Veiva

First news article I read today is of course absurd. In Indiana, the poor have to pay for Medicaid. Seema Verma, a private contractor who is responsible for that, said "[Medicaid's] rigid complex rules designed to protect enrollees have also created an intractable program that does not foster efficiency quality or personal responsibility" to a congressional hearing. In other words, she is saying the poor need to take responsibility for being poor. "Lol." (Article for those interested.)

I learned a couple things: 1) Off-by-one errors are a [bleep] 2) NaNs are a [bleep] I spent all day on two small issues stemming from off-by-one errors and an initialized matrix resulting in NaN.

Saw Rogue One. It was pretty awesome.

Looking forward to Rogue One! Going to see it Monday with my brother.

In my project, I use a server-client setup. There's a single server that handles dispatching messages to clients. The protocol is implemented in a C++ library. And I sped up the send method by 145x in my project. I use move semantics instead of copying data everywhere. It's amazing how much faster everything is.

IMAP lets you use an email provider with any email client. For example, Thunderbird or Outlook. Proton Mail does have apps for iOS and Android, so for most it makes no difference. I use Thunderbird for non-sensitive e-mail accounts. It helps create a distinction between sensitive and non-sensitive to prevent mistakes. It's why I have two user accounts, for example: one for unimportant doodling and one for important work.

I enter two passphrases at most a few times a day: the password manager passphrase and my disk passphrase. Just depends on how often I turn off my computer. My computer is off whenever I'm not home or if I'm sleeping. Proper security practices are really not much more effort if implemented correctly. Regardless, I really suggest Proton Mail for an email host if you don't need IMAP support.

I use Proton Mail for anything important. The password used to log in is 32 characters of data from /dev/urandom run through base64. The password used to decrypt the mailbox is also 32 characters of data from /dev/urandom. I store said passwords in my password manager. It's protected by 15 word passphrase. The password manager is also stored on my encrypted disk, which is protected by a separate 15 word passphrase, or in physical backups, which are protected by another 15 word passphrase. The passphrases are generated from a dictionary of 10,000 words. I highly doubt even state actors are capable of accessing my email so long as Proton Mail's promises about its client are true.

I had a memory leak recently and used Valgrind to track it down. My program analyzes gigabytes of data, and small test cases didn't leak. Running it through Valgrind took forever. But after I reviewed the log, it was trivial to fix the leaks.

I get it now! It's an allosaurus!

They look impractical as weapons.

I have the Tetsu weapons keepsaked. They're the best looking swords in the game, in my opinion.

I ran into the most elusive bug in my project. The interpreter/JIT I use in the project represents values by using NaN tagging. Using the FFI, a structure with a floating point value was returning nil, when that should have never been possible. Of course, unless it returns a NaN that just so happens to map to the same NaN tagged value as nil. I sanitize the structure's fields now and all is fine.

Speaking of programming, I've done some good work on the secret project since I finished Pokemon. 230 hours put into it so far, since late September. A giant leap considering four/five months ago I barely spent 5 hours even playing video games or watching TV a week.

I beat Pokemon Sun after 75 hours. In most RPGs I follow some theme for a character. In Bloodborne, I was a fiery anti-theist. In RuneScape an executioner for Zaros. So on. Well, in Pokemon, I was the God King Ditto. In human form. I spent 40-some hours breeding and training a perfect team: Ulyaoth the Milotic, after the Ancient from Eternal Darkness; Mercy the Mimikyu, after Arya's alias in A Song of Ice and Fire; Storm King the Kommo-o after the final boss of the storm shrines area in Demon's Souls; Fool's Idol the Ribombee after the first boss in the Tower of Latria from Demon's Souls; Pernix the Decidueye after the Zarosian ranger from RuneScape; and Lady Death the Salazzle after Death's daughter from the Discworld series. It was terrible because I can't yet transfer my perfect Dittos I have from prior generation. It would've been like five, ten hours work if I could. But it was amazing. It made the game too easy. I OHKO'd nearly everything regardless of level. But that's what happens when you're the God King Ditto. And the character's constant, empty smile fit the theme so well, which was a bonus.

Doesn't playstation run on freeBSD? It's a highly specialized proprietary fork of FreeBSD, yes. The exploit used to gain super-user privileges via WebKit exploited an old FreeBSD kernel escalation bug.

I only buy Nvidia because Nvidia actually provides native binaries for FreeBSD (and Solaris, though that's probably less surprising). Since maybe 0.0000000001% of people use FreeBSD, the manufacturer providing support is a major selling point.

Pokemon Sun/Moon are pretty neat. Also, there's a Ditto pillow in your room. That makes it instantly one of the better Pokemon games.

I tried looking at several networking libraries for IPC like ZeroMQ, but couldn't figure out how to bidirectional push to a central server. So I rolled my own just using bare sockets. There was a lot of rage when I screwed something up so badly that I caused a local denial of service attack and somehow exhausted file descriptors. So I had to: 1) Test change. 2) Power off computer. 3) Type in 20 word passphrase. 4) Repeat. That was painful...

A month ago I made a mistake where I deleted all my progress from a mistaken rm in a script. I now have rsync scheduled to run hourly. But a project I'm working on has lots of data (10gb+ files) that's not possible to back up. I formatted the drive as ZFS and make snapshots regularly. So if I 'rm importantfile', I can just 'zfs rollback pool/yyyymmdd' and be good as new!

It's a bit more complicated than mental hospitals releasing sick people. There simply aren't adequate out-patient services in a lot of places, and in-patient services are only a truly viable solution in extreme cases. No to mention the costs. I take a medication that is $600 a month. I go to therapy every 1-2 weeks, and have medication management appointments every few months. But I can only do that because I was rather lucky and receive Medicare and Medicaid! Without these services, my symptoms would be unmanageable.

I've been using KDE for a while, and Dolphin works pretty well for me. It was good (or maybe familiar) enough to make it onto my netbook when I was running Fluxbox. Dolphin doesn't have a FreeBSD maintainer and thus isn't in ports or the binary package manager. Ugh.

(This is just my reasoning.) Economics is a soft science. Personally, I wouldn't discuss social science or psychology (for example) since I'm not well learned in either, so I extend the same reasoning to economics. The exception is I will discuss the merits of economic platforms from an ethical standpoint, but that's a different scope I think.

Completely unrelated: Does anyone know a good file manager for Unix-likes? I use XFCE on FreeBSD, but Thunar crashes way too often. It seems a bug with file sort order changing, and it hasn't been fixed properly.

I definitely think Clinton's foreign policies are bad, but all I'm saying is we have no idea how Trump's will compare and his public statements don't inspire any confidence.