Benjamin Sago / ogham / cairnrefinery / etc…

Hi, I’m Ben

I’m a developer living in the UK.

Recent posts

Optional Type Misconceptions

Refuting a couple of arguments against using Optional types over null when programming.

I Miss Balloon Help

Thoughts on an old OS feature from 25 years ago.

Waltzing with Wireshark

Some of my Wireshark customisations.

That Annoying Shade of Blue

Why one of the standard xterm colours is so hard for people to read.

Lessons learned when my SSD died

Everything that went wrong this one time I had to restore from a backup.

Stuff I’ve done

Screenshot of exa

exa is a file-listing program written in Rust. It’s like ls if it had more colours, a tree view, and Git support.

Screenshot of What-The-Format

What-The-Format interprets numbers and codes you can find in the wild, and says which bits are which.

See all projects

Photos

My photo ‘As Above’.

My photo ‘The Altar of Abstraction’.

My photo ‘Plinth’.

My photo ‘From the Air’.

My photo ‘Wheel in the Sky’.

Technical notes

Use custom nmap port sets
Writing a script to test that your firewall works correctly. View a remote server’s live packets
Accessing another server’s network packets over SSH, and piping them into Wireshark. Change terminal colour when using SSH
Configuring iTerm2 to automatically change the background colour when using SSH.

Speed up fish by avoiding ‘alias’
Something I found was slowing down my Fish shell startup time. Run ‘cargo-fuzz’ in a RAM disk
Sparing your disk from unnecessary read/write cycles when fuzzing Rust code. Maintain file associations with Specsheet
Using one of my tools to make sure files open with the right application on macOS.

See all technical notes