I've moved to sdf, a very cool public access unix system. The new url is http://edoneel.chaosnet.org
I now work with lisp most of the time
31 Jan 2006
Lisp Crypto
Sparc and WSCONS
How to run NetBSD on a SparcBook
An interesting document on the TCX. The TCX is the frame buffer in the SS4 and SS5.
27 Jan 2006
WinXP
Once in a while I am cursed to deal with windows. This might help when I have to build a custom CD to do windows and/or get service packs installed without attaching the system of woe to the network.
SPARC
OpenSPARC T1 is the open source version of the UltraSPARC T1 processor.
Lisp
Update on Termite (A Lisp for Concurrent/Parallel Programming).
25 Jan 2006
Leap Seconds
One of the things I do at ISDC is deal with time. Ergo I spend time dealing with leap seconds. Below is a collection of links related to the most recent leap second. You noticed it right and didn't pop that cork one second early, did you? It was at 2005-12-31T23:59:60.
- Leap seconds considered harmful. Contains a nice article discussing the problem.
- There is a nice service, at least in Europe, where you can buy a cheap clock and it will sync to a radio signal which keeps it accurate. Sadly they didn't get it quite right either.
- How well did the NTP folks do? The problem is that you are supposed to warn that a leap second is coming up. Also, of course, if you do the leap second right than all the stratum 1 servers stay synced. They didn't.
- Discussion about POSIX and FreeBSD. The problem here is that you can't know more than a few months in advance that there will be a leap second and that means that it's hard to install timezone files which do the right thing. The exist, of course, but you have to keep them updated. This can be non-trivial.
- Two different observations from jwz. 1 and 2
- One problem with all of this is that you have to decide what to do. Do you display 58, 59, 60, 00. Do you display 58, 59, 59, 00. Do you display 58, 59, wait, 00? Also, how much software is coded to assume that seconds is always less than 60. And, a year has 365*24*60*60 seconds, etc. A lot. Finally, it's not clear that libc should know about leap seconds.
All in all it's too complex
24 Jan 2006
Swarms
Swarm Development Group announces a major re-design of our wiki site
Bruce O'Neel
Last modified: Tue Jan 31 16:41:39 MET 2006