For about two years I ran a little side project for OpenBSD called bluesnapper to provide automatic binary updates. There have been other attempts at binary packages, but they’re really more like packages than patches and targeted stable. I think my user base may have peaked around two active users, but I still learned quite a bit and consider the experiment a success.

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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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Yesterday Amazon offered up as their deal of the day this 31 disc boxed set of Harry Potter movies for the bargain price of $250, compared to the list price of $500 or the $345 they are selling it for today. I was disappointed not to find the weight listed in the product description, but spent a little time poking around the customer reviews. Unlike newspaper comments, even I sometimes find user contributed reviews interesting or helpful.

A couple quick facts. 519 total reviews. 292 (56%) one star. 154 (30%) five star. Not many in between. Of the one star reviews, I couldn’t find any verified purchases. I counted 93 (60%) verified among the five star reviews. What to make of this?

I’m not really sure how useful “too expensive” one star reviews are. I’m more than capable of looking at the price myself. What I want to learn from a review is if the product delivered is the product promised. If you haven’t purchased the product, you can’t tell me that. That’s why I love the verified purchase tag they’ve added to reviews. You have to be a pretty dedicated fanboy to buy a competitor’s product to write a disparaging review. The five star reviews aren’t that helpful either, as I do think you need to have more dollars than sense to purchase this monstrosity. Makes me wonder if anybody bought it just so they could write a review and brag about it.

In the grand scheme of things, this same problem exists in reviews of just about every (near) luxury item. There’s the haters who can only complain about the price and about how you can make your own with only $20 in materials from Walmart. And there’s the gushers, who can only wax poetic about how happy their purchase made them without ever describing their usage of the product.

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.