Previous post on rough code had some notes notes on a few of the issues we faced at ü2k15. I also collected some notes and links about utf-8 and unicode that weren’t directly OpenBSD related.
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Replaced my 5s with the new top of the line, 6s plus. Kind of an awkward name. I propose 7P and 7Ps for the next gen.
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Skip the middleman to save time and money by simply telling your customers exactly what you would have told your customer service team. Simple direct communications mean nothing gets lost in translation. Not even funtioning.
Best of all, if they screw up, it’s their own fault.
One of the perks of flying Lufthansa even when not traveling to Germany is their extensive catalog of German hacking movies. Well, maybe not extensive, but since there always seems to be a new one and the availability of these movies off plane is about nil, I consider it pretty extensive. Infinitely more than Netflix.
A while back I watched Who Am I? which has an English title to tell you it’s cool, but is otherwise German. It’s like a substantially better version of Blackhat, with maybe some Ocean’s Eleven style misdirection elements.
The hacking seemed realistic. No cringing. There is (as I best I can recall) a good mix of online hacking, and dumpster diving, and social engineering, and plain old sneaking about. The hackers are motivated by a combination of curiosity, respect of their peers, and embarrassment of political foes. Then it becomes slightly more serious. Nothing seemed too outrageous.
One unusual aspect was the meeting of assorted blackhats on a dark net forum was portrayed by masked figures riding a subway car. More exciting than reading chat transcripts on screen, and I think it made a meaningful distinction that this wasn’t some virtual reality that hackers were driving avatars through. Rather, it conveyed more of a mental attitude. Close enough for cinema, and much better than trying to make IRC look like a 3D video game.
More recently, I watched Boy 7 which is kind of about a hacker, but then drives more towards Manchurian Candidate style mind control conspiracy. I enjoyed it a little less, and it wasn’t particularly original, but passable.
Hoping I get another good one on my next flight...
Another new laptop to play with, the ASUS Zenbook UX305 (or UX305F sometimes). I’m a little late to the party, these have been available for some time. Amazon had a $100 rebate off the regular price, which puts it at pretty fair price I think ($599). I was looking for a second laptop, one specifically to serve as a “second” laptop, to run Windows when I wanted, etc. My laptop lifecycle seems to involve running Windows for a bit, then eventually giving up and installing OpenBSD. I’ve spent the day playing with this thing, so here are some early thoughts. It’s not my intention to use this laptop as a primary machine (although one could), but I think I’ve gotten a feel for what it would be like. The Anand Tech review is more complete than here.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As part of the effort to find idle hogs, I noticed some xterms were heavier than others.
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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.