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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • So the basic purpose of a library is to allow code that does some useful thing to be easily used in multiple programs. Like say math functions beyond what is in the language it self or creating network connections.

    When you build a program with multiple source files there are many steps. First each file compiled into an object file. This is machine code but wherever you have calls into other files it just inserted a note that basicly says connect this call to this part of another file. So for example connect this call to SquareRoot function in Math library.

    After that has been done to every file needed then the linker steps in. It grabs all the object files combines them into one big file and then looks for all the notes that say connect this call to that function and replaces them with actual calls to the address where it put that function.

    That is static linking. All the code ends up in a big executable. Simple but it has two big problems. The first is size. Doing it this way means every program that takes the squareroot of something has a copy of the entire math library. This adds up. Second is if there is an error in the math library every program needs to be rebuilt for the fix to apply.

    Enter dynamic linking. With that the linker replaces the note to connect to the SquareRoot function in math library with code that requests the connection be made by the operating system.

    Then when the program is run the OS gets a list of the libraries needed by the program, finds them, copies them into the memory reserved for that program, and connects them. These are .so files on Linux and .dll on Windows.

    Now the os only needs one copy of math.so and if there is a error in the library a update of math.so can fix all the programs that use it.

    For GPL vs LGPL this is an important distinction. The main difference between them is how they treat libraries. (There are other differences and this is not legal advice)

    So if math.so is GPL and your code uses it as a static link or a dynamic link you have to providd a copy of the source code for your entire program with any executable and licence it to them under the GPL.

    With LGPL it’s different. If math.so is staticly linked it acts similar to the GPL. If it’s dynamicly linked you only have to provide the source to build math.so and licences it under LGPL. So you don’t have to give away all your source code but you do have to provide any changes to the math library you made. So if you added a cubeRoot function to the math library you would need to provide that.







  • It was something around 40 TB X2 . We were doing a terrain analysis of the entire Earth. Every morning for 25 days I would install two fresh drives in the cluster doing the data crunching and migrate the filled drives to our file server rack.

    The drives were about 80% full and our primary server was mirrored to two other 50 drive servers. At the end of the month the two servers were then shipped to customer locations.




  • I do use wireguard. Mostly because the proton app for linux is so bad.

    Look into how they have you setup port forwarding on linux using the official app. They want you to open a terminal and keep a looped script running as long as you are using it.

    Not only that but when I was testing it the script would start erroring out after about 5 min requiring a restart.



  • It’s a hot mess. Or it was 10 years when I was last forced to use it.

    I remember there was one setting I needed to adjust from time to time. However the menu tree it was in had been removed leaving it a orphaned tree. So you couldn’t get to it through the ui. The only way to get to the setting was to go to a unrelated page in the documentation and click on the goto link in it. That would launch the menu that otherwise didn’t exist. From there you could back up and get into the menu to adjust the setting.