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“Sudo Mastery, Second Edition” and Cover Art

“FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” is out for tech edit. Reviews are due back on the 25th, so I can get it to the copyeditor before I leave for a writing conference on the 28th. Right now the manuscript is laying fallow and I’m not allowed to look at it. Next week, I need to be able to read what I actually wrote instead of what I think I wrote.

That means I need something else to work on. I scheduled a bunch of chores and stuff this week, plus fixing the women’s shelter computer lab, so it’s not a good week to buckle down and finish Terrapin Sky Tango. But I had enough time to dig into outlining my next tech book, a new Sudo Mastery.

This was originally prompted by various publishing industry neepery reasons, but as I’ve dug into the docs it turns out that a second edition is warranted. There’s lots of new options. Features I didn’t cover in the first edition have grown more knobs and do merit a mention. cvs2ldif is no longer a thing, thankfully. And Sun’s iPlanet LDAP server has been eaten by The Beast and rebranded as the Oracle Damnation Directory or something. Fortunately, the LDAP stuff hasn’t changed much. My LDAP setup is much smaller than when I wrote the first edition.

The hard part is, of course, the cover art.

I always post requests for suggestions on Twitter and Mastodon. I can count on three responses.

  • Munch’s The Scream — Endlessly applicable to any topic in IT. I want to do something special with this one. I don’t know what that “special” is, but it’ll come to me.
  • Any number of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch — I adore Bosch. His work will get used as a wraparound for the cover of “Ansible for {Artisan|Legacy|Heterogenous} {Systems|Networks},” which has moved towards the top of my queue but isn’t ripe yet. (That wraparound will go around the inside of the hardcover dust jacket, by the way. It’s going to be glorious.)
  • Dogs playing poker — because Americans.

Thinking about it, though: dogs playing poker might actually fit here. Specifically, “A Friend in Need.”

Dogs playing poker, and cheating
A Friend in Need, 1903

Why this one? Cheating.

I can have a couple Beasties, a couple Tuxes, a Dragonfly, and a Puffy playing poker. Sudo runs on all of those. I’d like as many actual mascots playing poker as I can get, though. I know that sudo runs on OSX, but there’s no mascot. Am I missing any big mascots? (Note that I’ve considered and consciously rejected a gnu. I won’t give press to a group whose front man declares that conference codes of conduct doesn’t apply to him.)

Also, who should be passing the card, and who should be receiving it?

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“FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” first draft complete

After far too long, I have a complete first draft of “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails.”

I have quite a few FreeBSD developers doing tech review for it. They’re the folks most qualified to check my work. I’ve also made copies available to sponsors and the Patronizers who will get a copy of the finished ebook, mostly so they know that the book really exists.

This means I have a whole bunch of folks offering feedback–almost, but not quite, more than I can handle. I promised I’d post here when this book reached the point where I could use technical feedback on the book, though. So, if you’re really qualified to tech review a jails book, and you desperately want to spend your next couple weeks doing just that, drop me an email and tell me why you should be a reviewer. Don’t assume I know who you are, because I’m ignorant of dang near everyone.

Now if you excuse me, I’m gonna go stare blankly into space until my brain restarts.

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End-Of-January Update

Part of having an annual goal is accountability, so: how did January go?

I wrote 27,500 words, or a little over half my goal. Given that I wrote 14,100 words in November 2018, doing my best to write full-out: I’ll take it.

Also, a big chunk of this was redrafting parts of the jails book. I don’t count rewritten words. I only count words that make the manuscript longer. If a book is at, say, 30,000 words, and I discard 5,000 of them and rewrite them in a day, how many words did I write? Well, if the book is 30,000 words at the end of the day, then I wrote… zero words.

Why count this way?

I am not paid to rewrite. I am paid to produce quality books. Left to my own devices, I’ll fiddle with text until it’s absolutely perfect. Long obsolete, but perfect.

But it’s clear that a whole bunch of what I wrote before my thyroid lobectomy was… unacceptable. I have no idea what some of those sentences were supposed to mean. So they had to go. (See the “quality” part of what I’m paid for.)

I could whinge and weasel and say that I actually wrote another 15,000 words this month, but you know what? That’s bogus. I’m a word factory. Factories don’t get paid when quality control throws out two months of product. That’s why I don’t count blog posts. (Which is part of why I don’t blog so much these days. Blogs do not pay the mortgage.)

The good news is, the jails books nears completion. I have to write about RCTL, figure out my last problems with delegating ZFS datasets to a jail, and a couple tidbits about iocage migration. Once I finish the first draft of the book, the print and ebook sponsorships close.

I’m drawing the tech reviewers for this book from the FreeBSD developers. I always give them first dibs, mind you, but the response this time was overwhelming. Seems a whole bunch of developers want this book to exist. Which is really cool! But it does mean that I have all the tech reviewers I can handle right now.

With any luck I’ll have FMJ for BSDCan. Perhaps even Penguicon, if everything goes really well.

As the tech reviewers and copyeditors do their work on FMJ, I’ll finish up Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) and get my lab set up for a second edition of the sudo book. After pounding my head on the bars of the jail for almost a year, I can really use a comparatively easy book.

I’ll leave you with the draft cover for FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. In addition to the nifty back cover quote from PHK, I also asked him to write a foreword. He was gracious enough to indulge me.

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When To Buy Your Own ISBNs

In 2017, I bought a block of one thousand ISBNs. Other authors have been asking me why I did that and if they should do the same. I’m writing this blog post so I can point them at it. The short but glib answer is, when the missed opportunity cost of piggybacking on Amazon’s (previously CreateSpace’s) free ISBNs exceeds the expense of buying your own ISBNs.

But let’s break this down a little more.

Most indie authors don’t sell many books. If you have only one or two titles, don’t even think about getting your own ISBNs. Spend your money on editing your next book.

If your book does sell, chances are it only sells on Amazon. Amazon doesn’t care where an ISBN comes from. I imagine they’d happily ditch ISBNs, except for that pesky Expanded Distribution to the wider world of bookstores.

And that wider world of bookstores is where your own ISBNs come in.

If you are regularly making sales in Expanded Distribution, you’re selling print to the world outside Amazon. Those are the folks where ISBNs matter. The reason that they matter isn’t because they check your ISBN against a list of Amazon-owned ISBNs and refuse to buy. It’s because:

the owner of the ISBN controls where the book can be printed.

This is vital.

If your ISBN comes from Amazon, you can only get your book printed at Amazon.

If you own your ISBNs you can have your book printed anywhere. Use Amazon and IngramSpark alike. If a book really takes off and you need to do an actual print run, you can do that and slip those printed books into the supply chain with the same ISBN. Stores and readers don’t care who printed the book so long as it’s of reasonable quality and doesn’t fall apart as they’re reading it. (I’m looking at you, Robert Jordan.)

Your own print run might seem ambitious right now, but while the plan “I’m gonna sell a million copies a year” might not be realistic, the plan of “If I sell a million a year I want to do it in the least profitable way” is just plain daft. Just as you have a backup plan in case of failure, have a route open to maximize success.

So how did I make this calculation?

One, I was being directly contacted for bulk orders on books in locations I couldn’t serve. I could drop-ship books from CreateSpace US, but many of these orders came from overseas. And CreateSpace wouldn’t put customs paperwork on overseas shipments, so I’d have to have the books shipped to me, prepare the customs paperwork, and ship them over to Europe or Asia or wherever. The shipping costs on orders of even 20 books were prohibitive.

The cost of a lost opportunity.

Additionally, my Expanded Distribution sales were growing. ED pays about 40% of cover price on sales. IngramSpark lets you set your own rate, but “50% no returns” is perfectly acceptable. That’s an extra 20% on each unit sold.

I counted my annual sales through Expanded Distribution. I figured out how many ISBNs I needed to buy. I assumed that I’d get an extra 15% on each ED sale (because I’m pessimistic), and that sales would go they way they had for last few years (because I had to pick a value). Yes, these are fragile assumptions.

When the calculation showed that the increased proceeds from IngramSpark sales would pay for the whole block of ISBNs in about a year, and everything after that would be extra income, I bought my ISBNs.

How did I decide how many ISBNs to buy?

I averaged how many titles I publish in a year. Multiplied that by the number of writing years I hope to have left. The math said I’d need a little less than 300 ISBNs. As I’m in the US, it was cheaper to buy 1000 ISBNs than 300, because Bowker is milking the US ISBN market for every last penny.

So I bought 1000. (Before you ask, I can’t resell my extras.)

I am now done with the ISBN problem forever. FOREVER.

To my shock, the investment paid off in three months. My unit sales almost doubled. My books sell in places they never could reach before, mostly in Asia. I sell print books in Malaysia and India. Will that happen to you? Dunno. It won’t hurt your sales, though.

And I have enough to experiment with things like hardcover books. Which, to my surprise, sell. Even in Asia, where they’re not merely expensive but fiendishly expensive.

Once you have your own ISBNs, the real fun begins. You need to re-issue all existing titles under your own ISBNs, so that you can control the printing. This is vital. Someone that wants to order your book will look up the title in their online system and order it by ISBN. If you have one version of the book on Amazon with one ISBN, and the identical book with a different ISBN in IngramSpark, who knows what they’ll wind up ordering? Basic business says you must have a consistent product line. When two hundred people order your book, you don’t want them either getting two different products or, worse, half of them unable to get your book because it’s not available in their area under that ISBN.

This means you need to prepare for success.

Changing your ISBNs means changing your book interior. Adding IngramSpark as a printer means changing your cover.

Are you prepared to make those changes?

Yes, your cover and interior designers are professionals and would never screw you over. Maybe your designer is a dear friend or an award-winning master with a sterling reputation. But people get hit by busses, leave the field, or eaten by antelopes all the time. If nothing else, there’s retirement.

You need not only the finished product, but the source files for them as well. (Some designers will offer digital escrow services, which can be okay so long as it’s at their expense.) When the time comes for you to update fifty titles with your own ISBN, the last thing you want to have to do is redo the covers of your best-selling series because you can’t change shift the design as needed to match IngramSpark’s requirements. You want to have your designer or their successor open the original design, shift a couple items a millimeter or two, and be done.

Do the math now. Figure out how many you need and what the cost would be. Once you know the answer: forget about it until you hit those numbers. Put your energy and your worry on the thing that you can control: your craftsmanship and the amount of time you spend making words.

Because making words is how you get to have problems like needing your own ISBNs.

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FreeBSD Journal column

As of the January issue, the FreeBSD Journal will be free. You can access it, and all back issues, through a browser. You’ll need to register for it–the Foundation is still using it for fund-raising, but in a less direct manner.

So it’s probably time for me to confess: last year I got suckered into writing a letters column for them. I, of course, wanted to call it “Letters to ed(1),” but the board got all prosaic and went with “We Get Letters.”

What sort of letters column would I write?

Here’s the first.

Hi Michael,

We were brainstorming column ideas for the FreeBSD Journal, and Kode Vicious suggested that you might be willing to handle a “Letters” column for us. People would submit their questions to the Journal, and you’d answer them for us. Any chance you’d be interested?

Best,

George V Neville-Neil

FreeBSD Foundation President

Hi George,

This is a terrible idea. It’s just awful. This is the Internet age. Nobody reads letters columns, advice columns, or anything like that. We have Stack Exchange, and all kinds of places for people to beg for advice.

FreeBSD has a whole bunch of places where users can go to get specific help. Help ships with the system, in the man pages. Where a bunch of Unix-like operating systems made this absurd decision to bundle manual pages separately, FreeBSD ships with the manual. Actually, you can’t not install the manual. You could build a FreeBSD that doesn’t include the manual, of course, but to do that means reading a whole bunch of man pages.

People say that the manual isn’t a tutorial, and they’re right. That’s why FreeBSD has the Handbook and a whole bunch of articles. Unlike the man pages, you can choose to not install those on a FreeBSD host. You can browse all of the documentation online at https://docs.freebsd.org, though.

New users can start with the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file, which contains literally dozens of questions and answers. It goes into everything from hardware compatibility to ZFS, and while some of the gags in “The FreeBSD Funnies” have aged dreadfully—nothing scratches in memory banks these days, they fixed that bug back in 1996—the rest of the document is rock-solid. Looking at it now, I realize just how useful it is to new users. I still remember that feeling of enlightenment when I understood why du(1) and df(1) give different answers for disk space usage. Setting aside an hour to read the FAQ will give new users that enlightened feeling over and over again.

Then there’s the Handbook. It’s broken up by tasks. If a user’s question has a little more depth than what’s in the FAQ, the Handbook is there for you. Some of the material orients the reader, and is well worth reading so that new FreeBSD administrators understand why there’s so much in /usr/local when everybody else just dumps everything in /etc and /bin.

Plus there’s all sorts of FreeBSD-related sites these days. Even my blog has some FreeBSD tutorials on it.

If anyone did write in for help, it would be because they didn’t use these resources.

==ml

Michael,

Not necessarily. People do have problems that aren’t yet documented. We really think a letters column could be useful addition to the Journal, and that you’re the right person to write it.

Best,

George

George,

Okay, let’s talk about the those folks who have issues that truly aren’t in the Handbook.

Back when I started with FreeBSD, you got help via the FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org mailing list. And it’s still around today. The people on that list want to answer questions. They subscribe specifically so they can help people with their issues. Those brave people volunteer their time to answer user questions. What can I do that those heroes can’t?

For those young punks who’ve forgotten how email works, there’s a FreeBSD forum at https://forums.freebsd.org. Unlike the mailing list, the forums are broken up by category. Users can delve into detailed discussions of installation, storage, hardware, packages, or whatever. Whenever I look at the forums, I find interesting discussions.

There’s a quarter century of problem-solving in the mailing list archives. What can I say that hasn’t been said many times over?

These channels are really suitable for issues with particular hardware. The Handbook and FAQ are permanent fixtures in the FreeBSD ecosystem—they’ve been around for decades. But if some chipset in your brand-new knock-off laptop is causing you grief, you can search the mailing list or the forum to see if anyone else has that same issue with that hardware.

Users who can’t be bothered to DuckDuckGo the mailing list archives or search the forums certainly aren’t going to bother composing a coherent letter to me.

==ml

Michael,

Seriously, there’s people out there who have problems that aren’t in the Forums or mailing list archives yet. You really could help them. When they see how helpful you are, it might even encourage them to buy your books.

Best,

George

Dang it, George, you just don’t give up, do you?

Okay, fine. Let’s walk this through.

A user has a problem. A truly unique problem, that doesn’t appear anywhere in the mailing list archives, the forums. The only reference on the Internet to a problem even vaguely like this is on a darknet site and in Siberian. They’re sincerely and honestly in trouble.

Before anyone could help this user, they’d need to describe their problem in a useful way. This means they’d have to send a complete description of the problem. Most people who compose a request for help can’t be bothered to give the output of “uname -a” and a copy of dmesg.boot. They can’t trouble themselves by giving actual error output or the contents of /var/log/messages. Or they “helpfully” strip out stuff they think is irrelevant, like the messages saying “PHP is dumping core” that appear all through their web server logs.

And that’s another thing. People want help with stuff that has no relevance to FreeBSD. They know it has nothing to do with FreeBSD. And yet they send a message to a FreeBSD mailing list? I mean, that’s just rude.

And speaking of rudeness—would it hurt people to be polite when they ask for help? Anyone on the mailing list or the forum who takes time to help a user is volunteering their own time. They have better things to do than to put up with your tantrum. I mean, I get that computers can really torque people off. I myself have more than once stood on a rooftop and screamed foul obscenities at the buffer cache—who hasn’t? But there’s no need to take that out on someone who’s trying to help you.

Most often, the mere act of writing the problem description is enough to make my own brain to solve the problem.

And nothing short of high voltage would encourage people to buy my books.

So, no. Let users with trouble go to the mailing lists or the Forums. I have enough to do.

==ml

Michael,

We’ll only send good letters. I promise.

Best,

George

No. No, no, no.

NO.

Do you have any idea how many books I still have to write in my lifetime?

Ain’t gonna. Can’t make me.

==ml

We’ll pay you in gelato.

George

George,

Curse you. I’m in.

But tell Kode Vicious that if he drops my name again, he’s going home in a bucket.

==ml

Questions?

Contact letters@freebsdjournal.org. Letters will be answers in the order that they enlighten or amuse the columnist.

Michael W Lucas has been a sysadmin for over twenty years. His latest books include “SSH Mastery, 2nd edition,” “Ed Mastery,” the third edition of “Absolute FreeBSD,” and “git commit murder.” Learn more at https://mwl.io.


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MWL’s 2018 Wrap-Up

I set some ambitious goals for 2018. How did I do?

There’s a few reasons why. A relative fell off a roof and suffered a traumatic brain injury. I’m the family member that won’t get fired for not showing up to work, so I handled a bunch of it. There’s something about arguing with hospitals and rehab clinics that totally saps one’s mental energy. I lost a few months of productivity.

I figured that was why I was tired and slow. But: no.

Enter HP Lumpcraft, also known as “the abomination formerly known as the right half of my thyroid.” The surgeon did a fine job. It looks like I won’t even need a zipper tat to cover up the scar.

Theoretically, a slowly escalating thyroid debacle explains last year’s anemia.

With HPL out, I’m feeling better than I have in a long time. Sadly, my cardio is utterly shot. I haven’t only been forbidden to exercise for the last few months, I’ve been forbidden to do anything that made me sweat. Apparently a “thyroid storm” could stop my heart. That sounded bad. I chose to become one with the recliner.

The upshot is, in 2018 I wrote 51,000 words of nonfiction. They appeared in:

FreeBSD Mastery: Jails was delayed by the aforementioned TBI and thyroid. It’s about half done.

On a more upbeat note: SSH Mastery and Relayd and Httpd Mastery are available in hardcover. And to my surprise, you people are buying them. All future tech books and novels will appear in both hardcover and paperback.

I wrote 121,800 words of fiction. That should be at least a novel, but unfortunately I didn’t finish any novels. Finishing a novel demands a mental clarity I lacked. All my the fiction that actually entered the world was:

Winner Breaks All will be issued as a standalone in 2019, as soon as I get the rights back. When I get the rights back to SttH, it’ll go to my Patronizers but not to the general public. Giving SttH a cover that matches the Immortal Clay tales is prohibitively expensive, and short stories don’t make that much.

Here’s a partial pic, minus Face Less and BSQ #4. I’ll post a true final 2018 pic once my copies of both arrive.

2018 in print

So what does 2019 hold?

I am assuming that the thyroid lobectomy fixed my root cause problem. It’s a hopeful assumption, yes, but I can’t plan based on the idea that my health is still mysteriously fubar. The only evidence I have for this is that my word-per-hour productivity more than twice what it was before surgery. That’s the only indicator that matters, right?

First, I must exercise. A healthy writer is a productive writer. I gained a good twenty-five pounds this year, and blame HPL for every one of them. My double chin is his fault. Losing weight is straightforward: eat well, and exercise. The latter is where I’ve fallen down.

I’m working back up to an hour of forms first thing in the morning, five days a week, plus 2-3 nights at the dojo. I started today with ten minutes, and plan to add a minute a day. Yes, that’ll stagger back and forth as my body demands. I turn 52 this year, I can’t charge full speed ahead any more.

My flexibility is gone. You are as young as you are flexible, and my physical inability to kick people in the head really wounds my soul. After each bout of exercise I’m spending fifteen minutes on the stretching machine. For the record, this morning I hit 49″ between my ankles, or not even a right angle. This measurement is personal to me and this particular stretching machine, but the only person I’m competing with is me, so it’s all good.

I still have the standing desk. I’ve been using a stool most of the time since September, but standing full-time is the goal.

The last health goal is to master a split keyboard. Should make my shoulders happier. The Kinesis Advantage2 made my wrists happy, but rather than the Kinesis split keyboard I decided to try a Keyboard.io because the connector cable is a standard cat5. The Kinesis split keyboard has a built-in cable that maxes out at twenty inches, which is too limiting for my eventual use plan. (As I work at a standing desk, I’m pondering strapping a keyboard to each thigh and truly relaxing as I write.) I’m already pretty well adapted to the keyboardio, except for the all-important arrow keys. My most frequent key combination, CTRL-SHIFT-arrow, is kind of annoying on this critter.

I’m breaking up my word goals a little differently this year. Last year I wanted to write 600,000 words. This year, I want to write 50,000 words a month, or… 600,000 words in the year. Only words meant for inclusion in books and magazines count towards the 50kwpm goal. This blog post doesn’t. Book announcements don’t.

Why do it this way? A yearly goal is difficult. You can’t get to December and go “oh crap, I’m 200k words behind!” and make it all up. With a monthly goal of 50,000 I can get to January 25th, say “Oh, crap, I’m 20,000 words behind!” and make it up in a couple of long-but-not-impossible days. I’ve written 18,500 words in one day when I really needed to. (No, I won’t tell you which words they were… but you lot bought them, read them, and told me you enjoyed them.)

That’s 2-3 hours a day, six days a week. It leaves time for tech research, experimenting, and testing, plus the annoying minutia of being self-employed. (Sometimes, owning the means of production kind of sucks.)

Also, if I fail one month, next month is a clean slate. I want to set goals I can achieve. Psychologically, it’s better for me to say “I met my goal ten months out of twelve” than “I failed my 2019 goal.”

So, there we are.

What books will those 50,000 words per month be? FreeBSD Mastery: Jails for sure. Probably second editions of N4SA and Sudo Mastery, because of stupid publishing industry reasons. But I honestly have new content for both, so that’s okay. Finish novels I started, like git sync murder and Terrapin Sky Tango.

After that? You’ll know when I know…

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Cutting My Throat at Last

So many people over the decades have volunteered to slash my neck for free, but I’ve decided to have a professional do it.

My long-time stalkers followers have probably noticed my declining output. In 2016 I released six big books. Last year, two. This year, I’m pushing hard to get three, and I probably won’t succeed.

I’ve been plagued by weird, seemingly unrelated health problems. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but the real problem is that my writing speed hasn’t been where it needs to be.

I’ve been going to quite a few doctors trying to figure out the root problem. Thought it was anemia. Got that patched over, sort of, but there’s other symptoms. Also, what caused the anemia?

On 10 December, they’re cutting me open to yank out the right side of my thyroid and the accompanying 22-centimeter cyst. At least, that’s the plan. The surgeon might open me up and realize that the whole thing has to go, as some problems aren’t visible until you lay eyes on them. MRIs and ultrasounds are miraculous, but nothing replaces the squishy cameras mounted at the front of your head.

Part of me hopes they take it all. It’s hard to say how long the thyroid’s been bad; “constantly feeling vaguely unwell” is a common side effect of a career in systems administration. The thyroid is your master gland and controls your whole body. It’s also a tricky bugger to diagnose, at least until it starts swelling.

I don’t know that my thyroid is the true root cause, but the list of standard thyroid symptoms includes most all of my non-personality problems.

What will happen next? Dunno. Maybe I’ll come out just fine. Maybe I’ll need hormone replacement therapy. The more extensive the surgery, the longer it’ll take to recover–perhaps as long as three months. If they take half, there’s a 30% chance they’ll go back a couple weeks later and take the other half. I do know that this is a common surgery (except for the whole twenty-two centimeter thing), and that it’s completely routine for everyone but me.

So, I’m doing the following.

  • All public appearances are canceled until further notice. I’ll still be at semibug, but I’m not talking at any more user groups or cons until I’m well. I’m not even doing any more bookstore readings. The people involved already know.
  • I’m not accepting any invitations for conferences until this is resolved. I usually get a flurry of invites at year end, but I’m deferring decisions until I’m stable.
  • Even if I come through this perfectly I’m planning to stay home afterwords, put my head down, and write some damn books. That’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted as a career. I’m ridiculously lucky in that people will buy almost anything I write. If I want to keep this career, I have to produce.

So, chances are I’ll turn down your con invite anyway. But hopefully it won’t be because I don’t feel well enough to travel; it’ll be because I feel finally healthy enough to disgorge the millions of words trapped in my brainstem.

I’m also looking forward to being able to routinely turn my head to the right without blacking myself out. That’ll be nice.

Also, if this leaves a big scar? Two words: zipper tattoo!

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Auction Winners

The auctions are over. (They ended late Saturday, but I spent Sunday traveling and couldn’t get the post up.)

The OpenBSD auction went to Jared for $1000, crushing poor Cybermonk.

Cybermonk did triumph in the FreeBSD auction, however, with a top bid of $325.

Congrats to the winners! Send me the receipts for your donations to the respective Foundations and your mailing address, and I’ll get your books to you. (Technically, Ayaka will be mailing the OpenBSD book; she’s taking it for a couple more signatures this week.)

My condolences to those who lost the auctions. Remember, you can still donate and get that warm feel-good dopamine from being a good person.

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Ugly Pics of AF3e auction signatures

The auction of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition signed by the FreeBSD devs attending MeetBSD is underway.

Gathering the signatures is also underway.

Here are some cruddy pictures taken with my cellphone while sitting in the devsummit audience.

A similar auction for my last OpenBSD book raised $1145. Consider this a challenge to the FreeBSD community.

The overwhelming theme of the commentary seems to be “apologies,” which is slightly worrisome but the cluster admins say “everything is fine” so I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.