Technology Tales

4th January 2025, 17:53

Having deleted all my accounts on there after overcoming a certain amount of inertia, I am now free of x.com (formerly Twitter). While others are heading for Bluesky, I am going to keep away from any political discussions for the sake of my mental health. It looks as if the world is in for a rough ride over the next few years. The less violent rhetoric we have, the better.

17th December 2024, 16:35

All my recent AI experimentation has convinced me that my main workstation needs an upgrade. It was open-source data programming in 2020 and 2021 that prompted me to do the last upgrade during the summer of 2021, so there is some consistency in what could be coming. Having NPU capability may be best for running GenAI models on my own machinery, though using API’s and chat interfaces will retain their place in all of this. With this year approaching an end and other plans already being made already, such an upgrade will wait until next year. Assuming the ideas come to fruition, that will be sufficient time for anything that happens. The dramatic upheaval in technology cannot but impact our computing world, much as it did to our lives thirty years ago.

17th December 2024, 11:39

Altair SLC is a software platform that executes programs using SAS language syntax without the need for translation or additional licences. It offers a full SAS language environment with the ability to integrate Python, R, and SQL, enabling users to combine diverse program modules. Its main features include multi-language support for SAS, Python, R, and SQL, comprehensive compatibility with SAS language and macro syntax, and flexible deployment options on IBM mainframes, in the cloud, and on various operating systems. Additionally, Altair SLC is cost-effective, reducing expenses by negating third-party licences and supporting advanced analytics, which enhances productivity and shortens development and deployment cycles. The platform is designed to support significant migration projects and maintain SAS language program libraries efficiently, delivering a modern and adaptable analytics solution.

6th December 2024, 21:52

This morning, I heard a story on Irish radio about someone who had their Facebook account hijacked. The impact was heavy: it was a place for fundraising for a child with cerebral palsy, a place to do business, and somewhere for social connections and sharing memories. There was assistance as a result, so I hope things work out in some way.

The cautionary tale highlights the importance of being forensic with passwords, never reusing them and using two-factor authentication. Password managers and generators are crucial, even if one wonders about all this paraphernalia overwhelms many. There also is the importance of being a paying customer in order to get support, rather than availing of a free service where you are the product for those who do the paying, advertisers in other words.

6th December 2024, 06:12

The website has suffered a bump that I inflicted on it through my own inattention. Databases do need backing up before doing anything serious with the WP Crontrol plugin, especially deleting every CRON event in the cause of getting the Site Health display to improve. A new database build was needed as a result, with the content being added in at the database level. While nothing major was lost, I still needed to iron out some creases, a few of which were time-consuming to resolve. All is steadier now, and there was a spot of flab removal too, which might speed up things following the upheaval.

26th November 2024, 15:23

Rclone is a command-line tool that manages files on cloud storage, offering features such as data backup, restoration, mirroring, migration, and mounting. It supports over 70 providers, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and Dropbox. Rclone preserves timestamps and checksums during transfers and allows for restarting operations. It also provides features like MD5 and SHA1 hash checking, synchronization, and mounting cloud storage as a network disk. The tool is open-source, written in Go, and supports various operating systems including Linux, Windows, and Mac. Rclone’s friendly support community uses it for backup solutions, restores, GUIs, and business processes. It is widely adopted and can be downloaded from rclone.org or official repositories like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Brew, Chocolatey.

22nd November 2024, 23:00

An open-source alternative to GPT-4, ColossalChat allows for faster and cheaper chatbot customization with its complete RLHF pipeline, bilingual dataset, and 4-bit quantized inference. Alpaca-LoRA offers a high-quality Instant model on limited hardware through low-rank adaptation, while Vicuna generates coherent and creative text for chatbots with near 90% of ChatGPT’s performance as part of the Fast Chat platform. GPT4ALL uses LLaMa architecture and low-latency machine learning accelerators for fast inference on CPUs and multilingual tasks, while Raven RWKV achieves comparable levels of quality and scalability with faster processing speed and VRAM conservation through an RNN language model. OpenChatKit offers a comprehensive toolkit for chatbot development with step-by-step instructions, fine-tuning capabilities, and both moderation features to train your own instruction-tuned large language model. OPT demonstrates remarkable abilities in zero-shot and few-shot learning, as well as stereotypical bias analysis through decoder-only transformers of various sizes. Flan-T5-XXL significantly improves performance on a variety of model classes through fine-tuning and multilingual tasks. Baize exhibits impressive multi-turn dialogue abilities with guardrails for risk mitigation, while Koala performs better than Alpaca and is similar to ChatGPT in numerous instances after fine-tuning LLaMa on a dialogue dataset. Dolly uses instruction following ability from old open-source language models, and Open Assistant offers truly open-source large language chatbots with dynamic information retrieval capabilities.

22nd November 2024, 18:59

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is utilising artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies to enhance its grant management operations. The Automated Referral Tool, an AI-based system launched in 2022, assists NIH staff in assigning applications to appropriate review branches based on historical data. An enterprise level tool comparing application abstracts with program officials’ expertise suggests matches and reduces workloads for liaisons at NIH Institutes or Centres. Digital tools also help prevent duplicate or overlapping applications from being funded, saving time and resources. NIH is exploring ways AI can guide programmatic assessment of an application’s Data Management and Sharing Plan, improve public reporting on funded projects, and reduce reputational bias during merit review. These technologies aim to make grant operations more efficient, innovative, and flexible while adhering to confidentiality rules and ethical guidelines.

25th October 2024, 16:08

It is better to close Mac applications using the CMD + Q keyboard shortcut or clicking on the Quit entry in the application menu. Simply clicking on the red X icon risks losing a memory of anything that you have open in the application. That was what I found when closing Firefox that way, and it happened a few times before I finally took the hint. Restoring open tabs is not only a faff, but also is unreliable. Visual Studio Code behaves the same way, and I suspect that CotEditor does too. All in all, this seems to be a general macOS thing and a gotcha for anyone coming from Windows or Linux.

17th May 2024, 23:22

Now that I have a presence on Mastodon, I have begun to use a command line tool called toot to add missives on there. The web interface works as well, yet toot can be logged into more than one account at a time; switching between accounts is a fairly facile operation. For a command line tool, toot is well intuitive once you get used to it.

8th January 2024, 13:08

Now that ownCloud has been acquired by Kiteworks, there is some uncertainty about what happens next. So far, there is an offer for ownCloud and Nextcloud users to move to Kiteworks’ proprietary platform. Nextcloud itself has been busy making use of the uncertainty to promote their own product line.

19th November 2023, 19:15

The open-source section of the website got a lot of tweaking in the last few weeks. The recipient of the attention was the operating system subsection. That got a full reorganisation, with all the listings seeing new entries too. The desktop software also got a bit of attention, and other areas could get altered yet.

20th January 2023, 11:35

Recently, I have been having trouble with Nvidia drivers following a kernel update in Linux Mint (21.1 is the version that I am using). The kernel version has been rolled back from 5.19.x to 5.15.x, and I installed an old AMD graphics card as well. Things still are not perfect, though, so I will be looking out for a way to make things smoother. For now, all is good enough for the moment.

12th February 2022, 10:30

Google Analytics appears to be losing favour in the EU, if Matomo is to be believed. First, Austria outlawed its usage and no France follows suit. This naturally suits Matomo, a self-hosted open-source alternative for collecting website metrics, so it should not be any surprise that they are forthcoming with these details.

9th October 2021, 16:20

Here is the sequence of commands to use when upgrading from OpenMediaVault 4.x to 5.x. All need to be executed with elevated access privileges:

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/upgrade4to5 | sudo bash

reboot

Once your system has restarted and you have logged in again, then you execute these:

apt-get purge openmediavault-omvextrasorg resolvconf

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/packages/raw/master/install | bash

apt-get update

apt-get dist-upgrade

omv-salt deploy run nginx

omv-salt deploy run phpfpm

apt-get install usrmerge

omv-confdbadm migrate conf 5.0.0

9th October 2021, 15:19

Here are some North American online emporia for buying computers, their components or peripherals:

Best Buy

Micro Center

Newegg

PC-Canada

Tech-America

24th September 2021, 09:06

Here are boilerplate commands for banning and unbanning IP addresses using Fail2ban:

fail2ban-client set <JAIL> banip <IP>
fail2ban-client set <JAIL> unbanip <IP>

27th July 2020, 13:09

If you ever need to install Linux kernel headers on an openSUSE instance in order to install VirtualBox Guest Additions, the following command should be executed in order to do the needful:

sudo zypper in kernel-source

5th February 2017, 10:37

Here is a possible way of resetting the CSS definition for an HTML element, class or ID:

#reset-this-parent {
all: initial;
* {
all: unset;
}
}

Browser support for the above may vary, though.

23rd November 2016, 10:39

After seeing messages like “The authenticity of host ‘hostname’ can’t be established” during ssh connections, I decided to investigate more and came up with the following solution:

sudo chown -v $USER ~/.ssh/known_hosts

My known_hosts file had gained root ownership so I could not write to it, so changing the ownership to that of my own user account sorted the problem. An alternative could be to change the group assignment using chgrp, and setting permissions using chmod, but what I did sufficed for my needs.

23rd November 2016, 06:30

When I ran into trouble with accessing my own websites using my broadband, I found that the solution was to change DNS Lookup Service to what Google offers. This was done on the router side and the IP addresses used were 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.

4th June 2016, 22:33

Here’s a way to convert DNG files to JPEG ones:

find -type f | grep DNG | parallel mogrify -format jpg {}

16th September 2015, 10:51

Here is a way to recursively delete folders and their contents in PowerShell:

Remove-Item .\foldertodelete -Force -Recurse

The Force switch silences any messages that otherwise would appear, and the Recurse switch is what gets directories removed.

12th April 2015, 10:18

Devuan (pronounced like dev-one) is a fork of Debian that does not use systemd as Debian is doing, like so many other distros. Part of the name must come from a collective calling itself Veteran UNIX Admin (VUA). There is no actual release just yet, but one is intended for around the same time as Debian 8.0 gets released and donations are being solicited via the website.

20th February 2015, 18:51

Here is a handy way to get PowerShell to show files larger than a certain size:

get-childitem | where-object {$_.length -gt 10000} | ft fullname, length -auto