Lazy Reading for 2011/08/07

I’m throwing this in as a late update as I catch up on what happened while I was on the road last week.

  • Venkatesh Srinivas is doing The Right Thing and making sure patches get applied to the original software, not just in pkgsrc.  (bitcoin, in this case.)  Thanks!
  • Hey, more reviews (they agree with mine) for Practical Packet Analysis, from other No Starch authors.
  • RetroBSD: a tiny version of BSD, based on 2.11BSD and running on MIPS hardware, is available.  That was the one that ran on PDP-11 systems, so the small footprint is no surprise.  (According to the site) It uses a tenth of the memory, can run its own C compiler, and can fork.  Apparently uClinux can’t do any of those things.

Your unrelated link for the day: Rotate Your Owl. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/24

Lazy reading is easy when it’s been this hot out.  In fact, I may melt before this article gets published.

  • Ecdysis – a NAT64 gateway program.  I link to it for two reasons.  1: You will probably need to NAT 6-to-4 sooner or later, and 2: it uses PF and so is BSD-compatible. (via)
  • Don’t not copy that floppy! (also via)  My original Apple ][ disk for Castle Wolfenstein is probably no longer functional.  Not that I have equipment to play it on…
  • World timezones, as a visible map.  (via)   I mention time zone updates here on occasion, and this is a immediate guide to what a strange patchwork of zones it is.  You can’t even see some of the really tiny/crazy ones.
  • A crappy way to start your day.  Nobody ever enjoys that call from work…

And now, a link that has nothing to do with this.

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/17

Man, it’s like the whole Internet decided to take a nap lately.  Warm weather in the northern hemisphere does that.

Lazy Reading for 2011/06/26

Somehow, I ended up with the most concise link listing I’ve ever done, even though I have a pretty good batch here.  Go figure.

 

Lazy reading for 2011/06/12

A nice big pile of links this week.  Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.

Lazy Reading for 2011/06/05

Short but good this week.

  • I always enjoy seeing other people’s window configs, even if I don’t use them.
  • The CCBY license is very similar to the BSD license – and there’s some big institutions using it.  That is good news for everyone.
  • I linked to telehack before, but I didn’t realize how huge it was.  There’s 25,000 virtual hosts in there, recreated from history, complete with realistic user lists.  You can ‘hack’ into hosts, or run games and BASIC files.  (hammurabi!)  It even recreates early USENET.  Read the description of what to do – it gets really interesting about halfway down.   It’s an Internet Simulation, if ever there was one.  (via)
  • Remember I posted earlier this week about my results with deduplication?  I had about a 7% gain of the disk.  As time has gone on and the Hammer reblocker was able to work overnight, I’m now up to a gain of 10%.  Neat!
  • Also: I got Minecraft working (as a server) on DragonFly.  See the comments on my original it’s-almost-working post.
  • RAS Syndrome: Recursive Acronym Syndrome Syndrome.  For anyone who has typed “GNU”.  (via)
Lazy Reading for 2011/05/29

Whee!

  • Do you like the Opera browser?  Apparently all it takes is a little misspelling to confuse it with a U.S. daytime talk show host.  The “Best of Oprah emails to Opera“.   (via)  Mistaken identity on the Internet is always fun.
  • Popular free software licenses, described.  (via)  One of the better, non-polemic descriptions I’ve seen.
  • For the opposite effect, the Free Software Foundation’s license recommendations.  Somehow, the BSD license isn’t even mentioned.  (via)  A commenter at the source link notes that the GNU Free Documentation License isn’t even considered ‘free’ by Debian.  Along those lines, I’ve always thought that GPL licensing creates a perverse incentive to keep your software undocumented.
  • The FreeBSD and NetBSD Foundations have acquired a license for libcxxrt from PathScale, which I assume is for C++ support in conjunction with clang.  (or pcc?)  This isn’t as much of an issue for DragonFly right now since we’re continuing down the GCC route.
  • Temple of the Roguelike, a searchable database of roguelike games.  It’s an idea that you would totally expect for this genre.  (via trevorjk on EFNet #dragonflybsd)  Also: a roguelikedev subreddit.