Andreas Bombe

Andreas Bombe

@activelow.net

57 followers152 following70 posts

Andreas Bombe reposted

"the author of that harry potter story leads an insane cult that's captured much of the media in this country" is a different person if you're in the UK or the US

Andreas Bombe reposted

parents told me that watching dumb 80s cartoons wouldn't prepare me for the real world, but the president is attacking europe because they didn't give him the peace price

Finally implemented some benchmarking into my #AdventOfCode runner to see how well my Ada implementations are doing. Longest (part 2) solution this year has been day 4 with about 1850 μs. Current day 7 comes in around 85 μs. (Depending on CPU temperature...)

That's after enabling -O2 optimization, which I didn't notice wasn't enabled before. My benchmarking runs the solutions in a loop until at least 2 seconds of run time accumulates and shows the average of all runs.

Back around day 2 of #AdventOfCoding and before I got around to solving it myself, I saw people talking something about using regular expressions for solving this, and I don't get how? As in, seriously counting through every possible number, converting to text and test with a regex?

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I haven't yet built a performance measurement into my runner. Using the shell's time command with a loop starting my runner for all six day's solutions so far comes out as 0.02 or 0.03 seconds, a bit to small to be meaningful.

I haven't been doing #AdventOfCode the last two years because it felt like too much work just for puzzle solving. Now there's fewer days so it seems more feasible to reach the end while still in December!

And it's so refreshing to solve these in #AdaLanguage again (which I currently don't program in otherwise), and also to try out those neat Ada 2022 improvements.

Andreas Bombe reposted

Mark your calendar! Next Vintage Computer Festival in Munich takes place from May 1st to May 3rd, 2026. Yes, its one of those rare three day VCFe, because of public holiday on May 1st. Website updates will start early 2026 as usual. #VCFe #VCFe25.0 #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

Andreas Bombe reposted

Last week, the vintage IBM 1401 computer at the Computer History Museum started behaving strangely: it wouldn't halt. More specifically, if you had two HALT instructions in a row, it would halt for the first, but when you continued, it crashed mysteriously. Here's how we fixed it.... 1/N

Last weekend at #VCFe I once again encountered the meme that using original power supplies for your home computers of the 80s is bad because the line voltage was raised by 10% from 220 V to 240 V since then. #electronics #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

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In typical linear power supplies you have a (big and heavy) transformer and rectifier that generates a low voltage DC from line AC, followed by a linear voltage regulator that generates the desired target voltage from that.

The regulator acts essentially as a resistor that takes just the value needed to drop the voltage to the desired level. That is, it converts the excess to heat. Higher input voltage means more excess and therefore more heat. But the output is a fixed voltage.

Last weekend at #VCFe I once again encountered the meme that using original power supplies for your home computers of the 80s is bad because the line voltage was raised by 10% from 220 V to 240 V since then. #electronics #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

So instead of 5 V, as the story goes, they now deliver 10% more and would be outside the specs. But no, that's not how voltage regulators in power supplies work. They regulate voltage. That's their one job.

There's of course a real reason not to continue using the CBM linear power supplies for their 8 bit computers: they didn't have protection circuits that would prevent a failing voltage regulator from potentially frying your computer.

Andreas Bombe reposted

i do have to give Haliey Welch some credit for comedic timing. intentional or not, she perfectly timed her rugpull to steal the spotlight from bitcoin hitting $100K, a moment coiners have been awaiting for years. masterful stuff

Over the months I've put so many hours into trying to get GHDL to work on all Debian architectures, but now I've finally cut my losses and uploaded a new version 4.1.0+dfsg-4 restricted to the architectures that actually work to unstable. #GHDL #VHDL #FPGA #Debian

But hey, amd64 and arm64 architectures are included. There's some serious work that would need to be done to make it portable (and I attempted some of it) and I don't think it's worth it.

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