Lazy Reading for 2012/05/27

Let’s get right down to it:

  • Hey, Nmap 6 is out.  It’s one of those always-useful tools, similar to wireshark.
  • Biculturalism, a fair assessment.  (via)  The generalizations are a little extreme (1 Unix-based author who Got Religion, vs. a diffused Windows developer stereotype) but still has value.
  • A Git Horror Story.  (via)  Not a true story, but useful for describing how git commits can be GPG-signed.
  • A recent Google Doodle, a playable Moog synthesizer, done for Bob Moog’s birthday.  The Moog Music site has instructions.  I happened to notice they’re using FreeBSD as the server – cool!  Maybe it’s just the hosting org?  Anyway, I link to it because Bob Moog’s cousin was for a while my father’s employer.
  • Google is transitive, whereas Facebook is reflexive.”  (via)  This sums up the practical difference between Google and Facebook rather well.
  • I did not know this existed: OpenBSD Network Shell.  (via)  Interface like a Cisco-ish router, internals are OpenBSD.
  • There’s been recent news articles about how programmers over 35 tend to not get hired.  Here’s one of the reasons: younger programmers discount the value of their own time.  Anything where all the benefits (cheaper labor, more products) accrue to the company, and all the costs go to the employee (time lost, extra work) is not a good idea in the long run.
  • Now I’ve met the other DragonFly BSD user, too.”  That’s two more than I expected for any given project, really.
  • Undeadly.org has an extensive interview/article about OpenSMTPd.  It’s OpenBSD’s implementation of a SMTP daemon, which is something I haven’t heard much about before.  Compare with DragonFly’s much-smaller-in-scope dma.
  • Van Jacobsen Saved the Internet.  Or just fixed a timing bug.  Depends on whether you listen to Wired or to him.  The interesting part is that he had to build the tools to troubleshoot the problem.
  • Here’s something I don’t think anyone’s noticed yet: Microsoft is responsible for half of Google’s DMCA notices last month.  My employer recently was audited by Microsoft (technically by Accenture contractors for Microsoft) for license compliance.  My Dell sales representative, when I asked him for a list of what Microsoft-licensed OEM devices we had bought, said many of his customers were asking for the same thing.  He joked that Microsoft was trying to improve its profitability numbers for the quarter.  Given that they are trying to push to Windows 8, that might just be true, and they are trying to enforce their way to it, not sell their way to it.

Your unrelated link of the week: MAD GOD, the film.

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/13

I’m starting to pack these full enough that I might have to go biweekly.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wizzywig.  A self-contained comic about the early days of phone phreaking and hacking, written and drawn by Ed Piskor.   The first two chapters are available as a PDF.  Read and if you like it, order the whole thing.  Also: Steve and Steve.  If you know your history, you’ll get the cartoon.

Ed Piskor is currently cartooning the origin of hip-hop at BoingBoing; it’s a good read.

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/29

I go a bit beyond presenting links and comment on them too, this week.  Not too much!  Enjoy.

Your unrelated link of the week.  Youtube Poop.  As far as I can tell, ‘Youtube Poop’ are glitched videos made from Youtube content but with segments repeated, frames modified, or new sentences constructed from reassembling the frames.  Sometimes noisy, sometimes rude.  Also, an art form that can only exist now, and never really before.  Reminds me of the old Fensler Films, or that odd series out of Japan.  I find the idea of assembling new rhythms and music out of non-musical items fascinating, but I would, wouldn’t I?

(Turn your volume down before trying some of those links.)

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/22

Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: One Thing Well.  The BSD tag might be the most useful.

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/08

The links are all over the map this week, which is fine.  Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: memepool.  It’s seen some activity lately.  It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.

GNU hash tables added

Another “first BSD to try it” feature: GNU hash table support has been added by John Marino.  These apparently speed up symbol searching during program startup, so it should improve large program startup time.  Think KDE or Open Office, though I don’t have numbers to back it up.

Some BSD Multimedia

Here’s several things to look at:

Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube.  I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk.  Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.

Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.