BSDTalk episode 230 is out. It’s 12 minutes of conversation with Burt Kaliski, CTO of Verisign, about the upcoming newest BSD convention, vBSDCon.
Maybe the title of this post doesn’t rhyme, but it does in my head. Michael W. Lucas is looking for people with interesting sudo setups, for his upcoming book.
I’d be really surprised to find this affects anyone, but it’s possible: some kernel options specific to Cyrix processors have been removed, by Sascha Wildner.
Registration is open for vBSDCon, happening in Dulles, Virginia, USA, on October 25th through 27th. There’s some neat-sounding presentations listed.
I think that is the same location where I went to a rather spectacular pre-dotcom-crash presentation from Time Warner/Road Runner back in 1999. The hotel was great; the presenters were befuddled. An internal account manager ran up a $3,000 bar tab in one night on a company credit card… I still have the fancy Guinness glass he bought me. I don’t think this convention will work exactly the same way, but unlike my 1999 trip, the speakers at this one will actually know what they are talking about.
If you look at the reports from students this week, they are mostly “I had bugs and I fixed them and there’s not much to do other than test”, which is the sign of well-planned projects. Here’s the status reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
If you missed Michael W. Lucas’s talk about DNSSEC, it’s recorded and available on Youtube. Or buy his book.
shiningsilence.com suffered a disk failure early this morning. I’ll take the opportunity to set up a new machine, given that my local backup drive hasn’t been mounted and my remote backup went offline, in a horrible coincidence.
The disk is up and limping, which is why you can read this, but I’m still rebuilding. What motherboard/CPU/RAID/etc. parts do people recommend?
Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”
- Perl, the Detroit of scripting languages. The slides are entertaining, but it’s also interesting for the discussion of how to handle a very old code base and a community. (which are BSD issues too) (via)
- Ruins of Forgotten Empires: APL languages. “APL uses one thread per CPU, which is how sane people do things.” (via)
- Remember when we used mega- prefixes to measure disk and memory, and not bandwidth?
- Ian Lance Taylor’s 20-part series on ELF linkers and linking. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- PDF compression formats. Incidentally, here’s an answer on the Xerox number alternation issue, where compression means one number gets misidentified and substituted for another. The Economist has a not-crazy take on it. It’s not a Xerox problem but rather a JBIG2 compression issue. I have a number of Xerox models at work and have not seen this issue, but also haven’t checked for it.
- OSI, the Internet That Wasn’t. People only ever care about levels 1, 2, 3, and 7 in the OSI model. And this joke. (via)
- The Toshiba Libretto. You can get more powerful, smaller computers now, but they’re cheap netbooks and totally uncool.
- A crash course in tmux. (via)
- Whatever room you keep your primary computer in – clean it, please.
- Robots for destroying buildings. This is not some speculative article; these are robots you can buy right now. Screw the flying cars joke everyone makes; the future is now. (via)
- How to shutdown computer under Linux? A rough summary of how Linux can be a moving target for actual usage.
- Vim 7.4 out, mostly so there isn’t so many patches to apply.
- Goto is making a comeback. (via Eric Radman)
Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.
Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.
Or at least scheduled to happen now, since I’m posting this and postdating it for everyone as a reminder. I hope I have the time right.
The mailing list archives for DragonFly (lists.dragonflybsd.org) have been moved to new hardware. (Yay!) The patch that actually shows date in the listings needs to reapplied, cause Mailman is somewhat stale. (Boo!) I applied the patch and I’m regenerating all the archives now. (Yay!) There’s some garbled messages in the archives that cause a bunch of “no subject” partial messages to be dumped at the end. (Boo!) I’ll manually fix them if I can, someday. (Yay?)
Definitely Saturdays for this summary. In other BSDs this week:
- It’s FreeBSD, but it can apply to any BSD where a personal attribution license is used: Julian Elischer’s name comes with every iPhone.
- cxgbe(4) cards can now display their temperature under FreeBSD.
- ciss(4) supports additional HP RAID controllers under FreeBSD.
- Bind has been updated to 9.8.5-P2 in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has initial support for the Cubieboard 2.
- FreeBSD now has a USB test program.
- NetBSD supports some additional ZTE modem devices.
- NetBSD has cgram, a substitution-cipher solver. For amusement purposes?
- NetBSD supports the Nuvoton W83795G monitoring device.
- OpenBSD now supports wireless devices using the Ralink RT3060.
Wired has an article up about Jordan Hubbard and his move from Apple to iXsystems. It’s not a bad article, though it doesn’t delve into the why of BSD very much. In any case, iXsystems has been really bulking up lately to be more than a generic hardware provider.
Speaking of which, that blade system going in now for dragonflybsd.org was sold by iXsystems.
Several parts of dragonflybsd.org are moving to a new blade server, so there may be some service interruptions during the transition.
Francois Tigeot has ported TTM to DragonFly from FreeBSD and I think a bit from OpenBSD. All this work has led to an update in the driver porting notes.
Michael W. Lucas’s next topic in his Mastery series is ‘Sudo‘.
It’s 24 minutes with Chris Cappuccio, talking about nsh and flashrd for OpenBSD.
Everyone passed their Summer of Code midterms! Not that this was a surprise; all the students have been consistently working and overcoming problems, but a 100% pass rate makes me happy.
Here’s the status reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
On August 10th, Michael W. Lucas will be giving a talk on DNSSEC to the Metro Detroit Linux Users Group, and it’ll be livestreamed for everyone to see. His talks are energetic and entertaining, and it’s worth making time to see.
Joris Giovannangeli, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, posted his thoughts on credential descriptors – have a read. He is working on capsicum and DragonFly, so this is a natural thought process.
These have been very easy to create over the last few weeks; there’s been a torrent of reading. Can I say torrent without making it sound like this is all downloaded large files? The word is overloaded. Anyway:
- How emacs changed my life, from I think the creator of Ruby. (via)
- Autodesk uses Creative Commons right.
- British kids in the early 80’s, using computers. Might induce nostalgia for some.
- Forth – The Early Years. (via)
- The Collapse of the Animal Crossing Economy. I am entertained by the intersection of games and economics. (via)
- Tagsistant, a tag-based filesystem. Works via command line, which is unexpected. (via Tim Darby on users@)
- Git and GitHub Secrets. (via)
- IE vs. murder rate. Correlation, rather than causation, but still funny. (via)
- toybox, a BSD-licensed command line environment for Android. I mentally said “so what?” until I saw the “Why is Toybox?” presentation. It’s an excellent talk that makes a sequence of good points about many topics on licensing and utility, and I recommend making time for watching it. (first link via)
- The Confused Deputy, an explanation of capabilities. (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)
Your unrelated link of the week: What goes on when you are not there!