11 Jan 2003 jrf   » (Master)

It has been a long time since I posted here and, as usual, guilt caught up with me and I decided to post an entry.

Since April of last year a lot has happened. I was diagnosed with an Acoustic Nueroma, a tumor near my brain sitting on the balance nerve of the inner ear. In November it was removed and I lost all hearing in the right ear. I have permanent tinitus (ringing) in it, which is sort of cool because when my blood pressure goes up, the ringing gets louder (sort of an onboard BP tracker). The post op nightmare was terrible. I had swelling so bad that blood flow was cut off to the brain and I had an infection. It lasted for nearly 3 weeks and I was back in the hospoital twice. In any case, I feel better now and am working from home. I also lost a lot of weight from puking (my body has a strong dislike of drugs and certain anitbiotics). I guess that is a benefit ...

Now onto the neat stuff. Since April I delved into NetBSD development. I migrated some code from a friend of mine to a module for the Verified Executable Kernel Modification. That was a blast. I learned a lot, lesson one of kernel development: do NOT try to track -current if your making big changes, merge them when you are done or ready for BETA. After that I went onto in depth tuning again, some PR articles, and started working on userland utils. My "open source" resume has expanded quite a bit.

In the future I want to get get back to helping with further kernel security, keep closing as many PRs as I can, and with some help branch out into other areas. I also need to wrap up my degree, I have too many floating credits and now that I have a lot of free time, it is time to put free time to use.

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