Right in time for the end of the year, BSDTalk 221 is out, with Michael Dexter interviewing Matthieu Herrb at EuroBSDCon 2012 for 11 minutes about Xenocara.
BSDCan 2013, which is being held in Ottawa May 17th-18th, has a call for papers out. You’ve got until January 19th to submit, so just about a month.
BSD Magazine for December is out, offering the usual mix of articles in a free PDF. There’s several Postgres articles in this one.
Whomever submitted this story to Slashdot really doesn’t like FreeBSD; they’re describing FreeBSD’s annual end-of-year fund drive as failed. The month-long drive is only about a week old and has already picked up donations at a faster rate than any previous year’s donation drive, but apparently the poster – and Slashdot’s editors – can’t be bothered to do math. While we’re on the topic, donate to the FreeBSD Foundation; they do good things.
(There’s DragonFly too, though we’re not as ambitious or officially 501(c)(3) non-profit.)
It’s the end of the year, so it’s time for the FreeBSD Foundation’s end of year campaign.
NYCBUG is joining up with a whole bunch of other software user groups (Linux, Lisp, Puppet, etc.) for a holiday party on December 11th. This may not do you much good unless you live within a few hour’s travel, but I like seeing that sort of cross-group get-togethers, with no sponsor other than the desire to talk and drink.
Dan Langille runs BSDCan and PGCon. He also went to EuroBSDCon and described how he put together these conferences. The PDF containing his presentation slides makes a good checklist of what you might need for your own event, even if it’s not on the scale of his conventions.
While we’re talking about cross-pollination of BSDs: going by licenses, there’s some DragonFly code in the iPhone – at least the fairq scheduler. (Noted by several people on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A person labeled only as ‘wicked’ sent me a link to this conversation about BSD unification. I’ve seen the topic brought up before, and I’d argue that it’s already happening, slowly. DragonFly has code brought in from FreeBSD, pkgsrc from NetBSD, pf and dhclient from OpenBSD, etc. ‘bmake’ is used in NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonFly now. Clang works across the board, I think (dunno the status on OpenBSD). There’s more of that cross-pollination going on if you think about it.
We (as in DragonFly) are not participating in Google Code-In this year, but I’m happy to see there’s another BSD in there – NetBSD. (There’s only 10 participating organizations, so it’s not easy.) Look at their page if you’re in the right age range to do projects.
November’s PDF issue of BSD Magazine is out, with a number of articles including a hardware review of the Netgear Universal Wifi Adapter. We need more BSD-centric device testing.
AsiaBSDCon 2013 will be at the Tokyo University of Science, March 14-17. The call for papers is already out.
The free download of the October issue of BSD Magazine is available. The theme this month is security, though of course there’s more covered.
DragonFly 3.2 branches tomorrow if all goes to plan. Until then, I have a lot of reading here for you.
- Winners of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest for 2012. (via) The winning entries don’t appear to be listed yet, but you can look at previous years.
- “At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.” (via)
- This makes the D&D player in me take notice: A set of 12 sided dice that never tie. You can buy them, along with a bunch of other custom dice, right from the maker. (also via)
- “To understand the command line…” There’s some good UNIX history notes in there. Don’t hold the ‘User Friendly’ cartoon image against the author. (via)
- Dan Langille does it right when figuring out where his disk space went.
- Monthly Catonmat geek T-shirts. I know, I know, the last thing the world needs is more nerdshirts, but I like the first one on offer.
- Images to make perfectionists suffer. At first I laughed, and then I started to get irritated. (via)
- This networking change in Linux just makes me feel icky. (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
- An Interview with Brian Kernighan on C and the C Programming Language. (via)
- Statistics from 777 .vimrc files. (via) Hover your mouse over the ‘sparkline’ graphs for more information. That’s a very slick way to get more information into a small space. It also led me to this wonderful Solarized colorscheme.
- OCaml 4 will show up in pkgsrc soon.
- Bob Bagwill got DragonFly added on AlternativeTo.net.
- I link to this step by step sed explanation because I found it useful, and because it has this “perverse” example:
sed '/^g/s/g/s/g'
- The “dragonfly issue“. (thanks, Dean.)
- The Hall of Unwanted Dotcoms. Some of these are just fun to say. (via)
- 20 Years of Thinkpad. I have a Thinkpad x220 for work and I like the way it’s built far more than any other laptop I’ve dealt with.
Your unrelated link of the week: Dog Shaming. I have a parrot, rabbit, and lizard. They seem like easy, normal pets compared to some of these stories.
I mentioned open-sourced CDE here before, but it makes me happy to see someone planning to do a bunch of work on it that will hopefully make it upstream, and specifically include DragonFly.
Remember how I pointed at BSDEvent’s collection of slides from 3 different BSD conventions? Well, now’s it is a lot more conventions. As in multiple years of convention slides.
The weather is finally turning cooler, which makes me happy.
- I don’t think I’ve seen this before: Very old UNIX releases, listed for running in emulation. (via)
- Where the red-black tree name came from. A red-black tree underpins Hammer 1’s data structures, though it does not in Hammer 2. (also via)
- Someone with a HP passport login want to help this guy? He just needs to reinstall Windows in IDE mode, or perhaps find the right sysctl to toggle.
- The acme editor, from Plan 9. I didn’t realize it’s 20 years old.
- Speaking of editors, Replace in Multiple Files with Vim. I haven’t seen the argdo command before, or the Vim Ninjas site. Their color schemes article is useful just for the screenshots. (via)
- Adbuntu. It’s not as bad or as inconsequential as most reactions would lead you to believe, but advertising within an OS seems heavy-handed. The BSD model has been to use the operating system as a vehicle for selling hardware, and that’s been much more successful. (see iOS, PC-BSD.)
- Where Did the Internet Come From?
- The map for Adventure. (via)
Your unrelated link of the day: Victorian Sci-Fi. It’s not just a reference list, it’s a link to a lot of the original material, since copyright no longer applies.
BSD Events linked to the presentations for FOSDEM 2012, BSD-Day Europe 2012, and BSDCan 2012. There’s a lot of reading there for you – and even some video.
Francois Tigeot benchmarked the recent Postgres 9.3 release. Postgres apparently switched to using mmap instead of SYSV shared memory, and Francois has done this to show the performance differences. (view the PDF in his post.) Of course, work has continued since this was posted, so there should be new numbers soon, and new changes I’ll document in a future post.
I haven’t found a reference to the exact decision Postgres made on how to handle memory; please post a link in comments if you know a good source.
The September issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as usual. Visit the site to find out the table of contents.