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)...

Read the rest of this story...

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!

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?

OpenBSD's ypldap daemon provides YP maps using an LDAP backend. It was introduced with OpenBSD 4.4 but doesn't seem to have received much exposure within the community. I've been meaning to convert one of our bastion systems from using local accounts to LDAP, mainly for convenience.

The migration went smoothly except for the lack of a netid.byname mapping. Pierre-Yves Ritschard (pyr@) told me this is high on his to-do list. Without this mapping, sudo is unable to getpwuid(). Therefore, any accounts requiring sudo rights (read: administrators) will need to remain as local accounts until this is resolved.

The vast majority of this write-up was taken almost verbatim from a similar posting at the Helion-Prime Solutions blog. I've filled in some missing bits with regards to the sudo issue as well as ypbind issues over non-broadcast segments.

Read the rest of this story...

I've unofficially kicked off the pre-planning phase of DCBSDCon 2010 for tossing around ideas and informal preparations. If you're interested in becoming an event organizer (think carefully) or sponsor (spend graciously), I'd love to hear from you now. We'll be recruiting event volunteers as the New Year gets closer.

A lot of friends have been asking me when the event will happen. There's a strong possibility that it will be pushed back from February (where the F stands for effing cold) to April. DC weather is much more cooperative during the spring months (cherry blossoms anyone?).

I've never claimed to be a prolific hacker. I take much longer to complete a simple piece of code than even your typical hobbyist programmer. I'm easily distracted by shiny objects and WTFs.

Nevertheless, I finally gave in and threw together something resembling a blogging app. There are no fancy features yet, and likely never will be. It currently does about 90% of what I want it to do, which is closer to 2% of what the typical blogging/CMS application is capable of. It's my own KISS approach with a healthy peppering of careful input handling and a simple SQLite backend.

If you've been looking for a small blog application, particularly one designed for running in OpenBSD's default httpd(8) chroot, then Blogsum might be good for you. If not, that's ok too. Let the next guy have his World Domination. I just want to blog some.