Centroid.EU Blog

What can the brain do?

I've wished this book for my birthday (in march). It is about the sonar in dolphins. I came across some link (which I can't remember it's location now), that said that dolphins got the ability to use sonar 15 million years ago and that made them more intelligent than humans at the time. Considering that sound travels in water at 1700 meters per second. An object 1.7 meters away would cover 1/1000 seconds or 1 ms. The round trip of the sound bouncing off the object would be 2 ms. You try reacting to any thing in 2 ms! I wish you luck! So not only are dolphin brains faster than humans brains, they have been doing so for 15 million years! Birds are said to have been the survivors of the dinosaurs which lived 100's of millions years ago. Birds have an exceptionally small brain compared to humans but what if they figured out a way to compress brain functions? Where we have a relatively large brain in comparison with most mammals, birds brains are about 2 cm if not smaller. In English there exist what I would guess 20,000 words. For someone to know all these words requires a high IQ. But a bird may have less "words" in its brain and can tell apart a car from a tree (one hopes). What a bird lacks is the mouth functions to be able to speak a word (with exception to parrots perhaps). I wonder if birds and other mammals have quicker but compressed brains in order to have similar brain function to humans? We seem to be super slow compared to a dolphin. I just wanted to paint a what if. Also interesting is that CPU's have compressed instructions (see RISC-V 'C' section). So why not brains?

To systematically spy is akin to colonization

In this article (german) here, it is reported that China was systematically spying on the African Union parliament. One parliament member said this "If the chinese spied on us it's not so much a problem, because they never colonized us, supported sovereignty and help with the african economy". That may be true, but I think this member of parliament doesn't understand the Internet well. When hackers speak of other hackers taking control of a box they speak of "0wning" that box. The word 'to own' means that you lost your property to someone else. If that isn't akin to colonization then I'll be danged. China owned the entire network from the beginning and microphones and other spy tools were found. I think they were caught red handed. I don't have any advise for the AU here, other than the fact to build up your own education of the Internet, the RFC's are open at least, but they already knew that I bet.

I have taken on a new job

Today we signed the contracts (dated wednesday the 24th), and I gave notice at my old employer that I'll be leaving them. I'm starting a new job working with POWER based AIX systems and Linux on POWER/OPENPOWER. POWER architecture is an acronym and stands for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC. RISC being an acronym as well for Reduced Instruction Set Computer which you may know because I mentioned it before for RISC-V the fifth version of RISC. I have also made a CNAME to remember the POWER acronyms better:

venus$ ping pow.enhancedrisc.de
PING performance.optimization.with.enhancedrisc.de (78.47.14.22): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=0 ttl=248 time=19.505 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=1 ttl=248 time=19.251 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=2 ttl=248 time=19.549 ms
^C
--- performance.optimization.with.enhancedrisc.de ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 19.251/19.435/19.549/0.131 ms

So there it is. A POWER computer is based in part on PowerPC that was used for G3, G4, G5 Macs. I'm really excited by this new change. I start on March 1st, 2018 in full-time.

Defectiveness is my word

I have the following domains:

1. solarscale.de
2. virgostar.net
3. delphinusdns.org
4. enhancedRISC.de
5. centroid.eu
6. dtschland.eu
7. schweinfurtdating.de
8. freifunk-schweinfurt.de
9. goldflipper.de

There is a tenth but I'm not revealing it. It starts with an S though. Now I took all the first letters of these domains (which I btw randomly selected) and grepped them without the g for goldflipper. I got these words:

• defectiveness
• defervesce
• defervescence
• defervescent
• devicefulness
• diffractiveness
• disinfective
• diversification
• nondiversification
• overdiversification
• overfranchised
• undefectiveness
• unvouchsafed

I like defectiveness or "goldflipper defectiveness" a lot because my nick is buggy and a buggy computer part is defective. Interesting anyhow, notice there is an undefectiveness as well, that would match.

Electricity for 2017

I got my electricity bill for 2017.

Registered EnhancedRISC.de

As I'M a fan of RISC architecture (had a Mac G4 Cube a while back) I registered this domain. Another piece of news is that I may be going to Embeddedworld in Nuremberg February 27th, to view their RISC-V presentations. I'M looking to take a vacation day that day.

Freifunk, 1043's seem to be the next 841's

I took a look at Freifunk Stuttgart today and noticed they recommend 1043 routers because the 841's are not supported anymore. The 1043's are about twice the cost of a 841 but coming down. They dropped the USB port in newer versions so that would prevent playing with chaoskeys on this hardware. But there is another model the C7 Archer that has dual 5GHz/2.4GHz modes. Those are almost twice as much as a 1043, but would cut hardware if one is going into the 5GHz spectrum. That's something that interests me a lot. We'll see how it works out.

Mid-January Rainbow

I sighted this rainbow out of my east side windows.

I made a few more pictures about a minute later it started to sleet/snow.

How to build riscv-qemu on OpenBSD

As you know I lately became interested in RISC-V. Here is the webpage on how to build riscv-qemu so that you can simulate the RISC-V processor:

• riscv-qemu

$ git clone https://github.com/riscv/riscv-qemu
$ cd riscv-qemu
$ git submodule update --init dtc
$ git submodule update --init pixman
$ ./configure --target-list=riscv64-softmmu,riscv32-softmmu \
	--extra-cflags=-I/usr/X11R6/include \
	--extra-ldflags=-Wl,-z,wxneeded \
	--prefix=/usr/local/riscv
$ gmake
# [gmake install]

# uname -a
Linux ucbvax 4.6.2-00041-g030e817-dirty #2 Mon Dec 19 08:48:07 PST 2016 riscv64 GNU/Linux

qemu-system-risc(23987): mprotect W^X violation

Starting to buy books for 2018

I have ordered:

• The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas - Patterson & Waterman
• Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware Software Interface: RISC-V Edition - Patterson & Hennessy