Some many years ago, I posted a bit of perl code to jiggle wifi networks. I forgot about it in the shuffle of switching laptops, etc., etc., but dug it out again today and made a few tweaks for more modern ifconfig.

Usage remains as simple as ever. Edit the file to add networks and passwords. Run as root.

wifid.pl

A few days ago, the trackpad on my T430s started acting very strangely, registering phantom taps and touches whenever my fingertip came within its proximity but without making contact. Usually observed as attempts to move the cursor turning into tap + drag operations.

I’ve worn the little bumps off the center of my trackpad, so I thought maybe that was the problem. (It’s just a sticker, very easy to replace if you like the bumpy texture.) Not exactly. My trackpad was coated in an invisible layer of grime. It still looked clean (black), but after giving it a good scraping and scrubbing, full precision has been restored.

I used to have health insurance. I suppose I was pretty happy with it, although I didn’t think too much about it. It was, in the truest sense, insurance. I paid about $100 per month in exchange for coverage against unforeseen disasters (cancer, dismemberment, ebola, etc.). The premium was pretty low because it didn’t cover must of the day to day things; my doctor’s office copay was also about $100. Apparently somebody in the government decided my plan was unethical or unaffordable or subbronze or something, because it’s been cancelled.

Now I have to go through the signup process all over again, but this time I have to choose a plan with a minimum of a $200 per month premium. But my copay will only be $50. So I pay an extra $100 12 times per year to save $50 once per year. According to government math, this will save me money.

I was vaguely in support of Obamacare in the abstract, but much like the Republicans foretold, my support didn’t survive contact with the enemy. Er, healthcare.gov. I was promised I could keep my plan if I liked it. I liked my plan. I couldn’t keep it.

And so begins my healthcare.gov adventure. Despite assurances that the service was now fully operational, my first attempt to get insurance in December failed. I was told to try again later. So now it’s later and, and somehow the system has decided that I may be eligible for Medicaid or state assistance or something, and won’t actually let me enroll. I have to wait for my friendly local state agency to contact me. Will they contact me before the 3:00am deadline for coverage? The clock is ticking....

What a shitshow.

Received an email from United today. I guess one way to do translations is to just dump them all in the email and have the user select one?

$select(lookup(ML_LANG_CD), EN, MileagePlus Monthly Statement, ES, Estado de cuenta de MileagePlus, PT, Extrato do MileagePlus, JA, 月マイレージプラスご利用明細書, CH,前程万里 (MileagePlus) 邀约)$

Some idle thinking about what makes language succeed and replace their predecessors to go with the alpha release of rust. Mostly it comes down to not just being better, but solving a specific problem in a concrete way.

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A selection of random numbers regarding source changes in 2014. (src only, I don’t have ports or xenocara repos handy.)

At the high level, there were of course two releases, 5.5 and 5.6, each better than never ever before. They came out on time, much like the 35 releases before them.

The first commit of 2014 was to bump the copyright date, but then jsing jumped the gun and bumped it again at the end of the year, resulting in a copyright year one day shorter than the calendar year. Last commit, for the curious.

The top three committers for the year:

deraadt   995
tedu      913
miod      746

As far as slackers go, competition was fierce to commit the least, resulting in an eight way tie.

avsm        1
bmercer     1
jeremy      1
kirby       1
maja        1
nick        1
rpointel    1
stu         1

Who were the most productive developers? Top three in terms of lines added:

jmatthew    32799
afresh1     24880
daniel      19534

Files added:

schwarze      446
djm           105
bluhm         104

In order to prevent cvs from filling up with all this code, it’s necessary to delete some old code. Who’s to blame for the billowing smoke? Same top three for lines and files.

reyk      -848108   -3264
deraadt   -523341    -893
miod      -277918   -1209

Special mention to jsing for achieving the most churn and smallest net gain by adding 153802 lines and deleting 152604.

The three most popular files:

usr.bin/signify/signify.c        90
usr.sbin/sysmerge/sysmerge.sh    88
usr.bin/mandoc/mandocdb.c        85

Too many unpopular files to list.

Totals:

commits           11044
lines added     1192696
lines deleted   3484520
files added        2653
files deleted      9995

I was watching some Netflix (Joss Whedon Astonishing X-Men) on my iPad. I take a break and I’m catching up on some reading in Safari, when suddenly the next episode starts playing in the background. Not a short while later, but probably about 30 minutes later. It was weird and quite unexpected.

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A short review of Godus, iPad edition. It’s a modern update of Populus, one of my Super Nintendo favorites. You squish the earth around, let your idiotic worshippers build homes, and rain destruction on the blasphemous other tribe. It’s fun, especially to start, but then starts slowing down and running into some serious limitations.

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End of the year bug? Or always bug? Dunno. Seen at Starbucks.

Also, “try not to lose this page“? For serious?

Making encryption easier and accessible is all the rage. From a programming perspective, one of the most frequent suggestions is to use nacl. I have a few gripes with it.

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