The obvious skill I learned was how to write tests using a fancy testing framework, but the meta-thing I learned which has been even more useful is the fact that writing a test-case generator and a checker is often much more productive than the manual test-case writing that passes for automated testing in most places.

Also good:

It’s not that these books aren’t useful, it’s that almost all of them are written to make sense without any particular background beyond what any random programmer might have, and you can only get so much out of reading your 50th book targeted at random programmers.

Stories

Posted on 2022-03-29 [Tuesday] by Jay Jay

I think stories are so important, but here is a contrary idea: Be suspicious of stories | Tyler Cowen | TEDxMidAtlantic.

Postmodern design

Posted on 2022-03-29 [Tuesday] by Jay Jay

This one turned up in my feed today: There’s More to Design Than Data and Rationality. I feel like the author is discovering postmodernism. It made me realise that when people discover things they have the feeling like they’re the first (but they’re probably not).

Ethernet on ‘trick’

Posted on 2022-03-28 [Monday] by Jay Jay

Note to self: I’ve disabled my second NIC enp7s0 for now, I can enable it when its cable arrives.

-------------------
Mon Mar 28 16:34:31 [bash:5.0.17 jobs:0 error:0 time:1505]
root@trick:/home/jj5
# cat /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml
# This is the network config written by 'subiquity'
network:
  ethernets:
    enp10s0:
      addresses:
      - 10.3.2.5/16
      gateway4: 10.3.1.1
      nameservers:
        addresses:
        - 10.1.1.113
        search: []
    #enp7s0:
    #  addresses:
    #  - 10.1.2.5/16
    #  nameservers:
    #    addresses: []
    #    search: []
  version: 2

-------------------

blockdev –getsize64 /dev/sda

Posted on 2022-03-26 [Saturday] by Jay Jay

Today I learned you can get the size of a block device with e.g.: sudo blockdev --getsize64 /dev/sda

Stuttering audio on Ubuntu on Asus ROG Strix Z690-F Motherboard

Posted on 2022-03-24 [Thursday] by Jay Jay

My new computer ‘charm‘ wasn’t playing audio, there was just some incomprehensible and quiet static coming out of the speakers (I was testing with this). I ran this search and found this and ran this:

# apt install libavcodec-dev

Then I edited /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and added:

# 2022-03-24 jj5 - SEE: https://askubuntu.com/a/1059492
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1

And I edited /etc/pulse/default.pa and changed:

# 2022-03-24 jj5 - NEW:
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=1
# 2022-03-24 jj5 - OLD:
#load-module module-udev-detect

And I edited /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and added this at the end:

; 2022-03-24 jj5 - SEE: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766860&p=4816308#post4816308
default-sample-rate = 48000
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 10

I also read this and ran this:

# apt install inxi
# inxi -SMA
# apt-get install --reinstall alsa-base pulseaudio
$ mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/pulse.bak

Then after a reboot or two (and enabling USB Audio in BIOS) it started working! Probably didn’t need most of that, but I’m happy to have a solution.

John's blog

Talking about technology (mostly)

The Cargo Cult of Good Code

Modern PHP

File types In Linux

Quote for the day

Stories

Postmodern design

Ethernet on ‘trick’

blockdev –getsize64 /dev/sda

Stuttering audio on Ubuntu on Asus ROG Strix Z690-F Motherboard