2022-09-14
Link: USB, Thunderbolt, Displayport & docks
USB, Thunderbolt, Displayport & docks (via, also) is a high density 'overview' of the technology of all of these things, or at least the technology of the connectors and connections involved. Since it gets down to the level of the number of lines and lanes (and their speed) involved in USB signaling and so on, it's an overview only from a certain perspective.
Although I read it through once and absorbed some things, I think of it more as a reference work that I can consult for fairly low level details if and when I need to understand some aspect of the entire USB mess (and it is a mess) at some depth. There is certainly a lot there.
2022-08-04
Link: The MGR Window System
The MGR Window System (via) is a brief introduction to MGR, an interesting and under-mentioned Unix windowing system, including a screenshot. I once used MGR myself and have reasonably fond memories of it, so it's nice to see more writing about it on the Internet.
(And looking at my old entry I see that I linked to this article there in HTTP version. Still, I encourage you to read about MGR. It's a path not taken in Unix window systems.)
2022-05-02
Link: An opinionated list of best practices for textual websites
An opinionated list of best practices for textual websites by Rohan Kumar is what it says in the subject. I'm not sure I agree with everything in it (and I certainly don't do everything there), but I think it has useful information and it's certainly given me things to think about.
(Since this entire blog is a textual website, I have a decided interest in this area and some opinions of my own.)
2022-01-14
Link: Histograms in Grafana (a howto)
Histogram evolution: visualize how a distribution of values changes over time (via) has the article URL slug of 'grafana histogram howto', and the slug is quite accurate. It's a step by step walkthrough of how to do this for a native Prometheus counter histogram metric, which most of them are. It includes copious screenshots, which is especially useful since you have to do all of this through Grafana's GUI and describing GUI actions in text is not necessarily ideal. I've slogged through heatmaps and histograms in Prometheus and Grafana, and this article still taught me something quite useful that I hadn't realized (the 'exclude zeros' setting; I agree with the author that this should be the Grafana default).
PS: Contrary to what the article suggests, heatmap legends aren't always useful, at least in current versions of Grafana. I tried putting a legend on some disk IO latency heatmaps that have very small latencies and the result was not all that readable or clear.