I read a bunch of zombie themed novels. Some have lots of zombies, others not so many. Some are real books, some are what I was hoping were the upper echelons of more or less self published work.

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I happened to be in Best Buy today and noticed the computer department had sprouted a little Google Chromebook booth next to the Apple section. It was manned by a Google shirt and badge wearing dude, kind of a hybrid Geek Squad Apple Genius type, by way of Middle-earth. Whatever, people can look however they like. He did, however, have the whole super nerd speech thing down. Not just the language but the tone radiated the extremely smug, slightly condescending attitude that I’ve previously only encountered in Hollywood depictions, never real life. And I’ve dealt with some pretty nerdy types. As for the Pixel he was pimping, his main point was that it has the highest resolution laptop screen in the world (technically arguable) and how the Pixel could natively display 4k video (not even close to true), before trying to say it was both a computer and a tablet and could run the apps for both (too vague to be entirely falsifiable). To say the least, the shopping demographic in this particular South Philly Best Buy did not find him particularly endearing. He made it clear he didn’t work for the store (if you want to buy anything, talk to somebody in a blue shirt), but if he’s somebody’s idea of a product ambassador, relations between humans and halflings are not looking good.

I recently switched one of my laptops over from OpenBSD i386 to amd64, which meant reinstalling all packages. Due to using an older mirror, this ended up downgrading a number of packages, among them a certain browser which displays a helpful message telling me I’m “up to date” whenever the currently running version differs from the previous run version.

Yes, you’re reading that right. I went from version 18 to version 17. And somebody decided that was an upgrade. The silly part is you can go to the magic URL and get the same page in any version of Firefox, but if you use another browser like Chrome they sniff the user agent and redirect you elsewhere. Why isn’t the “not Firefox” check a “not up to date Firefox” check?

At some point Time’s humor columnist, Joel Stein, transitioned to writing about more serious topics. Still funny (if you thought he was funny), but less fluffy. The March 18 issue (Sheryl Sandberg on the cover) is a good example. It’s not yet online that I can find, but there’s a not funny similar article, albeit with a different conclusion at the Guardian. Do online comments hurt – or aid – our understanding of science? Stein also refers to these numbers about the Guardian’s comment stats.

He makes a great point towards the end of the column about how adding comments affects Time’s reputation. Generally negative. I’ve noticed the same with several newspapers I read. Why do they have comment sections? As Joel says, about the only thing the comments discuss is “whether the President is a horrible communist or a terrific communist.” How does the newspaper gain from reserving a part of every page for idiots? Is the all important engagement metric aligned with what they want to optimize? I try not to read the comments, but sometimes scroll down into that region by accident, and then I’m stuck reading them. And then I generally close the tab because I realize I must be reading a newspaper written for morons, and somewhere out there is a better website, a website I should be reading. Are the people who comment really of higher value than the people the comments chase away?

Here’s the setup: Heartless prosecutor offers kid a deal. Take the plea bargain and go to prison for one year. Or go to court and face thirty years. Inspired by true events.

Features Omar as Omar and the Rock as not the Rock.

If you increment a signed 64-bit counter at 1GHz, it will take about 300 years to wrap. 600 years for unsigned.

OpenBSD 5.3 is coming soon, the order page is up now. I don’t think I made a single commit for this release, which represents a new low. At least things can only get better, I already made a few minor commits for 5.4. One feature that I did hack on but which may go unnoticed because it’s largely invisible is a new disk I/O sorting algorithm. beck@ was the driving force in testing this and pushing me to write the code he wanted. :)

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My HP Mini has an unsupported wireless chipset, so I was in need of a USB adapter. To match the host system, it too must be mini. I started with a Keebox W150NU I had sitting around. Works well with the run driver, but it sticks out a little, so I picked up the B-Link BL-LW05-5R and the Edimax EW-7811Un on the cheap. Both use the urtwn driver.

All of these operate solely in the 2.4GHz band. Local download speeds are generally 1.5-2 MB/s for the Keebox and 2-3 MB/s for the urtwn devices. ifconfig reports the signal strength in dB, but I’m not smart enough to know what that means. No issues with reception moving around between rooms. Occasionally, while using a urtwn device, I’ll see complaints from ehci about such and such not being just right, but it doesn’t appear to affect performance. The Edimax has a glowing blue LED in it, the B-Link has a rather obscured LED on the end. I don’t need another blinkenlight poking me in the eye, so the B-Link wins this round. Amazon tells me I paid $6.70, shipped.

From left to right: Keebox W150NU, B-Link BL-LW05-5R, Edimax EW-7811Un.

Yesterday, Windows Update decided I won the IE 10 lottery and earned myself a new browser. Then I remembered the IE SunSpider performance scandal (turns out this was for IE 9, my how time flies!) and my own thoughts on the difficulty and fragility of dead code optimizations. For background, the Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks article at Ars is a decent read.

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The only thing more fun than talking about yourself is talking about the blog platform you use to talk about yourself. I rolled out some flak upgrades today and it almost worked. I did learn one critical lesson about sqlite which may be interesting, after that the post devolves into useless trivia.

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