There are enemies out there and they’ve made us so paranoid that we’re willing to risk making enemies of our allies. From: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/german-chancellor-amongst-list-of-nsas-list-of-high-value-targets/?comments=1&post=26558191#comment-26558191.

Read More → NSA’s paranoia

If you’re curious to find out how all your installed ports depend upon each other, you might want to run this neat, little script saving its output to a file, and install graphics/graphviz.

Read More → Using GraphViz to visualize the runtime dependencies of the installed ports

Make sure to request additional wrapping, if possible, when ordering books from Amazon. If not, your books might attack each other in transit. The result can sometimes be devastating. Amazon US failed miserably when shipping four books last month, while their UK counterparts, around the same time, managed to wrap each of the two books […]

Read More → Books shipped from Amazon to you

Update 2014-08-07: r363978, dated Mon Aug 4 09:11:25 2014 UTC, solves the parallel build bug once and for all, and there’s no need for the Makefile.local as shown below. I’ve been scratching my head over why mail/thunderbird doesn’t build in parallel when www/firefox does. Research reveals MAKE_JOBS_SAFE was removed last August, in r324744. I can’t […]

Read More → Parallel build of mail/thunderbird in FreeBSD?

I’ve noticed that Cisco VPN Client 5.0.07.0440 tends to fail with “Reason 414: Failed to establish a TCP connection.” on long-running Windows 7 SP1. It’s been going on for years.

Read More → Long-running Windows 7 SP1, Cisco VPN Client 5.0.07.0440, and “Reason 414: Failed to establish a TCP connection”

None of the below is relevant as of 2014-06-06, other than the possible need of reverting sys/dev/pci/pci.c. I have confirmed that FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 r267147 works as expected on Dell OptiPlex GX260. If you happen to run FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on older Dell desktop PCs, like an OptiPlex GX260, you might want to back out r262226 prior […]

Read More → FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on Dell OptiPlex GX260

While compiling a custom kernel for FreeBSD/amd64 base/head r264077, I began wondering how old is the oldest source file, how young is the youngest? This is the command I devised: The oldest source files are: The youngest source file is: That’s a span of about 10.815 years.

Read More → Youngest and oldest source file in FreeBSD base/head

My advice is to switch careers from programming to ditch digging (where at least at the end of the day you will know you did something). From: George V. Neville-Neil. 2014. This is the foo field. Commun. ACM 57, 4 (April 2014), 30-31. DOI=10.1145/2580942 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2580942.

Read More → Career advice