Privately, and I do *not* need y'all spreadin' this all over, by 507ce the western roman empire was quite over.

The two closest things to a western roman emperor were Odoacer and Theoderic. And they were *very* close to being that, a fact they both were rather well aware of, drawing mightily on the trappings of Roman imperial history. Further, they even both sustained the people of "Rome", tho mostly from the loving distance of Ravenna.

However, neither of them were de jure.

@btschumy I haven't seen them yet. I don't want to see them :(

GRUB bundles a support library for its `grub-install` command, including:

* A utility branching over a given "key" to concatenate on the appropriate subpath onto the given directory-path.

* Copy a file into place a bufferfull at a time with extreme care.

* A wrapper which might alternatively invoke a configured compression function with debug logging.

* Check a for filepath separator, handling Windows specially.

* Carefully create a directory & any parents if necessary.

1/5?

* Check whether a filename ends with a certain extension.

* Flag that a backup should be created upon exit, at which point (via a repeatedly-called helper) it renames various files into place.

* Invokes that same helper twice & (via another helper) registers that `atexit()` callback with some globals set.

* Check module list against an allow-list.

* Push, pop, & normalize an array of modules to load.

* Handle commandline flags, primarily to set the compression function.

2/5?

* Choose modules to load for decompressing that compressed data.

* Assemble commandline flags & defer to `grub_install_generate_image()`.

* A wrapper which transiently opens a destination for it.

* Copy over files which match a certain extension.

* Copy over all files in a directory.

* A couple routines that (via a helper) locates the locale dir & copies over files with certain extensions from it.

* A lookup table with wrappers describing supported platforms.

3/5?

It's impossible to not hate him.

Trump demands 'Washington Colossus' statue be enshrined at Smithsonian

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-smithsonian-2677850367/

#uspol

I heard someone yesterday evening describe the concept of a Labubu as ‘truck nuts for a handbag’ and can’t get it out of my head

And there's a sizable over-arching routine which copies certain files into place, using several of the other helpers including all the choosen GRUB modules.

As well as a routine for outputting a shell-script declaring envvars describing the chosen platform, & a routine to recursively delete files from the target directory.

3.5/3.5 Fin for today! Tomorrow: `grub-mkfont`!

Today I'll resume studying Papyrix's boot sequence, having gone on a tangent about how it renders text & other things. I explored it now because Papyrix might init this text-rendering early to display error messages.

If it does successfully init SD card access it'll check if that SD card contains a software-update to install! Installing it involves retrieving a singleton to which it passes the file, invokes a beginUpdate() method & displays update text, removes the file, & maybe restarts.

1/?

apparently scientologists are using dating apps to try to recruit acolytes now

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1we0ufz/scientology_recruiters_are_using_hinge_and_fake/

That singleton class has a verifying-setter for which file to install. There's a method to verifying that the configured file is of a certain size-range & has a valid header + (using mbedtls library) hash.

A beginUpdate method retrieves the next update partition, invokes that validation routine, opens the file, sets some properties, & sets a current state for whether this all process succeeded. If so the caller will display the emergency update screen.

2/3?

After that the caller repeatedly invokes the pump() method which verifies its in the "flashing" state & that an abort wasn't requested, checks whether we've finished & if so closes the file whilst setting the new boot partition, considers erasing some of the target partition, reads more of the file, & writes it to that partition. Cleaning up after any errors.

There's also setter for an abort flag, & a routine to reset various properties to default.

3/4!

Looking at dependencies of the display logic... Aside from the graphics APIs I've already explored there's a somewhat meaningless conversion from a bool to an enum, alongside which are defined the values to be rendered. Including 2 lines of text stating:

"Firmware update in progress
Do not power off"

The display is sent into "deep sleep" once its displaying this message, though there's a flag for not doing so.

4/4 Fin for today! Tomorrow: Settings!
I won't study ESP32's update APIs.

@jackielovescompchem32 genuinely we have so many sources of hope and awe for the future we can build together

@mos_8502 so in theory, the lowest-end i945 supported max 2GiB RAM, and 1/8th of that is maybe 256MiB of RAM which would be what I’d expect in something low-end of the era?

not to be confused with quesadilla

@blogdiva @ScottEdelman I realize this is a tangent, but I really loved this short biopic about Wendy Carlos and how they handled the fact that she's trans.

I learned some things, like how she had already transitioned in the famous 70s footage of her explaining how the Moog works, but she cosplayed as a man throughout that time of publicity because she was afraid it would hurt her reputation. Those mutton chops are pasted on!

But there's a lot of old footage of her seeming very happy while presenting femme.

https://youtu.be/jPpNZGjUflA

@jackielovescompchem32 gentoo is based on openrc btw. and the openrc maintainer is a super smart trans girl who incites roomfuls of people to cheer when she mentions offhand making a proposal to the austin group to fix POSIX bugs

@sundogplanets

Just came in from looking for the newly launched AST Bluebird satellites (#11, #12 and #13). Never saw the first one, but caught the last two. They’re definitely bright. I’d estimate around 1st magnitude, somewhere in between Deneb and Altair. Not looking forward to having ~250 of these polluting our night sky.

#Technology #Astronomy