honk is my take on a federated status updater. One might say it’s opinionated software. Since my opinions are correct, this makes honk the world’s first provably correct social media application. Here’s a formerly brief rundown of things that work, things that don’t work, and things that won’t work. Plus some complaints about how other people do things. The version number, 0.1, indicates your expected level of satisfaction.

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This is a little tour of some software I took today. One of the topics that consistently comes up when people discuss what operating system to run on their laptop is how much battery life to expect, and the answers are all over the map. The focus always seems to be on the kernel and how advanced its scheduler algorithm is, and the minutia of interrupt controllers. We throw around terms like race to sleep. But rarely do I see anyone mention the impact that the software they choose to run spending millions of CPU cycles on trivial tasks might have on battery life. Especially ironic if that software ends up being the software we’re running to monitor how much battery is left.

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I’ve been reading a lot about the benefits of virtualization and cloud deployment. And how to integrate these systems with modern web client design. It was all very exciting. So now I’m pleased to announce flak is fully cloud enabled. Here’s the story of my incredible journey.

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On the last day of AsiaBSDCon, George Neville-Neil gave the keynote talk, Security Fantasies and Realities. Some of it was good and some of it was bad. One of the central points is that the ioshitsunami is coming and in order to save humanity we need to do more of the good security and less of the bad security. One of the, or perhaps just the, good security things to do is hardware root of trust, which I will call TPM, although it has a few brand names.

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Some people tweet. (Me, previously.) Some people toot. (No, thank you.) I have decided to honk.

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I got a new Thinkpad, the 6th gen (2018) X1 Carbon, herein referred to as the t6x1c because why not. I’m not the first to get this laptop, and I’m sure some complete reviews are out there, but a few more personal notes I found interesting.

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I’ve been a rather happy lua user for a few years. In particular, the luajit implementation. But as part of an ongoing overhaul of this and that, I decided to rewrite all my lua code in go. Or wait, let me rephrase that.

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I wanted to make an interactive terminal interface for something. Usually I just bang out some vt100 escapes to move the cursor around, color this, erase that. It’s crude but effective as long as the number of screen elements is kept to a minimum. This time, though, I decided on a slightly more disciplined approach, and so I was looking for a library that might assist in drawing views of various sizes, and input fields, and buttons. The works. In go.

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I’ve been paying a bit more attention than usual to web interfaces, and there’s a few examples which really get to me. GitHub is one that’s annoyed me for a while, but I didn’t quite know what was wrong until I looked at some screenshots to see what was frustrating me.

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I needed a (text) diff algorithm, and if you search for one you mostly come up with the Myers algorithm. But then I stumbled across something called patience diffing, and it turns out to be just what I wanted. It’s already described elsewhere, but it seems more people could stand to know about it, so here we are. It’s easy to understand, and more importantly, usually makes pretty diffs (often prettier than Myers).

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