A reader of my blog discussed with the article about the BPF with me. He wanted to use the BPF for his own project and had read the FreeBSD BPF device HOWTO but several problems could not be solved.

During this e-mail discussion I found several flaws in the article and in the IMR demo program (concerning the use of the BPF_WORDALIGN macro). Hence, I updated the original article and IMR.

I hope these new versions will become even more useful than their predecessors.

Unicode is really nice: Less meddling with codepages, less display problems etc. Here are some notes explaining how to enable this functionality for FreeBSD.

On my system, two steps were required. Step one involved changing .login_conf (in my home directory). I added the following lines:

me:\
    :charset=UTF-8:\
    :lang=de_DE.UTF-8:

After logging off and on again, locale settings should work properly. Step two involved changing .gvimrc in my home directory because the fonts listed there had the wrong charset. Instead of ISO8859-15 I used ISO10646-1. This convinced vim to work properly, too.

Filenames:

For those of you who do have files with filenames in the "old encoding" the tool convmv might prove invaluable. FreeBSD users get it from /usr/ports/converters/convmv and might want to take a look at the man page.

Conclusion:

There is only one drawback: Unfortunately, if you are trying to use the console (without X running), things might get ugly. Apart from that problem (which can be fixed by temporarily resetting the input locale), all things "just work". My, my. Isn't that something?

Having used GnuCash for a long time, I was quite startled when the € symbol was not displayed properly anymore (after a make buildworld odyssey). Instead, all I got was "Eu". Ironically, every other currency seemed to work properly.

A vicious attack on the currency of many countries? Probably led by a cabal trying to undermine the world's economics?

No.

Just a glitch in the locale settings: Changing the second line in /usr/share/locale/de_DE.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY to "€" brought the currency back. Keep in mind that you might have other locale settings; find them out by entering locale in your terminal and change the appropriate file.

Back to managing money. By the way, did you know that Thursdays are really, really bad? According to GnuCash, these are the days where I tend to spend more money than usual. Interesting.