At EuroBSDCon, Taylor Campbell (of NetBSD) presented on Tricky issues in file systems. Many of the issues discussed were relevant to any filesystem, some were particular to FFS. One of the topics covered was the appearance of junk filled files after a system crash. Ideally, we’d like our filesystem to remain consistent and prevent this from happening.
more...
At many a BSD conference, there’s a keynote from somebody involved in the early development of BSD. They get up and talk about the history of some program they contributed, and explain how some of the strange quirks it has came to be. This is usually a good opportunity to then go into the source and review it to see if it can perhaps be simplified.
more...
A little while ago, deraadt converted the tame API to use strings instead of using CPP macros to assemble a bit mask. String based interfaces are a little unusual in C, but they’re quite handy in some cases.
more...
As part of the effort to find idle hogs, I noticed some xterms were heavier than others.
more...
The Pope is coming. And so, unlike the earthquake and two hurricanes Philadelphia has recently weathered, everything must be shut down. And what’s not shut down must be locked down.
Center City looks quite different without any cars parked on the streets. Or Big Belly trash cans on street corners. Or mailboxes. But sidewalks are lined with portapotties as far as the eye can see. It’s more than a little ridiculous.
The Pope is holding mass on the Franklin Parkway, so it makes some sense to prepare the immediately surrounding area. But this same area, earlier this month, hosted the Made in America concert without such extreme measures. The Beatles may be bigger than Jesus, but the Pope is still bigger than Beyoncé.
There’s some question of separation of church and state, though it’s not too big a deal for me. The Pope is a foreign dignitary. There were some special arrangements made when, e.g. Nelson Mandela gave a speech here. And arrangements might also be made if Richard Dawkins were popular enough to draw such crowds. What’s unprecedented is the scope of the restrictions.
A line has been crossed where the inconveniences of this visit are being imposed on everyone in the city, not just the people living immediately adjacent to the planned events. Subway and bus service is all carved up. (And originally with doubled fares, although they seem to have backed down from that.) Personal vehicles will be forbidden from entering the Center City area for the entire weekend. This isn’t a matter of higher than usual traffic slowing things down. This is the city simply shutting down. Giving up.
Here’s a page of maps showing the ever expanding no fun zone.
The city has promised they aren’t paying for any of this. I remain deeply suspicious that the IOC accountant was hired to reach that conclusion.
After reading about a function decorator that rewrites the bytecode to enable goto in Python, I realized a very similar technique could be used to manipulate the bytecode in luajit. Of course, being the superior language, Lua already has goto, so for this example we need to add even more advanced control flow, comefrom.
more...
Computers are kind of fast these days, which means a lot of little inefficiencies vanish from sight. In theory an idle system with nothing to do should be doing nothing, but frequently enough it turns out to be doing nothing. A couple examples.
more...
I consume earbuds at a fairly constant rate. They get lost, or washed, or fall apart. And then I need new ones. Unlike the collection of large headphones, or “cans” if you will, that I’ve accumulated over the course of ten years without casualty, earbuds are practically disposable. So I don’t like paying a lot of money for them. Nevertheless, I want a product with some level of quality.
more...
Regarding I Could Care Less. My theory has always been that at some point, long ago, the phrase was “Like I could care less.” You still hear this variant today. It means the same thing of course, that one could not care less, but the word like makes it clear. Over time, the phrase gets used and repeated and some of the sarcastic intonation drops out, but people still know what the words, in this particular formation, mean. Then the leading word gets lost.
Just pretend it’s really a single word, couldcareless, meaning apathetic. We already pretend that awful means something other than awe full.
Sort of. Maybe. It depends.
more...