Jonathan ‘theJPster’ Pallant

@bodil@social.treehouse.systems I really want to migrate there but they use the default Go user agent and my current hosting provider blocks that because it’s basically only used for bad things. I might just copy issues and releases over manually.

The whole He-Man movie was amazing but The Darkness … damn those guys understood the brief when doing the soundtrack.

Quake is 30 today.

I know the press was done a month ago but today’s the day the full retail version shipped.

A better game than Doom in every respect. I’m going to play it on my 1996 Silicon Graphics O2 later to celebrate.

Me, on the first 30 °C + day of the year: It’s so hot all I can do is lay naked on this concrete floor

Me, into our fourth heatwave of the year: I think I’ll wear these jeans and cycle to work at noon

Rick Beato interviewed Billy Joel. It’s a masterclass in every respect.

https://youtu.be/Q1Bebf3Y2rk

For Sale

* Diamond Viper V770 Ultra (nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra) AGP graphics card, with driver CD and pamphlet. Tested working.
* Sound Blaster Live! PCI Sound card. Tested Working.
* Sound Blaster Audigy SE (CA0106) PCI Sound card. Tested working.
* Adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra PCI SCSI card (with 50-pin internal, 50-pin high-density external and on-board BIOS). Tested working.
* Intel "Bayfield" D865GBF ATX Socket 478 motherboard, with Pentium 4 @ 3.0 GHz and 512 MB SDRAM.
* Has 2x IDE interface, Floppy interface, 2x SATA, AGP, 6x PCI, on-board sound, on-board video, on-board ethernet, RS-232, 4x USB. Tested working.
* Cirrus Logic GD-5440 PCI graphics card. Tested working.
* ATI 3D RageII+DVD PCI graphics card. Tested working.
* Hauppage WinTV PCI capture card, with RF and Composite input. Tested working.
* PNY GeForce 6600 LE PCI-Express graphics card. Tested working.

Happy to post in the UK at cost. No international mail - sorry.

Apropos absolutely nothing at all, my favourite ever meal was a simple Steak and Frites at the brasserie opposite Brussels Midi station. I try and eat there whenever I'm changing to/from the Eurostar to London.

https://brasseriebelge.com/en

Today I am mostly doing a git bisect on the QEMU codebase. So, yeah.

@kestral@masto.hackers.town the odds of getting through the weekend without a blown PSU or hard drive are not good.

@JPummil@genomic.social https://thejpster.org.uk/retrofest2026/machines/index.html

Ok I have six vintage RISC UNIX machines, plus two Pis, four keyboards, four screens (one is a spare), two CD changers, a spare hard drive, a spare power supply, a box of mains leads and a box of scsi cables. I think we’re good to …

Ah, crap. underwear. I should pack some.

https://eurorust.eu/talks/tales-from-the-embedded-rust-frontier-bootstrapping-a-brand-new-ecosystem/

Lots of great talks at EuroRust. And this aging idiot banging on about ancient processors or something.

Tickets for RetroFest in Swindon (UK) are now sold out for the Saturday, with some Sunday tickets left. So you should get one soon if you want to come.

I will bring my:

- Silicon Graphics O2 running IRIX and the Indigo Magic Desktop
- Apple Power Macintosh G3 running Rhapsody
- HP 9000 Model 712/60 running NeXTSTEP 3.3
- HP Visualise B-class running HP-UX and HP Vue
- UltraSPARC tower thing, with an UltraSPARC II running GNOME 2 on Solaris, and a Celeron 733 MHz on a PCI card running Windows NT in a window.
- Sun SPARCstation 20 running CDE on Solaris 7

They'll all be networked with browsers so you can pretend it's 1996 and you're at a very well funded university.

I assume this is a bit? Tell me this is a bit.

Excuse me, what now?

https://malus.sh/

> Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.

OK, maybe today's the day I move from Google Drive to pCloud.

OK, so here's a few words about different kinds of timers, why SYSTICK is good for what it was designed to do and crap for the modern tickless world, and how I implemented embassy-time for the Armv7 Generic Timer. https://thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2026-05-17/

You'll be pleased to note that I've typed long rants about people being jerks on The Internet into this box and I've deleted each and every one of them.

Highly recommended.

Well I was reading the blog by the xscreensaver author, but not any more. They totally grabbed the wrong end of the stick.

I wanted to write about asynchrous time, but first I have to give you a history lesson:

https://thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2026-05-16/

@rnd@toot.cat someone once scolded me at an exhibition for typing really aggressively on my BBC Micro. I explained that this was because I first used one when I was about six, and that was just how I've always typed on it.

@killercup every time I teach Rust to an Ada person they ask about ranged types and are sad at the reply I've had to give them.

@hyc no, fair point. I meant to and copied the URL from the wrong tab. Will edit.

@luc0x61 You've moved the goalposts. You said anyone with good sense doesn't use a heap in C. I spent years working on satellite telephone and modem firmware, and they all used dynamic allocation because it was the best solution for the problem at hand. The engineers on that firmware certainly were not lacking good sense. I'm well aware of MISRA C, ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 and yes, dynamic memory allocation carries certain risks that often rule it out under those workflows. However, the paper was explicitly about writing an IoT firmware that exchanges JSON messages with a cloud service and was not safety-crtitical. I would *hate* to write a JSON stack that didn't have dynamic memory allocation, because C has null-terminated strings and pulling a string out of a buffer requires null-terminating it (or exercising extreme care and attention). I think using a heap is absolutely a valid choice for their use case.

@luc0x61 having used heap allocation in C on an embedded device, I can prove that your claim is wrong.

This paper finds that Rust on an microcontroller costs you about 10% extra flash space, actually saves you a bunch of RAM, and takes no extra time to deliver (as compared to C).

Seems about right - especially as the C version needed a heap and the Rust version did not.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25679

Edit: replaced URL of PDF with URL of abstract

@LinuxJedi @bagder do you include “parsing X.509 certificates” as part of “cryptography”? I’d buy arguments about core routines (doing an AES256 block, for example) remaining as they are, but it feels like there’s a lot of supporting code higher in the stack where C and its null terminated strings are just problematic, and where Rust would need very little unsafe.

The card machine was busted and I was in trouble until I found a five euro note in my wallet I’ve had for so long I’d forgotten about it.

I see your Panic! At the Disco and raise you Confusion! At the Rail and Fresh.

For some of you this makes no sense and for some of you it makes perfect sense and I suspect there’s no middle ground.

@wren6991@types.pl This is hand written in RISC-V assembly, apparently. The mind boggles.

https://youtu.be/v8zKDotYh9A

@thelastpsion this is why I never complain when paying my Mythic Beasts hosting bill. Legendary customer support from fantastic people.

Happy New Financial Year.

@cliffle@hachyderm.io good to know, thanks! hot take: turning the watchdog on by default in the ROM is good, actually.

We could argue about whether using U-Boot is cheating, but this chip (OMAP4) boots with a very small internal SRAM and a fairly basic ROM that can copy code to SRAM from various places. Someone then has to configure the SDRAM controller, and I don’t want to do that - so I let U-Boot do it for me.

Got my PandaBoard to print to the console from bare-metal Rust, loaded with U-Boot over UART.

This is my first example of bare-metal Rust running on real Cortex-A hardware, rather than QEMU (but others have done it before me, so nothing groundbreaking here).

https://xkcd.com/1133/

I despise Daylight Savings because it doesn’t save anything (it moves it) and
it gives everyone jet lag twice a year for no good reason.

Just pick a time zone where Noon is roughly when the sun is at its highest, and let communities organise themselves around that.

I already have a computer containing an actual Arm chip, FYI.

I wrote some thoughts about Rust and how you can use it to talk to your hardware.

TL;DR: Read your own docs, like your users have to. Seriously. Go read them.

https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/hardware-access-rust/

Eins, Zwei, Drei … with a slice of pepperoni.

https://youtu.be/8XR2RvfZ-68

https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

@BlueSCSI thank for you taking the time to work with me on debugging that weird SGI O2 issue.

@irvingreid @mhoye uhhh, pretty sure you can’t, despite what the headlines said.

@Mara@hachyderm.io Hello? Yes, there's been a Murder.

@bagder@mastodon.social do you send them a quote? Or do you ignore them?

@aetios my cable ISP (Virgin Media UK) does not and nor does my mobile ISP (3 UK)