Quote from a friend who develops mobile apps: “Amdahl’s law generalizes nicely outside of performance gains to mobile software platforms. Once you’ve fixed all the bugs that are fixable, all you are left with are the fundamental limits of the platform, which users don’t understand.” (And he’s not even talking about iPhone.) Mobile platforms are certainly the most common situation where the same app running on two different phones will have different features, but I’d say it even generalizes to all software.

When my T430s arrived, OpenBSD didn’t yet support Sandy/Ivy Bridge graphics, so I stuck with Windows and OpenBSD in VMWare. Things change and now I want to run OpenBSD natively. I’m using TrueCrypt on the whole drive and trying to resize that while introducing another boot loader seemed a risky proposition, so I cheated a little by taking advantage of my laptop’s mSATA port and installed a 64GB Crucial m4 mSATA SSD, a trivial upgrade.

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Don’t try this at home. I gave up on my HP Pavilion g4 laptop as is and decided to try reviving it with a new CPU. The price for the A8 part was down to $30 on ebay. In theory, I was hoping the new integrated GPU would be sufficient to drive gaming on an external monitor at 1080p. According to the source of all true knowledge, stepping from the A4-3300M to the A8-3500M should give a substantial boost to graphics performance.

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The upcoming OpenBSD 5.3 release includes boot support for crypto softraid partitions, which allows for full disk encryption. The installer has all the pieces, but they aren’t automatically put together. Some assembly required. The basic installation procedure has been outlined by Ryan Kavanagh, but here’s the summary. Only the initial configuration is even remotely tricky, after that it just works.

Boot install CD or bsd.rd. Either pick shell or escape to one by pressing ! during installation before getting to the disk setup part. Create new disk devices by running sh MAKEDEV in dev. Run fdisk and disklabel to create a RAID partition on the physical drive. Run bioctl with all the magic options to create the softraid drive. bioctl -c C -l /dev/sd0a -r auto softraid0 Continue the installer and install to sd1. Magic.

A followup of sorts to the previous post on integer types. Let’s start with a little quiz of sorts. What does this function print?

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I used to like reading The Verge from time to time. Some of the articles are quite good, and although their review “methodology” is beyond pathetic, I could usually find something worth reading. Yesterday, however, I tried scrolling down the front page on my iPad when suddenly a new tab opened with a Mercedes ad. Huh, weird. I close it and go back. Try scrolling again, happens again. The Verge decided to stick an ad along the side of screen and trigger it on any contact. When I flicked my thumb on the screen to scroll the page, that activated the ad instead. That’s unacceptable, my intention was clearly not to open the ad. Goodbye.

“BitCoin, the Internet’s answer to “Capture the Flag” now with scoring in dollars.” - ChuckMcM

Yesterday I committed support for ZFS. (And the people rejoiced, ever so briefly.) What would a real port look like and what would be involved?

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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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