despair labs

Maybe LLMs aren’t the problem.

Six months ago I gave the most important conference talk of my life.

A few days ago I wrote about a OpenZFS bug I found and why it went unnoticed.

A couple of weeks ago I fixed a nasty bug in this function in OpenZFS:

I have spent the last couple of years of my life trying to make sense of fsync() and bringing OpenZFS up to code.

OpenZFS has some extremely nice tools and you can do a lot with them, but they start to struggle once you need to do more complicated things with your storage, or scale your OpenZFS installation out to tens or hundreds of pools, or use it as a component of

OpenZFS 2.3.0 will be released any day now, and it includes the new “Fast Dedup” feature.

OpenZFS 2.3.0-rc1 was just tagged.

In a couple of days I’ll back on a plane, taking the travelling circus to BSDCan 2024 in Ottawa.

AsiaBSDCon 2024 starts next week in Taipei, and I’ll be there!

My preferred programming style is highly interactive and exploratory, which requires a fast edit-compile-test cycle.

The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of.

I don’t remember where I first heard about Rust, but I know it was a long time ago, likely back in 2012.

2022-01-16 20:04 last couple of weeks I tried my hand at designing a board for GOOD COMPUTER. had to resist the urge to add features and just stick with what I know. they arrived today, the five I ordered and siz bonuses. exciting!

2022-01-12 20:05 back in 2020 I had some time at home (!)

I’ve been hearing about io_uring on and off for the last couple of years.

2024-03-30: this post has moved to /presentations/good-computer/.

2020-08-17 21:16 hey look, it’s GOOD COMPUTER mk2. totally rebuilt with an atmega88 after a minor voltage incident took out my remaining 8s.

2020-07-27 21:06 lol so I fucked up while getting the XIAO toolchain running and trashed the bootloader. so a new GOOD COMPUTER project begins: just enough JTAG/SWD to reflash the bootloader and make it usable again 2020-08-01 18:12 “just enough JTAG/SWD”…

2020-07-24 20:56 this is a XIAO, a tiny ARM dev board. gonna do another round of GOOD COMPUTER type work on it. more memory and tiny size are appealing, learning a new instruction set less so.

2020-07-12 13:29 started messing with this SD card module. seems it’s not properly SPI compliant, as it’s driving CIPO low even when not selected.

2020-07-07 22:02 This was once a thread on the bird site.

2020-07-06 19:44 I had an idea 2020-07-06 23:31 not a real clock, just text layout tests I have several ideas 2020-07-07 19:24 dropped in this 5x8 font to get 25 chars per line.

2020-07-05 17:30 I used a pair of ‘595 shift registers to hook this up to the SPI bus. it works fine, but needs constantly refreshed and on the bus permanently. if I did it “for real” I’d just drive it with another AVR, but that’s maybe just my software h…

2020-07-02 12:30 I decided to take a short break and add a LCD screen to GOOD COMPUTER, but it ended up taking a very late night and a morning to get it going. the timing is quite important and there’s not much example code around, so lots of study and ex…

2020-06-22 15:09 GOOD COMPUTER continues!

2020-06-02 12:35 I am making a GOOD COMPUTER, my take on a 70/80s-style approach to building a computer!

2020-04-28 20:19 I started building a little computer this week.

Like most (all?)

As I said before, I spend most much of my life in terminal windows, being a sysadmin or a programmer or anything else like that.

So I’m switching from macOS to elementary OS.

2024-03-30: this post has moved to /presentations/consul/.

2024-03-30: this post has moved to /presentations/u2f/.

From 1-3 October 2016 I was at CompCon Australia 2016, a technical conference aimed at tertiary computing students.

2024-03-30: this post has moved to /presentations/passwords/.

2024-03-30: this post has moved to /presentations/u2f-l/.

Secret level huh?

New release of salada, my JMAP server.

I was happy with this one

Settling in for an evening of programming puzzles…

Nicolas Grégoire’s excellent presentation from AppSecEU 2015 on various terrifying SSRF exploits.

If you’re going to provide OAuth access to your non-web protocols (eg XOAUTH, OAUTHBEARER, etc to IMAP, SMTP, whatever) then you need to give me a way to convert an access token into a username.

Success!

First release of salada, my JMAP server.

Here’s the start of a fully type-checked JMAP parser/generator in Rust.

With so much cricket going on at the moment, SixFour has seen quite a bit a work.

Making things like this excites and terrifies me in equal measure. robn/everybody-root

I had no choice.

So today I want to tell you about a little side project that I worked on over the Christmas break in between eating, watching cricket and napping.

A small tweak to the Pioneer build system has turned into building a dummy renderer for headless environments (for tools).