RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

This is a follow-up to my earlier article, “RaptorCS POWER9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake”. Since I published that article, I’ve been in touch with Raptor and they’ve been much more communicative and helpful. I now have a working machine!

Update Feb. 2024: Seems the improvements I asked for may not have stuck. Buyer beware.

After I published my article, Raptor reached out and apologised for my experience. They offered a full refund, but I agreed to work on further diagnosis now that we had opened a dialogue1. They identified that my CPU was defective and sent me a replacement, then we found the mainboard to be defective, too, and...

Why Collabora really added Digital Restrictions Management to Weston

A recent article from Collabora, Why HDCP support in Weston is a good thing, proports to offer a lot of insight into why HDCP - a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) related technology - was added to Weston - a well known basic Wayland compositor which was once the reference compositor for Wayland. But this article is gaslighting you. There is one reason and one reason alone that explains why HDCP support landed in Weston.

Q: Why was HDCP added to Weston?

A: $$$$$

Why does Collabora want you to believe that HDCP support in Weston is a good thing? Let’s look into this in more detail. First: is HDCP a...

Программирование под БК 0010 в 2019-ом году

Зачем?
Если Вы — энтузиаст ретро-компьютеров, то мотивационную речь можете смело пропустить и перейти к следующему разделу.
Весь август 2018-го года я и мой 13-летний сын Ivanq потратили на написание демки Good Apple. На фестивале Chaos Constructions наша работа заняла второе место, за что мы получили денежный приз 35 тысяч рублей, который честно поделили поровну. Для ребёнка это неплохой доход, хотя, созданием сайтов он зарабатывал столько же за меньшее время. Очевидно, и я мог потратить своё время с большей экономической выгодой… Но только не август! Надо же когда-то отдыхать от работы. Программировать в своё удовольствие — это роскошь, которую можно позволить себе...

RaptorCS POWER9 Blackbird PC review

November 2018: Ordered Basic Blackbird Bundle w/32 GB RAM: $1,935.64

Update 2019-12-23: This article was originally titled “RaptorCS POWER9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake”. Please read the follow-up article, published 2019-10-10: RaptorCS’s redemption: the POWER9 machine works

June 2019

Order ships, and arrives without RAM. It had been long enough that I didn’t realize the order had only been partially fulfilled, so I order some RAM from the list of recommended chips ($338.40), along with the other necessities that I didn’t purchase from Raptor: a case ($97.99) and a PSU ($68.49), and grab some hard drives I have lying around. Total cost: about $2,440. Worth it to get POWER9 builds working on builds.sr.ht!

I...

Don't sacrifice the right ideas to win the right words

There is a difference between free software and open-source software. But you have to squint to see it. Software licenses which qualify for one title but not the other are exceptionally rare.

A fascination with linguistics is common among hackers, and I encourage and participate in language hacking myself. Unfortunately, that seems to seep into the Free Software Foundation’s message a bit too much. Let’s see if any of this rings familiar:

It’s not actually open source, but free software. You see, “open source” is a plot by the commercial software industry to subvert the “free software” movement…

No, it’s free-as-in-freedom, not free-as-in-beer. Sometimes we call it “libre” software, borrowing the...

Status update, September 2019

Finally home again after a long series of travels! I spent almost a month in Japan, then visited my sister’s new home in Hawaii on the way eastwards, then some old friends in Seattle, and finally after 5½ long weeks, it’s home sweet home here in Philadelphia. At least until I leave for XDC in Montreal 2 weeks from now. Someday I’ll have some rest… throughout all of these wild travels, I’ve been hard at work on my free software projects. Let’s get started with this month’s status update!

Great view from a hike on O'ahu

First, Wayland news. I’m happy to share with you that...

How I decide between many programming languages

I have a few old standards in my toolbelt that I find myself calling upon most often, but I try to learn enough about many programming languages to reason about whether or not they’re suitable to any use-case I’m thinking about. The best way is to learn by doing, so getting a general impression of the utility of many languages helps equip you with the knowledge of whether or not they’d be useful for a particular problem even if you don’t know them yet.

Only included are languages which I feel knowledgable enough about to comment on, there are many that aren’t here and which I encourage...

Building interactive SSH applications

After the announcement of shell access for builds.sr.ht jobs, a few people sent me some questions, wondering how this sort of thing is done. Writing interactive SSH applications is actually pretty easy, but it does require some knowledge of the pieces involved and a little bit of general Unix literacy.

On the server, there are three steps which you can meddle with using OpenSSH: authentication, the shell session, and the command. The shell is pretty easily manipulated. For example, if you set the user’s login shell to /usr/bin/nethack, then nethack will run when they log in. Editing this is pretty straightforward, just pop open /etc/passwd as root and...

Shell access for builds.sr.ht CI

Have you ever found yourself staring at a failed CI build, wondering desperately what happened? Or, have you ever needed a fresh machine on-demand to test out an idea in? Have you been working on Linux, but need to test something on OpenBSD? Starting this week, builds.sr.ht can help with all of these problems, because you can now SSH into the build environment.

The next time your build fails on builds.sr.ht,...

Status update, August 2019

Outside my window, the morning sun can be seen rising over the land of the rising sun, as I sip from a coffee purchased at the konbini down the street. I almost forgot to order it, as the staffer behind the counter pointed out with a smile and a joke that, having been told in Japanese, mostly went over my head. It’s on this quiet Osaka morning I write today’s status update - there are lots of existing developments to share!

Let’s start with sourcehut news. I deployed a cool feature yesterday - SSH access to builds.sr.ht. You can now SSH into a failed build to examine...