Chris Siebenmann

I took the weekend fun bike in for necessary service today so of course Toronto graced the occasion with snow flurries. Thanks, March.

This is my sad face when people say they don't understand why Wayland pushed the window manager into the display server. Event processing is extremely connected to the window manager; X goes to significant event handling contortions to enable a separate window manager, and even then the contortions are imperfect.

(For example, no window manager can direct mouse scroll wheel events to the currently focused window instead of the window under the cursor. There are other issues too.)

Dear home desktop: now is not at all a good time to start being mysteriously flaky, periodically locking up and rebooting. This is my unhappy face.

(It's especially not a good time since this machine has 64 GB of RAM.)

I see tomorrow's forecast chance of snow has decided to arrive early. Thanks, Toronto weather, although it is kind of scenic to look out the window right now.

#dlws

One of the challenges brought on by the modern world of digital music is that it's alarmingly easy to acquire music faster than I can listen to it. I suspect ebooks have a similar issue if you get into them.

In related news, maybe I should get less new music on the next Bandcamp Friday. But, but, people keep releasing good new stuff...

Current status: hoping very much that disabling AppArmor in the kernel doesn't still have terrible bugs like it did early in the life of Ubuntu 22.04, when it gave you charming and fatal kernel memory leaks.

Because guess what we just did on all of our user-accessible machines (in an emergency immediate reboot, I'm sure people are happy about that one).

RE: @vir_borealis@mountains.social

It's not every day that a photo caption/alt text is talking about a snow blower pouring a wall section. But in context it makes perfect sense, and now I'm wondering what handling (Yellowknife) snow as a building material is like.

(Probably not exactly like either styrofoam or concrete, two things that are blown or poured into place, but I can't help wondering how much like or unlike more normal stuff it is.)

RE: @mhoye@cosocial.ca

Now I'm wondering to what extent the current situation is affecting the plans of gaming studios for in-development games. If much of your audience is not going to be upgrading their hardware any time soon, especially CPUs and RAM, what performance can you expect and demand for a new game?

(I'm not the only one having these thoughts, cf @jrconlin@mindof.jrconlin.com )

In theory I could try to go to CycleTO's coldest day of the year ride tomorrow, since I was able to bike today without much problems. In practice I don't trust the streets to be clear and safely passable all the way down to Sugar Beach. But if you're more enthused than I am, it's 10am tomorrow the 28th:

https://www.cycleto.ca/cdoyr_2026

There is an intermittent rattling noise in our office which it turns out everyone can hear, which is quite reassuring because I was wondering if the fans on my office desktop were maybe going (it and they date from late 2017). It turns out that this is coming from work being done on the roof, which we are just underneath.

It's less charming that raccoons (or squirrels) holding gymnastics competitions on the roof, although it is happening at a more reasonable hour than 'the dead of night'.

I bike commuted today because when I looked out the window at basically clear and dry pavement and saw the weather forecast, I couldn't not bike commute. It was good to ride again, and at least this means I've done some bike riding this February.

(It was a last minute impulse decision, which means that the bike wasn't completely ready and I had to hastily pump up the tires to proper pressure.)

Fediverse people: who do we like these days for buying DRM-free music in lossless format? Bandcamp is the obvious one but I know a bunch of (often artist-friendlier) alternatives got started up when BC had some ownership changes. However, I've lost track of them.

(Boosts welcome, and this is triggered by the conversation at @cks@mastodon.social )

On the one hand, the current situation for RAM, SSDs, and now HDDs looks grim for people who buy their own servers, desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, etc. On the other hand, the hardware has not been made and handed over. That requires money, and AFAIK no "AI" company is profitable. Can "AI" and cloud companies raise (and spend) enough more money to pay for all of the hardware they've signed agreements for? That depends on how long people will write more checks.

It has been '0' days since I've hand-authored a stub Atom syndication feed for Reasons. XML and quoting HTML in XML remains a pain in the rear.

Honestly, this Owls in Towels picture looks like the owl in question has just gotten out of the shower in the morning and would like to know what you're doing in their home, looking at them in their bathrobe.

@owlsintowels@mas.to

The department¹ has some new Dell (multi-)GPU servers that scream at 100 dB and can't be turned down any quieter. Thankfully they aren't in our machine room, but you can hear the screaming from the other side of their machine room door. I can't help but think that they're trying to tell us something.

¹ my group doesn't have that kind of money, these servers were directly bought by some researchers with very nice grants that can fund servers that reach six figures each.

Current status: reaping the informational benefits of a door-opening-and-closing sensor¹ on our machine room door coupled with a trail cam setup.

¹ It's a magnetic contact sensor hooked up to something that notices make/break state changes, logs them, and makes the current state accessible as Prometheus metrics that eventually drive a 'hey you left the door open' alert that has never actually triggered since we put the system in.