Notices by Peter Tribble (ptribble@mastodon.social), page 3

"First impressions are honestly really really impressive"

Experiences with Tribblix M30 on a Sun Blade 150

https://www.reddit.com/r/illumos/comments/1dd5r6a/experiences_with_tribblix_m30_on_a_sun_blade_150/

I've been messing about with some of these free AI image creation sites.

I asked one to create an image that demonstrates the power of Tribblix. I expected it to struggle, and it really did.

First image of the Power of Tribblix was a mushroom in a forest. The next one was a plate of salad. Slightly more tasty was a tray of brownies.

Think I'll give this a miss.

@joel

Normally, awk will do what you expect.

But consistent? Maybe not. Consider:

echo "a:🅱:c" | awk -F':' '{print $3}'

and

echo "a b c" | awk -F' ' '{print $3}'

Stumbled across an unusual Solaris oddity this morning.

On Solaris 11, there's a /usr/bin/gstrip but not a /usr/gnu/bin/strip. All the other binutils commands are in /usr/gnu/bin with g-prefixed links in /usr/bin, but not strip, which is in /usr/gnu/bin/gstrip. Why is it the odd one out, I wonder?

I could of course just add more storage, but it all costs real money, and there doesn't seem to be any great justification for a hobby project to fund some billionaire's yachts.

Disk space on the Tribblix repo server is starting to get a bit tight, so time to thin out the packages for some older releases. By old, I mean before m30, so there shouldn't be that many instances running that stuff.

Everything will still work, but only the latest version of a package will be available, not the whole version history.

#tribblix

There was even a Motif version. The fact that a 30-year old browser can still be coerced into building, linking, and running on a modern system is pretty remarkable.

With a little effort I was able to build viola, one of the very earliest graphical web browsers, on Tribblix. So old it doesn't send a Host header and certainly can't handle https. So the number of sites it can talk to is extremely limited.

The idea that Hashicorp is worth about the same as Oracle paid for Sun is truly a magical fantasy valuation.

In isolation, Natural Stupidity worries me a lot more than Artificial Intelligence.

The combination of the two takes things to a whole new level.

I suspect The Trainline's geoip detection is ever so slightly off

I'm sure AI could be good for many things, but much of what I'm seeing is a lot more Automated Ignorance and a lot less Artificial Intelligence

So the hay fever symptoms I've had for the past week might indeed be hay fever:

https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2024/02/23/will-climate-change-make-the-effects-of-pollen-worse/

I was starting to wonder if NetSurf was still under development, but after quite a long hiatus a new release came out at the end of last year.

https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

When something is advertised as cross-platform and written in Java:

Well, I missed out on the fact that Tribblix made it into print, in Linux Format of all places

https://linuxformat.com/archives?issue=279

Sadly I don't have a copy.

#tribblix

Found an interesting article on network installing various systems: Multi-OS PXE-booting from FreeBSD 12: Linux, illumos and more

https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2021/02/20/multi-os-pxe-booting-from-freebsd-12-linux-illumos-and-more-pt-4-2/

And yet again, getting around Cambridge is proving a nightmare due to chronic congestion.

It's astonishing that so many businesses who are suffering due to staff and customers being unable to get to them easily are against any measures to improve the situation.

@jamesog For most it's just one edit, 1 command to make the package. I could probably automate a little more in a minority of cases, but it's my insistence on manual testing and sanity checking that currently dominates the time budget.

It's highly scripted rather than fully automated, and in practice improving script performance has given me some fairly big wins.

There are almost 1400 software packages in Tribblix (in addition to the 500-odd packages in illumos itself). If each piece of software just did 1 release a year, then that's about 4 updates a day, a constant stream of updates.

In practice releases are more frequent on average. I seem to be averaging 10 commits a day to the main build repo. Fortunately most are trivial version bumps, which keeps the effort low.

#tribblix #illumos