Hey guys, I am waiting for my federal tax return (USA) to get a laptop to run OpenBSD on. I don't really know if this message is going to be format acceptable for this (through stripping or whatnot) I am using Windows 10 with gmail. I feel like I really don't have much control over my email situation right now since it is not like a postfix or sendmail with fetchmail and mutt and all that stuff. So, if this made it through and it is offending and was not somehow automatically rejected don't flame me please.
My motivation for potentially getting into programming for OpenBSD : Anyway, on topic : Hmmm, where to start ? It seems to me the hacker community should treat Linux as a complete joke since it seems to me the odds of any random Linux box, chosen at random, there is like a 1,000 to one odds (at best, maybe, I am being too generous here) of it not being hosed by the NSA. I mean bothanspy and an array other things that is a positive affirmative. Proving that OpenBSD does not have any FBI or NSA or whatever back door is trying to prove a negative or something (does that make sense?). OpenBSD code auditing has not (at least ostensibly) shown there to be such a thing (that is a win for OpenBSD) although some Linux dweeb (sorry for the insult it was useful for him to point them out) found like 25 OpenBSD kernel bugs and then went around crying the sky is falling like chicken little with the stale 1990s slashdot.org meme that the BSDs are dying. Anyway, I listened and read some of ex-NetBSD hackers Julian Assange's stuff such "Cypherpunks : Freedom and the Future of the Internet". All these events made me think just "wow, the world is tottally screwed up !" What the hell happened to the world where Linux is taking the mantle of FOSS ? I guess Linux kind of cool in the 1990s, it had a cool mascot and a relatively knowledgeable users base but then the pinheads like Poettering showed up. He seems not to care about POSIX and has never read ESR's "The Art of Unix Programming" (ESR the old school Linux icon actually eventually went on to extol the virtues of the BSD liscense over the GPL if I am not mistaken). If someone pointed that book out to him he would probably be like :" what ? that book is old ! let me go consult my windows programming book instead ( I am joking). Anyway, most Linux users use Ubuntu or Mint or whatever but with crappy man pages , no source code (it is not Gentoo or slackware although you can technically get source code but how many o them do that ?), and the GUI anti-CLI mindset how exactly are this idiots supposed to evolve into programmers ? They won't these idiots like : "Systemd ! it makes the desktop better even though Linux is a complete failure on the desktop and all I care about is installing apps and using facebook !" meanwhile the future of the internet is at stake ! so I think you can get the gist of my motivation here with out me having to rant and rave anymore on this. Yes, I know it is ironic or possibly hypocritical to be talking about NSA snooping while writing an email from gmail. So, anyway, my main reason for writing this email is to get your opinion and books and a few other things. The OpenBSD website recommends some programming books. Are all these books necessary to be read, in syntopical fashion, before even beginning to think about my code in a serious way ? Also, what do you think about Diomidis Spinellis's books : "Code Reading" and "Code Quality" ? He seems to be the anti-Kernigan in style but that does not necessarily mean the books are not potentially good per se. Obviously, things like K&R The C Programming Language Language (2nd edition) are canonical bibles but these other kind of books I am asking about don't fall under the same category IMHO. Also, to go a little off topic some of you may have heard of Malcolm's Gladwell's book "Outliers" ( a New York Times best seller ! Yes, I am a New York. OpenBSD elitist but New Yorker's are elitist too : if you are not from New York we generally don't like you). In it he claims it takes an average 10,0000 hours to become a master at something. So it seems to me I have all these books I have to read (some potentially syntopically but all anlaytically) plus a possible 10,0000 hours of writing code before I can start submitting code to OpenBSD. In the interim hopefully I will submit bug reports then baby step to small bug patches then bam ! Full blown CVS access (last time I read the OpenBSD site and used OpenBSD , years ago, things were CVS and not subversion). Also, where is the best place, in your opinion, to have my code critiqued online ? I am not just going to spam developer mailing list with 'newbie' code ? I do not have access to my old daemonforums account for a technical reason I dont want to mention (No, I did not get banned !) so that is probably the main reason why you are reading this message on the 'official' OpenBSD mailing list. I did not really want to send it here. Is reading code on the obsfucated C programming website necessary to get a feel for blatant bad style code ? So , those are my pertinent germane questions. I leave you guys with some potentially explosive flame material (I just put one my flame retardant suit). If any OpenBSD developers are secretly putting NSA backdoors or trojans in the code through faults in the compiler itself or whatever stop and think about math ! For instance, if a Canadian or American takes a trip to Europe the statistical probability of being killed in a terrorist attack is smaller than the chance of getting in a car accident (at least for Americans). Bottom like is terrorism is rare and the OpenBSD user and code base is not that large : therefore the probability of terrorists using OpenBSD is very small so that is not a good reason to sell out to big brother. Who pictures someone like Osama Bin Laden , before his death, sitting down using OpenBSD ? No one. It is bad enough some arcane formula of everyday items bought at target or some wonky algorithm at Facebook can false flag someone as terrorist I really don't want that nonsense in OpenBSD. I am not making any wild accusations or blaming anyone of misdeeds or anything like that : It is just that OpenBSD is Unix for Practical Paranoid. Unfortunately , I have to end this email here because the men in the white coats just arrived in the paddy wagon and there are here to lock me up in a mental asylum for 'paranoid schizophrenia' ! Just kidding ! P.S. I am not running OpenBSD in a virtual machine in Windows (I don't want to do that) so I am waiting to buy another laptop (my last one broke). That gives me some more time to catch up on my reading. Thanks for reading !
