Notices by Adam Leventhal (ahl@mastodon.social)

The (mostly) quadrennial DTrace conference, the only conference named after a config file, dtrace.conf is coming up next week. It's all online. We'd love to hear from DTrace users, from folks building with DTrace, or about work from related or inspired systems. For more, check out @bcantrill's great post https://oxide.computer/blog/dtrace-conf24

My slides: “DTrace is safe”
macOS: hangs on the second DTrace invocation

Hmmmm…

Do folks have tips for how to make mastodon more… interesting? I suspect I’m holding it wrong. And fka twitter is better at matching me with conversations I care about. I’m using @ivory and while I do like the interface I’m not sure it does anything for me with regard to curation. Thanks!

Pulling my hair out all day over the question "how has this ever worked?" the answer many hours later: "by accident" and "sometimes"

“Beginning with Windows Server 2025, dtrace is included as a built-in tool.” This is awesome to see! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/dtrace

@bcantrill @AndresFreundTec We started by ranting about the coverage in the New York Times… coverage that explicitly refused to dig into the details. It’s all the more shocking because the big story here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack!

I was really pleased by this background image so wanted to talk about it briefly. The concept was (of course!) simple: the (in)famous xkcd graphic with the thankless Nebraskan removed https://xkcd.com/2347/

What an Oxide and Friends last night! @bcantrill and I were joined by the one and only @AndresFreundTec to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. Definitely check it out (or on the pod tomorrow).

https://youtu.be/jg5F9UupL6I

I should mention that we don't put a ton of time into Oxide and Friends (sorry!) so I try to bound these side-quests at least somewhat. Somewhat. I decided to find a physics simulator (like a lunatic) and SimPHY was the first one I stumbled onto that worked well enough. I roughed out the structure from the xkcd comic:

Like all lazy people in 2024, I turned to Chat GPT for help. This didn't work out well. (Have I mentioned that I'm bad at Chat GPT?)

Until I got to something that was suitably calamitous:

And simulated...

Then removed the linchpin:

Then I threw the lines into Photoshop, applied the bucket tool, and ... good enough!

I threw it on the iPad that I "borrowed" from my older son and traced it in Procreate with his Apple Pencil. 100% it could have been better, but I already felt like a crazy person and wasn't sure it was going to work out

@steve @thomasfuchs ovens too

My oven clock just says “pizza” and no amount of button mashing or knob turning will change it to anything else. Easily the funniest way a clock can fail.

I'm fired up for tonight's Oxide and Friends! @bcantrill and I will be joined by Nirav Patel, founder/CEO of @frameworkcomputer. How does building a consumer laptop compare with building an @oxidecomputer server? Let's find out! 5pm PT (recorded as always)

https://discord.gg/DKFtMKtA?event=1176625793015746660

I was listening to a podcast that implied that the multi user model of an operating system, as conceived by Multics in UNIX hasn’t really panned out the way that people imagined. In particular, I see that most operating system instances have effectively a single user. What do people think about that?

Someone pulled the ultimate remote work power move on me yesterday: they asked if I had a minute, sent a video conference link.... and didn't join for 5 minutes while I just sat there obeisantly. Love it. Can't wait to play that card myself.

(j/k they were having a/v issues..)