26 May 2026
unix
freebsd
tooling
linux
A disk is filling up. Somewhere under /var are thousands
of stale log files. One line finds them all and clears
them: find /var/log -name '*.log' -mtime +30
-delete. No loop, no script. Most Unix tools
take flags; find takes an expression. You compose
primaries (-name, -type,
-mtime, -size) and operators
(implicit AND, -o, !,
grouping) into a small query language, and the tool
walks the tree satisfying it. That is the reduction: a
grammar that builds every case from a few parts. Dick
Haight wrote find for Version 7 Unix in 1979 in the
Unix Support Group; the researchers were put off by the
syntax and kept it because it was useful. The modern
descendant fd (David Peter, Rust, 2017) reproduces the
same idea. find is the rare Unix tool that is a little
language pretending to be a command. Technical Beauty
Episode 37.
25 May 2026
freebsd
linux
security
unix
A laptop is left on a train. With full-disk encryption,
the finder has an expensive paperweight and a drive
full of noise. Without it, they have your keys, your
mail and your customers. FreeBSD and Linux both solve
this well; they solve it rather differently. GELI is a
GEOM class: encryption is just another composable
transform alongside mirroring, striping and labelling,
with per-sector HMAC integrity behind one flag. LUKS
writes a LUKS2 header and opens through device-mapper
as dm-crypt; its argon2id key derivation is
memory-hard and genuinely ahead of GELI's PBKDF2. Both
default to AES-256-XTS and both turn a stolen drive
into noise. One framework of uniform parts, or several
specialised parts composed. The Unix way prefers the
version you can hold in one hand. The Unix Way Episode
18.
24 May 2026
architecture
freebsd
unix
tooling
A new test file. Before a single assertion, you build a
world: a fake database, a fake clock, a fake mailer.
Forty lines of fakes, two lines of test. A test with
no mocks at all would look almost negligent. The unit
test was born pure: Kent Beck's SUnit (1994) tested
parsers, algorithms, pure functions, with nothing to
fake. We carried it into application code, which is
nothing but world, and faked the world. The question
nobody asked: why was the logic tangled with the
world in the first place? The most testable software
ever written has no mocks at all. A Unix filter
(grep, awk, sort) is pure: text in, text out. Gary
Bernhardt called the shape functional core, imperative
shell; Alistair Cockburn called it ports and adapters.
A mock is not a tool. It is a reading on a gauge. On
Second Thought Episode 09.
23 May 2026
law
web
architecture
freebsd
You are reading this on LinkedIn. Somewhere in your
settings sits a switch labelled "Data for Generative
AI Improvement". For most of us it is on. None of us
turned it on. It lets LinkedIn use your profile and
public posts to train generative AI models, its own
and those of its affiliate Microsoft; private messages
are excluded. It arrived already enabled on 18
September 2024, opt-out only. Europe was spared after
the UK ICO raised concerns, then switched on as well
on 3 November 2025. The legal basis claimed is
"legitimate interest"; the opt-out is forward-only.
This is not a breach and not surveillance. The
judgement is about architecture: default-on with a
quiet notice treats your silence as a yes. Settings
& Privacy → Data Privacy: thirty seconds to
check. Not in the Brief Episode 04.
22 May 2026
licensing
architecture
saas
freebsd
You bought VMware once, outright, the way you buy a
tool. In November 2023 a $69 billion acquisition
closed, and the thing you owned quietly became a thing
you rent. Broadcom ended perpetual licences, withdrew
the free ESXi hypervisor then quietly reinstated it as
a non-production build that cannot reach vCenter, and
moved licensing from per-CPU to per-core sold in
bundles (VVF, VCF) that bill for NSX and vSAN whether
or not you run them. VMware held ~70% of the
virtualisation market in 2024; Gartner expects 40% by
2029. AT&T had to sue to keep support. The escape
route is a stack, not a product: bhyve, jails and ZFS
in the FreeBSD base, Proxmox VE for the mainstream
path, migration over OVF and qcow2. The hypervisor, it
turns out, was never the expensive part. In the Net
Episode 04.
