I’m a bit slow in reporting this, but: BSD Magazine for August is out in free PDF form. The theme article is memory file systems, but there’s all sorts of stuff, including an article from me talking about how I set up bulk builds of pkgsrc.
We went from feast to famine, and now back to feast. grok.v12.su is back up and running, for your source comparison needs. It complements the one at pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org – plus it still contains source for multiple operating systems.
Note/update: grok.v12.su is having some problems keeping Tomcat running, so your mileage may vary…
EuroBSDcon 2011, which is happening in Maarssen, The Netherlands 2011/10/6 to 2011/10/9, is now open for registration. This is the 10th anniversary!
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)
BSDTalk 207 is 15 minutes of conversation with Mohammed Farrag about ArabBSD. It’s good to see open source being supported in a part of the world I daresay has been underserved. This is the Internet, so I say that without supporting evidence, of course.
(I have a lot of catching up to do; more posts soon.)
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.
BSDday Argentina 2011 is happening the 4th and 5th of November, in Buenos Aires City, Argentina. The Call for Papers is out, if you’d like to contribute.
Man, it’s like the whole Internet decided to take a nap lately. Warm weather in the northern hemisphere does that.
- The Hidden Damage From Waste Data (And How To Deal With It) (via) My answer is more RAMdisks. That’s always my answer for everything, though.
- A replacement for ALTQ.
- Some developer who doesn’t use BSD says it’s not worthwhile. (via) Rather than argue, I’ll just note that the article was linked as “Developer says BSD not worth it” rather than “Interview with man who did PulseAudio” or “What’s happening with systemd”. That may show what people actually care about. Also, see this comment.
The July issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and the theme is Women Entrepreneurs. Next month’s issue is unthemed, so here’s a good time to write about open source and get published.
BSDTalk 206 is 17 minutes with Peter Losher of the Internet Software Consortium. I don’t think people realize how much ISC does…
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.
- Who doesn’t like the taste of BSD? Mmm, delicious.
- “redundant array of inexpensive crap”
- The invention of email. (via, via) It predates Unix.
- The worst ‘hacking’ scenes ever. (via) Starts funny, then you get angry.
- A nice explanation of the Lorenz Attractor, which I had only ever experienced as a screen saver. (via)
- Possibly the smallest roguelike ever.
Audio recordings of the events at BSDCan 2011 are now available, in mp3 form. If the file names aren’t descriptive enough, you can go through the speaker list and match up. (found indirectly via Facebook)
BSDDay Argentina is starting to look for speakers. The official site doesn’t list 2011 dates yet, but it’ll be in November, in Buenos Aires. (via Damian Vicino) Alex Hornung gave a DragonFly presentation there last year…
A nice big pile of links this week. Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.
- An interview with Dennis Richie about inventing Unix. (via) I like that he sounds just absolutely tickled that there’s a version of ‘his’ operating system on his phone.
- A nice article describing Project Euler, for those who want to program; or program more. (via several places)
- Michael Lucas points out something that isn’t new but still needs reinforcement: avoid SSH1.
- Anecdotal evidence that SSD drives fail a lot. On the other hand, the bulk builds I’ve done of pkgsrc have worked the crap out of several SSDs and I haven’t killed a single one.
- Weird things in IPv6 routing. (indirectly via this, via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd IRC)
- Aw, Google’s BSD-specific search page is gone. Not that it was really needed at this point; I hadn’t seen a difference in the search results for some time. There’s more pressing issues.
- The FreeBSD Foundation has a trip report from Sergio Ligregni and from Thomas Abthorpe, from sponsored trips to BSDCan 2011. I’d encourage everyone to make it to a BSD convention – it’s energizing to see others working on BSD, in person.
- I don’t think you really need a guide for this. (via)
- Emacs user at work.
- Totally unrelated: best dubstep video ever.
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)
BSDTalk has a 17-minute interview with Josh Paetzel about FreeNAS 8. Every time Will Backman makes it to a convention with a tape recorder, we all benefit.
The June issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the title being “NanoBSD and Alix”, but there’s plenty more articles in there. DragonFly news is on page 25 – if this month is better for me than last month, I hope to have more in there.
Fresh from BSDCan 2011, an interview with Ingo Schwartze and Kristaps Dzonsons, mostly about mdocml. (Which is already present in DragonFly.)
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.
EuroBSDCon 2011, which is being held at Maarssen, The Netherlands, is October 6th through 9th of this year. If you want to get a paper in, the deadline is in a week – May 30th. Get a move on if you want to present!