[Fri Jun 28 09:30:04 CDT 2019]

My oldest son shared a link to a news piece sharing that Linus Torvalds warns of "hardware headaches" ahead:

Moore’s Law has guaranteed a doubling of hardware performance every 18 months for decades. But as processor vendors approach the limits of Moore’s Law, many developers will need to reoptimize their code to continue achieving increased performance. In many cases, that requirement will be a shock to many development teams that have counted on those performance improvements to make up for inefficient coding processes, he said.

The danger here, I think, is to limit Torvalds' comments to the computer world only. The way I see it, we are just hitting the wall (i.e., the limits) across the board. Not only in computing, but also in the economy, politics, our consumption patterns, the ability of our human psychology to live happily in our surroundings, etc. In other words, the attitude we've had towards computing and sotfware development in the past two or three decades ("yes, this code is pretty shoddy, but since hardware is getting better and cheaper all the time anyways, who cares?") is exactly the same one we are applying to other areas ("yes, our lifestyle is pushing the Earth to the edge, but who cares, I'm sure someone will invent something new and technology will come to save the day"). The future doesn't look very bright. {link to this entry}

[Sat Jun 8 14:47:45 CDT 2019]

While trying to install the Remmina RDP client on Debian stretch I ran into the following dependency error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 remmina : Depends: libgcrypt20 (>= 1.8.0) but 1.7.6-2+deb9u3 is to be installed
           Depends: libssh-4 (>= 0.8.0) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: libvte-2.91-0 (>= 0.49.92) but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: remmina-plugin-rdp but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: remmina-plugin-vnc but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: remmina-plugin-secret but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

The issue was already reported to the Debian develoeprs via Debian bug 908049, and the solution is to install the application from the backports:

$ echo 'deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main' | sudo tee \
    --append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/stretch-backports.list >> /dev/null
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install -t stretch-backports remmina remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-secret

{link to this entry}