I did something useful yesterday, other than just working. Actually, I did a few things, but this only concerns two of them.

Wednesday night, I was making some changes to the natd configuration file on Saturn (soon to be renamed, but that's another story). I made a mistake that I've made several times before. I forgot to add a blank line at the end of the configuration file. Even though there is absolutely no need for it to be there, the code enforces it anyway. To fix the problem, because natd wouldn't restart and I no longer had remote access to the server, I had to drive the ten minutes to work, sit in the parking lot to type 34 keystrokes to fix it and drive back. (I counted the keystrokes involved on the way back.)

I have wireless access that I can (just barely) access from the parking lot (and yes it uses some security), but that still involves driving to work if I make the mistake remotely. This is the third or fourth time I've had to drive to work to fix it in the last 2 years, so I wasn't happy.

When I got to work yesterday morning, I finally sat down with the code to natd. As I suspected, there really is no reason for it to check for a newline at the end. All it does is convert it to a null character (C's end of string character).

I made a quick patch to the file and submited a problem report to the FreeBSD project with my patch. I really hope it makes it into the code because I really hate that behavior. And also because then I can say I wrote part of FreeBSD, even if it is only like 3 lines.

I also submitted an upgrade to a port I submitted a couple months ago. The developer released a small revision, so as the maintainer of the port, I felt obligated. It only took about 20 minutes (and most of that was looking up how to submit a maintainer-update because I'd never done one before.