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BSDCan 2025 Chair’s Entirely Personal Comments on the Con Mask Policy

Yes, we discussed this in the organizing committee. Nothing has changed since last year. And yes, some of the new covid treatments give hope for a better future.

Degreed scientists have performed large amounts of actual research. Their data shows over and over again, that masks work. Multiple sorts of studies have shown this.

YouTube is not science. Neither is Twitter, nor Substack, Facebook, any social media, blog, or influencer web page. Fox News certainly is not.

The BSD community has quite a few people with above-average respiratory risks. They include a few members of the BSDCan organizing committee. The world needs one conference they can safely attend. At BSDCan 2024, many attendees with marginal health personally thanked me for requiring masks so they could attend.

Are we serious? At BSDCan 2024 I told more than one person that if they wouldn’t wear a mask, we would remove them from the event. I expect I’ll have to do the same this year. If you are adamantly opposed to consistently wearing a mask, I suggest that you save me the trouble and choose another conference.

We also have people with hearing problems. I am investigating buying transparent N95 masks in bulk, either for just the speakers or for all attendees. Because people who need to read lips should also have their needs met.

All this falls under “I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people.”

69: Classic GM Cruise Control

My ears refuse to pop. Everything sounds flat. I hope this bit from the unnamed fiction WIP came out.

Every three years, Dad paid cash for a brand-new Chevy C/K pickup with all the features. AM/FM/cassette stereo, rip-resistant seats, and the classic GM cruise control that worked perfectly on straight dry roads. Even air conditioning, although using AC was for pansies. A truck birthed to haul sheets of plywood or a small fishing boat, except Dad had people to haul anything and the creek needed boots not boats. Dad didn’t allow anyone to eat or drink in his truck, but sometimes when he’d taken young Will out to the barrens to look for lizards and rocks they’d end the day with a trip to the drive-in for the slopburgers bigger than Will’s hands could hold, with ketchup and pickles and the thick tomato slices that slid out the back. Always right before trading the truck in, sure, but Will’s bones had burned with privilege and trust.

Being allowed to eat slopburgers in Dad’s shiny new truck is the highest of privileges.

68: Flying Crabs with Teeth

Today you get a snippet of the unnamed fiction WIP.

Here’s the problem: evolution doesn’t do what works. Evolution does random things. Some random things survive. Most do not. Entirely different branches of life tried making solar panels to absorb energy, and survived. Leaves “work.” Neighboring branches tried absorbing energy from stone, or wind, or indie rock, and died.

Raising the solar panels a little higher meant the creature survived better than those around it. Stalks “work.”

Raise enough of those solar panels, and you need a thick stalk. Call it a trunk. Boom. Evolution has yet again produced trees, or eyes, or caffeine. When humans reach civilized space they’ll discover flying crabs with teeth, because those things all “work.”

Study their ancestry and you’ll discover that oaks are strawberries. Mesquite is a pea. They diverged at the invention of the seed, and those branches of the family haven’t talked since. Two wholly separate things survived because they randomly wound up in similar shapes.

Is this a novel or a rant? I fear that’s not an “or” question.

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“Networking for System Administrators, 2nd edition” cover art

The inimitable Eddie Sharam has finished the cover painting for the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. It’s a parody of Giuseppe Zocchi’s Pietre Dure of Architettura. It’s a wraparound, but you can see a mockup of the front cover at the sponsorship page.

Eddie painted this. Like, on paper. With paint. The current plan is to include the painting as a Kickstarter reward level, much as we did with the cover for Run Your Own Mail Server.

At this moment, N4SA2e has 98 print sponsors. Two more sponsors and I have to do a challenge coin. If I have to do a coin, it’ll have the usual rat and bear the words NEVER MY FAULT/ALWAYS MY PROBLEM.

Mind you, my plan is that I will get exactly one more print sponsor and then y’all’ll stop backing it, so I don’t have to do any extra work.

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New Releases: Dear Abyss, The Last Hour of Hogswatch

It’s the end of the year, so I’m shoving a couple titles out the door at the last minute. Like you do.

First up we have Dear Abyss: the FreeBSD Journal Letters column, years 1-6. The ebook is on most platforms now, and print is leaking out.

For the folks who are into solstice holidays, my story The Last Hour of Hogswatch is now available standalone. It’s only in my bookstore; I don’t bother putting short stories on the big stores any more, or in print.

Happy holiday-of-your-choice, folks!

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November’s Neurypnological Sausage

[This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of November, and to the public at the beginning of December. Not a Patronizer? Sign up at https://patronizemwl.com. Okay, fine, technically, you don’t sign up there. You get to choose between my Patreon and my private patronage system. Still, you all get treated with the same confusion and astonishment. There’s no way these silly posts are worth $12/year, let alone what the daft folks like the infamous First Wildebeest send me. But here you are anyway.]

The important thing first: if you’re reading this on tiltedwindmillpress.com, and you want to receive announcements of new posts by email, you need to sign up again on the right-hand sidebar. I previously used Jetpack for emailed announcements, but the WordPress.com/WP Engine feud moved “ditch Jetpack” up to the top of my “annoying tech tasks” list. This is the last announcement that will go out via the old system.

Also: the RYOMS online launch party (a result of the Kickstarter campaign) will be held on 23 November 2024. There’ll be one session at 1500 UTC (10AM EST), and another at 2400 UTC (7PM EST). That’ll give the Europeans and the US West Coast reasonable sessions, and once again welcome the surprisingly robust contingent of Australian insomniacs. Mark your calendars.

I don’t have links yet, because this launch party will be different than previous ones. My last one was for Prohibition Orcs. That campaign had 197 backers, plus y’all. 26 folks attended. If I scale that up to RYOMS’ 1966 backers, that means I’ll have about 260 people. Even divided between two sessions, that’s a lot. My Zoom account can handle 100 attendees. I’m running a survey to see which backers wish to attend. If there’s anywhere near 100 per session I’ll need to beg, borrow, or steal videoconference facilities and probably suck someone into playing moderator.

Watching the rest of the RYOMS Kickstarter fallout is kind of mesmerizing.

My big experiment for this Kickstarter was dropshipping direct from printers. After the IOSS saga and resolving delivery problems, it comes out that I had about a 7% error rate. A few packages just… didn’t arrive. Some places, like South America, needed 45-60 days to deliver. Most problems fell into three categories:

  • EU shipments without phone numbers
  • Non-ASCII addresses
  • Canada

Each of these are mostly fixable, except for Canada. My loss rate for dropshipping to Canada was about 35%. It didn’t seem to matter if the recipient provided a phone number or not. Some packages took two weeks to arrive: others, six or eight weeks. I suspect Canada customs loathes international media mail and puts it at the bottom of the processing pile.

The current Kickstarter (Dear Abyss) does not offer dropship outside the EU, UK, and Australia. I need to figure out the failure patterns and what I can do about them before I dropship across national borders again.

I also launched sponsorships for the second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. I declared that if I got 100 print sponsors I’d do another sponsor-exclusive challenge coin. About a month in, and there’s 77 print sponsors. Many of them are first-time sponsors, lured in by the RYOMS Kickstarter. Just wow. Sucking people further down the Customer Acquisition Funnel works! And there’s a good chance I’ll have to follow through on the challenge coin.

Making new words has been difficult, what with the buildup to the most consequential US election in my lifetime. By the time this post hits the public we’ll know the outcome, but at the moment I’m hoping these posts don’t turn into “the difficulties of being a self-published writer building an entirely new legal infrastructure while living on a Digital Nomad visa and learning a new language.” At the time I write this, that’s a real possibility. Yes I’m a straight white middle-aged guy, but I’m also an insolent anti-authoritarian writer who throws around words like “neurypnological.” As soon as the list works through “women” and “queer folks” and “PoC” and down to Q-list celebrities, I’m on it. Creative work while carrying this sort of mental overhead is like losing half your RAM, and the human platform has incredibly poor paging and swapping performance.

If things go well, though, I’d like to crunch to finish Project IDGAF by the end of the month. It’s not a long book. All I need is time and spoons. I mean, I had time to write a Fediverse bot, so it should be perfectly doable. If. I’m amusing myself by imagining how I would market this ridiculous atrocity.

I am going through the N4SA manuscript, marking stuff to check and places to add stuff and discussions I need to have. Overlay networks like VPNs and MPLS are much more broadly used today than ten years ago. TLS, which was the main driver for this edition. Lots of little warts. It doesn’t matter how large a wart is, though; it’s still a wart and should be removed.

The nice thing is, I’m about out of inventory for Things I Need To Sell. I have an assortment of short fiction collections that are nearly ready. My Christmas collection needs a Prohibition Orcs short story, but I don’t want to launch that until next June so that’s okay. I have about 50,000 words of Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales, which is 1-2 stories short of a collection. There’s about 25,000 words of uncollected Prohibition Orcs, just short of half a collection. I could finish up any one of these but the truth is, I want to build up some inventory first. I want to do some damn writing.

So I’m going to try to do that now.

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My Social Media in 2024

I left Twitter right after Elon Musk bought it. After exploring many alternatives, I’ve settled in the fediverse (often called “Mastodon”) as my main social media channel. I also have a Bluesky account, but it’s decidedly secondary.

Why did I choose this? Isn’t Bluesky the Next Big Thing? Isn’t it “like Old Twitter but better”?

Bluesky sucks less than old Twitter did, yes. It has nice features, like subscribable community-maintained block lists. It’s still a business, though. They are not making money yet. Their plans to do so appear remote. Which means that somehow, I’m the product.

I’ve said this so often it’s turning into a Lucas Cliche, but: the Internet’s business model is betrayal. Every mature social media platform has betrayed us. Every big search engine has betrayed us. (Search Google for “the strike is the compromise”. Then ask yourself why they’d be hiding some of the most contentious bits of labor history. No, I’m not afraid that the Goog will deprioritize me. They already have. Google once sent me hundreds of blog each day. In the middle of the year, that fell off a cliff.)

Bluesky might be a public benefit corporation, but that only means they are allowed to consider public benefit as well as profits.

Is it possible that Bluesky will stand by their declared morals and not eventually sell us out? Yes. But I’ve watched Internet companies rise and fall for decades. I haven’t seen any company remain benign, and extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. I don’t want to invest ten years in a third party platform only to have it do a rug pull at the end of my career.

Until it can prove otherwise Bluesky is just another company, sowing another crop of victims.

Yes, I know you can’t prove a negative. I do not own that problem.

The fediverse is open. Any social network I build there is mine to grow or destroy. I control my experience, and can easily block alt-right/TERF/racist garbage at the server level. Does it grow more slowly? Yes. Does the fediverse lack a coherent user story? Also yes. The whole “by picking a server you’re picking the kind of moderation you want” aspect is critical, deeply confusing, and unadvertised.

Despite all that I’ve built a fedi following as large as I had on Twitter, and it supported me through the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter.

What about Threads, Instagram, or Facebook? Pffft. Meta is the poster child for betraying its users.

So: follow me on the fedi. Or on the RSS feed here. Or subscribe to my announcements-only mailing lists. Or, if you must, follow me on Bluesky.

67: Outmoded Oddities

Working on updating Networking for Systems Administrators. The gentle “yes you need IPv6” paragraph in the first edition is getting an update to something a little more… ranty.

Commercial operating systems now default to IPv6, falling back to IPv4 only if IPv6 is unavailable. New networks, especially phone networks, are often IPv6-only. Much of the southern hemisphere, much of Asia, and much of the human race? IPv6-only. Their IPv4 connectivity is a kludge of proxies, carrier-grade NAT, 464xlat, and a melange of workarounds that I’d call black magic if the Evil Wizards Union wouldn’t sue me for slander. These ramshackle measures require constant maintenance and adjustment. Such network operators are desperately maintaining their trickery until the day the majority of traffic uses IPv6 and they can dismiss IPv4-only sites as outmoded oddities.

When is that coming? We don’t know exactly, but Google reports that 45% of all their Internet traffic is IPv6.

My infrastructure is all IPv6, except for my home ISP, where I’ve chosen robust IPv4-only service over “dual stack with nine fives uptime.” But 13 more print sponsors on this book and I have to do another challenge coin.

66: It Means Nothing

Here’s a chunk from the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators.

Through your career, people have repeatedly blamed “the firewall.” The word firewall dates from the 1980s, when the concept of network-level access control was both exotic and bizarre. In the last fifty years, access controls have become broader and more complex. Some controls remained in the devices arbitrarily labeled “firewalls,” while others migrated to routers and switches and other devices. What does the word “firewall” mean today?

Like the words “computer” and “security,” it means nothing. Nothing.

Every layer of the network supports access controls. Any of these controls might trouble you. Proxies, network address translation (NAT, see Chapter 3) devices, packet filters (Chapter 5), protocol content filters, all of these can reasonably be called “firewalls.” Your network might have a device that gets called “the firewall,” but any organization’s network has multiple access controls.

The truth is, if I was willing to just slam out a chapter on TLS and X.509, and cut the stuff on 10/100 Ethernet, I’d have a first draft of this book by next week. But nooo, I have to be all stupid and ethical and painstakingly go through the entire book to be sure it’s the best, most up-to-date work I can create. You could support me by sponsoring the book. 16 more print sponsors and I do another challenge coin.