Thought Bricks

I really enjoyed this article in Men’s Journal about a ride by Erick Cedeño to retrace a route ridden by 20 Black soldiers in 1897. I didn’t know that the U.S. Army had ever experimented with a bicycle troop, but apparently they did and assigned a very tough task to some soldiers stationed at Fort Missoula, MT. Mr. Cedeño’s ride sounds very difficult but nothing compared to what those soldiers must have experienced.

In the same vein as my post yesterday, I was very impressed by this description of how small you can make a simple ELF binary. Starting with the generic output of compiling one of the simplest possible C programs from gcc at 3998 bytes, the article outlines how you can slim it down. The first steps are using the features in gcc to optimize the size. That gets it down to 2616 bytes.

The title is generally true, but in this case, I’m talking about an interesting article about the steps that happen when you run python3 hello.py. It’s a really nice breakdown of all the steps from figuring out the path to the python executable to mapping that file on the disk to creating a new process to finding the ELF file to linking to libraries to printing out “Hello World!”. The detail is nice.

This rant about scrollbars is hilarious and on point. Scrollbars are very handy. Most of the time, I’ll use arrow keys, the scroll wheel or swipe the two finger swipe to move around, but it is nice to jump around by clicking on an area of the scroll bar when you are skimming a long document. Unfortunately, as the post points out, in many cases the scroll bars are tiny or even invisible.

It’s really nice living about a mile away from the bike trails at O-hill. I can easily get on Ruby and go for a nice 45 minute mountain bike ride that covers about 7 miles and 800 feet of climbing. I’ve been trying to get out at least a couple times a week while the weather is nice. Since the trails up there dry really well (with a few exceptions), I should be able to keep it going in the winter.

Hetzner introduced Ampere Altra Arm64 processors as an option for their cloud servers in April this year. I hadn’t tried them until recently but they seem to perform on par with the Intel offerings at similar price points at least in my anecdotal testing on some small instances. The pricing is quite good (as low as €3.79 per month in the US market). You save €0.50 if you use IPV6 only which might be OK for some use cases.

Two months ago, I wrote about the LXD fork called Incus that was in the works. The first release of Incus is out and looks interesting. I haven’t installed it yet, but did give it a try online. It is very similar to LXD but has some nice changes. First, the simplification around instances rather than having separate containers and virtual machines is nice. It breaks backwards compatibility but makes things simpler going forward.

The UK’s OFCOM has referred AWS and Microsoft to the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) for anticompetitive behavior. The report (pdf) is on point. The major concerns listed are: egress fees technical incompatibility committed spend discounts It’s an interesting read. The cloud (e.g., someone else’s server) is critical for many companies and is becoming increasingly important. It’s a very profitable business for the hyperscalers and deserves some attention by antitrust authorities.

I did a little bit more testing with OpenTofu today. This time with LXD. There was a new alpha version of OpenTofu released to fix a bug so I installed that one to keep current. I didn’t encounter the bug although I did use the sensitive variable tag. An init, plan, apply and destroy loop worked flawlessly with the following simple LXD configuration: terraform { required_providers { lxd = { source = "terraform-lxd/lxd" } } } resource "lxd_instance" "tofu1" { name = "tofu1" image = "ubuntu:22.

I created a very simple project to test out the alpha release of OpenTofu using the Hetzner Cloud Provider. I figure many people are looking at the common providers like AWS and Azure, so I thought it would be interesting to check out something different. The first alpha release installed from a .deb file on Ubuntu 22.04 without issue. This release references the new registry amongst other things. I ran tofu init without any issues: