I am all over the map this week.
- How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive. I learned D’Nealian; my mother wrote Spencerian. Technical lettering in college and signing labs as a grad student destroyed my style. Anyone know a good source of fountain pens that are cheap/usable? I don’t want to go down the crazy route. (via)
- Triple redundancy in a Boeing 777. An Ada program compiled with 3 different compilers and run on 3 different processors. (PDF, via)
- If you’re curious about gold (the software, not the metal) and how linkers work, given DragonFly’s recent switch, the author of gold, Ian Lance Taylor, wrote a 20-part series about the topic. (Linked here before some years ago, but it’s worth reading now.)
- “We got around three“. A lesson in the persistence of Fortran.
- Former Atari Employee Posts Work Email Log from 1982-1992. The source of the link has many choice comments pulled out.
- Four examples of excellent interface design. In games, of course. The only one I’ve tried is Brogue, previously linked here, and its terminal controls don’t feel like terminal controls.
- The Storage Engine: Timeline. History of data storage, an online exhibit at the Computer History Museum. There are some delightful pictures and stories. (via)
- Raspberry Pi Zero: The $5 Computer. Pretty soon it’s going to be possible to sneeze and accidentally lose several computers because you blew them off the table. (via, also here)
- Also, a comparison of price between similarly-powered computers: everything circa 1980 and the Pi Zero now.
- C.H.I.P. vs Pi Zero: Which Sub-$10 Computer Is Better? Topical! “Which runs BSD better?” is the question you should ask, cause price is almost immaterial. (via)
- A browser-based optics sandbox. Funny how this used to require a standalone program. (via)
- The Software Freedom Conservancy is looking for your support. They provide infrastructure to software you use.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Sunday Comics Kickstarter.
Your unrelated open source game of the week: 0 A.D. Works on FreeBSD and OpenBSD and can run on DragonFly if you can fix gloox. (via)
Just for reference. All Ian Taylor’s articles about GOLD in nicely formatted pdf http://inai.de/documents/Linkers.pdf
The gloox failure looks like it’s missing `#include ‘ in dns.cpp.
The game might need a few small additions in a few places (since I guess you don’t define any of the FreeBSD defines per default), but I don’t expect any huge breakage there. Then again actually having a system with some gpu that is supported by the system helps a lot with testing things. (Even if most of the OpenBSD porting was VM only.)
Seems like it ate the string.h part due to the surrounding angle brackets.
0ad is in dports now, but there will never be a binary package due to it’s sheer size. It will always have to be built from source. We had to add a couple of minor corrections to get it building on DragonFly.
Somebody might want to build it to see if it actually works.
For the fountain pens, I got the following advice from a stationery shop owner in France: buy Pilot or Lamy. Both are technically excellent and reasonably priced, almost cheap if compared to the other well-known ones.