Category: Rust

retrospective — morning has broken

whbeebe3 Comments

I’m dipping back into my past Flickr photos and pulling one out to talk about it. This is the first of I don’t know how many, but there may be a few. I’m doing this because I got pulled into looking at my past work, and discovering that I still liked what I had produced 10 years ago.

This photo was taken December 2011 of a three-year-old Ruby on the left and her companion, eleven-year-old Max on the right. Max left us in 2015, after a long and robust fifteen years with us (he was rescued by us in January 2000, and he was already six months old at the time). The story behind this photo is that I had a very rough night and had crashed out on the old La-Z-Boy sofa in the TV room so I wouldn’t bother my wife. The Labs, of course, saw an opportunity to spend that night with one of their favorite persons, so they wound up sleeping right up there with me. When I got up in the morning, they stayed up on the sofa, picking spots comfortable to them. When I came back in there they both sat. Fortunately I had a camera close to hand to capture this moment.

I just like the composition. Both of them are exuding personality, especially Max. It reminds me how much I’ve missed him these past six years. Ruby is still with us, and she’s still my sweatie.

The camera used is the Olympus E-P2, with its ‘mere’ 12MP sensor, along with the m.Zuiko 2.8/17mm. This was during my ‘dark black-and-white’ period, where I was post-processing the hell out of everything because I thought it would look more artistic that way. The only saving grace is that I used a sepia tone which helped to bring up the highlights a bit and added a bit of texture to their coats.

building and running deno 1.8 on a jetson xavier nx

whbeebe

I’ve been wrestling with building Deno on my Jetson Xavier NX running Nvidia’s version of Ubuntu 18.04.2 as part of L4T, or Linux For Tegra (although I tend to think of ‘T’ for Tensorflow). Deno is a reimplementation, if you will, of NodeJS in Rust, attempting to correct many of the bad design decisions that went into Node over time. Deno was created by Ryan Dahl, the original creator of NodeJS, so he should know where the skeletons of Node are buried.

The problem with installing and working with Deno on the Xavier is that it’s Arm-based, whereas all the other environments are x86-based. You can thus download and update (deno upgrade) Deno natively, whereas on the Xavier you need to install a native distribution of Rust, then build deno on the platform with cargo build deno. This worked for all of deno versions up to 1.6.7, then 1.7 was released and building deno on Arm failed repeatedly due to a failure to build librusty_v8. I filed a bug report over two weeks ago, and then, three days ago, I got a response from one of the devs telling me that there was “no pre-built 0.17.0 static library for aarch64 but there is one if you upgrade to 0.20.0.” Sure enough, when I re-ran cargo build deno and watched the task pull and build all the libraries, it pulled librusty_v8 version 0.20.0, which successfully built along with everything else. I have since closed the bug (see https://github.com/denoland/rusty_v8/issues/630 ).

The big draw for me is Deno’s experimental support for WebGPU API. I ran the example given in the release notes ( https://deno.land/posts/v1.8 ) and copied the results into the top of this post. I doubt that JavaScript running on Deno will replace Python as the front-end for ML running on the Jetson Xavier, but I can see it supporting Python, especially with web-based development. I am no fan of Python’s web frameworks, and I’ve lost my disdain for JavaScript over the past 12 months due to another task that showed I could use minimal JavaScript to cleanly solve a knotty problem. Deno also gives me plenty of powerful examples of programming in Rust, so there’s that angle.

Since retirement I’ve explored more interesting languages and their uses than I ever did in the last five years of my regular employment. It wasn’t so much ageism as it was my employer’s adamant insistence that development was their way or the highway. I’m now free to follow my own path(s) and finding what I’m learning to be new, interesting, and challenging in a good way.