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!
This week: lots more reading!
- Michael Lucas describes an extra layer of protection for when you can’t force public key usage on every SSH user.
- Cool, but obscure Unix tools (via) The screenshots are all from a Mac… How many of the 24 tools listed are in pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip? Almost all of them. (tpp sounds entertaining.)
- NYCBUG, in addition to having a really fun convention, has been regularly posting audio of the presentations they host. The most recent is “William Baxter’s NYCBUG presentation on The Unix Method of Development Management”. See the BSD Events tweet for the download.
- What Ubuntu means. (via)
- Here’s a nice explanation of Intel’s new Tri-Gate design and with it, an incidental explanation of the processor market.
- This ycombinator post about Hammer2 work has an in-depth comment from Venkatesh Srinivas about DragonFly’s network setup, memory allocator, and token use. (Ignore the trolling in other comments.)
- Michael Lucas’s next No Starch Press book is Absolute OpenBSD, second edition.
- Pictures and video are starting to show up from the just-passed BSDCan 2011. (via this and also thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- My first experience of The Internet was very similar to this. It should be bizarrely unfamiliar to anyone under 20 or so. (via) Get this: I typed ‘exit’ instead of just closing the browser window when I was done messing with it, because some habits cannot be broken.
The 10th EuroBSDCon is happening in Maarssen, The Netherlands, October 6th through the 9th. The call for proposals is up until the end of the month.
The May issue of BSD Magazine is out. The cover says “Embedded FreeBSD” as a continuation of last month’s theme, but there’s really a wide mix in there. Of course, there’s a DragonFly news section from me, talking about 2.10. I’ll point at the zsh article that opens the magazine, since every zsh user I’ve met talks about zsh rapturously. Also, the iXSystems ad on page 2 has a rather fun illustration…
There hasn’t been much to nab for Lazy Reading, lately. Oh well. The last few weeks were good so it has to even out sometime.
- Did you know GBC stands for Great Ball Contraption, a Lego device designed to move little plastic balls? Here’s 20 of them chained together. (via b3ta)
- The original University POSTGRES. (thanks, Jan) This is a source for PostgreSQL, as far as I can tell, which makes it in some ways contemporary to BSD’s origins. I am not surprised. PostgreSQL seems to be the thinking person’s alternative to MySQL like BSD is the thinking person’s alternative to Linux.
- Do you have a pf.conf? The people behind fwbuilder can use it for examples, so they can support pf in their config builder. (via)
The Open Source Business Resource issue for April is out, themed on Collectives. A lot of it covers the Keystone Off the Shelf (KOTS) project, which is a collection of open source software designed to work as a starting package for a technology business. Read the first article for more details.
The April issue of BSD Magazine is out! It’s a very full issue, including another news roundup by yours truly.
Getting into the swing of this link collection thing…
- The first paragraph of this things magazine post is about the “lingering memory of the space of ancient video games.” It’s good; follow the links to read. It also mentions the excellent This Gaming Life book, which is on the shelf to the right of me as I type, and can be read in full online. (though it’s worth buying.)
- This made me laugh.
- How to kill your online community. Good guidelines for how to (not) act.
- This week’s “Only the Internet could produce this”: Einstein vs. Hawking, the rap battle.
- pcc is now at version 1.0.
- Anyone have recommendations for a good domain registrar? I’m sick of mine.
This week’s Daemon & Penguin podcast is about 3 things that I did not know existed. The mystery computer items are two languages, Genie and Vala. The mystery movie is S.Darko, a sequel to a movie that I am aware of, but never saw: Donnie Darko.
I’ve found enough good links I’m able to schedule this post ahead of time. Yay!
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author, is selling a short story via Amazon/Kindle. It has nothing to do with BSD, directly.
- Also, he offers beer to anyone who can get KVM working on a BSD. Any BSD. I guess vkernels don’t count, really.
- This idea came up at work recently: Etherkiller!
- The evolution of computer displays. (via) It covers some pretty ancient stuff – the article doesn’t even get to Pong until page 3.
- A paper on the new PBI format for PC-BSD (PDF). This is being presented at AsiaBSDCon.
- The Dancing Poultry License (via ftigeot on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A chart of the evolution of science fiction. (via) There’s some good titles in there, if you can read it.
The Daemon & Penguin podcast has a new 50-minute podcast about GhostBSD, a FreeBSD/Gnome install, and a review of the horror movie Parasomnia.
We made it into Google Summer of Code for a 4th year! (yay!)
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
If you want to mentor, apply here:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/mentor/request/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
(You will need to create a login if you don’t have one.) I’m assuming the applicants are going to be people I know with a direct history with DragonFly; otherwise be prepared to give a good history. Signing up to mentor does not mean you must mentor if there aren’t any projects that interest you; it does mean you need to review applications and provide feedback for students March 28th – April 8th.
If you want to be a student with DragonFly:
Check the projects page for ideas:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/
… or come up with your own.
Get your application together by March 28th. Start talking about it on the mailing list or IRC or however as soon as you can; there’s a direct relationship between the amount of preparation we see beforehand and people getting accepted.
Here’s the timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline
Copied from my email to users@/kernel@, cause it has everything you need.
The newest BSDTalk has a roughly 15-minute talk with Dan Langille about the upcoming 2011 BSDCan and PGCon events.