Tag: software

NTP reimplementation

Interesting account on the reimplementation of NTP (network time protocol, what is responsible for accurate time on all your devices)
2022-11-12: And now it’s time for PTP

Where NTP allows for precision within milliseconds, PTP allows for precision within nanoseconds. PTP has the potential to enable synchronization of GPUs across data centers, which could open up unprecedented scale in AI capabilities that is difficult to achieve today. This level of accuracy will help ensure synchronization of not only the computers on our networks today but also the advanced systems that will be on our networks in the future.

Let’s build a modern Hadoop

This is interesting, as a timestamp of what’s generally possible now.

If you’ve been around the big data block, you’ve probably felt the pain of Hadoop, but we all still use it because we tell ourselves, “that’s just the way infrastructure software is.” However, in the past 10 years, infrastructure tools ranging from NoSQL databases, to distributed deployment, to cloud computing have all advanced by orders of magnitude. Why have large-scale data analytics tools lagged behind? What makes projects like Redis, Docker and CoreOS feel modern and awesome while Hadoop feels ancient?

GIMP sucks a little bit less


while i wasn’t looking, the GIMP turned from a paint.exe replacement into a tool with bipolar issues: as a host to amazing image processing suites like Gmic while still having the worst UI. for a while, there was seashore on the mac to paper over the UI, but development has stalled in 2011.if you work around the bugs / put in the hours, you can get pretty decent image processing for free these days.

Crash Simulations, the game


there’s now crash simulation software, used in forensics. i predict this will be a game soon.

Flipping open his laptop, Arvin kicked things off by showing us a kind of greatest hits reel drawn from his own crash reconstruction experience. Watching the short, blocky animations—a semi jack-knifing across the centerline, an SUV rear-ending a silver compact car, before ricocheting backward into a telephone pole—was surprisingly uncomfortable.

Apple is terrible at enterprise

in case you were confused: yes, apple stuff sucks just as much as any other os.

So, Yosemite is out. It has some bugs, and we (Google) couldn’t deploy it on the day it was released.

I followed the instructions in this support article and created a profile that sets the App Store to “Restrict App Store to software updates only” mode, since we don’t want users to self-upgrade to Yosemite until we are ready.

But since Apple has terrible enterprise management tools, this puts the App Store in a confusing state for users.

1) Only the Updates pane is accessible, with no indication that the other panes have been administratively disabled

2) The “OS X Yosemite” advertising banner is still shown in the Updates pane

3) Despite showing the banner, clicking on “Free” to try to download it prompts the user to sign-in, but the sign in button does nothing, confusingly.

4) Third-party software updates are disallowed, even for previously-installed software. This is especially confusing.

Annoying. This is a bit weird but at least it’s not actively prompting users to upgrade.

A Wild Security Update Appears!

A security update for 10.9 is released! Good news, it fixes security issues. We push it out ASAP with munki/simian, with a force-by date because it’s important.

Now our users are getting really confused. We just sent them all a note saying to not install Yosemite! And the App Store is in an odd state! But now they have a prompt to install something! But didn’t they just get an email about not installing something? I guess I’ll just ignore!

This is frustrating, but it seems to have generally died down.

Until this morning, when Apple, via what I presume is the App Store, sends a fucking notification to everyone

Which, of course, just sends them to the App Store where they are disabled from actually doing anything.

So I send another note to everyone – thanks, Apple! – which of course just confuses things.

Christ.

Naturally now our users have no goddamned idea what to do, because why should the have to even care about this? If they get prompted, we’ve taught them to install, because security and bug fixes. But now! They’re getting prompted for something they’re blocked from installing, and we’re telling them to not install something, but how are they supposed to know the difference between a security update and Yosemite? I mean it’s super clear to us, the management team, what’s what, but that’s for us to deal with and the users should not have to worry about.

But, now, thanks to this clusterfuck of App Store banner ads, weird update-only modes, and notifications for things they can’t install, everything is in a terrible confused state.

Thanks, Apple.

PS: I can also rant a while about Yosemite itself.

Mathematica for pure math

mr. wolfram is prone to hyperbole, but at least he’s not boring.

But could we systematically extend the Wolfram Language to cover the whole range of pure mathematics—and make a kind of “Mathematica Pura”? The answer is unquestionably yes. It’ll be fascinating to do, but it’ll take lots of difficult language design. One might think that somehow mathematical notation would already have solved the whole problem. But there’s actually only a quite small set of constructs and concepts that can be represented with any degree of standardization in mathematical notation—and indeed many of these are already in the Wolfram Language.