About
“And folks, let’s be honest. Sturgeon was an optimist. Way more than
90% of code is crap.” ~ Al Viro
Character Statistics
Name: Zeph
Level: 30
Gender: Female
Class: Dual Class - Healer/Technomage
Occupation: Hospital/Sterile Compounding CPhT/PharmD Student
Combat Statistics
STR: 08
DEX: 15
CON: 10
INT: 18
WIS: 06
CHA: 06
SAN: 08
Blurb
Hi, my name is Zephyr and I’m a 30 year old Pharmacy student based out of
Missouri. When I’m not reading up on the latest and greatest pharmaceuticals
I like to take things apart. Anything. A car, a computer, dumping compiled
code into object code to see how it works. Running network scans on my ISP
to try and figure out why PMTUD on IPv6 is broken and I have to manually set
an MTU of 1280 on my router… If you can think of something, I’ve probably
done it.
Right now I am especially interested in embedded systems and networking, which
is why it makes up so much of my content current large sets of data and
efficient synchronization, however, this may change at a moments notice. I like
embedded systems because they still require an extreme amount of efficiency. The
previous sentence is still true, but I’ve moved on to working with large amounts
of data. Data transactions need to be precise and unfaltering, or you are
immediately penalized. That’s where I tend to spend most of my time now.
As for the style of computer user I am, I believe it can be summed up by a
small list of view points:
- My favourite processor is SPARC. This is followed by MIPS,
AVR32, ARM, and last and certainly least, x86 and x64. The
last x86 processor I actually liked was when Cyrix
reverse engineered Intel’s Pentium via clean room engineering
and produced a faster processor, which Intel
then stole and made into the Pentium Pro.
- I think microkernels are the golden standard of what should be
implemented in an operating system design.
- Modular kernels are the worst thing to ever happen to security. (I
will be nice and not go into the fragmentation penalty.)
- Dynamic linking is
one of the worst things to ever happen to programming.
(Library Symbol Versioning Hell)
- SystemD is the worst thing to ever happen to Linux, and that’s
saying something. (GNU is Not Usable)
- While my viewpoint on this has not changed, it seems that I am in a
rapidly diminishing minority. As such, my current linux systems use
SystemD because that is what they’re shipped “stable” with. I have
recently had to start looking into writing unit files.
- Refer to the final bullet point below for my views on widely used
software.
- In a past life, I was a developer for a source based linux distribution
where I spent literally all of my time attempting to make linux packages
build for Clang/LLVM and yelling at upstream for using GNU specific
extensions.
- DragonFlyBSD is the most exciting operating system of today.
NetBSD should be the standard of Embedded System Development.
- Recently, an article was written that stated the BSDs may be dying.
While I still greatly prefer the BSD architecture, the fact is that fewer
and fewer people are deploying it, and as the user-base dwindles, the
amount of support will dwindle as well.
- With this in mind, while NetBSD SHOULD BE the standard of Embedded
system development, I am ready to concede that it might not be. Instead,
you should look for a Realtime Operating System, or consider Open/FreeBSD.
- This might be one of the most painful updates made yet to this page. I
really do love NetBSD.
- GPL is
just as bad, if not worse, than standard copyright.
- Time has only further hardened my view on copyleft licensing. Copyfree is
the only license I will ever use.
- GPLv3 is the single most terrifying thing
to ever happen to GNU, and that is REALLY saying something.
- “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it
so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to
make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” ~ C.A.R.
Hoare.
- It is highly likely that the days of good code are over, because when
given the choice between easy and terrible (Java, Javascript)
versus hard but stable (Haskell,C,Go)
the entire most
of the computer science world has embraced the first.
- I previously listed Python as a member of the first set of
languages. With my recent dabbling in AI, I have been impressed with the
performace python is capable of obtaining. Additionally, Cython solves one
of my primary complaints which was the inability to compile the language.
With that said, I still do not believe Python should be used to handle
important tasks. Even the backup system I am currently favoring
(BorgBackup) implements the most serious portion of its codebase in
C. Things like Portage still baffle me, even though I worked on them. At
that low of a level, you should be shipping compiled binaries, not
interpreted languages.
- Ruby was also a former member of the first group of languages. With
this section under way, let me start by saying Ruby should absolutely
not be used to write “programs”. Ruby on Rails is a horrifying concept
to me, but web developers have always been scary. All that being said,
Ruby can be an absolutely wonderful scripting language. If you need
something stronger than shell and don’t want to write a full application,
Ruby fits nicely into that niche as long as the script does not need to
be performant. It is still horrifyingly slow.
- Also, fuck the idea of writing full programs in Javascript.
- I don’t believe that just because you have a 1TB Hard Drive that you can
justify or allow a 16+ Gigabyte operating system.
- I don’t believe just because you have CPU cycles you should waste them
on abstraction compared to low level clean code.
- I don’t believe that any program other than those handling data sets of
over 512MB should EVER use 1GB or more of RAM.
- SQL Databases are so horrible that the designer will get into heaven
simply because the devil doesn’t have time to deal with that shit.
- I’ve recently begun to quite like SQLite3. They’re still fucking horrific
to work with, but SQLite3 makes things nice by having a single file.
- While we’re on the topic of databases, KV Stores are really neat.
- Git is the only sane version control software.
Last, but certainly not least:
-
Just because everyone uses a software, a software is easy, you are mandated
to use a software, or the software/protocol is old does not mean
you should live in a delusional world about how bad it is. (I’m looking
at you, SSH.)
“Zyradyl is a 72 year old male Bell Labs Employee trapped in the
wrong body.” - Asaph