Technology

• SIGCOMM '17: 2017/08/21 -- SIGCOMM is the flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication.
• CppCon 2017: 2017/09/23 -- is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community.
• SaltConf17: 2017/10/31 -- fourth annual SaltStack global user conference will be held in Salt Lake City,
• LISA17: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

Some interesting links while building an mp3 decoder:

• DSP Guru - tutorials, tricks, and resources
• music-dsp - unruly mass of links
• PortAudio - not quite sure how applicable, but I book marked it anyway
• DSP Related: articles, blogs, books, and notes about Digital Signal Processing

• The Synthesis ToolKit in C++ (STK): set of open source audio signal processing and algorithmic synthesis classes written in the C++ programming language, which contains the RtAudio Class for drivers for realtime audio input/output across Linux (native ALSA, Jack, and OSS), Macintosh OS X (CoreAudio and Jack), and Windows (DirectSound, ASIO and WASAPI) operating systems

• White, Pink, and Brownian Noise
• Pink Noise in Python
• Triangular Density Function
• Colored Noise
• Wikipedia WhiteNoise
• Generation of white, pink and brown noise for audio use: c++ code

• juce: deliver music applications on all main platforms, with high performance and professional tools (C++)
• Audio Programming Blog: audio suggestions for the Android, including design of a lock free ring buffer

2017/07/05

• resampler: secret rabbit code
• resampler: Shibatch's Software Repository
• Digital Audio Resampling Home Page

2017/07/22

• DSPFilters: on github, Collection of Useful C++ Classes for Digital Signal Processing

Looks like we'll have another second in 2016:

leap-second-2016-atomic-clocks

Chris Adams:
> Leap seconds are inserted to keep the atomic clocks synced with an
> arbitrary time base (that is guaranteed to vary forever).  There's
> nothing magic about having noon UTC meaning the Sun is directly over 0°
> longitude; if we didn't insert leap seconds, it would have drifted
> slightly, but so what?

Here is "so what". From my blog, earlier this year: "In defense of calendrical irregularity": Eric S. Raymond

I’ve been getting deeper into timekeeping and calendar-related software the last few years. Besides my work on GPSD, I’m now the tech lead of NTPsec. Accordingly, I have learned a great deal about time mensuration and the many odd problems that beset calendricists. I could tell you more about the flakiness of timezones, leap seconds, and the error budget of UTC than you probably want to know.

Paradoxically, I find that studying the glitches in the system (some of which are quite maddening from a software engineer’s point of view) has left me more opposed to efforts to simplify them out of existence. I am against, as a major example, the efforts to abolish leap seconds.

My reason is that studying this mess has made me more aware than I used to be of the actual function of civil timekeeping. It is to allow humans to have consistent and useful intuitions about how clock time relates to the solar day, and in particular to how human circadian rhythms are entrained by the solar day. Secondarily to maintain knowledge of how human biological rhythms connect to the seasonal round (a weaker effect but not a trivial one).

Yes, in theory we could abolish calendars and timestamp everything by atomic-clock kiloseconds since an epoch. And if there ever comes a day when we all live in completely controlled environments like space habs or dome colonies that might actually work for us.

Until then, the trouble with that sort of computer-optimized timestamp is that while it tells us what time it is, it doesn’t tell us what *kind* of time it is – how the time relates to human living. Day? Night? Season?

Those sideband meanings are an important component of how humans use and interpret time references. Yes, I know January in Australia doesn’t mean the same thing as January in the U.S. – the point is that people in both places have stable intuitions about what the weather will be like then, what sorts of holidays will be celebrated, what kind of mood is prevalent.

I judge that all the crap I go though reconciling scientific absolute time to human-centered solar time is worth it. Because when all is said and done, clocks and calendars are human instruments to serve human needs. We should be glad when they add texture and meaning to human life, and beware lest in our attempts to make software easier to write we inadvertently bulldoze away entire structures of delicate meaning.

UPDATE: There is one context, however, in which I would cheerfully junk timezones. I think timestamps on things like file modifications and version-control commits should always be kept, and represented, in UTC, and I’m a big fan of RFC3339 format as the way to do that.

The reason I say this is that these times almost never have a human-body-clock meaning, while on the other hand it is often useful to be able to compare them unambiguously across timezones. Their usage pattern is more like scientific than civil time.

On Sun 2016-07-10T11:27:33 +0300, Saku Ytti hath writ: So how can we solve the problem? Immediately and long term?

The ITU-R had the question of leap seconds on their agenda for 14 years and did not come up with an answer. Their 2015 decision was to drop the question and ask an alphabet soup of international acronym agencies to come up with something better by 2023.

The problem remains that simply abandoning leap seconds has the effect of redefining the calendar, and Pope Gregory's last attempt to do that took 300 years to consolidate. For time scales there are three desirable goals, but it is only possible to pick two

Pick Two - Issues involved in computer time stamps and leap seconds

Leap second handling code is not well-tested and is an ultimate corner
case.  There's been debate about abolishing leap seconds; with all the
every-day bugs people have to deal with, few people set up a special
test environment to handle something that may never happen again (until
you get less than six months warning that it'll happen at least once
more), and even then, tests tend to focus on what broke before, because
it is really hard to test EVERYTHING.

If this particular issue is your beat -- or your avocation -- you really should read both these blog postings, and all their comments; they are nearly comprehensive:

falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time and more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time

They are also both funny as hell.

To myself be comprehensive, I should point out a companion piece about names:

falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names

and there are similar lists for phone numbers, geography, civil addresses and gender, linked from this thread.

If you write any code that has to interface with the outside world, these are pieces I think you should read at least annually. Cheers, -- jra

HP G6 servers are running ILO2. Trying to find recent ILO upgrades is difficult, especially after HP server stuff has split off into HPE (HP Enterprise). The new web site has lost a lot of resources. But, ILO2 was hard to find, even on the original HP site in later days.

The latest version I could find is at cp027873.exe

The reason I went looking is that ILO2 Java console doesn't work very well any more in a browser. The quick fix as supplied in the article Investigating/Fixing HP ILO2 Java Remote Console fails to start with Class Not Found remcons.class, is to "Uncheck Use TLS 1.1 and Use TLS 1.2 in Java Control Panel, Advanced Tab". And then restart the browser. That link has a good article on the background of this issue. The article has other to-do's to help mitigate the problem.

Other links:

• ServerFault: Unable to connect to iLO2 Remote-Console be it either IE ActiveX or JVM
• Older HPE Community article: Remote console not working with java 1.6
• iLO2 Remote Console not working - com.hp.ilo2.remcons.remocons.class
• Reddit: Problems using ILO Java interface with Java 7 and Java 8

Make File Tutorial: barebones, to the point, and effective it building up a full fledged make file

Retrospective Plans: Retrospectives play a crucial role in software teams. It is time specifically put aside to reflect on how the team is performing and what can be done to improve.

5 Questions Every Unit Test Must Answer: Unit tests combine many features that make them your secret weapon to application success.

• Design aid: Writing tests first gives you a clearer perspective on the ideal API design.
• Feature documentation (for developers): Test descriptions enshrine in code every implemented feature requirement.
• Test your developer understanding: Does the developer understand the problem enough to articulate in code all critical component requirements?
• Quality Assurance: Manual QA is error prone. In my experience, it’s impossible for a developer to remember all features that need testing after making a change to refactor, add new features, or remove features.
• Continuous Delivery Aid: Automated QA affords the opportunity to automatically prevent broken builds from being deployed to production.

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces: a book centered around three conceptual pieces that are fundamental to operating systems: virtualization, concurrency, and persistence.

Anatomy of a Modern Production Stack: stream-of-consciousness dump of the parts a modern (container based) production environment. Qualities to look for in a "modern" stack:

• Self healing and self managing. If a machine fails, I don’t want to have to think about it. The system should just work.
• Supports microservices. The idea of breaking your app into smaller components (regardless of the name) can help you to scale your engineering organization by keeping the dev team for each µs small enough that a 2 pizza team can own it.
• Efficient. I want a stack that doesn’t require a lot of hand holding to make sure I’m not wasting a ton of resources.
• Debuggable. Complex applications can be hard to debug. Having good strategies for application specific monitoring and log collection/aggregation can really help to provide insights into the stack.

Linux Containers with systemd: using systemd-nspawn instead of LXC for container management. Some testing still required to affirm the content of the page.

DevOps and Security: The Five Monkeys: The most damaging phrase in the language is: "It’s always been done that way."

A group of scientists placed five monkeys in a cage, and in the middle, a ladder with bananas on top.

Every time a monkey went up the ladder, the scientists soaked the rest of the monkeys with cold water.

After a while, every time a monkey would start up the ladder, the others would pull it down and beat it up.

After a time, no monkey would dare try climbing the ladder, no matter how great the temptation.

The scientists then decided to replace one of the monkeys. The first thing this new monkey did was start to climb the ladder. Immediately, the others pulled him down and beat him up.

After several beatings, the new monkey learned never to go up the ladder, even though there was no evident reason not to, aside from the beatings.

The second monkey was substituted and the same occurred. The first monkey participated in the beating of the second monkey. A third monkey was changed and the same was repeated. The fourth monkey was changed, resulting in the same, before the fifth was finally replaced as well.

What was left was a group of five monkeys that – without ever having received a cold shower – continued to beat up any monkey who attempted to climb the ladder.

• "We've always done it this way". "Why?".
• "We can't do that, it'll slow us down". "Why?".
• "This checklist item is non-negotiable". "Why?".

• tindie: where hardware comes to life
• Our Galaxy: Ripples around our galaxy suggest it’s way bigger than we originally thought
• Hubble 25:In this image tournament, some of Hubble’s greatest pictures faced off against each other in a series of head-to-head competitions. Find out which image won the championship, and download some products featuring the winner.
• hubble ultra deep field:search links for photographs from hubble space telescope
• Interop Liveblog: IPv6 Microsegmentation
• The dawn of trustworthy computing
• Immutable Infrastructure: Networks
• An introduction to Zero Trust virtualization-centric security
• MP-BGP eVPN control plane for VXLAN – SDN is growing up
• f.lux: ... makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.
• 3D web apps

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A couple of items useful in Datacenter situations:

• AirConsole: portable, battery powered, RS232 Serial over WIFI and Bluetooth Adaptor. Designed to be seamlessly used with Mobile Apps on iOS, Android and also on PC, MAC OSX and Linux, Airconsole provides flexible and convenient access to physical Serial and Ethernet ports from devices (such as iPads and iPhones) that have only WIFI network interfaces.
• Lantronix Spider: provides secure KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) server management over an IP network. Spiders can be easily daisy-chained together. Serial administration console port (RS-232) supports Telnet and SSH tunneling to a server COM port. Does not require an external power supply.

• Inventibles: v-groove rails, various printing and milling platforms
• Micro RAX: micro rails
• DIY Motorized dolly + pan tilt head
• OpenBuilds Parts Store: lead screws, linear rail, pulleys, etc
• ServoCity: pan tilt heads, robotics, etc
• Motus: DIY 3Axis Time Lapse kit
• SuperDroid Robots>SuperDroid Robots
• RobotShop
• SparkFun
• DragonPlate: Carbon Fibre Rails
• CameraFriend: Carbon Fibre Rails
• Cam On Wheels: wheels and rubber track
• FilmTools: rails and accessories
• Stock Composites: carbon fibre sheets, rods, ...
• Goodwinds: carbon fibre sheets, rods, tubes, ...
• Soller Compositescarbon/kevlar fabric
• Clearwater Composites: carbon fibre tubes, plates, ...
• Stock Drive Components/Sterling Instrument: lots of accessories
• Berg: precision components
• PIC Design: precision components
• CNC Zone Forums
• CNC Router Parts
• Surplus Center
• 3D Printing: printers and accessories and parts
• Allied Electronics