Valuable insight on software portability and obsolescence, by
@sevan

# Portable Legacy

"Something I’ve been thinking over on and off for a while, is the meaning
of portability claimed by folks regarding software. Fish out an old
computer with a matching vintage closed source operating system, how
does the portable software fair in such a situation?..."

https://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=3162

#software #portability #retrocomputing

#ssi #Transparency , #Portability, #Interoperability enforced by open standards and portable self-explaining and self contain data format and distributed data with meaning and context understandable for machines and humans. Together with data, we have interoperability of behavior that is achieved with #protocols that describe data, user roles, and expected behaviors.

#SSI principles 
#Existence — exist in real life
#Control —control their identities.
#Access —access to their own data
#Transparency — Systems and algorithms must be transparent.
#Persistence — must be long-lived.
#Portability — identity must be transportable
#Interoperability — Identities should be as widely usable as possible.
#Consent — Users must agree to the use of their identity.
#Minimization — Disclosure of claims must be minimized
#Protection — The rights of users must be protected

Solved a Linux/MacOS portability issue today 🙊

It turns out, `grep` doesn't print out the file name if you don't provide multiple files on Linux. The workaround is to append `/dev/null` as an extra file.

🐧 Issue: https://github.com/kyu08/fzf-make/issues/53

#linux #macos #portability #grep

Arduino* and a custom board

At work a colleague developed a custom board in the time of chip shortage™ and had to use a 20 MHz oscillator in place of a 16 MHz requiring a custom board configuration. The solution after searching the often misleading Arduino forums was to hack it into the global platform.txt.

This is neither portable nor does

https://bowfinger.de/blog/2023/08/arduino-and-a-custom-board/

#Arduino #Embedded #Hardware #arduino #board #Hardware #platform #portability

Compiler vs. interpreter: Key differences - Learn about the crucial differences between compilers and interpr... - https://cointelegraph.com/news/compiler-vs-interpreter #softwaredevelopment #errordetection #codeexecution #interpreter #programming #portability #differences #compiler

If you missed our @devconf_cz talk about @Cockpit 's new bridge and the "get a Cockpit UI on any machine", the video is available now. Thanks to the organizers and session chairs!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAVUG6E0Xd4

#cockpit #python #portability

#introduction

Our motto is »#Linux #OpenSource News & Know-How for #Office Tasks.«

Our content is for #solopreneurs, #trainers, #facilitators, and everybody else who tackles their office tasks using open source software under Linux. Tasks over tech!

While we appreciate #portability, we're strictly Linux-only. With respect to other operating systems: no bashing, no praise, no comparisons. We've already made our choice!

@tchambers @fediversenews Maybe #Meta is smart enough to comply with its #DigitalMarketsAct obligations in the #EU early (should #Threads ever be launched there).

Art 6(9) #DMA: "The #gatekeeper shall provide end users and third parties authorised by an end user, at their request and free of charge, with effective #portability of data provided by the end user or generated through the activity of the end user in the context of the use of the relevant core platform service [...]."

Since I started getting interested in computer science, I have always believed in the openness and accessibility of data. Traditional social platforms, for example, incorporate our data, and if one day they were to decide to shut down their servers (Google Plus, I'm looking at you), we could only export them and keep them in a drawer, but we would lose their original purpose. The Fediverse, through the use of its own instance, allows the storage and access to any content produced for life. For the same reason, my websites and blogs have never been hosted on "closed" external platforms but always on my own servers and using open-source tools, to ensure portability and future accessibility. Long live freedom. #dataopenness #dataaccessibility #Fediverse #serverownership #opensource #portability #freedom

*As container #technology matures, what I really expect to happen, as Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of enterprise cloud management company RightScale, put it is that #VM and #containers will come together to form a #cloud #portability nirvana. We're not there yet, but we will get there.*

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3068392/containers-vs-virtual-machines-how-to-tell-which-is-the-right-choice-for-your-enterprise.html

As a still practicing academic, I don’t quite know how to formulate my tech interests just yet — so here’s a disorganized hashtag list of such things I tend to like thinking or learning about:

#csv #linux #archlinux #bsd #datalog #dlv #naturallanguageprocessing #functionalprogramming #rustlang #rustlings #python #javascript #portability #unicode #lexicography #obsidian #postgresql #gis

@jeffjarvis EXACTLY THAT!

The purposeful #walling is done to work against #portability of #data and #accounts!

The Top 10 Best Cameras of 2023: A Comprehensive Guide https://www.charlienaebeck.co/letsgo/2023/04/05/the-top-10-best-cameras-of-2023-a-comprehensive-guide/ #NikonZ7II #CanonEOSR5 #SonyA7RIV #FujifilmXT4 #PanasonicLumixGH5II #SonyA7SIII #NikonD850 #OlympusOMDEM1MarkIII #LeicaSL2S #mirrorless #fullframe #4K #inbodystabilization #EyeAF #autofocus #resolution #imagequality #lowlight #videorecording #handling #portability #advancedfeatures #Wi-Fi #Bluetooth #photography #professional #camera

That being said, there is some relevance in the changes made to make it run correctly, but rather than about the OS, it's about the architecture. Relying on char being signed _was_ a (#portability) bug, so it's good that it got fixed.

I love the idea of managing / building your own audience (read: really amazing, interesting people!), but the idea of spinning up my own Mastodon instance feels quite daunting.

I recently moved Mastodon servers, and I realized that I couldn't bring over my social graph to this new one. This feels like a big miss to me.

Is anyone working on this or is this not part of the Mastodon vision? (Sorry for the noob question!)

#socialgraph #portability #mastodon #ethos

Cryptography gadget of the day: Javascript Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jose/documents/ and the jose command line utility (h/t Nathan McCallum)

I appreciate this little set of (draft) standards because they codify quite a bit of best practice. The input and output formats (JSON or condensed base64url) are highly portable, and even printable, resulting in good crypto agility. The algorithm selections are limited to reasonable, recommended combinations, key sizes and padding. Proper key wrapping or key encryption is automatic and relatively effortless.

jose is such a better choice for the uninitiated than openssl and the vast troves of crap advice on Stackoverflow. It's also a decent learning tool. If there's any question about the algorithm in use, the JWA RFC7518 describes the details and operation of each in a manner more readable than most RFCs.

Looking for a tool to encrypt log files before shipping them off to NFS or S3 storage? How about creating a signed message? jose is probably going to be easier than openssl. Heck, openssl doesn't even do AEAD on the CLI anymore.

#cryptography #cli #tooloftheday #portability #cryptoagility

Steffen Christgau on #HPC at #deRSE23:

#CUDA (#nVidia) and #HIP (#AMD) are essentially the same, you just have to use a different prefix. And they are both #proprietary.

So, best use an #openStandard, #crossPlatform, vendor-agnostic framework for your #GPU code. To make sure it can run on any HPC system.

For #AI applications, you don’t need nVidia GPUs as well. Platform #portability is possible nowadays!

Steffen Christgau on #HPC at #deRSE23:

#CUDA (#nVidia) and #HIP (#AMD) are essentially the same, you just have to use a different prefix. And they are both #proprietary.

So, best use an #openStandard, #crossPlatform, vendor-agnostic framework for your #GPU code. To make sure it can run on any HPC system.

For #AI applications, you don’t need nVidia GPUs as well. Platform #portability is possible nowadays!

#C #portability gets interesting. Subtle. Sometimes even weird.

The familiar #size_t has some wrinkles, as is nicely described here:

https://noncombatant.org/2023/02/12/int-size-t/

One detail not mentioned there: some platforms will limit the size of a single data structure to a size smaller than the available virtual address space, which means you can have 64-bit pointers, and a 32-bit size_t and 32-bit ptrdiff_t.

Put differently, there are some implementations where the following is a false statement: "But on a 64-bit machine, size_t must be equivalent to uint64_t, and so it is."

For example, one of the weirder hybrid 32- and 64-bit memory model systems, #OpenVMS (which only recently saw C99, and with a C17-ish update underway with the OpenVMS x860-64 port of Clang):

$ cc/ver
VSI C V7.4-002 on OpenVMS Alpha V8.4-2L2
$ cc/point=64=argv x
$ link x
$ run x
sizeof( size_t ) = 4
sizeof( ptrdiff_t ) = 4
sizeof( argv ) = 8
$ type x.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
main( int ac, char *argv[] ) {
printf("sizeof( size_t ) = %d\n", sizeof( size_t ));
printf("sizeof( ptrdiff_t ) = %d\n", sizeof( ptrdiff_t ));
printf("sizeof( argv ) = %d\n", sizeof( argv ));
exit( EXIT_SUCCESS );
}