@FenTiger@mastodon.social
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

FenTiger

@FenTiger@mastodon.social

Mid-40s techie living in #Ely, #Cambridgeshire, UK. Mostly low-level software with bits of #ASIC and #FPGA stuff, #electronics, #RF. Discoverer of the "Snark" in #ConwaysLife. Currently working on memory subsystems for packet matching and filtering in high-speed networking equipment.

Player of #Ingress, under the name "Wrongfellow". I've used this name elsewhere, too.

#Dog and #cat lover. Drinker of #ale and #cider. Occasional #CAMRA and #beer #festival volunteer.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Dtl, to science
@Dtl@mastodon.social avatar

When it's my turn to be god, I'm making all scientific instruments out put well commented, documented CSV files.
UV-Vis Spectrometer - CSV
Profilometer - CSV
Raman - CSV
SEM - CSV
Hubble Space Telescope - CSV.

EVERYTHING for CSV.

Until then I'll just sulk at this data I have that's not entirely commented as to what units it's using.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@Dtl Not sure I'd insist on CSV personally, though I won't object if others do.

Units are an absolute must, though. Presenting a graph without units on it should get you fined, with jail time for repeat offenders.

(And if you do get jailed, we won't tell you what the units are. You'll be sentenced to "6 in jail" or something, and left to wonder if that was days, months or years.)

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Probably Coming Soon: Trump tells rally crowd "Biden pushing solar energy has made the sun go crazy, and I'm going to throw both him and the sun in prison!"

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@orci @lauren The Sun must be some kind of woke Commie activist, providing us with all this energy without charging us a penny for it, and expecting us to believe we can just go on funding this profligacy from the taxpayer's purse forever. When will they learn that you always run out of other people's hydrogen?

evan, (edited ) to fediverse
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

Very happy to announce that @tomcoates and I have been given a grant to develop an end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protocol for DMs, including a reference implementation and a report to submit to the W3C SocialCG.

https://forum.summerofprotocols.com/t/sop-2024-pig-and-pog-grantees/1270

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@evan @tomcoates Will this be based on your proposal here?

https://evanp.me/2023/05/19/end-to-end-encrypted-messages-over-activitypub/

FenTiger, to random
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

I just noticed the depiction of St George on today's Google search page.

Such a fine figure of British manliness!

I have to wonder what the Yxly-Lnnn crowd think of him now.

azonenberg, to random
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange avatar

New thread on my big ongoing embedded project since the other one was getting too big.

To recap, this is a pilot project for a bunch of my future open hardware T&M and networking projects, validating a common platform that a lot of the future stuff is going to run on.

The primary problem it's trying to address is that I have a lot of instrumentation with trigger in/out ports, sometimes at different voltage levels, and I don't always have the same instrument sourcing the trigger every time.

So rather than moving around cables all the time and adding splitters, attenuators, amplifiers, etc. to the trigger signals I decided to make a dedicated device using an old XC7K70T-2FBG484 I had lying around.

Of course, as with any project, there was feature creep.

I'm standardizing on +48V DC for powering all of my future projects as it's high enough to move a lot of power but low enough to be mostly safe to work around live. So I needed to design and validate an intermediate bus converter to bring the 48 down to something like 12 for the rest of the system to use.

The FPGA has four 10G transceiver pairs on it. I used one for 10GbE (not that I need the bandwidth, but I was low on RJ45 ports on this bench and had some free SFP drops) and the rest are hooked up to front panel SMA ports (awaiting cables to go from PCB to panel) to generate PRBSes for instrument deskew.

Since I'm pinning out the transceivers and am planning to build a BERT eventually, I added BERT functionality to the firmware as well (still need to finish a few things but it's mostly usable now).

And since I have transceivers and access to all of the scope triggers, it would be dumb not to build a CDR trigger mode as well. That's in progress.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

I'm always amazed when I see one of these floor plans and realise how little of it relates to the thing you're actually trying to build.

It's said that "we share 95% of our DNA with chimpanzees", and it's interesting to look at modern digital machines and see similar amounts of stuff being shared between devices that might seem to be completely unrelated.

I bet there are similar Curve25519 accelerator blocks in all sorts of gadgets that have nothing at all to do with crypto!

azonenberg, to random
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange avatar

@taral If you're interested, I think I have the TCP/IP and SSH stack done enough for at least the beginnings of a source review.

This is the base stack so the BSP stuff for my current board (i.e. the FPGA accelerator integration and FPGA Ethernet-over-QSPI MAC are not included) but this is probably most of the attack surface.

https://github.com/azonenberg/staticnet/tree/master/ssh

There's some test code in staticnet-demos which I need to update (it's bitrotted due to recent API changes) but let me know if/when you want to do some dynamic analysis or fuzzing or something.

There's a demo app that lets you build the stack for Linux and run it off a tap device as a virtual Ethernet link partner, which is probably going to be a lot easier for messing around with it than trying to get valgrind/asan working on a STM32.

(Also if anyone else has some spare cycles and wants to code review a TCP/IP and SSH stack, be my guest!)

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@azonenberg @taral 2 - are you assuming the partner will never want to backpressure you? This can happen even when it's much faster than you are.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@azonenberg @taral I suppose you can just keep retransmitting until you get through ... it's only your local link that will suffer ;)

shoq, to random
@shoq@mastodon.social avatar

And so ends the debate. What’s next?

In reply to…
https://mastodon.social/@tarheel@mstdn.io/112254504272456965

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@shoq Toasts?

Edent, to android
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

What software features do you miss from older versions of ?

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent Re-flowing web pages to fit the new width when you zoom in, rather than forcing you to scroll horizontally.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Looks like both placekitten.com and fillmurray.com are both down.

I've switched to https://picsum.photos/ for putting placeholder images in HTML layouts.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent It's so tempting to set my avatar URL to this ;)

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

There are too many ants.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Well, why not just pick the best one, and get rid of all the others? ;)

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Workout advertisements are always just like…

"FEEL THE BURN! PREPARE TO SWEAT!"

and I'm just over here going… but what if we didn't?

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@hrefna Is this a workout or a chilli contest? ;)

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

What did Einstein do after discovering general relativity in 1915? Sit around and complain about the Lord playing dice with the universe? Not quite:

  1. In 1916 he showed his theory predicts gravitational waves, whose existence was first confirmed in 1974.

  2. In 1917 he introduced what we now call "dark energy", whose existence was first confirmed in 1998.

  3. In 1925 he wrote a key paper on what we now call "Bose-Einstein condensates", predicting that particles of integer spin form a new state of matter at low temperatures. This idea is important for understanding superconductors and even lasers - though photons, being massless, work differently.

  4. In 1935 he wrote about the "Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox", which laid the groundwork for understanding the true weirdness of the quantum world. Even though the paper was phrased as an argument against quantum mechanics, when Bell sharpened the argument it revealed features of quantum entanglement that are crucial to quantum information processing!

  5. Also in 1935 he coauthored the first paper on wormholes, showing that general relativity allows amazing solutions that connect distant regions of space. He wanted to use this to explain particles as wormhole ends: the paper was called "The particle problem in general relativity".

I think it's cool that items 3 and 4 served as the basis for current and future quantum technologies. He was always way ahead of his time.

And don't forget all his work on unified field theories! Though not successful, it was crucial in lifting the goals of theoretical physics to something very ambitious: unifying all the forces of nature! He spent most of his later years on this.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@gregeganSF @johncarlosbaez @spacemagick By an obvious symmetry argument, there ought to exist the related phenomena of "apsorbtion" and "aqsorbtion".

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

in LA I have to have discipline to only hit up a taco truck once per day max. One of the hardest parts of living here aside from the rent and proximity to rich people tbh

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@jonny Maybe your body secretly holds shares in taco companies.

gsuberland, to random
@gsuberland@chaos.social avatar

gonna have to start blocking folks who post GAN images without CW. they're so gross to look at.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@gsuberland Gallium nitride?

revk, to random
@revk@toot.me.uk avatar

Anyone else with me on this?

https://www.revk.uk/2024/03/missing-unux-file-open-option.html

@torvalds

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@revk If I were to redesign from scratch, the actions of creating a file and adding it to a directory would be separate operations.

First you'd create the file, which would give you a FD referring to it. This would be the only reference to the file - just as you get today if you first create and then unlink a file.

Then you'd write to it.

Finally you'd add it to its containing directory, under the name you want it to have - atomically replacing any existing file which had that name.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@ids1024 @revk That is more or less exactly how I envisioned it working.

Damn. Once again I have invented something that turns out to already exist. Story of my life... ;)

jwz, to random
@jwz@mastodon.social avatar

A couple of times in the last week, I've noticed that I was not following someone who I'm 100% sure I used to be following. I didn't unfollow them on purpose, they don't have me blocked, and they don't seem to have migrated servers any time recently. Weird.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@jwz This has happened to me, too, along with other things like posts getting deleted(!)

I think it might happen because I use the web interface, and I'm used to scrolling down with the space bar - but sometimes the keyboard focus isn't where I expect it to be, and I end up "clicking" on something I didn't mean to.

underlap, to haskell
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

Non-deterministic behaviour in a specification can be a headache for testing. This updated post explores the non-determinism in the JSONPath RFC 9535, describes how the Compliance Test Suite is being upgraded to deal with non-determinism, and shows how non-deterministic tests can be generated automatically. There's also an "explosive" challenge for Haskell programmers.

https://underlap.org/testing-non-determinism

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@underlap This is my approach too. First, make a mess. Then make a well-tested mess. Then tidy it up.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@underlap "Fire, Aim, Ready" - I haven't heard that before, but I like it. I've certainly met a few people who swear by doing things in this order. ;)

(Oh, and I'd suggest skipping over step 1 and going straight for step 2, if that's possible, which it sometimes isn't.)

maxleibman, (edited ) to random
@maxleibman@mastodon.social avatar

Inside you there are two wolves.

Wolf Basic is free for individuals and includes ad-supported access to all of the classic features of the Wolf platform. Or, for $19.99 per month, upgrade to Wolf Plus and unlock an ad-free experience, Priority Howls, and all of our pro features.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@maxleibman Is there no AI howlbot to save me time by taking the hard work out of howling?

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Why WhatThreeWords lacks Scottish localization:

You try getting someone from Englandshire to pronounce "dreicht, teuchters, scunnered" correctly!

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross "Where are you?"

"Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung, Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz!"

"I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"

"Er, somewhere near Berlin."

shoq, to random
@shoq@mastodon.social avatar

Can someone tell me the status of digital identity in the fediverse? Is there someone actively pursuing that tech as an extension to activity Pub? Is there a graceful way to transition to it? Can they coexist in parallel with existing Mastodon/AP IDs?

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@shoq Can you clarify what you mean by "digital identity"? I don't think I've heard this term before.

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@shoq Ah, OK, I get you.

There is FEP-ef61: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md

It's probably best regarded as a research project right now. Real world implementations of this are some way off. is probably the closest - @silverpill knows the most about this.

Edent, (edited ) to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Which (new) HTTP response code would you use to represent "User Has Died"?

FenTiger,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent There's no need for a new code. Just use 410 Gone, with an "X-Clacks-Overhead" header.

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