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Simon Frankau

@sgf@mastodon.xyz

SRE manager on Google Compute Engine (only speak for me), ex-quant dev. Fan of maths, Haskell, Rust and retrocomputing. London, UK. CS PhD. Fuck cancer.

Available on Twitter while stocks last.

262 Followers

125 Following

10 Posts

Joined April 22, 2017

Website:

https://arbitrary.name

Twitter:

@simon_frankau

Posts

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Nov 22, 2024

I've been back reading Fedi for about 5 minutes when I see a post about how the trolley problem is completely unrepresentative of anything that might happen in real life, about 30 seconds after wondering whether they could possibly vote for Harris. Some things just never change!

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Nov 19, 2024

I'm back!

I'm not yet back on social media - I'm not yet reading my feeds - but I am at least back home after two months in hospital, on and off. It's so good to be home!

(I\m happy to answer questions from curious friends in DMs, but probably don't want to spam detailed medical stuff to my feed.)

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Aug 26, 2024

@Viss@mastodon.social feels like security maintaining its old, macho image.

In any other modern software development wotsit, the response to a competitor having a major visible public outage is "There, but for the grace of God, go I".

CrowdStrike's screw-up was very visible and in many ways embarrassingly basic, but most competitors a) dream of that market share b) will have an embarrassing killer bug embedded in them *somewhere*.

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Aug 08, 2024

https://www.cheshire.police.uk/news/cheshire/news/articles/2024/8/woman-arrested-in-connection-with-inaccurate-social-media-post/

How the fascist state works:

A woman (allegedly) exercises her first amendment rights by spreading misinformation intended to encourage racist riots.

She's then arrested because we don't have a first amendment, but do take a strong line on hate speech.

From here, it's a slippery slope to an authoritarian nightmare. Just remember, this could have been you, if your hobby is spreading racist disinformation.

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Aug 07, 2024

Replying to @sgf@mastodon.xyz

So, I can see myself trying to reverse engineer how the Neo Geo handled its sprites. Nothing deep, just a kind of architectural proof of concept. I expect I'll be digging out schematics and timing diagrams to get there. Again, as I said, nothing deep, but it's geek-sniping me into a fun little mini-project. 3/3

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Aug 07, 2024

Replying to @sgf@mastodon.xyz

To display these graphics, the Neo Geo has incredibly powerful sprite-rendering technology, with up to 96 sprites per scan line. Doing this in 1990's tech seems like magic to me. 96?! The technical documentation for the Neo Geo seems relatively thin on the ground compared to other consoles, and is developer-oriented. This is a huge contrast to e.g. the Amiga hardware reference manual, which gives you practically enough information to reimplement the thing. (Read the sprites chapter!) 2/

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Aug 07, 2024

I've been retro-gaming, playing the Metal Slug series on Neo Geo.

Metal Slug has two distinguishing features: An abysmal name, and the most kick-ass pixel art.

I've a fondness for the Bitmap Brothers & Amiga/SNES/Megadrive graphics in general, and too many "retro" games ape an ugly NES style, but Metal Slug's graphics are hands down the best.

So, yeah, I recommend playing the series, which also boast fun gameplay and a sense of humour.

That, though, is only half the story...

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · Jun 23, 2024

Replying to @AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org

@AdrianVovk @mhoye There's some irony that as an SRE I'm about as computer-landlord-y as it gets, but even if rm isn't a landlord conspiracy, it (and the UNIX way) is a reliability disaster. Maybe appropriate for small systems 40 years ago, but a menace today! Similarly, having a command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" delete your home dir... and blaming the user for not thoroughly reading the docs first is aggressively user-hostile. It's a reliability nightmare, and we should be doing better!

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · May 03, 2024

Replying to @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz e.g. https://www.goldennumber.net/music/ ! It's one of those things that just gets repeated around by people who don't really get the maths. To be fair, "black and white notes" are more accurately 8 notes in a tonal scale (really 7), selected from 13 notes (really 12) in the octave. "Black and white" is just explaining that in the context of C major.

Simon Frankau @sgf@mastodon.xyz · May 03, 2024

Replying to @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech

@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz What I particularly like is /why/ people get all golden ratio on music (*): An octave has: Five black notes. Eight white notes. Thirteen notes. 5, 8, 13, Fibonacci, Φ! Unfortunately, the 8 and 13 double count the first/last note, and it's really about the twelfth root of two. So you've got a whole branch of musical numerology based on incorrect 1-based indexing! ((*) Sorry, Andrew, if this is what you were referring to, but I didn't see it explicitly mentioned.)

Simon Frankau

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