Ryan Kavanagh's /dev/brain

The easiest way to reach me is by email.

Voici le troisième article dans ma série d’articles sur la configuration d’imprimantes universitaires sous Linux.

I often use my laptops as portable desktops: they are plugged into AC power and an external monitor/keyboard 95% of time.

I’ve been using OpenIKED for some time now to configure my VPN.

I recently discovered SDF’s PiDP-8.

I switched from Jekyll to Hugo last week for a variety of reasons.

I contribute to various free software projects and maintain various pieces of free software.

Dear Canadians, It turns out that your Charter rights only apply if you can afford them.

A few weeks ago I configured a road warrior VPN setup.

I use sbuild to build my Debian packages under a clean environment.

I was reading the message backlog in com on SDF this morning and noticed that cfenollosa is on a nostalgia trip through Usenet and looking for active newsgroups.

Several people have asked me over the past months how to simultaneously authenticate against multiple Kerberos realms and how to hook this up with AFS.

A few years ago, I took out a subscription to The New Yorker for a few months.

Every math student at some point runs across "folklore" results.

Though I study programming languages for a living, I also study natural (human) languages for fun.

I use a custom keyboard layout based on the Programmer Dvorak layout, where numeric keys are accessed using shift.

I recently had to fill in a form on the USPS website requesting me to reconfirm my email preferences.

A year ago, I wrote a post on Configuring CMU SCS printers on Linux.

Though Standard ML provides the OS.Process.system function to execute an arbitrary command using the default system shell, and the Posix.Process structure for fork and the exec variants, it doesn’t (as far as I know) provide a mechanism to run a process a…

\(\gdef{\Hom}{\mathsf{Hom}}\) \(\gdef{\C}{\mathbf{C}}\) \(\gdef{\hC}{\hat\C}\) As I’ve been working through “Sheaves in Geometry and Logic”, I’ve been skimming proofs and attempting to rederive them.

Edit: Please see these instructions for printing to the centralised SCS-Public print queue.

I recently had to sign someone’s GPG key.

I had never before realised the immense usefulness of the Yoneda lemma.

I’m currently working through Mac Lane’s and Moerdijk’s “Sheaves in Geometry and Logic”, and came upon the following two sentences in a proof (p. 43): Note that when \(P = Hom(-, C) = \mathbf{y}C\) is representable the corresponding category of elements \…

This is the second post in my series of reading summaries.

I’ve recently gotten into the habit of condensings readings I do in the course of research down to a single page in a 9cm x 14cm notebook.

I’ve been cleaning up my website and blog after having neglected it for several years.

I recently decided to try out a snapshot of OpenBSD 5.3, intrigued by the notice that softraid(4) RAID1 and crypto volumes are now bootable on i386 and amd64 (full disk encryption).

A few years ago I was doing research comparing how large software distributions handled shared object libraries, and studied Debian, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu.

When writing man pages, I often find myself wanting to preview my man page as I write it.

Every now and then I have to kill mutt, which if done at the wrong time, can leave the header cache in an open state.

I’ve been a longtime mutt user, but have gotten somewhat annoyed of having to open a new terminal when I want to read or reply to a Debian bug with mutt (using ‘bts show 123456’).

The Kubuntu Wiki has a new wiki theme based off of the Ubuntu Light wiki theme found on the Ubuntu Wiki.

Since it's the holiday season, I thought I'd greet my server's users with a colourful MOTD.

Recently, I was asked to write an essay and to number its paragraphs.