- Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Removing write protection from MicroSD card?
by Evan Leibovitch 05 Feb '18

05 Feb '18

Hey there. Subject says it. Regular SD cards have a physical switch but MicroSD don't, yet I can't use this because it's reported as write protected. Any suggestions? Is it a micro-brick? Thanks!

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Seen in passing: PDF to epub/docx converter for windows
by David Collier-Brown 04 Feb '18

04 Feb '18

https://www.lightenpdf.com/pdf-converter.html $29.99, with a free trial if you have a windows emulator handy --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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Increasing interest in the Go language
by David Collier-Brown 04 Feb '18

04 Feb '18

Later this month I'm joining a company that is fairly Go-intensive. They originally prototyped in Perl, but over time needed more performance but not to the level that would require assembler or even C. What else have folks observed? --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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Linux Journal, RIP
by Stewart C. Russell 01 Feb '18

01 Feb '18

Looks like last month was their last month of even digital publication: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication Jason Scott has saved everything he can on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/linuxjournalmagazine Looks like he could use some help creating tables of contents for all the issues, though: So, next bit. I took the table of contents from a page on the site to generate the table of contents here: https://archive.org/details/Linux-Journal-2011-06 - so, unfortunately, this has to be done for each issue. Any brave soul want to do this task? — @jscott : https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/938198975982850048 I'm sure it would be an amusing SMOP for someone on the list, and Jason's good people to work with. archive.org's Python interface is pretty powerful, too — https://internetarchive.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ cheers, Stewart

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How to go fast without speculating... maybe
by David Collier-Brown 31 Jan '18

31 Jan '18

Kunle Olukotun didn't like systems that wasted their time stalled on loads and branches. He and his team at Afara Websystems therefor designed a non-speculating processor that did work without waits. It became the Sun T1. Speed without speculating The basic idea is to have more decoders than ALUs, so you can have lots of threads competing for an ALU. If, for example, thread 0 comes to a load, it will stall, so on the next instruction thread 1 gets the ALU, and runs... until it stalls and thread 2 get the ALU. Ditto for thread 3, and control goes back to thread 0, which has completed a multi-cycle fetch from cache and is ready to proceed once more. That is the basic idea of the Sun T-series processors. The strength is that the ALUs are never waiting for work. The weakness is that individual threads still have to wait for data to come from cache. You can improve on that Now imagine it isn't entire ALUs that are the available resources, its individual ALU component, like adders. Now the scenario becomes * thread 0 stalls * thread 1 get an adder * thread 2 gets a compare (really a subtracter) * thread 3 gets a branch unit, and will probably need to wait in the next cycle * thread 4 gets an adder * thread 5 gets an FPU ... and so on. Each cycle, the hardware assigns as many ALU components as it has available to threads, all of which can run. Only the stalled threads are waiting, and they don't need ALU bits to do that. Now more threads can run at the same time, the ALU components are (probabilistically) all busy, and we have increased capacity. But individual threads are still waiting for cache... Do I feel lucky? In principle, we could allocate two adders to thread 5, one doing the current instruction and another doing a subsequent, non-dependent instruction. It's not speculative, but it is out-of-order. That makes some threads twice as fast when doing non-interacting calculations. Allocate it three adders and it's three times as fast. If we're prepared to have more ALU components than decoders, decode deeply and we have enough of each to be likely to be able to find lots of non-dependent instructions, then we can be executing multiple instructions at once in multiple streams, and probabilistically get /startlingly/ better performance. I can see a new kind of optimizing compiler, too: one which tries to group non-dependent instructions together. Conclusion Is this what happens in a T5? That's a question for a hardware developer: I have no idea... yet Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunle_Olukotun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afara_Websystems https://web.archive.org/web/20110720050850/http://www-hydra.stanford.edu/~k… -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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Re: [GTALUG] January TASK Reminder
by David Collier-Brown 30 Jan '18

30 Jan '18

Task seems to have a permanent location now, at Cisco > <https://task.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=55cba2f29693cfd9f99a07a20&i…> > > > *January TASK Reminder* > > > A quick reminder this month's TASK will be held tomorrow night > (Wednesday, January 31) at our *new location* on the 29th Floor at 88 > Queens Quay West, courtesy of Cisco. > > This month's sessions will see Apurva Kumar and Jeremy Richards > discuss the newly published Dark Caracal investigation, and Lee Kagan > talk C2 tradecraft and design. See below for more details. > > As always, TASK is free to attend, no registration is required, and we > welcome you to invite friends and colleagues. > > *January TASK* > *Date: *January 31, 2018 > *Time: *6:00 pm > *Location:* > Floor 29, 88 Queens Quay West, Toronto > <https://task.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=55cba2f29693cfd9f99a07a20&i…> > > We look forward to seeing you there, > /TASK Steering Committee/ > > > >

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Getting external IP
by William Park 29 Jan '18

29 Jan '18

Hi, I recently switched to CarryTel, and I'm getting disconnected quite often. So, I want to monitor my external IP, every minute. For this, I usually use <http://myexternalip.com/raw>, but it has rate limit. What site do you use to get your external IP? I want to round-robin through these. Google gives you this when you search "what is my ip", but it's difficult to dig it out. Simpler, the better. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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Swap and Hibernate on SSDs
by Giles Orr 28 Jan '18

28 Jan '18

In the early days of SSDs, there was a lot of talk in the Linux community that you shouldn't have a swap partition on an SSD. An indirect side effect of that is that it becomes impossible to suspend-to-disk (aka "hibernate") on a SSD-only system. Although I suppose that you could have the swap partition and set swappiness to 0. So I have a new SSD system, and was wondering the current state of these things: - is it considered okay to have a swap partition on an SSD drive? - how should I set the swappiness? - is it considered okay to hibernate to an SSD? -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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War Story
by Jonasz, Randall 21 Jan '18

21 Jan '18

A diegesis about my experience moving Windows 10 from a 512GB SSD to a 1TB SSD. I had EaseUS Todo Backup which promised to do the job for me. Alas when I inserted the 1TB disk into my SATA USB connector Windows 10 would not recognize the disk. So I installed the 1TB disk into my laptop and put the 512GB system disk into the adapter. All was good. The BIOS recognized both disks. I then used a bootable USB stick to load up ToDo Easeus Backup. It refused to clone the 512GB drive! What the $%@!. It said the disks were offline. :( Ok, I had enough of wasting time on Windows software. I had a bootable USB stick with Linux handy and loaded that on my laptop. Linux recognized both drives just fine. Thinking like a Linux sysadmin, I used dd command to copy sector for sector from the 512GB drive to the 1GB drive. It completed without an error. Now the moment of truth. I tried to boot Windows. Windows immediately went into recovery mode and wiped out the GPT entries for the first two partitions! Needless to say Windows did not boot. This is now 5am and I resolved not to be defeated by Microsoft! So using another laptop I created a bootable USB stick with Clonezilla; a Debian based distribution which promises to clone drives and partitions. I then booted my Windows laptop into Clonezilla. As expected it recognized both drives. I selected device to device copy with all of the default parameters. After 50 minutes Clonezilla announced the copy to be completed. Now the moment of truth. I booted Windows.....and it worked! I now had Windows 10 running off of my 1TB drive. Alas I still had one problem. Clonezilla was so thorough that it copied the disk geometry in the GPT table from the 512GB disk to the 1TB disk. Windows, being as smart as it is, thought the 1TB disk was only 512GB in size. Even though I should have known better, I tried EaseUS Partition Master to fix the GPT table. It said there was no problem with the disk$#%#$#@%! Back to Linux I went. I booted the Linux live USB again. I started gParted which immediately notified me that the GPT table was reporting the wrong size of the disk. Being a helpful Linux utility it offered to fix the problem for me. I accepted. Back to Windows 10 I went. This time Windows said the disk was 1TB in size. Yay! Now, since I use Bitlocker on my drives, when I went to resize the C drive to occupy the rest of the disk, both Windows 10 and EaseUS Partition Master said it couldn't be done. What the ^$#@! I've done this in Linux many times. Resizing encrypted partitions is not trivial but certainly doable in Linux. So after Googling I realized I had to first turn Bitlocker off. When I tried to do this, Windows 10 notified me it had to decrypt every file on my drives which could take hours. What the %$#@! I left it running and finally went to bed for four hours. When I got up, Windows 10 said Bitlocker was turned off. I then tried EaseUS Partition Master to resize the C drive. It took less than a second for it do so. I now have my 1TB SSD as my main disk in my laptop. Thank goodness Linux was available to save the day er night.A diegesis about my experience moving Windows 10 from a 512GB SSD to a 1TB SSD. I had EaseUS Todo Backup which promised to do the job for me. Alas when I inserted the 1TB disk into my SATA USB connector Windows 10 would not recognize the disk. So I installed the 1TB disk into my laptop and put the 512GB system disk into the adapter. All was good. The BIOS recognized both disks. I then used a bootable USB stick to load up ToDo Easeus Backup. It refused to clone the 512GB drive! What the $%@!. It said the disks were offline. :( Ok, I had enough of wasting time on Windows software. I had a bootable USB stick with Linux handy and loaded that on my laptop. Linux recognized both drives just fine. Thinking like a Linux sysadmin, I used dd command to copy sector for sector from the 512GB drive to the 1GB drive. It completed without an error. Now the moment of truth. I tried to boot Windows. Windows immediately went into recovery mode and wiped out the GPT entries for the first two partitions! Needless to say Windows did not boot. This is now 5am and I resolved not to be defeated by Microsoft! So using another laptop I created a bootable USB stick with Clonezilla; a Debian based distribution which promises to clone drives and partitions. I then booted my Windows laptop into Clonezilla. As expected it recognized both drives. I selected device to device copy with all of the default parameters. After 50 minutes Clonezilla announced the copy to be completed. Now the moment of truth. I booted Windows.....and it worked! I now had Windows 10 running off of my 1TB drive. Alas I still had one problem. Clonezilla was so thorough that it copied the disk geometry in the GPT table from the 512GB disk to the 1TB disk. Windows, being as smart as it is, thought the 1TB disk was only 512GB in size. Even though I should have known better, I tried EaseUS Partition Master to fix the GPT table. It said there was no problem with the disk$#%#$#@%! Back to Linux I went. I booted the Linux live USB again. I started gParted which immediately notified me that the GPT table was reporting the wrong size of the disk. Being a helpful Linux utility it offered to fix the problem for me. I accepted. Back to Windows 10 I went. This time Windows said the disk was 1TB in size. Yay! Now, since I use Bitlocker on my drives, when I went to resize the C drive to occupy the rest of the disk, both Windows 10 and EaseUS Partition Master said it couldn't be done. What the ^$#@! I've done this in Linux many times. Resizing encrypted partitions is not trivial but certainly doable in Linux. So after Googling I realized I had to first turn Bitlocker off. When I tried to do this, Windows 10 notified me it had to decrypt every file on my drives which could take hours. What the %$#@! I left it running and finally went to bed for four hours. When I got up, Windows 10 said Bitlocker was turned off. I then tried EaseUS Partition Master to resize the C drive. It took less than a second for it do so. I now have my 1TB SSD as my main disk in my laptop. Thank goodness Linux was available to save the day er night. Randy Know something about everything and everything about something --John Stuart Mill --- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. http://www.avg.com

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Carrytel.ca -- 75M/10M at $35/month
by William Park 21 Jan '18

21 Jan '18

I think I posted about Carrytel.ca, about whom I found out about from KWLUG. Today, I switched to Carrytel Cable75 (75M/10M, unlimited, $35/month). That's $25 cheaper than Teksavvy's equivalent. So far, it performs as promised. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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