Goblin / is on Nostr

Keeper of the Goblin Church, and mostly just a weirdo academic-y type who is quite fond of OpenBSD, Lisp and drawing Pokémon with boobs for questionable reasons.

gopher://: goblin.church

Last Notes

2024-10-02 16:56:55

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The (open access) version of the paper is here, if anyone cares. Turns out OpenBSD gets a lot more use of its sandboxing mechanisms in its packages than other OSs (and maybe theres a reason for that…)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06447
(4/3)

2024-10-02 16:54:10

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The student has been running around with a massive grin on his face since. He even phoned his mum to boast proudly.
Contrast this with what happened when he found a small bug in Debian and the devs laughed at him.
I love #OpenBSD, but a random act of kindness by its devs like this, giving time and attention to a student is remarkable, and unheard of from any other project.
Dunno what it is but the BSDs are just friendly and I’m happy to be a user of such a friendly OS. Its just fab.
(3/3)

2024-10-02 16:42:20

Sometimes people ask me why I like #OpenBSD so much.
Over the weekend Theo de Raadt the founder of the whole project emailed me and my PhD student to say he liked our paper (and that it was 95% correct). We have never interacted with him before and the paper was published in a tiny workshop and on arXiv. He just stumbled on it.
(1/3)

2024-08-10 19:14:58

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didn’t have school dinner but remember walking past the kids that did and being jealous. Also the pale yellow pear in a sort of grey custard that looked awful but smelt so good.

2024-06-07 11:55:05

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they programmed up an interface to git in Inform 7 (which is an odd descendent of the languages used to make Zork) and then told a story about merging timelines using Git spells as a kinda teaching aid

2024-06-07 09:14:05

All my undergrad’s got firsts for their dissertations this year… even the weird ones making text adventures with Git. Super proud of them all 🥰