One of the things I used to like about my phone was the fact that it didn’t have an ssh client. Going to a bar and drinking is a great accompaniment to reading about obscure server config tweaks, but less ideal a place for trying them out. I count the inability to screw things up as a feature. But then I wrote a mail system in ruby which required 24/7 care and feeding, and suddenly I couldn’t leave the house without a baby monitor.

I was vaguely familiar with Panic when they announced their ssh client, Prompt. There were two things I liked. First, Panic had reputation for building things which worked (I think, no personal experience). Second, some of the best iPhone apps come from established companies who build them either as an experiment or to meet their own needs, not trying to make a quick buck. The main problem was that at $7.99, Prompt was a full $7.99 more than I’d ever paid for an ssh client. Finally the price dropped temporarily to $1.99 and I took the plunge.

Short version: it works. There are a few bugs, but nothing major. It is almost certainly worth the full price, which only seems expensive in comparison to App Store pricing (and openssh). And now I can finally use my phone to suspend my laptop without getting out of bed.

There are also some free or lite ssh clients available, which are universally so bad as to not be worth naming. From terminal emulation too poor to run top to rejecting hostnames that didn’t contain a dot, the bugs are many and varied.

The early reviews of Google Glass are starting to arrive. Most seem enthusiastic, but I doubt I’d pay $1500 to beta test a gadget unless I was more than a little prejazzed to begin with. In the midst of processing these thoughts came the news that Google Now is available for the iPhone as well, giving me two things to complain about.

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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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