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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • For those who don’t know the history, Servo was the very first Rust project to ever exist.

    Back in 2012, Mozilla knew that their Gecko web engine was already getting old and unmaintainable. One of the engineers in their R&D department Mozilla Research was quietly working on a new programming language, so they adopted that to start work on their new browser engine, Servo.

    Rust v1.0 was released to the public in 2015, and was much more popular than the new browser engine it was used to create. Mozilla Research eventually gave up the idea of a new browser engine, but they did merge some of the Servo features into Gecko. Mozilla Research was shut down in 2020, and the Servo project was taken over by the Linux Foundation.




  • I’ve only ever been out of the country one time.

    My boss and I wrote a paper that got us invited to an international conference, that took place in Palermo, Sicily.

    It wasn’t high on my list of places I want to visit, but free overseas work trip to Sicily!

    It was pretty disappointing in many ways. The whole time I was there I constantly felt like I was about to be robbed or scammed.

    The taxi drivers are nuts, we were sure we were going to die multiple times just on the ride from the airport to the hotel.

    The accommodation in the city was pretty cheap but most places had awful reviews, so we splurged and chose a 5 star hotel near the conference venue. It ended up being the equivalent of a 2 star back home. Mold in the bathroom, paint peeling off walls in the bedroom, exposed wires poking out of every electrical outlet. The hot water didn’t work in the shower for 2 of the 4 nights we were there. At the buffet breakfast they served cold toast, warm yoghurt, and spoiled milk. You couldn’t make it up. And that was the best accommodation in the city.

    When we walked from the hotel to the conference centre, we were walking past piles of garbage that people just dump on the streets. Apparently that’s a normal thing. There’s nowhere else for garbage to go. Sometimes it gets picked up by the city collectors, usually it doesn’t.

    There were no pedestrian crossings, and cars don’t stop at red lights. So the traffic is constantly flowing at full speed on all the roads. Often the only way to get to where you need to go is to walk out in front of traffic, don’t make eye contact with any driver, look straight ahead, clench hard, walk sure, and change your underpants when you get to the other side.

    It wasn’t all bad. The food at the restaurants was amazing. I had some very good authentic Sicilian pizza. They serve cheap pints of Heineken at every restaurant and bar. If you like oily fish such as sardines, pilchards and anchovies, you’re in heaven because it’s their staple, they serve them on everything. The locals love cannolis and eat them like crack. They were served for desert at the conference, at the gala dinner, and at every restaurant we went to. I wasn’t a fan of them.

    I liked the novelty of being in a different country for the first time, but I wouldn’t go back to Sicily again.










  • Yep, not bricked. Just frozen.

    There are two forms of bricked:

    1. hard bricked. This is when a software change (eg, installing a custom firmware) caused the system to fail to boot, and there is no possible way to ever get it to run again.
    2. soft bricked. Where a software change caused the failure to boot but there is a way (eg, reflashing using UART) to recover back to an older version that does boot.

    Both are terms from the Phone modding community (ie, a phone has become as useful as a brick after this update) it’s quite hard to actually brick a modern PC.