I recently signed up for BlueSky. I just learned of a new service, EchoFeed, that polls RSS feeds and posts the content to BlueSky (and elsewhere). So, this is a test.

Will it post to BlueSky? Will fed.brid.gy mirror it to Mastodon? The suspense is killing me!

This page documents my experience with "pressure washing" my vinyl fence and siding. I have pressure washing in quotes, because it's SH or sodium hypochlorite (or bleach) that does the bulk of the work. Pros often call this "soft washing".

For vinyl fence soft washing, you want around 1-2% SH. Most household bleach is 6% SH, so if you mix 1 part bleach with 5 parts water, you'll get around 1% SH.

You also want to use a surfectant to help the mixture stick to the fence. I used Dawn Ultra. Some people claim that some dish soaps will cause a bad reaction with the bleach, ranging from "mustard gas" to neutralizing the bleach.

I personally found that at 1-1.5% SH, the mixture was safe to use around grass. I wet the grass before and after applying the mixture, and I didn't see any damage.

Supplies

• 1 Gallon Pump Sprayer
• Measuring cup
• Dawn Ultra
• Whatever 6% bleach you can find

Recipe

1. Add 3 cups of 6% SH bleach
2. Add 0.8 gallons of water
3. Add 2 fl. oz. of Dawn Ultra

Make sure to put the soap in last, or your mixture will foam up and overflow the sprayer when you try to close it.

Spray the mixture on the fence, let it sit for about five minutes, and then rinse it off. You can use a garden hose, but I personally found that using a Ryobi One+ EZ-Clean worked better. I'm sure a pressure washer would have been even faster, but it is less convenient to use.

That's about it. This removed most of the staining.

For some areas that had large amounts of growth, I used a Ryobi Scrubber to physically remove it before spraying.

The bleach was not able to remove all stain spots. For those remaining spots that were in conspicuous places, I used a magic eraser / melanine sponge.

At some point, I hope to create a Notes section on my website that will turn Markdown files into a list of notes. This is basically how the blog works. But, I'm kind of busy. And since Gatsby seems like it's dead, I'm not sure that I want to invest a whole lot of time into it. (Although putting the notes in markdown seems like a good idea for compatibility.)

Anyway, here is my first very short note on Profiling.

SpeedScope

SpeedScope is an awesome tool for visualizing profiler output. It has a flame graph view that is wonderful. I also like to use the Sandwich view, sorting by total time and simply looking for the first function that I recognize. This is often the culprit.

The documentation is pretty good. It also shows how to record profiles in compatible formats for most platforms. I mostly use py-spy and perf.

Java

The one notably missing platform is Java! Luckily, it's not too hard to convert Java's async-profiler output to a format that SpeedScope can read. Here's how I do it:

• Download async-profiler
• Create an output file in collapsed format
• You can do this in several ways, such as:
• ./asprof start -i 1s Ghidra followed by ./asprof stop -o collapsed -f /tmp/out.prof.collapsed Ghidra
• ./asprof collect -d 60 -o collapsed -f /tmp/out.prof.collapsed Ghidra
• Then open out.prof.collapsed in SpeedScope.

The collapsed format takes a while to parse, so it might be worth it to export the native SpeedScope format.

Fostering

My wife and I started fostering rescue dogs mostly by accident. We adopted a Shih-tzu mix, who seemed completely relaxed when we met her at the rescue. When we got home, we eventually figured out that she was terrified, and freezing was her coping mechanism. Once she got a little more comfortable, she started hiding from us in the house. It took many months, but Molly eventually warmed up to us and we gained her trust.

For as frustrating an experience it is to have a dog be absolutely terrified of you for no reason, it was also incredibly rewarding to see her come out of her shell. We decided that we wanted to help other dogs in similar situations, so we started fostering. It's been several years, and we've fostered dozens of dogs. For a long time, we fostered for A Tail to Tell, which unfortunately recently closed. More recently, we have been fostering for Lucky Dawg Animal Rescue.

Blanche

This week, however, we had a "first", and not a good one. We picked up a new foster dog, Blanche, on Sunday. We have a nice fenced in yard, and we immediately took Blanche out back into the yard. She was very skittish, and we gave her some space. She immediately dove into a row of large evergreen trees in our yard and hid. Eventually, I had to go in and carry her out, which was not a simple task given the size of the trees.

The next morning, I let Blanche out and saw her run into the same trees. It was very hot, and after about an hour, I started to grow concerned and went out to look for her. She was not in the same tree as last time, but I figured she was hiding in another one. There are several trees, and it is fairly difficult to see into them. I started exhaustively searching the trees, and I couldn't find her. I also found a part of our fence that was slightly pushed out, as if something had forced its way out. She had escaped.

The Search: Monday (Day One)

My wife and I were very upset, but we shifted into action. We reported Blanche as missing on PawBoost, our community Facebook page, called the local police department, and notified our rescue, Lucky Dawg Animal Rescue. We quickly began receiving sighting reports of Blanche. She was initially seen at approximately 10am in a wooded area next to a busy road. I went to the area and searched for her while my daughter and wife started talking to neighbors and handing out flyers. I saw no sign of her in the wooded area.

We spent the rest of the day trying to put up posters on telephone poles, which is harder than it seems! Tape doesn't adhere very well to dirty telephone poles. The trick is to tape all the way around the pole so that the tape sticks to itself.

We received another sighting report at 5pm, this time on the other side of the busy road. The report was of a dog "playing/fighting" with a chicken. Fortunately, I knew which house this was at from the description. Around the same time, two members of our rescue arrived to help. We went to the house and I talked to the owner, who revealed that Blanche had attacked her chicken. She chased Blanche off, and Blanche ran into the woods. While I was talking to the owner, our rescue members saw Blanche in a large field nearby. Blanche spotted them, and ran into a wooded area near a creek. I was able to reach the other side of the wooded area, but the experts decided that it would be better to leave a food station for Blanche so she stayed in the area rather than try to chase her.

The Search: Tuesday (Day Two)

The next morning we received a few sightings of Blanche near our neighborhood again. More surprisingly, my wife left our fence gate open and saw Blanche sniffing around the fence around 8 am. Unfortunately, Blanche ran off. It was very hot, and Blanche presumably slept during the day.

That evening, the rescue returned and put out a trap with lots of food, and a remote camera to monitor it. We cranked up the volume on my phone so that every time the camera detected movement, we would wake up. We were woken up several times, but it was mostly false positives. At 1:59am, a cat wandered by. At some point, the cat triggered the cat, and at 2:28am we were greeted by a picture of Blanche studying the cat in the trap.

I snuck outside, and saw Blanche eating food about 10 feet away from me. It was frustrating to be so close but not be able to do anything. But our rescue members told us that it was safer to make her feel safe and comfortable with the trap. She clearly enjoyed the food that we had put out for her. She would be back.

After Blanche finished eating, we freed the cat from the trap and added more food, but we didn't see Blanche again that night. Stupid cat!

The Search: Wednesday (Day Three)

The next morning, Blanche was sighted in many of the same places, including near our house. Unfortunately, she was also seen crossing the road again. We were worried that a car would hit her. She slept during the day again. In the evening, there was heavy rain, and we decided to wait until after the rain to put the trap out. Naturally, Blanche showed up during the rain, and we missed an opportunity to catch her. Fortunately my wife had put out a couple pieces of food, so she didn't leave empty handed.

We armed the trap again and waited. She came back around 9:43pm and began investigating the trap. She was very cautious, and decided to yank out the towel on the bottom of the trap. She stayed for a very long time, as we waited in suspense for her to trigger the trap. Eventually she entered the trap, but it didn't trigger for some reason. It was frustrating, but not the end of the world. She would begin to think the trap was a safe source of food.

Blanche stayed around for a long while, but eventually left. We examined the trap. When she yanked the towel, it actually disarmed the trap without activating it. We fixed the trap and waited again, hoping she would be back later that night.

At 2:05am, she came back and began to investigate the trap again. We waited for what seemed like forever. At 2:15am, we received this picture of her deep in the trap.

The camera we were using would take a burst of three pictures every time it detected motion. After that picture, we didn't receive any more pictures. This could mean that she was in the trap, or that the trap had not triggered and she had left. We waited for a while, and then snuck outside to check. We had caught her! We carried the trap inside and put her back into her exercise pen, and finally got some sleep.

The Aftermath

Blanche is not very happy to be back inside, but she ate, drank, and is safe. She hasn't been very lively yet, but this is not uncommon with mill rescue dogs, who often need a few days before they start to interact and show personality. Hopefully she'll quickly realize that we're not so bad, and that she is safe and sound in our house.

We have a long list of interesting stories from our years fostering rescue dogs, but this was certainly one of the more interesting and stressful ones. On the positive side, we met a lot of our neighbors, and we were pleasantly surprised by how helpful and supportive they were, without exception. Many people wanted to help in whatever way they could. We really live in a cool little community.

In my last post I talked about how I have been using Ansible for my new laptop configuration, and shared my configuration for notion.

So far, I've been extremely happy with using Ansible for configuring my machine. Prior to using Ansible, I'd spend a fair amount of time creating detailed notes that described what I did. I estimate that creating Ansible recipes takes about the same time as keeping good notes, and maybe even less. That's because there are many existing roles for common settings and software that can be reused. As with any ecosystem, the quality of such roles varies.

The big difference between my notes and Ansible, though, is that Ansible playbooks can be played in minutes, whilst manually following my notes can take hours to set up an entire new machine. I used to dread the idea of configuring a new machine. But now it's fairly effortless.

I just publicly shared my Ansible configuration. I don't expect that anyone will use my configuration as is, any more than I expect anyone to use my notion configuration! I'm extremely opinionated and picky. But I do hope that it might give people some ideas, like how to install llvm, nvidia drivers and so on. I know I personally found other people's repositories to be helpful.

In a very similar vein, I've started using dorothy, which claims to allow you to "... bring your dotfile commands and configuration to any shell." Since I usually but not always use fish, I've always been hesistant to write my own commands in fish. Plus, I have been writing bash scripts for long enough that I'm decent at it, so it tends to be one of my go-tos. Dorothy makes it easy to define variables and commands in such a way that they magically appear in all shells. (Again, this is very useful for fish, which is not a posix-compliant shell.) There's also a fair number of useful built-in commands. Dorothy encourages users to split their dotfiles into public and private portions, and you can view my public dotfile here. Specifically, here are my custom commands. Some of these might be useful, such as setup-util-ghidra and setup-util-ghidrathon. I've found that having a designated spot for these types of utility commands encourages me to write them, which ultimately saves me time. Usually.

Sometime while I was in graduate school, I started using the notion window manager. (Actually, at the time, I think it was ion3.) Notion is a tiling window manager that is geared towards keyboard usage instead of mouse usage. But let's be honest: I've been using notion for so long that I simply prefer it over anything else.

Notion, like most minor window managers, is a bit spartan. It does not provide a desktop environment. It really just manages windows. There are some features of a desktop environment that I don't need, such as a launcher. I know all the commands that I use; I don't need a GUI to list them for me. But it's often the little things that get you, such as locking the screen, or using the media keys on your keyboard to adjust the volume. I used to be (more of) a hardcore nerd and relished in my ability to craft a super-complex .xsessionrc file with all kinds of bells, whistles and utilities connected as if with duct tape. But as I grow older, sometimes I just want my computer to work.

For a long while now, I've found that running notion alongside GNOME for "desktop stuff" to work pretty well. For a long time, I followed an old Wiki post about how to combine GNOME with Awesome WM. This worked really welll with GNOME 2.

Many people say that you can't use GNOME 3 with window managers other than GNOME Shell. I've actually had pretty good luck copying the Ubuntu gnome-session and replacing Gnome Shell with notion. The above Awesome WM Wiki also shows how to do it. Unfortunately, I've found that some features do not work, such as the keyboard media keys, much to my dismay. Do media keys matter that much? Yes, yes, they do. This apparently broke when GNOME Shell started binding the media keys instead of gnome-settings-daemon. There used to be a gnome-fallback-media-keys-helper utility around that would simulate this behavior, but it seems to have disappeared.

As I was trying to fix this problem, I came across a blog post and an unrelated but similar github repo both describing how to use the i3 window manager with GNOME. TLDR: GNOME Flashback is a still supported variant of GNOME that is explicitly designed to support third-party window managers. Whereas GNOME Shell incorporates both the window manager and other stuff such as handling media keys, GNOME Flashback has the "other stuff" in a separate component that is designed to be used with a window manager such as metacity. But it works just fine with notion! Best of all, both my media keys and screen locking work. Hurray!

Because I hate setting up stuff like this, I've actually been hard at work packaging up my Linux computer configuration into reusable ansible components. It takes a little longer than doing it manually of course, but it's not too bad and it's pretty easy to read. I'm making my notion role available here in case anyone wants to try out my setup. Most of the logic is here if you are curious what is involved. Below are a few snippets to show how Ansible makes it relatively easy to manipulate configuration files.

# Same thing, but for gnome-flashback

- name: Copy gnome-flashback-metacity.session to notion-gnome-flashback.session
  copy:
    src: /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gnome-flashback-metacity.session
    dest: /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/notion-gnome-flashback.session

- name: 'notion-gnome-flashback.session: Change metacity to notion and add stalonetray'
  replace:
    path: /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/notion-gnome-flashback.session
    regexp: 'metacity'
    replace: notion;stalonetray

- name: 'notion-gnome-flashback.session: Remove gnome-panel'
  replace:
    path: /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/notion-gnome-flashback.session
    regexp: ';gnome-panel'

- name: Symlink systemd target for notion-gnome-flashback session to gnome-flashback-metacity session
  file:
    src: /usr/lib/systemd/user/gnome-session@gnome-flashback-metacity.target.d
    dest: /usr/lib/systemd/user/gnome-session@notion-gnome-flashback.target.d
    state: link

- name: Install gconf override for notion-gnome-flashback
  copy:
    src: notion-gnome-flashback.gschema.override
    dest: /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/01_notion-gnome-flashback.gschema.override
  notify: Compile glib schemas

- name: Set META
  lineinfile:
    path: /usr/local/etc/notion/cfg_notion.lua
    regexp: '^--META='
    line: META="Mod4+"
    backup: true
- name: Set ALTMETA
  lineinfile:
    path: /usr/local/etc/notion/cfg_notion.lua
    regexp: '^--ALTMETA='
    line: ALTMETA="Mod1+"
    backup: true
- name: Disable mod_dock
  lineinfile:
    path: /usr/local/etc/notion/cfg_defaults.lua
    state: absent
    line: 'dopath("mod_dock")'
    backup: true
- name: Enable mod_statusbar
  lineinfile:
    path: /usr/local/etc/notion/cfg_notion.lua
    regexp: '^--dopath("mod_statusbar")'
    line: 'dopath("mod_statusbar")'
    backup: true

I'm a serial car leaser. This December, when my old lease was running out, there were not a lot of very appealing lease deals. Some of the best deals were on electric vehicles (EVs). The US offers a tax credit on some EVs for $7500. To qualify, the vehicles must be assembled in North America. But some EV manufacturers that do not meet this requirement are offering a similar rebate out of their own pocket to avoid losing customers to their competitors who do qualify. In short, because many EVs come with a 7500 dollar rebate, either from a tax credit or otherwise, EVs were some of the best deals that I could find.

Naturally, the benefit to the environment was another selling point as well!

I ended up leasing a Hyundai Ioniq 6. It's a very slick car, and there are many aspects of it that I like that are not EV specific. But I'm not going to talk about those here. This post is about my initial thoughts on owning an EV.

EVs Are Fun to Drive

I knew that EVs could produce a great deal of Torque, but I didn't realize how much that impacted the driving experience. The Ioniq 6 can accelerate way faster than I ever need it to. This is useful for merging onto highways and such, but it's also just a lot of fun. I've owned cars with powerful motors, but the instant torque of an EV is a different experience. It's hard to imagine going back to driving a non-EV at this point.

EVs Are Quiet

The only noise that the Ioniq 6's engine makes is a whine that lets pedestrians know the car is nearby. When you turn on the car, the engine makes no noise. None. No ignition sound, no idling; nothing.

Charging At Home Is Nice

The Ioniq 6 includes a "level 1" charger that plugs into a standard 120V outlet. It's pretty slow; it takes about 48 hours to completely charge the battery from empty. But it's probably sufficient for most people's needs. I did have a problem one day when I didn't have enough time to fully charge the car at home before embarking on a long trip, so I had to stop at a charging station. But we'll talk about that in a bit.

Hyundai has a promotion where they will install a "level 2" charger for you, so I now have a "level 2" charger that charges the battery in a few hours.

My car's range is about 200 miles (we'll get to that in a bit), so unless I'm going on a long trip, I can easily charge my car at home. This is super convenient. I never have to go to a gas station. Every time I get in my car at home, it's fully charged and ready to go.

Public Charging Is Not As Convenient As Gas Stations

My car's range is about 200 miles, so for long trips, I need to stop and charge on the way. There are more public chargers than I thought, but they are not as common as gas stations, and they have different speeds. There are extremely fast, DC chargers that can charge a car in minutes, but they are not as common as the slower, level 2 chargers. In theory, my car can be charged in less than 20 minutes. But in practice, I have yet to experience that. Charging speed is greatly effected by temperature, and I have never experienced anything close to that optimal charging speed. The Ioniq 6 has a preconditioning system that is supposed to prepare the battery for high-speed charging by warming it up, but all I can say is that it hasn't worked well for me, and all of my public charging experiences have been significantly longer than 20 minutes.

The longest trip I have taken with my EV has been to Pittsburgh. This trip is largely on the PA turnpike. There are no chargers on the turnpike itself, but there are several DC charging stations a few minutes drive off the turnpike.

When you combine the time it takes to leave the turnpike, and the longer time it takes to charge an EV versus fill the gas tank, the bottom line is that long trips will take longer in an EV. On my first trip, I expected my car to charge in 20 minutes as advertised, and for the trip to take only slightly longer than usual. But it ended up taking me over an hour longer, which was upsetting.

You may have also seen various stories about charger stations having long lines during cold weather. This is a real problem, and it contributes to the unpredictability of long trips in an EV. It should get better over time as charging infrastructure becomes more adequate.

Range Anxiety

There are so many gas stations that in a internal combustion engine (ICE) car, having an exact range to empty is not that important. But because chargers are less prolific, you would think that all EVs would be able to tell you a fairly accurate estimate until empty. Well, that's simply not the case for the Ioniq 6. Battery performance is greatly effected by temperature, and the car's range drops significantly in cold weather. You would hope that the car, or the car's manual, would provide accurate guidance on how far it can go in various conditions. But they do not. Instead, you need to rely on personal experience or external guidance such as these tests from consumer reports.

I think that car manufacturers are shooting themselves in the foot here by not being more transparent. If you are going to advertise that your car has a 270 mile range, then it should have a 270 mile range in all conditions. If it doesn't, then you should be open about that. I think that the lack of transparency is going to make people less likely to buy EVs. The same principle applies to charging times. It's great if the car can charge in 20 minutes under ideal circumstances. But if you don't openly admit that it performs significantly worse in real-world conditions, then you are going to upset your customers.

I've read that Tesla cars can estimate their range very accurately. But I've been on long trips in which I've steadily watched the buffer between my car's remaining range and the distance to the closest charging station decrease in my Ioniq 6. It's not a good feeling at all, and from an engineering point, I think it's inexcusable.

Fuel Cost

Of course, one of the selling points of an EV is that you don't have to buy gas. You do have to pay for electricity, but it's significantly cheaper. Here's a comparison of how many miles I would get out of my Volvo S60 vs. my Hyundai Ioniq 6 for the cost of one gallon of gas. (The S60 actually takes 91+ fuel, so it would cost even more than the $3.95 listed.)

Conclusion

I'm very happy with my decision to lease an EV. I would do so again. But I think that manufacturers' decision to focus only on performance under ideal conditions is a mistake that will ultimately result in more people being leery of buying EVs. I know it has colored my experiences (negatively). My ultimate take away is this: If you are driving long distances in an EV, plan for your trip to take more time. We have a two car household, and I'm not sure that I would be ready to replace both with an EV at this point. But for everything but long trips, I think that EVs are the way to go.

I was playing around with ChatGPT and it came up with this gem:

In the thrilling world of ones and zeros, where the mere thought of assembly code sends shivers down the spines of mere mortals, there exists a unique breed of masochists—reverse engineers. Are you the kind of person who looks at a complex problem and thinks, "Why not make it harder?" If the idea of disassembling convoluted code into something even remotely understandable without any upfront instructions sounds like a fun Tuesday afternoon, then we have the perfect job for you.

Introducing the glamorous world of reverse engineering, where the nightmares of dealing with assembly code, hexadecimal hellscapes, and cryptic comments—or the lack thereof—don't just haunt you in your sleep; they're your 9 to 5. Ever wanted to spend hours, nay, days, unraveling the mysteries of code that was never meant to be understood, like an archeologist deciphering the Rosetta Stone, except what you're translating doesn't want to be translated? Congratulations, your masochistic tendencies can finally pay off.

In this role, you will dive headfirst into the abyss of other people's code, armed with nothing but your wits and perhaps an unhealthy dose of caffeine. You'll experience the unparalleled joy of finally understanding a function's purpose at 3 AM, only to realize it was a decoy. But fear not, for the fruits of your labor are many—aside from the occasional existential crisis. You'll gain the satisfaction of knowing you're outsmarting attempts to keep you out, one painstaking line at a time.

So, if you're someone who relishes the thought of your brain being tied into knots by assembly language, who finds the idea of decrypting software protections better than a crossword puzzle on a Sunday morning, and who sees a "No Trespassing" sign as a personal invitation, then the lucrative world of reverse engineering awaits. Where else can you get paid for indulging in your penchant for digital masochism? Join us, and turn your nightmares into your day job.

Ready to sign up? 🤣

I saw a quote in a recent ACM article that resonated with me:

Security must be a business enabler, not a hinderer.

The article is about product development, but the quote is applicable to IT security as well. Too often, IT departments forget what their purpose is, which is to support the mission of the organization. Security is a means to that end, not an end in itself. The goal of IT security is not to eliminate risk. The most secure computer is one that is not plugged in, but that doesn't really help us, does it? The goal of IT security is to manage risk so that the organization can achieve its mission. Unfortunately, it's significantly easier to just say "No, you can't do that because it would increase our risk" instead of "Let me fully understand why you need or want to do that, have a discussion about the security risks that will impose, and collaboratively make a decision that balances the risks and rewards for the organization."

I'm not saying that we should be cavalier about security. After all, I'm personally passionate about security. But we should be intentional about how and where we apply security when it impacts the mission, which is almost always!

I suspect a lot of people would be surprised at the (relatively low) level of security I employ personally. It's not that I'm lazy or incompetent. It's that I've made a conscious decision to accept certain risks in order to achieve certain rewards. For example, I don't bother trying to defend against nation state adversaries. I'm not a high value target. I don't have the resources (time) to defend against a nation state. I'd rather be nimble and flexible in my work capabilities, so I focus on the easy, low-hanging-fruit mitigations that will stop most (but not all) attackers.