mark shroyer, dot com

Lately I’ve been hopping between projects that use different Rust, Python, and TypeScript package managers, and I kept having to turn back to documentation to keep their subcommands straight when switching from one back to another.

This post is about a portable Unix shell script, socklink.sh, written to keep SSH_AUTH_SOCK working within a long-running tmux session—even when switching between multiple clients that have different SSH agents, whether those clients are simultaneously co…

I finally got my hands on the micro:bit, the BBC’s new educational computer and spiritual successor to the legendary BBC Micro, and I’m absolutely in love with its potential as a platform for learning how to code.

Recently the Guardian published a story falsely claiming the existence of a “backdoor” in WhatsApp.

I finally got around to modernizing this old site, which has included moving from WordPress to a statically-generated, Amazon-hosted site based on Pelican and Bootstrap 3.

Recently I had to track down a minor bug in the OpenBSD kernel.

I love Emacs GDB mode, but I always found it annoying that there is no given key binding (or function which could be directly mapped into a key binding) for switching between the different views given by gdb-many-windows.

Additional discussion: Hacker News, Reddit I ran into a really fun bug at work yesterday, where I discovered that my C program was branching down logically inconsistent code paths.

Additional discussion: Hacker News I’ve been getting back into Python lately… I just wrote a small module that provides support for pointfree style programming with a combination of automatic partial function/method application and operator overloading for

I just found a great blog post by Martin Kleppmann titled Accounting for Computer Scientists, a succinct introduction to double-entry accounting (although he doesn’t refer to it as such) in terms of basic graph theory: Eventually I figured it out: basic a…

I’ve been using OpenBSD as a NAT router for a few years now.

I’ve been banging my head against the wall on account of different music players which can’t play the subset of songs I have encoded as either Vorbis or AAC.

Update: I’ve expanded the contents of this post into a full guide to running an OpenBSD router on an ALIX board.

I just found a great web site providing a better Kindle content search than what’s baked into Amazon: eReaderIQ.com.

I had a funny experience yesterday.

Ars Technica has a four-part introductory series on logic and argumentation, entitled “Getting to QED.”

This guy is the best kind of crazy… How am I just finding this now?

I’m posting this here so I can find it again later, because this one caused a surplus of annoyance before I finally found a solution… I have a Windows 7 x64 laptop which would randomly (once or twice a week) set the NTFS “dirty” bit on its C: drive, causi…

Update: Jacob Stanley has a great article on installing gtk2hs on Windows which goes into more detail, including a tutorial on GTK theming.

I wrote a little old-school Windows HTA script to delete the .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._* junk files and directories typically littered across non-HFS media by Mac OS X: You can download it from my GitHub account if you have a use for this sort of thing.

Once again I’ve up and moved my whole little site here to a new platform — Wordpress 3, this time around, on top of Nginx + PHP-FPM + (obviously) MySQL on FreeBSD 8.1.

Now that Firefox 3.5 is out, I wanted to get it running on my 64-bit Debian 5.0 laptop—but there’s no 3.5 package in Sid yet, as of July 2, and mozilla.com only carries 32-bit binary tarballs for Linux.

Looks like I’ll be rocking out on my way to work tomorrow…

One of the things that I really like about pf, the OpenBSD firewall, is how it lets you define dynamic packet filtering rules — rules that filter based on your network interfaces’ current addresses at the time of filtering.

This evening I had the chance to download Google’s newly-released (and by “released” I mean “beta”… hey, it’s Google) web browser, Chrome, and give it a try.

A couple of months ago, I upgraded an old PowerPC machine from OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3, and I discovered that the new version of pfctl in 4.3 would segfault when reading my old pf.conf file.

I finally got around to trying the Linux version of Opera 9.50, the newest version of the Opera web browser.

I’ve tired of manually pointing my browser at http://www.phys.ufl.edu/weather/ each time I want to check the conditions on campus, so I made a small widget to bring the campus weather report to my NetVibes home page: Fellow Gators can use this widget too –

I’ve been waiting for this since I was a kid: MacGyver is headed for the theater!

I finally tired of WordPress eating up memory on my humble VPS that I’d really rather have for my email server and other things, so I tossed it (along with its requisite overkill DBMS back-end, MySQL) out the window in favor of Movable Type static publish…

After setting up my apartment’s OpenBSD based network, I decided it would be handy to have a simple report generator to describe active DHCPD leases.

I just found an excellent video mash-up of Carl Sagan’s narration of part of his book Pale Blue Dot, inspired by the famous Voyager 1 photograph of the Earth from halfway across our solar system: Courtesy palebluefilms.com.

I always thought I was a bit of an oddball for choosing the ancient scheduler Remind as my favorite OS X calendar software.

It seems to be a commonly experienced problem with the Intel rendition of OS X 10.4 that some power management settings, such as the halfdim pmset parameter (a.k.a., “automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep”) may be reset w…

The University’s software licensing program proudly furnishes UF engineering students with Microsoft’s latest-and-greatest (with the notable exception of cash cow Microsoft Office).

Thank you, Mr.

Probably to help ensure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else, Apple has decided to recall more than a million batteries shipped with its G4 iBook and PowerBook computers from October 2003 through 2006: More information can be found on the Apple web sit…

The ABS warning indicator in my Integra started lighting up this week.