Went to a friends and carved some pumpkins last night, that means I didn't manage to do anything interesting yesterday. Weekends are when I make coffee , Sunday is filtering day which looks something like this:

I have to run out to meet someone for lunch, tonight I am going to have a play with Scapy. I think I will try to pull an image out of a http stream, that seems like a small enough task to be doable.

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Abaddon's' Gate

pic.twitter.com/DSD8e44xZJ

— Archillect (@archillect) October 29, 2016

This robot is excellent, you should follow it.

Reading: Abaddon's Gate

Maybe because there is an election on or maybe just because I wanted a use for my new stream 7 tablet thing, I read through all of Transmetropolitan . Transmet (as I am told the cool kids call it) is a Cyberpunk comic book series written by Warren Ellis, featuring a Gonzo journalist reporting on an Election from 'The City'.

I am a huge fan of Gonzo as written by Hunter S. Thompson, but Hunter is long dead and this has limited his journalistic output severely. So here I have a problem, I would be very happy to read more high quality pieces in the Gonzo style, but I have found finding such writing to be an absolute nightmare.

Here is a list of people I know writing great stuff:

• Barrett Brown has been writing from prison, his stay is nearly up, it seems they want to kick him out for some reason.

I might have to look harder.

Reading: ELEKTROGRAD

I couldn't finish Little Brother, it became too YA and it just annoyed me. I did read all of it when it came out so I am not that bothered.

I finished Hacktoberfest Last night !!!! Hacktoberfest is a month long hackathon thing run by DigitalOcean and github, in exchange for some open source Pull Requests DO will send you stickers and a tshirt. I tried to do this last year, but found it is really hard to do small commits against projects, I ended only managed 1 commit, but DO still sent me a sticker.

This year I was determined to manage the 4 commits required to get a tshirt, silly me I thought that working on an open source github hosted project for $work would make that easy. Instead I really struggled to manage the four PR's, I only got two via the work project, small commits are hard things to find.

For the other two pull requests I looked at open source software.

gpredict is a cross platform open source satellite tracker, I have used to for following amateur satellites. gpredict has always been super buggy for me, the current packaged build for FreeBSD dumped core when I tried to open the 'sat info screen'. Firing up gpredict with debug symbols and within in gdb made it really easy to find the use after free that was the culprit.

There were a pile of issues like this, I ran the build through llvm's scanbuild tool and it showed up a bunch of potential bugs. They too went into the PR for gpredict.

Last night an email came from DO stating there was still time to get the necessary PR's in. Dern, I had only manage three of the four pull requests so far.

Kaitai Struct is an awesome project for generating code from binary formats, it is a compiler, a visualizer and a declarative language. There is a set of example formats of images, games, media, compression and network packets. I noticed that UDP was missing from the network set and shamelessly added it .

Reading: Little Brother, Autumn 2600

Osmocom can do 3G voice! Look at this awesome article about the new support, it builds on this equally awesome article that gives a status update on the 3G stack. This is excellent news, as we move through LTE into whatever the 5G tech will be called, the open source community is starting to catch up with commercial hardware.

Look at those awesome diagrams:

                                +--------+
                             ,-->| MGCPGW |<--RTP--...
                            /    |        |
                            |    |        |<--MGCP
                            |    +--------+       \
                            /                     |
        +------------+<--RTP     +--------+       `->+----------+
 UE <-->| hNodeB     |           | HNB-GW |          | OsmoCSCN |
 UE <-->|            |<--Iuh---->|        |<--IuCS-->|          |
        |            |     ...-->|        |    ...-->|          |
        |            |           |        |          +----------+
        +------------+<--GTP-U   |        |
                              \  |        |          +------+           +------+
                              |  |        |<--IuPS-->| SGSN |<--GTP-C-->| GGSN |
                              |  +--------+    ...-->|      |   GTP-U-->|      |
                              |                      +------+  /        +------+
                              \_______________________________/

I mean, look at the awesome curved line:

            +--------+
         ,-->| MGCPGW |
        /    |        |
        |    |        |
        |    +--------+
        /
-+<--RTP

I cannot draw lines like that, I can draw lines like this:

               +--------+
               >        |
             -/|        |
            /  |        |
           /   +--------+
         -/     
   -----/

[DrawIT][2], the vim plugin I use for ascii boxes and lines just can't do those amazing curved lines. I bet it is a emacs plugin or something else I can't use making those awesome lines. Man am I jealous.

Reading: Little Brother, Seveneves