GraalVM - Community Edition Short Comings

 I think the GraalVM technology is pretty awesome and it or similar technology probably has a bright future.  The ability to compile down to an optimized native code has lots of positives.

• Startup speed faster
• containerized image sizes reduced
• memory foot print reduced

Given those benefits, what could be a negative?  

Well, what jumps out at me from documentation relates to garbage collection.  If you are using the community edition then you get the Serial GC where as the G1 GC (multi-threaded GC optimized to reduce stop the world GC pauses) is ONLY available with the Enterprise edition.

I find that to be a pretty limiting factor for anyone doing development in a business setting but not wanting to pay fees.  Some indications of cost were found here. 

Being that the community edition is open source, I do wonder whether there is potential for someone to add in a more scalable garbage collector into the open source version or a fork of it?

Have an awesome day!

Scott

Lanai doorway nearly done

I've almost got the lanai door done.. getting close.  Unfortunately, when I took the original trim off around the door I damaged (peeled back) a good chunk of new paint so now I have some paint repairs to make.

Below is after 2 codes of primer and one coat of enamel. The original trim is still in place at this point.  When I took the trim off around the doorway, I found the previous owners had used some newspaper to "block drafts" at the top of the door. I went back and spray foamed around the door frame instead.

I had some paint that I thought would work great - I had used it before on some trim.  When I went to open the can this time, I had a terrible time getting the lid off and when it did come off there was rust around the edges which fell into the paint.. sigh..  Some painters tape was useful to sort of dip and catch the rust pieces.  When I went to stir the paint though, I found that it was "chunky".  Not sure why I bothered but I stirred for about 10 minutes and it was looking better.  I don't think it was that old but I did have a number of cans that I found while organizing the garage so who knows.  I gave it a try after I had 2 coats of primer on already - figured I could sand it off with the orbital sander if it looked too bad.  

Once I had put the initial coat of enamel on, I fought with the lid a bit while trying to get it back on but finally gave up and plan to get rid of that can.  I had another can of enamel paint on hand which had some rust around the lid edge but it wasn't nearly as bad and it wasn't chunky.  I decided that was a better choice for the 2nd coat.  

Below is the door after the 2nd coat and with the trim up (but not the rosettes). 

You can see at the top where I accidentally peeled the paint when taking the original trim off.  I was pulling on the side trim and it was well nailed to the top trim which I had loosened but not taken a knife and cut along the top edge fully. When the edge trim came loose, the top trim popped off while still stuck to the side trim in my hand. It had staples coming out from a bunch of places. I was a bit surprised and lifted the side piece and stepped back as I thought it was going to fall on me.  It didn't fall but it held onto the new paint very well. 

Here is the result with the rosettes in place.  I'll need to do a little bit of caulking and touch up paint but it is better than it started.   Actually, once I get the tape/paper off the glass, I'll probably have quite of bit of touch up work to do..  

There was a roll-up blind on the door which I took down.  I'm thinking about trying to "frost" the glass and see if that is enough to provide privacy and not put a / the blind back.  I've only got a soda blaster right now so it probably won't be enough on its own - even if I do both sides of the glass.  I'll give it try and then figure out what to do next.  Hopefully, I can get the rest of the floor trim done soon as well.

Oh, yes, and I purposely didn't tape around the deadbolt and door handle.  I'm going to replace the hardware to match the rest of the doors.

I also need to get a threshold that will work for this door - it is a bit odd with a small step up from the lanai combined with stucco on the exterior side. The stucco isn't really a problem but the concrete ledge/step combined with the luxury vinyl tile at the door interior is a bit awkward to cover. 

Take care,

Scott

Shortfalls of outside storage containers

 We bought an outdoor storage container to keep the chlorine, pool shock and other miscellaneous pool chemicals outside.  It has done good job for a few years but I had noticed signs of rust due to stains running down it.  I had not taken the time to look at the hinges to see what state they were in - until one day a door basically fell off in my hands.

The steel hinges that came with the container were not stainless steel nor were they coated very well.  The chlorine containers and such appear to allow enough water vapor and chlorine to combine which I think vigorously corroded the hinges faster than normal - see below.

 

Many people have heard the phrase 'When life gives you lemons, make lemonade'.  Not exactly lemons but since I have been remodeling rooms I had old door hinges laying around. Not exactly lemonade either but was a reasonably quick fix rather than replacing the entire storage container since I could not find a source for replacement hinges. I did buy some stainless still washers, bolts and nuts with nylon inserts that shouldn't loosen easily.  This was actually my backup plan since initially I planned to try and use some threaded rod through the door hinges and attach to the roof/floor.  I ended up deciding that was too awkward to do so went on to plan B.. which worked but only on the second attempt.

Note, I really didn't want to spend much time on this so I made a quick stab at using some large steel blind rivets to attach the hinges to the doors/walls.  What I didn't check was how much the blind rivets I had would "mushroom" on the backside/inside to prevent them from pulling out.  They did not mushroom enough - early on I went to open the door I was working on and heard and interesting metallic ping sound - which turned out to be a rivet popping out of the plastic and hitting the concrete.

Off to Lowes I went.. got some stainless bolts, washers, etc.  and started the process again. Here is a door hinge installed on the container.

So making progress.  Not exactly pretty but should keep the door from falling off.  Oh, did I mention that I didn't end up with enough washers for all the hinges? Sigh.  I'm sure I'll be at Lowes again soon enough.

Here is the storage container with the "new" door hinges.  Other than needing more washers and maybe slightly better spacing/placement of the hinges, I did make one other mistake which may or may not be noticeable in the 2nd picture - not related to the rivet I left. I'll give a "Well done" to anyone who comments correctly on what the mistake is - it isn't totally obvious at the moment but could provide further humor down the road. I made sure to not repeat the same mistake on the other door.

Thanks for reading!

Scott

Blast from the college past - old games

I don't consider myself a 'gamer' but have played various computer games over the years.  One fond memory is playing 'umoria' in college on an i286 Tandy 3000. It is funny to compare a game like this with today's modern games - this game has no fancy graphics/sound.  It is a text based game using the 'curses' library to draw the screens and control movement, etc. My kids would find this about as interesting as a rotary phone but back in college it provided some 'down time' from the normal course work.

I ran across source distributions for 'umoria' and another similar game named 'rogue'.  For fun, I wanted to see if I could even get them to compile and run - code bases that originated in the 80's tend to have some compatibility issues with modern C/C++ compilers & libraries unless someone maintained them.

I found 'umoria' here.  And 'rogue' was from here.

I had a bit more trouble getting rogue to run.   I don't know if the added include was needed - I was trying to sort out an error related to curses/ncurses. Eventually, I ran across a blog item mentioning a define for NCURSES_INTERNALS and a search of the header files returned it as well - so after ensuring it was defined as shown below - rogue compiled and ran.

The final 'configure' line I ended up with was:

CFLAGS='-DNCURSES_INTERNALS' CPPFLAGS='-DNCURSES_INTERNALS'   ./configure --build=x86 --with-ncurses

I also added a include after the #include<curses.h> in mdport.c.

#include<term.h>

I didn't confirm this was actually needed but just in case.

A quick screen shot of it..

For umoria, simply changing directory to the top of the git source tree and running the following almost worked.

cmake .

make

"Unfortunately", the compiler settings are more strict now and it complained about an array out of bounds issue during the build.

I didn't fully analyze the issue but took a guess that it was an 'off by 1' type error in the game_save.cpp file and made the following change which then allowed it to compile and run.

-                if (tile >= &dg.floor[MAX_HEIGHT][0]) {

+                if (tile >= &dg.floor[MAX_HEIGHT-1][0]) {

Here is a screen shot from umoria.

Thanks for reading..

Hope your day is blessed!

Scott

COVID questions and concerns

 

There are so many wild claims surrounding COVID due to politics and news/sensationalism that it is hard to find real truths.

There are things I would like answered about COVID and the related vaccines that would help me make better decisions. I do believe I should have the right to make the decision and not the government.

With answers to pertinent questions, there would be less room for some of the outrageous public statements previously made.  So far, the public messages are often conflicting and appear aimed at causing fear and mass public reactions through peer pressure.

• What criteria define variants of COVID? 
• How similar is COVID to any other virus?
• How many "variants" are there and when/where were they identified?
• If a person has COVID (vaccinated or not) and are asymptomatic, can they still transmit it?
• The vaccines are not 100% effective regardless of which one or how many boosters?
• What risks are not advertised and are there still unknown risks related to mRNA vaccines? 
• Why are mRNA vaccines considered safe?
  

If a vaccinated asymptomatic person has COVID and can spread it - then I wish more would be done to spread the truth instead of covering it up. 

Even if there is no direct safely issue; are there other considerations which no one thinks about or discusses?  One that I do think about is whether such global vaccination can result in faster formation of worse variants.  This may not be a great comparison but MRSA bacteria seems associated with antibiotic resistance produced over time. I know there are significant differences between these but could there end up being similarities in long term effects?  

These COVID vaccines were pushed very quickly into use on a global population. The CDC says it followed all protocols - and if the vaccines were similar in nature to all preceding vaccines then that would mean more to me. 

Some general/background messenger RNA (mRNA) information extracted from various sources.

Messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA for short, is a single-stranded molecule that carries genetic code from DNA to a cell's protein-making machinery. Without mRNA, your genetic code wouldn't be used, proteins wouldn't be made, and your body wouldn't work. If DNA is the bank card, then mRNA is the card reader.

So how wide spread were mRNA vaccines before COVID?  Let's refer to some online sources to try and understand the "when used, how many exist and what the use was".

• https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
• Pre-COVID article.
• First successful use was 1990 in mice. The successful goal was finding that it caused protein production in the mice. Another successful study was done in 1992.
• Used in some human/non-human cancer therapy. 
• https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/52424.html
• Provides some timelines
• https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211122-could-mrna-make-us-superhuman
• General comments on amazing timelines and results.
• https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/the-long-history-of-mrna-vaccines
• Some history behind things.
• https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/five-things-you-need-know-about-mrna-vaccine-safety
• Some more info regarding safety

 

Notes regarding COVID vaccines as first ever mRNA vaccines approved for human use.

We've now seen that process play out in real time. On 10 January 2020, Zhang Yongzhen, a professor of zoonoses at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing sequenced the genome for Covid-19 and published the next day. Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March. On 16 March, using Zhang's sequence, the first mRNA vaccine began its phase one clinical trial. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on 11 December, 2020, making history as not only the first ever mRNA vaccine approved for humans but also as the first to have a 95% efficacy rate in clinical trials. Approval of the Moderna mRNA vaccine followed close behind on 18 December. The previous title holder for "fastest ever vaccine", the mumps vaccine, took four years.

One article indicates that safety benefits include:

• mRNA is non-infectious, non-integrating platform
  
• degrades due to normal cellular processes (so has a "life span")
• its "in vivo" half-life can be regulated through the use of various modifications and delivery

A summary of the benefits:

It is, therefore, safer to produce, more quickly and cheaply, compared with traditional vaccines. You no longer need huge bio-secure labs growing deadly viruses inside millions of chicken eggs. Instead, just one lab can sequence the proteins of the antigen and email it around the world. With that information a lab could make "a million doses of mRNA in a single 100ml test tube," says Blakney.

This does leave me with the question of what can go wrong? How easy would it be to abuse this? How easy would it be to turn the technology from vaccine to pathogen (production)? I highly doubt this is something that can ONLY be used to improve health. Who has or will have the ability to abuse this and in what ways?

Some statements extracted from the articles that gives me pause and makes me wonder if we are not wandering into scientific areas which we don't even fully understand but claim are safe include the following. I won't claim to fully understand everything said here - but in a scientific article related to these "vaccines" I find it difficult to be comforted when the the articles include statements with wording of "we don't understand".

Although the paradoxical effects of innate immune sensing on different formats of mRNA vaccines are incompletely understood, some progress has been made in recent years in elucidating these phenomena.

The mechanisms of mRNA escape into the cytoplasm are incompletely understood, not only for artificial liposomes but also for naturally occurring exosomes

A recent study demonstrated that sustained antigen availability during vaccination was a driver of high antibody titres and germinal centre (GC) B cell and T follicular helper (T_FH) cell responses⁸⁴. This process was potentially a contributing factor to the potency of recently described nucleoside-modified mRNA–LNP vaccines delivered by the intramuscular and intradermal routes^20,22,85. Indeed, T_FH cells have been identified as a critical population of immune cells that vaccines must activate in order to generate potent and long-lived neutralizing antibody responses, particularly against viruses that evade humoral immunity⁸⁶. The dynamics of the GC reaction and the differentiation of T_FH cells are incompletely understood, and progress in these areas would undoubtedly be fruitful for future vaccine design .

Potential safety concerns that are likely to be evaluated in future preclinical and clinical studies include local and systemic inflammation, the biodistribution and persistence of expressed immunogen, stimulation of auto-reactive antibodies and potential toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components. A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms^54,166 induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity^167,168. Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken. Another potential safety issue could derive from the presence of extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination. Extracellular naked RNA has been shown to increase the permeability of tightly packed endothelial cells and may thus contribute to oedema¹⁶⁹. Another study showed that extracellular RNA promoted blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation¹⁷⁰. Safety will therefore need continued evaluation as different mRNA modalities and delivery systems are utilized for the first time in humans and are tested in larger patient populations.

 Some side effects comments

Before we get too carried away, however, questions remain around mRNA vaccines. Currently we need regular booster shots – and these shots tend to hurt your arm, sometimes with fatiguing side effects. At the time of writing, we are less than a year into real-world use. Anaphylactic reactions (albeit with no deaths) have been observed in approximately 2 to 5 people per million vaccinated in the United States: slightly higher, 4.7 per million, with the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine compared to 2.5 per million vaccinations from the Moderna vaccine. According to one analysis, while still low, this is 11 times higher than with the flu vaccine.

These leave me wondering if this wasn't the largest global "lab rat" test  performed on humans.

I'm not a doctor, biologist or even chemist but the statement "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true" has kept me out of plenty of trouble over the years.  It is obvious that huge sums of money are involved in mRNA research and so are politics - both of those don't inspire me to be comfortable with this "silver bullet".  

Note that I wrote most of this up on 2022/1/17.  Today, 2022/2/07, I ran across this article which was posted on linked-in. That article does a much better job describing a concern of mine than my post does but in doing so it appears to confirm one of my concerns.

I hope the politics and big money are taken out of the analysis of this technology and only the true benefits and hazards are used to decide its future direction. Until then, I'm leery of fully believing every mainstream message but also can't deny that the technology probably did help some individuals.  

Thanks for reading. Please research these types of things yourself and don't put faith where it doesn't belong.

Scott