I was reviewing the flak logs the other day (chasing an unrelated issue) when I noticed lots of requests with additional parameters, like utm_campaign=twitter. Huh? I’m not running any campaigns. GTFO.

I find these tracker tags in URLs annoying when other sites do it. It’s not the tracking that bothers me, but the fact that the URLs end up being long and ugly, and it means there’s several URLs for the same content. I much prefer canonical URLS. Different tracking URLs break duplicate detection on various link sharing sites, and trick the browser’s history feature. Boo.

Of course, it’s your site, you do what you want, but this is my site, so don’t dick with my URLs. To that end, flak now filters out extraneous parameters by driving you through a bounce screen. Hopefully this prevents the further sharing and posting of the infected URLs.

Try it out.

Everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black.

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Do you miss the good old days? So does the Feb 1 The Atlantic.

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Get excited, the Super Bowl is coming, which means Super Bowl Squares are coming! It’s time to start thinking about the value of each cell in the square. You can let players pick cells, but it’s more fun to randomly assign them. That still allows trading cell for the skill player, but doesn’t leave a hobbled 2-2 cell lying around for some sucker to pick. Either way, it’s good to know the expected value of each cell.

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Consider this a thought experiment. No hard recommendations.

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I don’t know a whole lot about typography and fonts, but there’s two things I know about font files. They’re ridiculously complex and their parsers have only just begun to experience life with hostile inputs. In short, I’d put fonts second on my list of files likely to pwn your browser, after Flash (assorted video formats are probably closing in fast, though). Relevant.

To address this concern, I disabled downloadable fonts. But thanks to the hard work of the geniuses in charge of making the web better, now I frequently get shit like this:

Hey, look, my lucky numbers are 26 and 78.

Separation of presentation and content, my ass.

Here’s another great one. WTF does any of this mean? Click here to 0xF029 a new tweet!

Even better, at some point I installed the Ubuntu fonts, which contain a magic ubuntu™ logo glyph. Naturally, Twitter uses this same codepoint for some other icon. Here’s a tweet that only received two 0xF147s, but it’s ubuntu™ approved!

Octicons for everyone! This is going to be spectacular.

Video controls on the NY Times website. Click here to 0xE805 the video!

Easter eggs from the Atlantic! Hovering reveals that each is a link to “#”. How helpful.

Not to be outdone, Medium decided to add a slight rise to their icons, building anticipation for the next story.

Here’s a gem from the Microsoft Store.

One of the things OpenBSD has never done is sign releases, for whatever reasons. But 2014 is a new year, time to make a change. The first thing you need to start signing OS releases (besides the release itself) is a signing tool. Other projects use a variety of tools for this, but unfortunately none of them were invented here. signify is a small tool I wrote to fill that gap. Here’s a few notes about it, working from the top down.

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Finished reading the rest of the Dec 16 New Yorker, beyond the State of Deception article.

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There’s a new private key format for OpenSSH, thanks to markus and djm. It’s enabled automatically for keys using ed25519 signatures, or also for other algorithms by specifying -o to ssh-keygen. The new format allows for new functionality, the most notable of which may be the addition of support for better key derivation functions (KDF). (Also known as a PBKDF, as in password based.)

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Nerds is a live musical comedy. I’d say it was somewhere between awesome and really awesome.

Act One roughly follows a similar track as the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley although with less attention paid to historical accuracy. It’s a comedy, not a biography, but it gets a lot right. Various video screens showing era correct screenshots and logos were a nice touch. Act Two covers events up to today, but without even the pretension of accuracy. (The original script was apparently from 2007; it’s been updated to include the iPhone and death of Steve Jobs.)

Favorite part was probably the unveiling of Windows. Previously, Gates and Allen had tried to introduce DOS with a rap song but with bungled rhymes; e.g., “MS-DOS is lots of fun; we made it for every...body“). Then Jobs and Wozniak introduce the Mac (complete with the 1984 commercial showing on screen, but on stage is Wozniak in a crop top throwing the hammer). Finally, Gates steals all of Jobs’s cool ideas, leading to Windows 95. Gates and Allen run out on stage and launch into a Beastie Boys style number with tons of style.

Least favorite parts were probably the love interests for Gates and Jobs. It felt rather forced, especially the sex crazed band geek style stereotype chasing Gates around. Does every musical need the main character to have a love interest, just because it’s a musical? Allen and Wozniak both stuck around far longer than in real life, but that’s forgivable in the interest of plot streamlining. The love stories, on the other hand, were an unnecessary and awkward complication.