded with very substantial changes to my private life, has kept me quite busy; thus I’ve had very little time and patience to dedicate to my side projects and this blog.

Quarterly Book Review

It’s not dead. I swear.

Right now I’m reading a very interesting paper that compares the FreeBSD ULE scheduler and the Linux CFS scheduler, the book Ultimate FreeBSD by Michael W. Lucas and Dr. Frank Soltis’ Inside the AS/400, 2nd Ed.

The paper might spawn an article (or a series of articles), as I plan to take a deep dive into RT-class scheduling in both Linux and FreeBSD at some point, while both books are really good and will definitely be QBRed at some point.

Acquisitions

Throughout 2022 I have acquired several systems. I won’t go into too many details but I now have:

• An Itanium 2 system (HP rx2660) with two different types of CPUs;
• Two IBM pSeries 630-6C4s with POWER4+ CPUs;
• A very interesting and rare system (or rather, parts of) I’m not willing to disclose yet;
• The cursed IPASON motherboard with the AMD “Cato” Xbox One APU;
• A very sad and broken RS/6000 B50;
• A MacBook Pro 13,2 (Mid-2012). One of the best MacBooks ever made, in my opinion;

And of course I got some mix-and-match x86 systems (because why not?).

Planned Articles

Nevertheless, I am planning to write a few articles in the next months, mainly:

• An in-depth look at the static, volatile and extern keywords in C;
• The ultimate UnixWare 7.1.4 Install Notes;
• Disabling CPU Mitigations: How, Why, and Why Not?

I also have a few, long overdue articles that might or might not be completed:

• celldoom - A port of the original DOOM to the PlayStation 3. I’ve got the game to load but have been unable to get PSGL to display an image;
• An article explaining how to build MIDP applets with the Nokia J2ME SDK for the S40 series of phones, or rather how to navigate the extremely complex feature phone ecosystem;
• A retouch on my Sun Blade 1500 article, which is obtuse and incorrect;
• An article detailing the transplant of an AS/400 Model 170 planar into another chassis;

…and a few missed opportunities:

• A detailed walkthorugh of my PDP-11 restoration, of which I have mostly forgotten the details. It still needs some work though, so it might still be a viable candidate;

Wrapping Up

All in all, 2022 has been a good year. I went and re-read my Resolutions for 2022 and here’s the takeouts:

1. Project Tracking was a massive failure: I spent a lot of time carefully tuning my Redmine instance only to find myself unable to use it properly. Excel sheets are still king, after all.
2. I have acquired new programming skills, having deepened my knowledge of C and brushed up on C++. I have used Ruby and I can say that it’s a boon for small projects but I have the feeling it doesn’t scale at all. I’ve used some R and MATLAB but no Common Lisp, and I must admit I’m not missing a thing.
3. Regarding my collection, I have tied some loose ends: I’ve sold or passed on systems I couldn’t spend time with, moved most of what I had around to cold storage, and acquired a crapload of spares and redundant systems. What I failed to do was cataloguing everything, but I can safely say I’ve put together a very well organized worksheet that can be filled as I work with stuff.

Ultimately, I am considering moving this blog to Sphinx and ReStructuredText, but it’s gonna be a major pain if I ever get around doing it. I need to play around with Pandoc at some point.