Category: technology
General technology, not anything in particular
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Gulf of Mexico
It’s pronounced “Gulf of Mexico”
Gulf of Mexico Your favorite free map provider may lie to you. Your GPS even may lie. But I will not lie. I’m not paid to lie, or lying to suck up to Daddy, to avoid government interference or worse “regulation”. No here it is, the truth, both plain and simple.
It is what it is, what it has been, and always will be. The Gulf of Mexico. -
#TIL Banana-Melt
Who sez’ Spotify’s recommendation engine is no good. This band is described as
Try to imagine an even more energetic incarnation of the Boredoms.And that’s good enough for me.
Hellz Yeah! gimme summa dat dere Spotify Recommendation Engine, yo!
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Matt Mullenweg is EVIL incarnate
bullenweg
Bullenweg.com is no longer available following threats of legal action from Matthew Mullenweg.
Platforming the claims in the lawsuits, in particular, is shaky ground. I encourage you to read this article:
https://www.vulture.com/article/piers-morgan-apologizes-jay-z-beyonce-uncensored-jaguar-wright.html
It is important to me to know who is behind Bullenweg, and I believe the legal system provides ample opportunities to do so. That will take a few weeks, or if you reveal yourself now we can discuss next steps.
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The Human Element
Nice little summation of the role tech plays in removing the “need” for intervention/assistance from a person in the loop. Ideally everything is DIY, freeing you to spend less of your valuable time waiting to perform a key activity, chore if you will, for work or daily life. The more those automations occur, the more we are disengaged from our human experience. We’re just stimuli and actors, not so much something with agency, self-actualization, and of course empathy.
One of the things I immediately recognized was the mention of Jon Kabat-Zinn (he of Cognitive Based Therapy of pain management) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat-Zinn. But they re-use the idea of being “present” and emphasizing that slowly eroding human connection, and connected-ness to real life experience. Glad to see such a humanistic essay in Campus Technology website. -
#ds106radioSummerCamp
Reclaim Hosting is home to more than a few higher EDU type hosting services, with all kinds of apps, packaged up, scaled up to a lot of different needs. But let’s get serious about one thing,… ” Professional Development”.
I never was nor have I ever been a card-carrying “Academic”, no. I’m barely there when it comes to the credentials (I never completed out the MFA program I entered in 1994, took all the classes, but did not present and full art exhibition, which is the de rigeur for such degrees in the U.S.)
However I did follow my bliss and got way into what was purported to be the “future” in 1996 which was NOT the web. No. It was CD-Rom development and so-called “multimedia” that held sway back then. And I had acquired just enough skill to throw together a Macromedia Director based “toy” with a few animations, and one or two button click interactivity. Jump to NOW,…
Boy have things changed a lot since 1996. Lots of conference and vendor conferences over the years. But my visits/travels curbed considerably after our EdTech Center shutdown in 2012. I think the last visit I made to a conference was one that came here to ol’ Roch-cha-cha NY (aka Rochester) in 2016. One of the last 2-3 New Media Centers conferences prior to NMC’s demise in 2018. My employer tolerated the time I spent going downtown to the convention center for about 4 days in a row seeing presentations, talking with colleagues. I now I was there to see Bryan Alexander’s presentation on “futurism” that Summer 2016. Anyways, my professional deveopment story was mostly me auto-didactically watching YT videos, reading Blogs and very rarely if ever actually talking to someone at another University.
So when did I bump into Reclaim? I think it was on Twitter following folks from Mary Washington and noticed Jim Groom was leaving WMU, and starting a company with Timmyboy, and that sounded cool. And after that I just kept sneaking peaks, looking in and finding out what was going on. And step-wise, it got BIGGER. And then I learned our Library folks had adopted Domain of One’s Own for Digital Scholarship (I’m I.T. and not the library, so that’s another topic/discussion for much, much later). But we were approached at least once by the Library to maybe, possibly, if we could see our way through to taking over DoOO from the Library. Reader, we did not, ‘cuz being IT we already had WordPress sites being managed and you can imagine all the arguments that would have started. So DoOO has stayed at the Library. But, I’m a worrier by nature and thought, “I must needs get edu’macated on this DoOO, just in case”.
And hence I read, and followed along, and followed teh socials to get up to speed. And DoOO seemed pretty cool, but the bigger Greater enterprise was even MORE interesting. And lo’ and behold, old Rev. Jim Groom would blog about the Co-working space in Fredericksburg and then the Video Rental Store Front, and then the Arcade. And Reclaim was just getting BIGGER. And then the big announcement, Reclaim EdTech.
Now Reader, if you followed me this far,… know that my job title has been, will forever be tied to variations on a theme of that exact word: EdTech. My original title in 1996 was:
Instructional Technology Liaison Coach
So EdTech is where I’ve been (except for 1yr, after our EdTech Center shutdown). And even now I’m amazed I stuck around this long with that responsibility. But, unlike some I did not waste the privilege of that title, and just keep doing the same thing, or worse ignoring everything outside my daily grind of responsibilities. And when Reclaim EdTech appeared, I wanted to find out what/how Reclaim was going to Reclaim EdTech?!
Which leads us up to the very moment, this pinpoint, needles edge, NOW. Right HERE. Being a fan of all the live streams of ReclaimTV and the variety of topics covered, and the Reclaim EdTech crew conducting all those hours of stuff, I admit I never paid much attention to Reclaim Radio. I know Paul Bond did stuff with it, having studios product audio programs for air on the Internet Radio station. But I never tuned in to hear music sets. So when the announcement went out that the Radio station was going to host an event on #ds106Radio, I said to myself,…
Oh man! You do NOT want to miss this!
And like so many other people I registered, and go the link to the site. And realized Taylor J. had wired up the same Discord widget to the ds106Radio page, and it was all there. It was NOT:
1.) A Teams Call
2.) A zoom webinar
3.) A GoToMeeting conference.
It was way better than that, but more importantly was on the surface of it, a joining of loosely coupled parts An internet radio station AND a Discord server. Now I know full well behind the scenes it was WAY more than that, but the simplicity of it all on the surface, brilliant. An Economy of means, par excellence. But what happens next will AMAZE you.
While it wasn’t overrun like the Woodstock Music festival, people joined in. Big Time. 25 simultaneous listeners, and once they figured out they could chat in real-time on Discord and interact,… that was it. People figured it out. And each session, even when it was just re-streaming of WFMU’s stream or a bigger produced presentation, was still amazing to sit and listen to. A Good Time was had, and people were challenged, urged into action, or thinking differently about things. I know I was feeling super-duper energized. It was a perfectly designed and executed Professional Development opportunity all around. And it was all there on the Interwebz.
No delayed/cancelled flights on Delta Airlines. No CrowdStrike mishaps, or weather delays. Just hour by hour, discovering something new. Like Steven Spielberg once said, the best movies (change that to “experiences”) are ones where the thing begins, and then it never stops beginning. No middle, no end, that is the #ds106radioSummerCamp in a nutshell. It’s a story that just keeps on beginning. So I salute Reclaim EdTech, Reclaim Hosting and all the principal players invovled. This was as good/better than any conference I’ve ever attended.
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Lady Deathstrike – AKA Crowdstrike A/V
I don’t want to dump on a company who as nears as I can tell has been good at it’s job. It “feels” like they are able to prevent some of the barbarians attempt to break into desktops and servers all around the world. And by some accounts the hacking groups do attempt to sense/figure out if a computer has Crowdstrike installed. So they are aware of it, and do what they can to work around it. But today, July 19th 2024 is not good. With all the infrastructure and sensors and installs and binding tightly to the operating system (and we’re talking MS Windows here). And yes, sometimes dear Pogo possum, yes. We have met the enemy,…
I say that in part because these are the remediation steps as presented unto countless thousands of IT folks worldwide. And to say it’s not a good User Experience is truly damning with faint praise.
Here now are the directions as communicated
Summar- CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.
Details
- Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheckblue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor.
- This issue is not impacting Mac- or Linux-based hosts
- Channel file “C-00000291*.sys” with timestamp of 0527 UTC or later is the reverted (good) version.
Current Action
- CrowdStrike Engineering has identified a content deployment related to this issue and reverted those changes.
- If hosts are still crashing and unable to stay online to receive the Channel File Changes, the following steps
- can be used to workaround this issue:
Workaround Steps for individual hosts:
- Reboot the host to give it an opportunity to download the reverted channel file. If the host crashes again, then:
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
- Navigate to the C:WindowsSystem32driversCrowdStrike directory
- Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
- Boot the host normally.
Note: Bitlocker-encrypted hosts may require a recovery key. Please contact the Service Desk at xxx-xxx-xxx
Workaround Steps for public cloud or similar environment:
Reattach the fixed volume to the impacted virtual server
Detach the operating system disk volume from the impacted virtual server
Create a snapshot or backup of the disk volume before proceeding further as a precaution against unintended changes
Attach/mount the volume to to a new virtual server
Navigate to the C:WindowsSystem32driversCrowdStrike directory
Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
Detach the volume from the new virtual server
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Citation: Simon Willison
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/#atom-everything
Simon’s sharing some slides for a talk he gave at PyCon 2024. Well worth reading his account of what “was” back in 1956 when the term “artificial intelligence” was coined. This is in contrast to what we have NOW, Large Language Models. And this is the killer slide for me:
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A.I. – Hackaday weighs in,…
I’ve followed Hackaday for a number of years via RSS, because they have been able to deliver the goods on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s simple stuff that gets shared, like an overlooked YouTube video on something old or esoteric. But sometimes there’s long form pieces like this one attempting to survey the current trends in some categories (like home made, home designed new computers!). In this instance they take a look at Large Language Models and find out just what’s up? What’s going on? Note they mention Anthropic’s Claude LLM, which I’ve seen mentioned by a few folks as being useful for some tasks. So if I had to recommend Anything, I would start reading up on Claude at least. It’s not just all hand-waving and breathless claims. It’s not intelligent tho’ don’t get me wrong. Not an A.I. by any stretch. And more to the point, attempts now are being made to show what happens in the “internals” of training.
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Keeping up with IOPS
https://www.anandtech.com/show/21440/silicon-motion-demos-7-watt-pcie-5-ssd-controller-sm2508
Input/output operations per second (IOPS, pronounced eye-ops) is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN).
Back in the heady days of 2002, I got wise to the coming wave of flash memory based storage devices. I had heard of RAM drives from limited/elite run manufacturers (some of them I’m guessing probably sold to defense contractors). That had DRAM backed by by battery backup and could hold up to 1GB of files, connected by an actual SCSI interface. The whole nine yards.
Cut to 2002 and I’m visiting a friend in Texas, where we go into a giant shopping Mall where they had one of the early (but not the first) Apple Store. I was still very much following technology news/industry trade websites at the time (back when MacWeek was still a thing) and heard of a device called a Kanguru thumb drive. They came in lots of colors sizes but all connected with a USB connector. This arrived at a time when the Zip 100 drive “seemed” like the next big thing (cheap disks) that could hold enough stuff. Surely Intel/Apple would all jump onboard.
I say this somewhat facetiously because many computers from Apple and Intel were’ still stuck on floppy drives (or worse SuperDisks! ew! holding 128MB). But here was this fledgling technology used on smaller scale in niche markets (mostly small snapshot cams, using proprietary form factors like Sony’s “stick” memory cards). But Kanguru had this cute little tchocke, with a USB connector. It didn’t hold as much as a Zip drive or a SuperDrive (much less a Jaz drive! 1GB). But it had USB,… and that my friends was the key. There was no media, no drive to buy, no cables to connect, nor a power supply. It was in a word, “complete”.
Which is to say, it didn’t matter “how much” you could store. It was solving the problem of convenience and WHEN you needed to store something. That was the core problem being solved. And there up on the shelf behind the counter were 8MB, 16MB, 32MB and 64MB Kanguru thumb drives at all price points. But 64MB was an eye-watering $82USD in 2002. Can you imagine. But it smelled and looked like the future. And it was. Performance, storage size be damned. I could plug it into any computer and walk away with up to 64MB of files (pre-YouTube). It held less than a Zip drive, and cost a LOT more than a Zip drive disk itself (I think $5 for 100MB back then). But I had freedom.
Jump forward 22 years later. And now we can do 2+million IOPS on an M2 NVMe SSD. To do even 1M IOPS in 2002 was just barely possible anywhere at any price even for researchers at government labs. Oracle did an attempt at the worlds fastest disk array back then running hundreds and hundreds of SAS (Serial Attached Storage) in multiple stacks of 19″ rack enclosures. I think it was probably 20 racks in total all in parallel and just barely achieved 1M IOPS on spinning rust in 2002 era (that’s also disks spinning at 10,000 rpm btw).
But now, we got manufacturers (Silicon Motion) spitting out a tiny little M2 drive controller (the SM2508 article linked at the top) that can achieve the throughput of two, count ’em, TWO of those 20 rack drive arrays that Oracle engineered into record setting attempt at storage throughput. So a hat tip to 20 years of technology advancements in flash controllers, flash memory chops, circuit board packaging and embedded systems. It’s hard to contemplate the Moore’s law of solid state storage in that time period.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 