Status 2024-06-08

I voted today. Yes, I know. The EU is still a strange marvel of high-functioning bureaucracy and not the federated worker's Union of Europe we all would like it to be. But what can you do? Make it more democratic? Insist on combined civics and small arms education in schools? Insist on more economic democracy? Yes, please, all of that. But, today I voted. A small step on the way.

Of course, there was nobody I actually would like to vote for, but I did it anyway. As a friend said when we had lunch today: "In Serbia you vote for the lesser evil."

I'm back at home in the flat. Two conferences in two weeks, first Lund Linux Conference, then an entire week in Gothenburg, finishing with the Security Fest, then a three-day-week because of the National Day.

Summer vacation is coming up. I've been incredible nervous and angsty about it. I have to decide when I would like to have vacation! Stressful. Of course I want to have a vacation… but to have to decide isn't that easy for me. Most important, of course, is the time off when we're going to Venice in the autumn for the Venice marathon, P's 10th full marathon, and her birthday celebration.

After all that I needed some relaxation, so I reread the entire Transmetropolitan. Again. And the latest of the new Ken MacLeod trilogy: Beyond the light horizon. New book from Ken: Priority fucking interrupt!

At about the same time #3 had found some sticker paper and made a sticker with original art for me. I indicated the three-eyed smiley in Transmet and in a couple of minutes had one of those, too!

It's also the end of the semester for the graduating classes of the secondary schools around here. This means a lot of wreckless driving, honking, and blowing whistles outside my flat.

They dole out the final day of school for the schools every day for two weeks to avoid total traffic chaos. That's probably a good thing but it also means I have to stand the noise and the constant worry for traffic accidents for two weeks.

I stopped connecting to my own XMPP server. I'm probably shutting it down soon, but not sure yet… For now I'm reachable with XMPP at mc (at) lysator.liu.se. OMEMO fingerprints and stuff on https://hack.org/mc/contact/ as usual.

I'm considering leaving XMPP altogether, but I'm still thinking about it. I really like the late night chat sessions I have with some of you, of course. It's like olden times, when chat used to be a more synchronous affair.

And what's the replacement? IRC? Yeah, sure, but I'm mostly on a private IRC server these days and not on any of the IRC networks except OFTC for work on the #tillitis channel bridged to Matrix.

I'm not that into group chats anymore, really. Yeah, I'm still on some Signal groups, of course, but mostly for synchronizing meetups.

Matrix? Hahahaaha. Yeah, alright, Matrix actually fixed the net.splits with its really cool eventually-consistent distributed database. I also really like the idea of cross-signing, so you don't have to trust all of someone's clients directly, like in OMEMO. But hey, what kind of client can I use in a terminal (or Emacs) that actually support it? I've been using gomuks but it's quite buggy. Ement.el is also buggy, doesn't offer any OMEMO at all and the integration with Pantalaimon is… not working very good.

SimpleX seems nice. Looked into the protocol a bit and I like the security thinking. I have two clients running, one on a phone and the CLI client on a laptop. The CLI looks promising with its Websocket option. Perhaps I can help work on an Emacs frontend?

Yeah, I'm confused alright. Don't know where this will end up. Suggestions?

I have a used 1U Supermicro on my work desk. It's hack.org:TNG: The new main server for hack.org. The old main server has been complaining about memory errors for a while and it's from at least 2011. My very understanding co-lo provider also lets me keep a tower server there, but would obviously like it if I changed to a proper 1U server in a rack instead.

The new 1U box now has four spinners attached with SATA. Strangely, they don't show up in the firmware settings!

I have rebooted the box more times than I care to remember. One of the two SATA controllers on the motherboard might be broken.

I might have to investigate how to use the built-in hardware RAID controller in FreeBSD, if at all possible.

I'm a bit slow in even exploring this. So… Tired… of all hardware problems. Why don't we just emulate it in Lisp!?

We've had some adventures with the drains in the flat.

First our landlord said they were going to do relining of the pipes. It would take one week. They would put temporary toilets and showers in our yard. Wait, we have a yard!? Turns out if you go to the next entrance over and up a stair you can actually get into something looking a lot like… someone's roof. That's what they call the yard. They have airdropped some wagons there with showers, toilets, and stuff. They also offered a composting toilet to everyone to keep in their flats for emergencies.

OK, fine.

Suddenly they sent a message saying it would be two weeks instead of one. OK, whatever, we thought, and planned to move to the cottage for the duration. #3 would have to commute to school, 120 km each day. Sucks, but it's doable.

Seven weeks later we were still in the cottage!!!

A week after that we had moved back to the flat but there were gaping holes in a lot of walls. They had to come around during daytime while I was working and fix the holes.

Yeah, OK, I get it. A house from 1938, with nothing having been done to the pipes since then… Yeah. Like that. So, of course a simple relining wouldn't do it. They had to actually put in new pipes in at least a c couple of places.

One of our toilets is still not working because of some fuckup, but at least we have working drains now.

Lund Linux Conference is a small invite-only conference in the neighbouring town of Lund. Perhaps 300 people showed up. The focus is mostly the Linux kernel itself: scheduler, drivers, filesystems, eBPF, that sort of thing, but also the tools used to build, debug, and verify all of this. Talks about about hardware archictecture and other things close to the metal are also welcome.

Last year at LLC Krister Walfridson introduced us to Frama-C, a way of formally verifiying C code. This year, Julia Lawall told us about how she and one of her students had used Frama-C to formally verify parts of the Linux kernel!!!11eleven

My friend Linus Walleij held a talk about the new Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) (PDF white paper) in ARM v8.5A which you can use to keep track of allocated memory, basically, so you're not freeing the wrong thing, for instance unallocated memory. It's just four bits and not something like the hardware capability bits in the likes of CHERI and ARM's Morello, but it's much better than nothing.

I didn't sign up for the social event, because I didn't think they could manage any food for me. Vegan with strange allergies, remember? I thought I'd tag along for a beer or something. Then the rain started pouring down. I took refuge in another pub with some of the others. We talked for a pint or so. Then I took the train back to Malmö, thoroughly wet.

Security Fest is a yearly security conference in Gothenburg. This time the venue was the Park Avenue hotel where I also lived the entire week. The entire company was there on May 30, 31, all three Tillitis employees.

We didn't present at Security Fest. Instead we were mostly manning the Tillitis booth. At first we were quite bothered that we didn't get our booth where all the other people were. Instead, we got a room of our own! There was supposed to be some lockpicking thing there as well, but they had had to cancel.

Instead, they eventually decided to put the bar in our room! Good idea! They also put the soldering workshop where you could solder on your electronic badge in the same room. Altogether, this meant we had people at our table almost all the time!

We had this idea that me and dehanj would do some live pair programming on one of our projects, but since we had people talking to us most of the time, that turned impossible. Not that I'm complaining. We sold out all the TKeys we brought and had many interesting conversations.

The catering managed to get me food during lunch! I was very happy about that.

There was an official dinner and party on the first day. Catering sort of forgot about me this time! After a while I got a small slider (those mini burgers). I couldn't even eat anything from the salad buffet. That wasn't good, but I managed.

A lot of us went to an unofficial afterparty late that evening. I didn't get back to the hotel until 4 am.

I was a little tired on the second day after something like five hours of sleep, but not too hungover. Apparently, it seems i don't have to buy beers anymore? "You're MC, right? Want a beer?" Ha!

I watched only 1.5 talks during the conference, first about half of the keynote until I couldn't take it anymore, then, much later an interesting talk about the Polish electronic ID. Considering what we do at dayjob we just had to listen to that one, right?

The loot from Security Fest included no less than six Snom IP telephones and DIY kit of the original MNT Reform ARM laptop. I gave away three of the phones to better homes. I will probably give away the others, too, to include some more people in my little telephone network. As you know, I'm fighting a slight phone phobia. What better way to fight it than immersive yourself in phone tech?

Before the conference I was holed up at the office and doing stuff to our attempt at an automatic production line. That worked out alright, I think.

The three-eyed-smiley I got from #3 will probably end up being the first sticker on the MNT Reform, as soon as I've assembled it.

Until next time,
MC