Vehicle Size Envelope
Trees that overhang roads give you some idea
of the size of the biggest vehicles that
drive along the road.
Information Camouflage
Recent content on Information Camouflage
Latest posts
Fortunes: Some Good and Some Bad
Three terrible and two good fortunes.
ssh on a Higher Port Keeps Out The Bots
I moved sshd from TCP port 22 to a higher port
2026-08-01T23:31Z.
I also put the
 endlessh 
tarpit on port 22.
 sshd has not seen a single password guessing attempt
since then.
The combination of ssh tarpit, and non-standard port works.
Semantic Line Breaks
Although I can’t find it on the sum total of human knowledge,
the World Wide Web,
I have a memory that one of the Enlightened Unix Masters,
Dennis Ritchie or Brian Kernighan maybe, wrote some tips about
how to format written input for the venerable troff 
typesetting system.
Find the Median as a Job Interview Question
I stumbled across a blog post about
finding the median of a list of numbers
as a job interview question .
Four Years
481 posts in 4 years. 
 Last year
You should be using Xterm
Back in the day, before about 1995,
if you wanted to use a terminal emulator,
you used xterm 
 That was 30 years ago.
Because you use Linux as I recommend,
I strongly encourage you to use xterm today.
It’s still the best terminal emulator.
Thing Based Programming
I have contemplated trolling software engineers by re-naming
“object oriented programming”,
and claiming I have made a major discovery,
Thing Based Programming.
Eschatian Hypothesis
You’ve heard of the Silurian Hypothesis ,
now get ready for the
Eschatian Hypothesis! 
 Eschatian Hypothesis 
David Kipping 
February 3, 2026 draft
Hidden Witches of Cornwall
Archaeology magazine, vol 61, no. 6, Nov/Dec 2008
has a cool article 
about UK witchcraft.
A FOR ANYTHING
A FOR ANYTHING 
Damon Knight 
© 1959 Zenith Books, Inc 
© 1965 Damon Knight
Neovim State Machine
Learning the State Machine Behind a Modal Text Editor: The (Neo)Vim Case Study 
Pierre Ganty 
 SPIN 2024 , 30th International Symposium on Model Checking Software,
10-11 April 2024, co-located with ETAPS 2024 in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg 
 PDF
Offensive Internet Posture
I do these things to make the VPS this blog runs on
less palatable for internet bottom feeders.
Tarpit effects on ssh scanner behavior circa 2020
I found endlessh ,
an SSH “tarpit” a while back.
This is an investigation I did in February of 2020 into its effectiveness.
Changed Linux Kernel
I have had the Arch Linux
 linux-hardened kernel installed on
my Qotom fanless server 
since I bought it a couple of years ago.
The Qotom has had kernel panics on the last two
 linux-hardened updates .
I changed to the plain linux kernel.
It was pretty easy, even though I had a case of the nerves about it.
On Bots
I came across a 20 year old project called On Bots .
I decided to use some of the concepts to create a new Scraper Junkyard .
Googlebot Impersonation
Internet Sage Chris Siebenmann wrote of a
 Plague of Googlebot Impersonation 
on his amazing Wandering Thoughts blog .
I decided to find out if I could detect such a plague in
this blog’s Apache log files.
Sandworm Lifecycle
One of my kids is excited for the release of Dune: Part Three .
We were talking about Dune , how the movies broke up the
enormous book, and got on the topic of “sandtrout”.
Downgrade Arch Linux Kernel
As is my habit, I ran pacman -Syu on my
 Qotom fanless server 
to get all the fresh Arch Linux software updates.
The update included a kernel, moving from “linux-hardened-7.1.3.hardened1-4”
to “linux-hardened-7.1.5.hardened1-1”.
Kernel upgrades are almost always no big deal.
Today, I got a kernel panic!
Physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity
William W. Crockett, Jack O. Shaw, Carl Simpson, Christopher P. Kempes; 
 Physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity 
Proc Biol Sci 1 June 2024; 291 (2025): 20232767. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.2767 
 PDF
The Big Four
The Big Four 
Agatha Christie, 1927 
 Hastings narrates a rather weird Poirot mystery.
I am beginning to wonder why Hastings hung out
with Poirot at all,
since Poirot treats Hastings arrogantly at times.