Welcome to the site of solemnwarning (Daniel Collins), here you will find software and other debris I've published over the years.
Posted on 04 Jun 2024 at 19:14 UTC
Earlier this year, I built a server using a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard in a custom case (build thread), it is loud. It is very loud.
My phone running some random sound meter app is scientific, right?
Before starting this project, I took some baseline measurements - at idle, I recorded a noise level of 30 decibels in front of the server and both CPUs were hovering around 40C, after 10 minutes of running stress-ng --cpu 32
, the recorded noise level was 73 decibels, the front CPU was hovering around 55°C and the rear CPU, ingesting the pre-heated air from the front CPU cooler was sitting around 75°C.
Not ideal.
I've always felt water cooling was unnecessary and overkill for computers... but with a server I can hear throughout the house whenever a CI job spins up on one of my projects, I'm willing to try it.
Posted on 31 Aug 2022 at 16:36 UTC
So its been over 2 years since I last posted anything on this website, I'm still around though.
Those of you who follow me on GitHub have probably seen that I've been spending a lot of time on-and-off developing rehex (which I should probably write about here at some point), and besides that, most of my time has been taken up between my day job and a never-ending stream of repairs around the house.
Nothing exciting, just figured it was about time I put something here before people started auctioning off the furniture :v
Posted in Software Development on 27 May 2020 at 21:39 UTC
At the end of the last article (In September 2017 actually), I had a fully automated regression testing system for IPXWrapper. In September of 2019, after two years of not touching the system and doing a little work on IPXWrapper itself, I felt it was time to install Windows updates in the VM images... and that's where everything went wrong....
Posted in Software Development on 07 Oct 2019 at 18:48 UTC
The GNU Make shell
function executes a shell command, expanding to whatever it wrote to standard output. If the command fails, thats just fiiine - however much it did or didn't output is what you get.
command_output := $(shell command)
I use the shell function for (among other things) getting compiler flags necessary for using libraries (e.g. from pkg-config
), and Make's behaviour of ignoring these errors is rather annoying, since it can mask the actual error with pages of output before getting to a build command that actually fails. Sometimes it can even mess up the compiler flags to the point you (or at least I) spend ages hunting down a phantom problem that doesn't exist.
Weirdly, I couldn't find any good solution on the web, with a bit of experimentation I wound up developing the following macro:
# Wrapper around the $(shell) function that aborts the build if the command # exits with a nonzero status. shell-or-die = $\ $(eval sod_out := $(shell $(1); echo $$?))$\ $(if $(filter 0,$(lastword $(sod_out))),$\ $(wordlist 1, $(shell echo $$(($(words $(sod_out)) - 1))), $(sod_out)),$\ $(error $(1) exited with status $(lastword $(sod_out)))) WX_CXXFLAGS := $(call shell-or-die,wx-config --cxxflags base core aui propgrid adv) WX_LIBS := $(call shell-or-die,wx-config --libs base core aui propgrid adv)
If you don't mind depending on GNU Make 4.2 (a bit too new for my tastes), if can be simplified to:
shell-or-die = $\ $(eval sod_out := $(shell $(1)))$\ $(if $(filter 0,$(.SHELLSTATUS)),$\ $(sod_out),$\ $(error $(1) exited with status $(.SHELLSTATUS)))