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It’s been going on in my mind for a while, and I finally dove into Android development. As always when I put my hands on a new language / system, I had a basic need; this time I wanted to develop a simple init system that would resist my various ROMs flashing, i.e. a program that would not be located in the /system partition of the Android OS, but instead would be a package, an apk, that would read init scripts from the sdcard.

Considering latest Google Chrome’s bugs with Tweetdeck, which I use a lot, I decided to switch back (until next time) to Mozilla Firefox. That was anyway a move I wanted to do as Google is gaining too much knowledge about me… While restoring my various logins and passwords on Firefox, I leaned about Firefox Sync, but most of all, about the ability to run my own Sync server. While there’s a good official documentation on how to achieve this, I heard that ownCloud has a plugin for that.

Like every year, my trusty Fonera 1 running OpenWrt Kamizake repeats the nearest signal to my Hotel room. Until now, my lovely Sol Bahia had an open WiFi access, which was trivially configured in OpenWrt, but this year, they changed their access point to a Zyxel Prestige 650HW-33 (don’t ask) which is “secured” (yeah, right) with WEP. Why am I writing an article about this? because I tend to never use WEP and forget how to configure it on my router everytime.

I need vacations, I really do. Yesterday night, I decided to upgrade my home’s Internet gateway from NetBSD 6.0 to 6.1. As I already had some success with jmmv’s sysupgrade, I simply ran … on an i386 machine. That obviously lead to massive failure such as: As I still had an SSH session opened on that server, my first thought was to use /rescue’s binaries, which are statically linked, but guess what, /rescue is also part of base.

I’m slowly migrating some parts of my personal Wiki to Github using their own markdown syntax. Before committing, I wanted to make sure the docs look like they should. Here’s a small Flask snippet I wrote in order to achieve this: Python Markdown has an extension called fenced code blocks which supports Github’s tidle (```) syntax, thus making this small program’s output similar to what the doc will finally look like.

So last week I had that massive presentation to do and was already depressed to click on the Impress icon. So I took a couple of hours to dig into those various HTML5-enabled presentation systems and came across reveal.js. An impressive piece of software that somewhat changed my life forever: Never more am I to fight with misplaced bullets and erroneous indentation, reveal.js permits to create your slides using markdown. Yes, reveal.

I’ve been learning and diving into SaltStack for about a month now, for both work and personal interest, that thing simply rocks. In the meantime, I’ve contributed a couple of modules, like bridging and Xen support, plus a couple of grains improvements for NetBSD. But most of all, I’ve been preparing my ${DAYJOB} infrastructure for Salt, and I must say this has been much easier than I thought, thanks to this beautifully designed piece of code.

I’ve been obsessed with SaltStack for over a week. This infrastructure management suite is exactly what I needed for both my personal and professional servers: simple but modular, written in python, not depending on a thousand unnecessary complex messaging stacks as it bundles zeromq, capable of both orchestration and configuration management, all this through comprehensive, well documented API and commands. Only drawback was it had poor NetBSD support. Was :)

I know about estd for a while, that daemon “dynamically sets the CPU-frequency on Enhanced SpeedStep, PowerNow, and APCI P-States-enabled CPUs depending on current cpu-utilization” (manpage excerpt). Thing is, I’ve never seen any CPU changing from its current speed while monitoring the machdep.powernow.frequency.current sysctl. In order to understand what was happening, I started estd with the -o flag, which outputs the CPU-frequencies as they are set. I then realized that the “ligh watermark percentage” and “low watermark percentage” default values were way too high (respectively 40 and 80) and were never reached, so the CPU speed was never changed.

Update As written on the comments: _ Colin Watson Says: May 17th, 2013 at 7:12 pm I uploaded 6.2 packages to Debian a week or so after you posted this, so you can/should now just use those instead. I expect they should build fine on wheezy. _ As a matter of fact, the following is now deprecated At ${DAYWORK}, we used to have our own OpenSSH debian package which included the famous OpenSSH LPK patch, which permits the use of an OpenLDAP server as an SSH public key provider.