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Hello 2019!

 

January 19 2019

I have released Deadwood 3.2.14, discuss working on MaraDNS again, and explain why Lenovo is not releasing a Thinkpad T490 laptop right now.

==I’m working on MaraDNS again==

There have been been some changes in my personal life which make it possible for me to work on MaraDNS and Deadwood again for a couple of hours each week.

I have released Deadwood 3.2.14. This is a five-line patch which took about four hours of work to release: I have an extensive set of “smoke tests” to make sure any change to the Deadwood code base does not introduce regressions. In addition, I need to both prepare the Deadwood source code release tarball and the Deadwood Windows binary zipfile.

In Deadwood 3.2.14, I have fixed a bug where, in the Windows version of Deadwood, it would sometimes not read all of the bytes in the binary “secret.txt” file. The issue is that the Windows open() system call is not 100% compatible with UNIX API; It needs to have non-UNIX O_BINARY flag set to act the same way.

More discussion about this update is here:

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/issues/51
Download links:

My plans for MaraDNS in 2019 is to fix at least one other open bug, and to add at least one new feature to MaraDNS. While I now have a little more time to look at non-critical bugs and to add small features, I do not have enough free time for MaraDNS to do significant overhauls (e.g. DNSSEC).

==Why the Thinkpad T490 is delayed==

The reason why Lenovo is not releasing a Thinkpad T490 laptop right now is because there isn’t anything really new Lenovo can put in this computer. The cycle has been, so far:

  • In the fall, Intel announces some new update to their mobile x86 chips
  • In the spring, Lenovo announces a new T4X0 computer using that new Intel chipset

However, this year, Ice Lake has been delayed, so there is nothing new Lenovo can put in the T490 to distinguish it from the T480—so we will get another few months of the T480 until Intel has their Ice Lake chips ready for Lenovo to put in the T490.

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