A few different perspectives this week.

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Halcyon changes of summer.

Continue with some cleanup and improvement of the depend step of building. Lots of little things to support lex and yacc better as well.

Intel Optane parts are leaking into the wild, some driver fixes to support them.

Add support for pattern substitution to variables in ksh using a common syntax borrowed from ksh93. Or not, reverted.

Deprecate fgetln.

Add detection for missing X sets to syspatch.

Refinement of the inteldrm code, including better backlight support.

A special edition of slaacd for the installer.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, fix strtol to parse strings like “0xridiculous”.

A fix for malloc and zero sized allocations when using canaries.

Add the ability to pause and unpause VMs in vmd.

Remove “listen secure” syntax from smtpd.conf. It’s broken since a couple of months and noone complained.

Remove sending of router solicitations and processing of router advertisements from the kernel.

The lidsuspend sysctl has been fully replaced by lidaction.

Fix fortune to filter out unprintable characters. Convert the fortune files to using UTF-8 instead of archaic overprinting. Fortunes with unprintable words may still be obtained with the -o option.

Introduce some quirks to the IDE and ATA code to prevent drives from attaching twice on hyper-v.

Add vmctl send and receive as well.

Update to xterm 330.

Remove some magic cleanup from dhclient. It will not deliberately attempt to interfere with other operations on the same interface.

Update libexpat to 2.2.2. Fixes NULL parser dereference.

Ilja Van Sprundel found a whole mess of kernel bugs in this and that. Some info leaks, some erroneous signal handling, some unbounded malloc calls. Lions, tigers, bears. Try to fix them.

The time has finally come to switch everything to https. Actually, I’ve been using https for a while, but now it’s time to inflict, er invite, everyone else along for the ride.

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Keep it simple.

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You’ve got a great big server that’s capable of supporting multiple users. Everybody wants to run a web server. This would be great, but alas, archaic decisions made long ago mean that network sockets aren’t really files and there’s this weird concept of privileged ports. Maybe we could assign each user a virtual machine and let them do whatever they want, but that seems wasteful. Think of the megabytes! Maybe we could setup nginx.conf to proxy all incoming connections to a process of the user’s choosing, but that only works for web sites and we want to be protocol neutral. Maybe we could use iptables, but nobody wants to do that.

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Configuring an HP laptop, came across this gem.

I like that I get a choice, but is it really necessary to tack on a $2 fee? If I have to choose one or the other, maybe just include it in the listed price? I thought airlines were bad...

Possibly related to this great option:

It’s a tough choice, but somebody has to make it. And pay $22 for the privilege.

How big is the ideal team? How do we organize it?

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Saving up a bunch of changes for a very special treat.

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Got a new spam today, subject “hard facts”, which was actually kind of interesting. There was a link, which obviously not clicking, but the body was a reply to an email I had allegedly sent. Here’s what I said:

Be careful with shitcoins. They tend to market themselves based on the latest trendy arguments against btc.

First it was the confirmation time then mining algorithm then inflation schedule
and recently, unfairly distributed, incomplete shitcoins are hyped on the grounds
of smart contracts, usually asking you to buy in their "crowdsale" or "IPO".

That’s so on target I thought maybe it really was an email I’d sent. Is it still spam if I agree with it?

Moving on, getting in to some good stuff.

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