obfuscurity.
hidden in plain sight

News broke recently that Oracle would begin enforcing old-school licensing policies on Solaris. The future of OpenSolaris has been in question for some time now. The writing is on the wall, in this geek's opinion. Oracle is a revenue-generating monster with blinders towards open source. The product manager in me appreciates the directness of it. The hacker in me despises them for raping Sun Microsystems and pulling the rug out under from the rest of us.

This will almost certainly renew interest in BSD distributions. Sure, Linux will get plenty of (re-)adopters migrating off Solaris. But keep in mind that many Solaris users left Linux for greener (read: more stable) pastures. They've tasted the delicacies of ZFS, Dtrace, project Crossbow and zones. Linux is a big bitter pill to swallow after you've tried those.

Fortunately, users have a choice. Although I'm not a big user of FreeBSD myself, I appreciate the work they've put into porting ZFS and Dtrace. They have OpenBSD's PF packet filter and experimental support for Valgrind. There are plenty of reasons to love FreeBSD right now. Suffice it to say that I'll be testing my alternatives and looking for an exit strategy from Oracle.

I'm not sure how effective it is to post these here, but I'm hopeful that having them in cyberspace will help keep me motivated. I'm hereafter calling these goals rather than resolutions The latter, to me, implies something that you begin immediately. This cold-turkey approach virtually guarantees failure. The moment you trip up, the subconscious immediately considers them a lost cause and reverts to the old behavior. As goals, I think it sets a more optimistic tone and allows me to gradually adapt the preferred conduct.

Without further ado, my personal list of goals for this year (in no particular order)...

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I'm probably not treading into undiscovered territory, but having re-watched a number of my favorite Christmas specials as an adult, I couldn't help but notice the influences of an earlier, simpler, uglier life in America. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had an especially hellish upbringing in the shadow of Claus and his elven slave-drivers, according to the storytellers at Rankin/Bass Productions, Inc.

Overtones of discrimination and the Old South start from the very beginning. The comforting tone of Burl Ives as the friendly, banjo-toting, Good 'ol boy snowman-narrator help to lighten the apocalyptic mood of newsreel footage foreshadowing the storm that inevitably vindicates Rudolph's hapless existence.

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If you're unaware, there's an Advent calendar for Systems Administrators. Strangely enough, they accepted my submission and published it this past weekend. I believe these philosophies will benefit anyone who has "internal customers", but they are especially well-suited for IT professionals. If you have other suggestions please let me know.

I'm happy to announce the release of Blogsum-1.0. This release includes a number of bugfixes and a couple enhancements over 0.9:

• Fixed preview mode
  Preview content is now encoded so markup will always get recreated properly in your browser.
• Tag Cloud
  Thanks to Jim Razmus who submitted this new feature. Make sure you add the new $max_tags_in_cloud setting to your local Blogsum.pm.
• Update date when (re-)publishing
  The published timestamp updates when you publish or republish an article.
• Fix timezones in db
  Fixed a bug where article or comment timestamps were always set to GMT instead of localtime.
• Fix pagination
  Removed pagination view from all non-default views. That is to say, we shouldn't paginate when viewing by year/month or tag filters.
• Minor aesthetic improvements
  Lots of whitespace fixes, a redesigned footer and the addition of a meta generator tag for Blogsum.
• Example httpd.conf for Apache-2.x
  Thanks to Dan Colish for testing Blogsum with Apache-2.x and submitting his configuration example. This has been added to the examples directory as httpd2-blogsum.conf.

I'd like to also thank Johan Huldtgren for submitting Blogsum to the FreeBSD ports tree for inclusion. It has been accepted and will likely bring many new Blogsum users, which will inevitably cause me to struggle even harder against the onslaught of feature requests. ;)

Just kidding, I'm glad to see Blogsum gaining interest in the community. I've also updated the OpenBSD port, if you happen to be using that instead of following svn. Enjoy!

There are people out there who would argue that Security through Obscurity is better than no security at all. They advocate port knocking or running applications on "random" ports. Certainly, I'm not one to go around broadcasting my attack vectors to random visitors (oops!), but that doesn't mean it's a rational means of protection (honest, I'll pull out this time).

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ove fonts? Check out the work by Jessica Hische over at the Daily Drop Cap. I stumbled across her work thanks to an interview linked by @shiflett. Believe it or not, I was an art geek before I went full-bore UNIX geek. I still have an appreciation for the analog arts even though I'm a left-brainer now.

Jessica's work is very impressive. It almost makes me want to try my hand at letterpress. And then I saw Pictorial Webster's and became afraid. Very afraid. Just kidding, it's unbelievably cool no matter which half of your brain dominates. Check it out now!

Like any self-respecting UNIX user, I consume most of my email through the console. Mutt has been my client of choice for a few years now. I used to be a die-hard Mail.app fan on my Apple systems, but the performance was abysmal. As time went on, I evolved from running Mutt on my laptop to running it in screen on a home server. Combined with imapfilter's client-side "push filtering", this allowed me to keep my existing mailserver architecture intact (outside the scope of this post) while gaining all the functionality I missed from a traditional fat mail client.

Recently my Facebook and Twitter Attention Span Syndrome (FaTASS) has peaked, motivating me to find creative solutions for managing the extra load. Growl is a very popular notification system that Mac OS X users have enjoyed for years. I've haven't found myself wanting for it before, mainly because I don't use an abundance of GUI apps for my daily tasks. And yet, Growl's unobtrusive nature and support for network events seemed the perfect fit.

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I've heard all sorts of stereotypes about bad drivers. Usually they're racist or sexist (or both). And although it's politically incorrect to agree with them, there's almost always a sliver of truth hidden inside. But it's pretty rare to hear a specific criticism about an entire state of drivers (other than "they suck").

Maryland drivers are quickly gaining a reputation for cruising in the Passing Lane. This might sound like a minor gripe, but you have to consider that the entire state of Maryland is the size of a pimple on Virginia's forehead. Most of the highways are two- or three-lane affairs, not including interstate 95 or the Baltimore and DC perimeters. Monopolizing the Passing Lane can have a significant affect on the normal flow of traffic, and not just during rush hour.

Sometimes I try to consider what they might say if I confronted one of them. I bet they would argue that "I'm already going the speed limit in the fast lane, you're just trying to go faster. You're the unsafe one!". Therein lies the crux; it's not a fast lane, it's a Passing Lane (excessive and redundant emphasis mine). There's nothing subjective about the intended purpose of that lane. It's intended for passing slower traffic. It's not there as your personal safety zone, and it's certainly not yours to do with as you please. You're free to use it for the purposes of Passing vehicles. Once that's over, GTFO of my way.

That is all. Safe motoring, everyone.

Stumbled across the Barrelfish project over at OSnews. The proof-of-concept Operating System appears to borrow concepts from distributed systems design. Rather than have a single kernel managing multiple cores, the Multicore kernel assumes no inter-core sharing and communicates with message passing. Presumably they've been able to overcome some of the traditional performance hits there.

I was particularly pleased to see their first relase distributed under a BSD-style license. Those crazy bastards at Microsoft, what's next... a Windows release that doesn't suck?