| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-17, 09:44 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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 Post: #161 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Sophie Wilson - The Future of Microprocessors - in this talk from 2016, one of the designers of the original ARM1 CPU discusses how CPUs got ten thousand times faster over the course of her lifetime, and why they aren't going to get much faster than they are now. Among other things, she discusses Moore's Law, Amdahl's Law, and has a cool "power density" chart that plots Intel CPUs from the 80386 to the Core i7 against "hot plate", "nuclear reactor" and "rocket nozzle". Spoiler: Intel hit "hot plate" shortly after the Pentium Pro, but they chickened out before the P4 could reach "nuclear reactor". The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-17, 10:33 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #162 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Not in the main body of the talk, although I didn't sit through the questions. The first question was about the economic restrictions that make smaller-than-28nm processes costly, and she didn't immediately start talking about giant ultra-ultra-violet lasers refracting through a fog of molten tin that absorbs 90% of the energy (which I understand is a required part of the 7nm process), so I stopped watching. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-17, 10:44 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #163 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem Really? The guy who starts off the very first post with "You will..."? Not even "Hello, I'm a fan of the Pale Moon browser, and I noticed you're doing this particular thing that the project leaders hate" or "Thanks for helping to get Pale Moon working on your platform, but we've got some problems with the way you're going about it"? Regardless of the legal or technical merits of his position, that's not the way to get people to want to help you. They both seem to have the same issue many of those kinds of developers do; due to spending too much time interacting with complete idiots they respond to anyone doing anything with complete hostility. You can see it clearly in the FAQ/rule lists of cough some websites as well, where the author sometimes appears to have been figuratively seething with rage when he or she wrote it. That's definitely a problem - there's always more jerks in the world, and it can be very difficult to give the next person the benefit of the doubt when the last five people you interacted with were assholes, just ask anyone who's worked retail. That's really part of the job, though. Some people have the emotional maturity and support network to handle that kind of work, and other people don't, in the same way that some people have the upper-body strength and fitness levels required to haul loads of bricks around all day, and other people don't. If you have those things, you can do the job well, but if you don't have them you're going to do the job poorly, or do OK for a little while and then burn out. If you can't do the job, there's no shame in finding a more appropriate way to contribute. All that to say, if the Pale Moon developers and their proxies can't send legal requests in a polite manner, they should find somebody who can do that on their behalf, for their own good, and the good of the project. Heck, if they'd just called their lawyers instead of creating that GitHub issue, the resulting cease-and-desist letter would probably have been more pleasant to read. Either they're competent enough to actually make something of value, in which case there is no problem, or they are incapable of this, in which case they are the kind of person who wouldn't need a complicated license agreement to get persuaded into rebranding the project they're forking into something along the lines of "PaleMoon+ Optimized Edition by somedude123", in which case any sane person would avoid it, in which case there is no problem either. There's also the people who take browsers like Firefox and sell "subscriptions", where for an monthly fee they'll send you a copy of the Firefox installer and tell you they've scanned it for viruses. There's even people who will build Firefox with an insecure configuration, or with nefarious CA certificates bundled, or with spyware, and pass it off as the real deal. Sure, you and I probably wouldn't fall for such tricks, but with a product as widely used as a web-browser it's good to have some level of protection; protection that trademark law was invented to provide. It's not just browsers, either; I remember hearing about a bunch of punks who would take every VBA-M release, hex-edit the binary to replace the original attributions with their own names, then upload it to their own website with changelogs like "improved HDMA timing accuracy" and "higher-fidelity colour reproduction for mode-3 graphics", and ridicule the original VBA-M team for being unable to provide such improvements themselves. It's enough to make a man want to invent a device to punch people in the face over the internet. It feels like somewhere along the line, the free software movement got mired down in the legislation they were fighting against (GNewspeak: "use copyright to guarantee their freedom" - direct quote), confusing the map with the territory and getting us all into this great big hash of licenses and regulations. For all practical purposes, The Pirate Bay accomplished far more in six years (operating at a net profit) than the FSF has done in thirty-six (spending about $1mil a year) and counting. Even if the heroes who ran TPB would have paid their fines, which they did not, it would still have been a vastly cheaper endeavor ($6.5mil) than whatever the FSF did (something to do with India?) with their money. I'll grant that TPB probably provided more practical freedom than the FSF in the time they were around, but where are they now? TPB was an attack on the excesses of copyright law from the outside, the FSF is an attack from within. TPB had much success with little effort, but the System brought its resources to bear, the System squashed TPB, and the System will be immune to such attacks in the future (why download MP3s when you have Spotify? Why download movies when you have Netflix? Why download an office suite when you have Office365.com?). The System cannot attack the FSF, because the FSF is made of the same stuff, so it would just be attacking itself. Honestly, if anyone wants to make any kind of techno-social change, investing the money in India or Africa or somewhere like that is probably a far smarter move than doing something in the USA or Europe, calcified as they are in their existing systems. If you really have a better idea, you have a better shot at getting it adopted in a culture that's not already heavily invested in an alternative. For example, the ideas behind Kaizen were invented by Americans, who couldn't get them adopted in America because American industry was in love with Ford-style mass production. It wasn't until those ideas came to Japan post-WWII that they were successful, because Japan's industry was largely destroyed during the war and they were ready to try something new. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-18, 09:11 in Announcing the bsnes history kit
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Post: #164 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
When I started this, I was quite happy with the unofficial git repo, I just wanted to try and extend it backward without too much manual labour. However, I've come to appreciate the usefulness of original, unmodified artefacts, even when (especially when) a human-edited summary is available. For example, the datestamps in the unofficial git repo are about right, but usually there's a few hours between byuu posting a WIP and me waking up and committing it, and sometimes if I was busy doing something else I have a stack of WIPs built up and commit them all, one after another on the same day. Having the original WIP tarballs available means I can find out the *actual* time they were made, instead of hand-waving. Normally when I add a WIP to the unofficial repo, I download it, commit the changes, then move the tarball to the trash. However, I don't empty the trash very often, so I looked in there and discovered I had copies of most WIPs and releases dating back to the first version of higan (v091), so I decided to dump those artefacts into the the mix as well. If you go look at the bsnes-history repo now, you'll see there's tags from v005 up to v107 in the same repo. No changelogs for most of them, of course, but better than nothing. I say "most WIPs and releases"; comparing the list of tarballs to the commits in the unofficial higan repo, I see I'm missing tarballs for v100r12-r16, v101, and v101r01-r12. No idea what happened there, but if somebody happens to have them lying around (that was 2016-07 to 2016-08, if it helps) I'd love to get a copy. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-19, 01:49 in Something about cheese!
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Post: #165 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
There's a number of things I don't like about this: - I don't like dumb pipes trying to act smart: Clever algorithms like filtering belong at the edges of the network, on devices users control, not in the network itself that users have to share. - It's too late: the problem is that people go looking for that stuff, it doesn't matter so much whether or not they find it. I *guess* it makes sense in that if it's difficult to get access to this stuff, fewer shock videos will get made from it, and less material to radicalise impressionable youths. But then, the Streisand Effect... It's worth pointing out that Telstra *isn't* a monopoly ISP, though. Sure, they're the biggest, but also the most expensive. I expect most people trying to visit those sites over Telstra would be teenagers living with their parents. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-19, 03:28 in 32X CRAShTEST: the mushroom of doom strikes back!
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Post: #166 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Looks like you've got the MAME and GENS logos switched at the top of their respective columns. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-19, 10:13 in Announcing the bsnes history kit
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Post: #167 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Having incorporated just about all the historical archives I can find, I've turned my attention to changelogs. I discovered the tukuyomi collection had a changelog for v045r09 as a separate HTML file for some reason, beside the rest of the changelogs. I wrote a hacky HTML-to-text converter to convert it to the standard changelog format and taught my pile of scripts how to automatically do the conversion and sort it into the right place. Next, I started poking around at the "bsnes Dev Talk" forum on the old ZBoard. It turns out the forum was locked, so everything's pretty much just as it was a decade ago, I used wget to grab the HTML for every thread in the forum, and wrote a script to scrape the forum HTML and spit out each post into a separate HTML file, neatly labelled with its date and author, and used my HTML-to-text script to convert those HTML files into something a little more human readabla/searchable. From ~240 thread pages, I got ~5000 individual posts. The tukuyomi collection already covers release changelogs, so I'm mostly interested in WIPs. From the 5000 posts, I grabbed ones by byuu that mentioned "wip" (case-insensitive), which brought the number down to ~140. Of those 140 posts: - A few were public WIPs, so they mentioned an actual specific version number, like "v034 wip05" - Most just said "New WIP", so I just blindly guessed that the first such post in a thread was r01, the second was r02, etc. - Sometimes, I'm pretty confident my numbering is correct. For example, there's a post in the v039 thread where the changelog mentions "changes since wip 19", so I guessed that post described wip 20... and sure enough, there were 19 "new WIP" posts in the thread up to that point. - Sometimes, I'm pretty confident I got it wrong. For example, there's two "new WIP" posts in the v037 thread, then a post that mentions changes that might have landed in wip 4 or 5, so three WIPs are missing but I have no idea which ones. - A lot of these could probably be sorted out if I had the archives corresponding to each release. For example, if a changelog says "added multitap support", then whichever archive adds a file like "multitap.cpp" is probably the one. - A bunch of posts were just talking about WIPs, rather than announcing them. - A few posts just mentioned "wiping". Overall, I found 97 new changelogs from v030r03 to v042r05(?) inclusive. My next step is to figure out how to automate converting these files into the changelog format the rest of the scripts expect. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-20, 08:02 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #168 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem They have no obligation to be nice, but they also have no obligation to be nasty. I guess they have to say *something* because of trademark law, but I don't think there's an explicit time-limit, and even if there is, I'm sure it's longer than two days it took that bug to go from "hello" to "repository locked". I assume the developers' long-term goals for Pale Moon include gathering enough of a community around it that the project becomes self-sustaining, and (in this instance at least) their actions are undermining their own goals. It's not about obligation, it's about strategy. Personally, I'm no fan of either, but I would much prefer contributing to a project with a perpetually angry but honest maintainer, than the one with one who uses the disgusting corporate sickly-sweet tone, referring to problems as "challenges," expends large amounts of time on writing meaningless documents about "inclusive language" (and actually enforcing them, instead of treating them like repository ornaments like the gratuitous makefiles), and uses expressions such as "yikes" and "sweetie" instead of explaining their issues with a given suggestion clearly. Ultimately, as in so many other things, being a good project leader is about being a good communicator. If somebody tries to contribute to my project, and I respond with a nugget of information wrapped in aggression and profanity, that's just as bad as a response wrapped in passive-aggression and equivocation. Luckily, if I take a minute (or a day) to wait and think before I respond, I can usually just write a response without the emotive overhead that should be clearer and more pleasant for everyone involved. I have a theory that because software developers work so intimately with computers, we fall out of practice at identifying and processing emotions in ourselves and others (or maybe the kind of people who have problems with that are naturally attracted to software development). And so, like people who are hard-of-hearing yelling at each other indoors, we get super-emotional because we don't remember what volume-level regular people use, and we wish regular people would speak up and quit mumbling so we can observe their emotional state without having to guess wildly. And like people who are hard-of-hearing, even though we're behaving rationally and haven't done anything wrong, it's more pragmatic to learn to control our volume level and learn to lip-read than it is to try and make the rest of the world conform to our expectations. Posted by Screwtape I believe it's also blocked by a lot of ISPs, or run by the CIA, or visiting it flags your account for increased scrutiny, or something. I'm pretty sure all the good content is now mostly (only?) available on smaller trackers, or even private trackers, and there's no tracker as central and complete as TPB was back in the day. Sure, a lot of fresh content is still available *somewhere*, but it was generally available before TPB arrived, too. TPB made it *widely accessible*, and now with the decline of TPB content is less widely accessible again. It used to be that members and representatives of the copyright industry from all over the world were fighting TPB tooth-and-nail, but now they are not. The copyright industry has not evaporated, it has not given up control of copyrighted works, and even if it's smaller than it was, it has not gone away. Therefore, I conclude that TPB is no longer a threat to the copyright industry. What has the FSF accomplished? Helped large companies externalize software maintenance? I'm typing this right now on a computer with a Free operating system, Free drivers and mostly Free firmware, and I didn't have to ask anyone's permission, or pay $99 a year for a developer kit. It's true that multi-billion dollar companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook are the biggest beneficiaries, but other people benefit too. In fact, it's a good thing that those companies exist and that they use Free Software so heavily, because it means lots of software developers want to develop software on Linux so they can deploy software to the cloud, which means hardware makers want to keep their machines Linux-compatible so that software-developers will want to buy them. Certainly not *all* hardware makers want *all* their machines Linux-compatible, but even the most locked-down laptop maker would baulk at a standard that mean they couldn't sell nice expensive enterprise servers that worked with Linux. It used to be that members and representatives of the proprietary software industry from all over the world were fighting against GNU and Linux tooth-and-nail, but now they are not. Many of those companies have gone bankrupt, or gotten acquired, or reorganised their business models into different shapes. Heck, today I saw a product announced by Microsoft, that is not only open-source, but "requires Python 3 and only supports Linux and macOS systems at the moment". The very idea would have been *madness* a couple of decades ago. Therefore, I conclude that even if the FSF hasn't achieved their ultimate goals, they have certainly had a tremendous impact on the entire computer industry. The Global South at best perpetually skijors on the achievements of the West, and so does China but with actual, quasi-legitimate industry. There isn't any change to affect down there anyway, since nearly nobody uses computers and if they did they would all just use whatever shipped on the computers the West sent them. Generally, economically weaker nations tend to follow in the steps of the economically stronger nations they trade with, but they don't always *stay* economically weaker, and there's a tipping point where a large number of people with tech-level X can be economically stronger than a small number of people with tech-level X+1. Indian film-makers might be using western-made cameras and editing equipment, but Indian cinema is very much its own thing, distinct from the genres and tropes of Western cinema. A huge chunk of the Indian software industry is devoted to handling outsourced tasks from the West, but do you really think no Indian software developers would think to use their skills for problems they themselves face, or problems they see in society around them? If you're going to argue that economically weaker nations always wind up as pale imitations of the stronger nations they trade with, I'd like to remind you that America was once a poor little nation that imported all its technology from Britain, and they've had quite a sizable influence on world culture and technology since that time. It is a common fantasy, that the oppressed third world will rise up against their capitalist masters and do something, but it's not a realistic one. Even the so-called independence movements were mostly just the Soviet Union funding proxy wars, or power struggles that had completely nothing to do with ideology (Sierra Leone). It's not about "rising up against their capitalist masters". If anything, it's about *preventing* such a thing. Technology and population are both economic multipliers. There's a bunch of countries that are weak despite having large populations, because of their low tech level. Their tech levels are growing very, very quickly, and soon they'll be strong enough to do whatever they want. From a progressive point of view, it'd be really nice if those countries could learn from our mistakes rather than repeating them. From an economic point of view, it'd be really nice if those countries shared fundamental values with us, like egalitarianism and democracy rather than, say, authoritarianism. At the very least, we'd like them to think of us as the people that helped them grow up, rather than the people that held them down, and dismissed them as cheap and dirty. It might be a bit late for China, what with communist dictatorship and all, but democracy has had a pretty good track record versus dictatorships (albeit a bit bruised since 2016) but there's hope yet. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-20, 08:51 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #169 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Sure, but I think 2016 is when people really started to think there might be a systemic problem and not just some unfortunate coincidences. Anyway, this isn't the politics thread! Today Firefox 66 was released, which means Firefox Nightly got bumped to version 68. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I actually found some regressions and filed bugs for them: - browser.display.use_document_fonts=0 is not respected - Tree Style Tab requires an extra click to do anything Much to my (pleasant) surprise, both bugs got triaged, confirmed, and somebody found the exact commit that caused each regression within a couple of hours of my reporting them. I'm still a bit annoyed that the regressions happened, but I'm pleased to get a response so quickly, and now I'm keen to see how long it takes the regressions to be fixed. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-20, 12:36 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 2)
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Post: #170 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I came across a Twitter account called World's Most Aggravating Edge Cases, and yow, are they ever aggravating. Most of them are hypothetical ("Every number which will fit legibly on an American football player's jersey has been retired") or widespread problems we've learned to live with ("negative zero", "discontinuities in civil time"), but there's a lot of real-world ones that would really make me grind my teeth in frustration if I had to deal with them myself. - Somebody fixed a timer overflow in Qt, then had to wait 2^32 milliseconds (~50 days) to verify the bug was fixed - "Hey Siri, play 'Something', by the Beatles." - The UK parliament currently has 10 independent members, belonging to no party, and 11 Independent members; that is, members of the party called The Independent Group. - A gdb bug that caused gdb to core dump, but loading the core dump into gdb would cause the *new* gdb to core dump - Escape Room and Escape Room are two unrelated films both released in September 2017. They are also unrelated to Escape Room, a film released in March 2019. - A suspect born on 2000-02-29 was charged with a crime committed on 2018-02-28. If you count March 1st to March 1st, she's legally an adult and can be tried as such. However, if you count February 28th to February 28th, she's a day short of her 18th birthday and should be tried as a minor. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-21, 04:45 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #171 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
A friend of a friend works in the Canberra court system, and according to them that story smells very much like "the defence asked very nicely that the defendant be tried as a child, and the judge bent over backwards to find a vaguely plausible legal justification". The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-21, 14:35 in Announcing the bsnes history kit
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Post: #172 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem And of course none of the WIP announcement messages were posted on 2009-03-07. The changelog I've labelled "v039r22" was posted on 2009-03-05, and v040 was posted on 2009-03-09, so who knows what source code that binary corresponds to. Still, I'm pleased that I could figure that out with a few seconds' searching, instead of just sighing helplessly and wondering. "It's better than nothing" is the preservationist's eternal refrain; it would have been grand if I (or somebody else) had thought to collect all these things at the time, and not as much has survived as I would have hoped, but more has survived than I feared, and focussing on the positive is how we all make it to the end of the day without becoming gibbering wrecks. It's a damn shame everything was on byuu.org and that wasn't archived. Google code doesn't have changelogs, only binaries. Google Code? Oh wow, there's a bunch of downloadables there, but it doesn't go back very far and doesn't have many WIPs; I'm guessing the tukuyomi collection already has all that stuff, but I guess I need to double-check just to be sure. Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe it would be of interest to try and match the dates of news published on https://web.archive.org/web/20071002155056/http://byuu.cinnamonpirate.com/?page=bsnes_news to releases? That would be pretty cool - again, it's not guaranteed that every news post is a WIP, but some of them mention a version number in the text, and some have screenshots that mention a version number in the title-bar, which is pretty great. I would love to download those pages and add them to the History Kit to be automatically extracted and formatted into git commit messages, but annoyingly those scrapes were done by Alexa, and the Internet Archive page for that scrape says "this data is currently not publicly accessible". Even if it were, I suspect the crawl data is divided up by time, not by site, so it'd be one HTML file from cinnamonpirate.com and a million pages from random other sites. Definitely something I'd like to do, but would probably need to be done manually, so I'll put that in the "later" basket. Following up from my previous post, I've pushed a new version of the bsnes-history repo that includes all the changelogs I found on the ZBoard. It's not super-clean, since these changelogs weren't designed to be self-contained, plain-text commit messages - embedded images look weird, and some commit messages have some changelog content along with a bunch of byuu's replies to other people. Again, manual cleanup could make things a bunch nicer, but I'm going to put my effort into more easily automated things for a little while longer. In particular, the next item on the list is the bsnes thread - before bsnes had a subforum on the ZBoard, it had a single thread that grew so long it made the whole site flaky and unreliable, so it was archived for posterity and deleted from the database. The archive has condensed the three years of posts into a single 13MB HTML file, but it seems to have preserved enough of the phpBB markup that it shouldn't be too hard to extract post-dates and authors and find all the byuu posts mentioning "WIP" again. Just looking at the thread myself, the earliest version mentioned is v011, which is about the oldest I've seen outside of the tukuyomi collection; that Wayback Machine crawl's first news-post is v014. Again, though, I expect it to be quite difficult to come up with version numbers to assign to any of the posts. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-22, 07:51 in Monocultures in Linux and browsers (formerly "Windows 10")
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Post: #173 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
There was an MS-DOS 8? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-22, 13:42 in UI-less mode
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Post: #174 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
higan has a full-screen mode which hides any other UI, but of course you can't see any other applications. There's no "borderless windowed" mode or anything like that. You might be interested in RetroArch, which has a higan v106 core available and has a console-style UI that hides itself when the game is playing, even in windowed mode. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-23, 02:58 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #175 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
> if you have a copy of a GPL'ed piece of software you by definition always have a license for it. Sure, you can *use* it, but you can't necessarily *distribute* it. The GPLv2 says to distribute a copy of the software, you must include the source-code, a written offer to provide the source-code yourself, or pass along the written offer you received from your provider. I'm guessing these dev-kit owners didn't receive the source-code *or* a written offer, it would have been impossible for them to legally distribute it. > It's not like playing tag, where the last link in the chain only has the responsibility. It really is. If person A published a program in source form, and international mega-corporation B distributed binaries to a billion users, it wouldn't be fair for mega-corporation B to leave all the responsibility of source-distribution on person A. In practice, it's not a big deal because person A generally pushes their source-distribution responsibilities onto international mega-corporation C (i.e. GitHub), so if B abuses C's resources they can fight it out among themselves and A doesn't care. But it should be *possible* for A to take care of things themselves, and if they do, they shouldn't have to shoulder other parties' responsibilities. > If I find a flash drive on the street with a copy of emacs on it I could contact the GNU project and ask for the source, Ignoring the question of whether finding (or losing) a flash drive counts as "distribution", you could contact the GNU project for a copy of Emacs even if you *didn't* manage to acquire a binary, because the GNU project gives out as many copies of Emacs as they can. In the case of a console dev kit, the console manufacturer only gives dev kits to people in their licensing program. If they include the source-code with each dev-kit they distribute, then they don't have to include a written offer to provide source code (because it's already provided), and so the dev-kit recipient can't pass on that written offer (because there isn't one), and so the dev-kit recipient is responsible for providing source to the people they give binaries to. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-23, 04:45 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #176 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
No, that's the Extensible Vi Layer. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-23, 07:14 in Announcing the bsnes history kit (revision 1)
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Post: #177 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem You may be interested in the comm command ;) Try scraping directly from IA instead. You can get the raw HTML (as the crawler saw it) by appending id_ to the date, as in https://web.archive.org/web/20071007054817id_/http://byuu.cinnamonpirate.com/?page=bsnes_news. Then use the file list from e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/*/byuu.cinnamonpirate.com/*. No need to follow the links, so that makes things easier. You'd need to set a cutoff date also, since they changed it to a parking page and some of that got archived. That's a neat trick, I'll have to write that down. Thanks! Have you compared your results to tukuyomi's changelogs? They seem to mention some WIP releases. My results are built from tukuyomi's changelogs. Not that *specific* file, since it's labelled "outdated", but bsnes_changelog.txt, higan_changelog.txt, and the extra v045r09 changelog are all there. I've started digging into the archived bsnes thread, following the same process I used on the ZBoard, but it's more difficult than I expected. phpBB markup has never been particularly semantic or machine-readable, but the ZBoard famously uses the Hermes theme and hasn't been updated in ages, so I assumed that the code I wrote for the current board would work just as easily on the archive. Turns out, the bsnes_thread.zip archive seems to have been made with the old subsilver theme, and uses much stupider markup. For example, where Hermes wraps bold text with <b>, which is easy enough to detect and handle, subsilver seems to wrap bold text with <span style="font-weight: bold">, so apparently now I need some level of CSS parser to properly understand the content. Hermes wraps each post in <div class="postbody">, and fills it with text, other block elements (like tables and code-blocks) and <br>s to simulate paragraphs, so I had to teach Python how CSS block layout works to get things to look right. However, subsilver wraps each post in <span class="postbody"> and still uses <br>s. While a <br> ends a *layout* block, it is not technically a block element, and so it can go inside inline elements like <span>. If a <span> were cut short by the end of a block element, like </div> or </p>, the span would be over and we could move on, but when it's cut short by a <br> the span needs to continue on afterward. Luckily, I only need to parse a few pages, rather than all the Internet, so I don't need the full HTML5 parsing algorithm... but it's still more complex than I'd hoped. EDIT: And there's no way to distinguish user signatures from the post body! GAR! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-25, 07:04 in Announcing the bsnes history kit
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Post: #178 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem While I understand that probably nobody else will ever run these scripts, I want other people to be able to easily change the editorial decisions I've made in bsnes-history-kit and make their own bsnes-history repo. As part of that, I've tried to reduce dependencies to a minimum... or at least, to only the most useful ones. html5lib would do very nicely here, but Python dependency management is (to put it nicely) a ballache. If there were an HTML5-compatible parser in the Python standard library, I'd absolutely use it, but I've got an 80% solution in 20% of the code, so I'm happy with that. As for the signatures, it was done in one go, so everyone will have the same signature for all their posts. So for all posts containing ^_________________$, find the longest common suffix for each user, and if it includes the final set of underscores, save that as signature. Wait, are you saying that every signature starts with a fixed number of underscores? That'd make it easy to trim them off... but I guess I'm only really interested in byuu's posts, and he didn't use a signature, so it's not really a problem. Thanks for the info, though. Also, there are some issues with character encoding. Not sure if they come into play for the changelogs, but might be worth keeping in mind. Try doing a CTRL-F for "ƒ," for instance. Is that when you open bsnes_thread.html in a browser, or are you looking at the bsnes-history repo somewhere? I can't see any "ƒ" anywhere. Posted by byuu It super-is! You can get the zip file from gitlab, or I believe tukuyomi's collection is back up again, so you can get it from there as well. My nick on the ZBoard was Thristian ("Screwtape" was already taken), and apparently my first post was encouraging you to make your game database identify games by MD5 instead of CRC32. ;) Also, until now I didn't appreciate how much effort FitzRoy put into testing things in the early days of bsnes. > Just looking at the thread myself, the earliest version mentioned is v011 It looks like the thread started off as other people talking about this new development in SNES emulation, and then you showed up to join in the conversation. If I had to guess, I suspect the oldest surviving changelogs are the byuu.cinnamonpirate.com archives on the Wayback Machine. Luckily, I don't think *those* are going away any time soon, so I don't feel rushed to collect them. Posted by JieFK Thank you so much for actually collecting all that stuff to make it possible! I decided to stop archiving byuu's work -and snesemu too- because your repo is much cleaner than my pile of files randomly saved in some folder. I mentioned it above, but this project has really made me appreciate the importance of primary sources and artefacts. If all the source material was preserved, anybody could come along later and reformat and edit it together, like I've done with bsnes-history-kit. With a pre-editorialised archive like the unofficial higan repo, you can never necessarily recreate the original artefacts. There's been a bunch of things I could have archived over the years and decided not to (things like bass and beat and treble and other assorted tools) because I didn't want to commit to maintaining a full repo like I do for higan. In retrospect, I really wish I'd just saved them all and stuck them in a folder, because even if I didn't get around to making a repo maybe somebody else could have. ----- Anyway, I have now added changelogs from the bsnes thread. As with the changelogs from the bsnes Dev Talk forum, there's a few WIPs with actual hard version numbers, but most of them are wild conjecture. Also, from context it seems like most actual announcements were being made somewhere else, and (especially early on) there's only occasional references like "thanks for that report, it's fixed in the latest WIP", so some of these "changelogs" might not even correspond to actual releases at all. I guess I'm kind of pinning my hopes on the Wayback Machine providing dating material to clear things up. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-25, 14:14 in Announcing the bsnes history kit
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Post: #179 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem Because this content was designed to appear in a browser, so if I want to understand it I need to parse it the same way a browser does, and browsers use the HTML5 parsing algorithm. Also, I'm not sure I've ever heard of anybody writing an HTML4 parser. Lots of HTML5 (uh, "HTML Living Standard") parsers, because HTML5 specifies how to make sense of real-world web-pages, but previous HTML specifications weren't that relevant to the real world. In the browser. When I copy paste the raw entities into the file and paste them into the first result for "HTML entity decoder," it's normal. So probably just a misdeclared encoding somewhere. Might be good to fix though so the errors don't propagate up the chain. OK, *where* in the browser, so I can see how it appears for me, and check how my pipeline has handled it. Also, which browser are you using? What about http://black-ship.net/~tukuyomi/snesemu/tools/ ? A lot of good stuff, but maybe if I'd saved everything I'd find something that was missing from this collection, or we'd have confirmation that that's all there was. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-03-26, 00:17 in Monocultures in Linux and browsers (formerly "Windows 10")
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Post: #180 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Ah, the ol' "it's not wrong unless you're caught" defence. While there's definitely a time and place for civil disobedience, I find it hard to muster sympathy for people who say "I demand Microsoft control my computing environment, but not quite that much". If you want Microsoft to control your computing environment, let them do that. If you don't trust them to act with your best interests at heart, don't let them act at all. > Hosting guy is probably the only one violating any actual laws As long as their hosting provider takes down the infringing content as soon as they receive a DMCA notification, they haven't broken any laws at all. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
