Notices by Kensan (kensan@mastodon.social)

Oh this is good! “Arxiv Vanity renders academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages so you don’t have to squint at a PDF.”

https://www.arxiv-vanity.com

Example:
https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1805.12512/

Well that was a first: flight almost got cancelled because airspace in Dresden was closed due to a WWII bomb they found two days ago at a construction site and had trouble defusing. Luckily they got the job done in time for my flight 😅

Wow, somebody had the audacity to do a formal & executable (!) memory model for the Linux kernel and they aptly named the paper „Frightening small children and disconcerting grown-ups: Concurrency in the Linux kernel“.

From the abstract: „We offer a model written in the cat language, making it not only formal, but also executable by the herd simulator.“

http://diy.inria.fr/linux/
https://paulmck.livejournal.com/

Herd is a toolsuite written in OCaml to test/simulate memory models.
https://github.com/herd/herdtools7

So I found a new goldmine of video interviews: Computer History Museum‘s Oral Histories:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85ubzbWdTB36-_q

Especially the interesting interview with Dave Ditzel who talks about computing history, Transmeta, Intel, the „Russian Connection“ and where things may go in the future (chip stacking, etc)
https://youtu.be/etta_NYCVxA

He is the CEO of Esperanto Technologies, who announced they are building high performance RISC-V chips:
https://youtu.be/f-b4QOzMyfU

My casting suggestions for the Cambridge Analytica/SCL/Facebook movie:

Stephen Merchant as Alexander Nix
Jack Black as Steve Bannon
Peter Capaldi as Robert Mercer
Ricky Gervais as Ted Cruz

So get this: the CEO of a Certificate Authority, which control the lock icon of your browser, sent >20k private keys via email, unencrypted. How hard can you show your incompetence and make clear that you had no place running that business in the first place?!?

https://www.digicert.com/blog/digicert-statement-trustico-certificate-revocation/

The HiFive Unleashed board by SiGive is pricey but it comes with 8 GB RAM *with* ECC. According to the FOSDEM talk t has no microcode.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed

https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/
https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/attachments/slides/2322/export/events/attachments/riscv/slides/2322/SiFive_RISC_V_FOSDEM_2018.pdf