Brian Raiter has written an excellent article about what overhead is involved in building ELF binaries, along with /bin/true in 45 bytes. This is nicely complemented by linuxassembly's guide on (guess what) assembly and Linux.
All very useful if you're a compulsive bit-twiddler and control freak (like me).
Brian Raiter's site
Linuxassembly's guide
What a bloody lying bastard!
Commission Spokesman Jonathan Todd has admitted that Commissioner Frits Bolkestein has concealed important details on the draft agreement reached with the USA on the transfer of Passenger Name Record Data (PNR) to the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection when reporting to two Committees of the European Parliament four weeks ago.
...
"It is now clear that the Commission has agreed to the abuse of EU citizen's personal data to test a surveillance system that in its very nature is against the principles of EU data protection legislation."
The federal government is planning to overhaul its employee drug testing program to include scrutiny of workers' hair, saliva and sweat, a shift that could spur more businesses to revise screening for millions of their own workers.
...
All federal workers are eligible to be tested.
How userfriendly can make your day.
Link
I do think so, and that's why I'm currently very much against entering that
place - like a lot of other people with their brains switched on.
Link to a very succinct article about current US fascism
sure; I /am/ a geek but nevertheless I do find the time to think of a couple of other things in my CFT:
stuff like this of course did not happen.
...but I like my privacy very much and am concerned about security, privacy
and free speech issues. And I am not paranoid, noooo
<shaking head vigorously>...
click here for the rest of the story...
(The picture above shows Phil Hystek, my instructor and mentor.)
After years and years of longing I've finally found the time to do a paragliding course in the beginning of 2002. It took me about four weeks (one full week and some weekends) to achieve the first licence for it. Since then I've spent most of the flyable weekends (which means almost all) on the hills around here, either flying, parawaiting or lugging the pack up the hills again.
Currently I'm also running the net presence of the local club, the Canungra Hang Gliding Club (which despite its name also caters to paraglider pilots).
So far I'm still alive and I'm really enjoying this challenging sport.
In the beginning of 2001 the opportunity to move to Australia presented itself - and got taken, as I had been longing to at least visit this continent once for ages. The opportunity involved a job offer and nice benefits for the move itself.
Without too much fuss I god rid of some of my stuff (motorbike, flat etc.)
and on August 10 2001 I reached downunder - for the first time: I hadn't
been to Australia before, so it was a bit like navigating uncharted waters.
click here for the rest of the story...
Fortunately (for us BOFHs) many of the dumbest people on earth auto-darwinate themselves, and the methods and results are hilarious.
I won't talk about Dilbert and userfriendly, they are must-sees anyway..
This is a very good compilation of computer jokes.
There's the list of toaster makers^W^Wcomputer companies and the famous methods of how to shoot yourself in the foot, but see also other Unix methods.
Internet...On A Stick is cool! Attrition has a nice picture gallery.
I've given a talk about Debian at SAGE-AU's annual conference in 2003. The paper and presentation slides are avaliable here. It was very well received, and I'll give some follow-up presentations at this year's Tasmanian Summer IT Conference as well as the SAGE-VIC IT Symposion
Debian is my favourite open source project. The structure of stuff in Debian very much pleases my sense of perfectionism. Plus, Debian is perfect for server machines.
I'm supporting the project by packaging and maintaining various stuff, most notably kuvert my mail privacy tool.
This list shows the packages I'm currently maintaining and a bit of technical status for each of them.
...that fights back.
The languages of my choice are
No real hacker should ever miss the Obfuscated C Contest nor its Perl Counterpart, these are truly awful. Wish I could write gems like those.
Participating or stealing^Wborrowing code from the entries is worth its time for sure, because you'd improve your job security vastly by emanating that weird code :-)
I'm firmly in favour of open source software, whatever exactly you may call it. The dark side would like to condition everybody with propaganda like this, but it is not going to work:
As we all know UNIX is very good for nice, common tasks like
shooting yourself in your foot.
click here for the rest of the story...
Of course (#insert <asbestos.h>) emacs is my editor.
Tom Christiansen said:
Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.
Nevertheless emacs is not my login shell.
Are you familiar with the following?
R$1<@$2>$3 $#error $@ USAGE $: "aaaaaaaaaaah"
Well, I am. Yes, very familiar. And I still like sendmail. Enough said.
There's a faint possibility that you might want to see what anti-spam hacks I've added to version 8.8.8+. Yes, I know that this is almost paleolithic in comparision to today's versions. Still it was a nice setup then. The new stuff is good for all of us, but there goes my effort :-).
Recently I've played with milter, the sendmail on-the-fly filter system - and I still like the beast (must be congenital, then).
As a discerning BOFH, you should never be without your
O'Re*lly...ahem, though.
Don't miss the
other series of O'Really designs.
russ's rant about job postings flooding is still applicable, years later. not a good sign for humanity if you ask me.
...and the daemon is my good-luck charm which I have with..ahem, on myself all the time. The Guru levitation status is what I aspire to.
Check out userfriendly's daemon series: day one, day two, day three, day four, day five and (IMHO the best) day six.
