Saturday April 27th-Sunday April 28, 2024

now playing: Destiny - Time Is for Clocks: Deja Vu Rise Again
Destiny - Time Is for Clocks: Rising Meditation
Joao MS - disambiguations

Renewal, reasoning, RAIDers, right on track, roving, raster/vibrations, reminiscence

Renewal

Hello, world! Today is Saturday and Saturday is coffee day, which means I'm full of beans. Since my last entry, I've updated my machine from OpenBSD 7.4 to 7.5 <g> w00t! This was easier and quicker than it has been for me than any other OS I've used, which is pretty cool. This upgrade has made me think about a number of things including the number of the version of the operating system itself, to which I will devote a sizeable digression, but being as it is a digression, I will actually include it last among the sections of this blog entry.

Reasoning 0: RAIDers

Just yesterday evening, I had a nice dinner with one of my oldest friends, Pat. Pat is one of my friends who has not only studied programming but found some gainful employment doing so. Sometimes we talk about the things he does in his job and friends of his who work in related disciplines. So, we briefly chatted a bit about RAID, which stands for redundant array of independent discs and it made me think about how one of the things I'd like to do as a mediumterm goal with my learning of UNIX and about networks is setting up a home server! Does that sound like a daunting proposition? Yes, undoubtedly, but in a good way! One of the reasons I've taken up this line of study is to give myself an interesting challenge and to increase, within reason, my independence from the giants of computing. To wit, "being the cloud" instead of paying G**gle, *pple, Ad*be, or any of 'em anymore than is strictly necessary. In doing so it will make me feel smart and useful, feeling like I'm "creating internets". That last part also plays nicely into my political beliefs which involve seizing the means of production from the ground up (as much as is possible). Realistically, though of course I am still beholden to my ISP and its privileged access to capital, so that part's less than ideal.) Luckily, there is a vast wealth of information available people have written about setting up home server systems and a substantial amount of the hardware required can, like the computer I'm on be something relatively inexpensive and refurbished (see my computing philosophy.)

Part of how RAID works involves something I don't totally understand the minutia of called parity used to ensure that if one of the discs of the array ceases to function, all is not lost, hence why it is called a redundant array. Also, the I in RAID used to stand for inexpensive, so if data loss occurs, it won't cost an arm and a leg to replace that component. There are different levels of the RAID standard that may be employed and the simplest of which makes use of an XOR function. This Boolean logic gate, whose name is short for "eXclusive OR" means that either proposition p is true or proposition q is true, but not both. For a visual representation, imagine a Venn diagram of two overlapping circles with the overlapping section nullified. At further levels, RAID makes use of socalled Galois fields, which is a good example of higher mathematics above the level of my ken but very much the sort that I'd like to be to understand/I want at some point to study, "modern/abstract algebra", in part because it explains a lot of underlying structures, as well as the highly romantic figure of Evariste Galois himself, and the feminist mathematical icon of Emmy Noether, one of the most important women in the disciple and one whose works have greatly affected most areas of study directly or otherwise.

Right on Track: I'll C you in (the) shell (and other Korn-y puns that will leave you wanting to bash your head in)

In my readthru of Brian W. Kernighan (aka bwk) and Rob Pike (aka rob')s forty year old and still relevant book The UNIX Programming Environment, I'm currently on the chapter introducing the use of the shell. The simplest explanation of what a shell is, is an interactive interface between the user and the core functions of the computer using different commands with their various options/flags, which is not strictly speaking what most people think of when they talk about programming. A shell is used primarily within a terminal emulator and for users of *NIX systems (not necessarily including macOS X in this case) one of the primary features they will use, at least in domains such as networking and admninistration. The shell bwk and rob are writing about is Steve Bourne's Bourne shell. One alternative to this which arose in the 1980s was David Korn (aka dgk)'s Korn shell, which is also known as ksh. As of 1993, the earlier version of ksh has been made open source and by default, OpenBSD is bundled with a spinoff of ksh, which is why I bought Bill Rosenblatt's book on the subject. Most versions of Linux will come equipped with a shell called the Bourne Again SHell or bash for short which was originally developed by Brian Fox.

Reasoning 1: Roving

It is perhaps well known in some circles that part of the original impetus for the UNIX operating system was that programming mastermind Ken Thompson (aka ken) had developed an early (1960s) computer game called Space Travel. The game concerns flying a rudimentary simulated spacecraft throughout our solar system and "landing" on different planets and their moons based on their gravity and the speed of the vessel. It was through Ken's desire to have his little science fiction game work on a PDP-7 in the lab that he started the now immortalized operating system, whose name originates as a pun made by bwk on one of its main predecessors, MULTICS.

Reasoning 2: raster/man/vibrations (with apologies to Bob Marley's Rastaman Vibrations)

Two things I'm particularly curious about learning certain intricacies of are how the domains of graphics and sound are handled by computers. (Cue David Bowie's "Sound and Vision".) Many out there will insist with all their breath that one simply must use macOS or Windows (and therefore, expensive, proprietary, closed source software) in order to work with music, sound editing, visual art or film editing. This conventional wisdom has been challenged, to varying degrees of success, by a range of software. Many are aware of Audacity, Blender, GIMP, and BitWig. Fewer still have heard of LMMS, Inkscape, Ardour, and Cinelerra. Granted, not all of the aforementioned are Free, Libre, and Open Source Software but almost all of the named offer zero-cost alternatives to more expensive better known programs, and indeed, all but the one paid program of the bunch can run without emulation on almost any operating system. Yes, Photo$hop is nice and so are Ab£eton and Ma¥a. They all notoriously cost an arm and a leg, and so in response to their ubiquity in piracy, a lot of major companies "pivoted" to a subscription based material. Just imagine! In an era where greater quantities of storage are more affordable to consumers than ever before, no less! Can you imagine if an artist didn't own their own supplies and had to pay their patron instead of being the latter's beneficiary?

In addition to a general interest in how file formats work, both lossless and lossy, here are some things I'm curious about, in two categories: image (raster) and audio (vibrations). They are also the counterpart to three pages, for the eYes (FtY), for the eaRs(FtR), and for the eaRs alpha (FtRa) which will be home to posts about visual and audio projects/works created from these. FtRa is a spinoff which will be my devotional computer music which is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

raster

vibrations

Digression 0: man

Digression 1: Reminiscence 


               O tessa o
          _\_   o
       \\/  o\ .
       //\___=
          ''


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