About

My name is Christopher Bojarski. I'm a web developer, programmer and blogger. Fan of all things technology related. Avid reader and traveler. Married and living in Philadelphia. Connect with me at cbojar.net.

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Trying Out FreeBSD

I've used Linux as my main driver for several years now. I've been quite happy with it, as it does so much to make my life easier. But like so many things in life, sometimes it's best to see if the grass is greener on another side of a fence. Hearing so much about it from Allan Jude on TechSNAP and BSD Now, I decided to give FreeBSD a whirl. I tried it first in a VM, then later installed it to an old laptop to really test out how well it worked.

My goal was to get a full-fledged desktop system up an running, preferably comparable to my Linux system. I knew this was possible given what I had seen and heard. FreeBSD is a UNIX-derived system that looks a lot like Linux. Many of the same programs will run on both, and so it won't "feel" too different. I tried both FreeBSD proper and the desktop spin, PC-BSD, in a VM to get a feel for each. In the past, I had tried to play around with NetBSD, with little success, but I didn't let that experience cloud my opini…
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#FOChaCo: Fear of Changing Code

In code, as in life, things are always changing, whether we want them to or not. (Focusing on the code part,) Operating systems, libraries, protocols, languages, standards, and best practices are changing on the regular underneath every bit of code we write. While many of these systems work hard to change in "backwards-compatible" ways, sometimes there are changes that break things. As software developers, our job is to write our code that is robust to change, so that it still works well when the future arrives.

But sometimes there are those among us who suffer from #FOChaCo: the fear of changing code. Despite the inevitability of the future, they fight tooth and nail to keep things exactly as they were. They might insist that we cannot support anything later than version X of our platform, or that we should not update any libraries unless there is a dire need to do so. These developers are well-intentioned. They may have been bit in the past by a library update. They might …
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This One Subtle Bug You Might Not See Coming

Sometimes bugs are obvious. You used a ++ where you should have used a --. Other times, bugs are much less obvious. A regular expression was missing an escape of a .. Then there are those bugs that are so subtle and insidious that they deserve their own blog post just to document and excoriate them. This post is about one of those bugs.

Fortunately for me, this wasn't my bug. It was a bug hidden in a Programmers.SE question. The questioner was blaming himself for not seeing or understanding a change in an external library, and he was desperately looking for a way to write better code to account for such changes in the external library. What did that library do? There was a method that returned a long, where the long was milliseconds since epoch. In the update, the method was changed so that it still returned a long, but the long now represented nanoseconds since epoch.

Putting aside the discussion about whether a long has enough precision, this change is a special type of awful. T…
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