Google Search turned up something new: Daemon & Penguin oggcast. It’s a podcast, with every episode covering something Unix-ish – usually BSD. Each episode also reviews a horror movie. It’s not a mix I would have predicted, but I can see how it would work. The first oggcast has him installing DragonFly.
This month’s issue of BSD Magazine is titled “The Wonders of Blender”, but there’s a lot more articles in there with other topics. There’s a two-page spread of DragonFly news that may look familiar to readers of this site…
Dan Langille has announced the BSDCan 2011 schedule/list of events in several places. There’s some fun stuff in there, like discussion of Sendmail from the guy who (originally) wrote it. There’s a talk about Roff (it’s that old?)from Kristaps Dzonsons, whose mdocml also happens to just have been committed by Sascha Wilder to DragonFly’s contrib.
NYCBSDCon 2010 was crazy fun. I hope I can make it to BSDCan…
Jaime Fournier ran a Ruby benchmark against the various BSDs. (noted via IRC and here) DragonFly came out scoring very well. However! I don’t really know what these benchmarks are testing, since I haven’t used Ruby or these tests before. Jaime seems to be planning more tests.
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010 is online, in video form. I got to see this as it happened, and it was a excellent talk. Mr. Lucas is able to put some reasonable arguments together as to the why of things, since he’s been published multiple times, plus his sense of humor keeps it moving.
Hey, wait – there’s more from the conference on BSD TV! How did I miss this? Hopefully even more will show up; the facility was perfect for recording.
February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.
Chris Turner went off into some extra detail on how the rc system works, with extra links for anyone interested in some history.
The theme for this month’s Open Source Business Resource is “Recent Research“. The topic’s broad, so there’s something for everyone. The article on licensing (BSD and otherwise) is of interest.
Entertainment, this week. There’s several items here that will be more entertaining if you’re over 25. Or maybe 35. Get clicking!
- If O’Reilly was to publish any of the various parody books out there, it should be this one.
- Also, looking for those image links led me to this programming language suggestion. Oh! And that led me to this treat for people who remember Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
- A good game critic talking unabashedly about his love of roguelikes? I am so linking it!
- An update on the OpenBSD IPSec backdoor kerfuffle thing.
- OK, back to entertainment. A magic number!
- Wierd: new NetBSD platform support… from Microsoft.
- Huh. Apparently there’s some other meanings for BSD.
- Among other things, this article describes some Ruby tests that work so vigorously to make the tests like natural language that they become harder to write. No big story there; I’m sharing my sense of surprise.
- BSD: it’s tough. (link fixed) The complaints these people make are valid, though.
‘file’ has been updated to version 5.05 by Peter Avalos. file(1) is one of those utilities that I forget is a contributed, external piece of software, even though it’s been in Unix since 1973.
(file is one year older than me!)
The latest BSD Magazine is “BSD’s and Solaris“, and it sets my teeth on edge to write that apostrophe. Seen via FreeBSDNews, though I haven’t seen it noted in BSD Magazine-sourced email/RSS yet.
Stuff!
- I find this erasure of the separation between remote code repository and local code editor very interesting. It may upset more traditional people.
- If you haven’t been watching the BSD Events Twitter stream, Dru Lavigne’s written a nice summary of the next few months, including BSD Exam dates/locations.
- The XFCE 4.8 release announcement hinted at some problems with BSD. It’s apparently because udev, a Linux-only product, is the only consistent way to access various items, so XFCE’s power and volume controls use it. There’s no udev on BSD, so we get left out. I’d normally end this with a call for a compatibility layer, but udev is the latest in a series of jumps from framework to framework in Linux, so I don’t know if it would actually do any good. (Thanks, sjg on #dragonflybsd for the link)
- The Economist has an article on open-source that does a hype-free job of describing the state of open source today. It points out two trends that I don’t think are covered enough: the large amount of open-source work funded by companies, and the hidden costs of training and integration. One downside of the “software is free, training costs money” model for open source is that it creates an economic incentive for byzantine configurations and difficult setups. That idea could use some exploration, but I don’t think many people want to, precisely because it’s negative. The article doesn’t go that far, but they should.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is titled “The Business of Open Source”. The first article, titled “Cost Optimization Through Open Source Software“, explains why iXSystems is all BSD, all the time. There’s also an eye-opening breakdown of the dramatic cost savings from going with open-source rather than Windows.
MirBSD is apparently also interested in pkgsrc as an alternative to the exclusive-to-MirBSD Mirports. The more the merrier, I say.
The latest(?) version of BSD Magazine is out. Among other things, it has an intro to pkgsrc. The site lists November 2010 for this issue, but it just showed up on the Twitter feed, so I’m not totally sure I have this right. In any case, it’s a free download.
Marius Nünnerich posted a call for papers for FOSDEM 2011. Submissions need to be in by December 20th; the Brussels conference itself is happening in February.
(Has anyone been to this? What was it like?)
My NYCBSDCon 2010 summary, or How I Spent My New York City vacation:
This is just based on what’s shown up in my Inbox lately:
- AsiaBSDCon has a Call for Papers for the 2011 event, next March.
- ECI in Argentina has a Call for Course Proposals.
- MeetBSD 2010 is in a few days. (The conference with a paraplegic woman as the logo?)
- BSDDay 2010 is happening in Hungary later this month.
- NYCBSDCon has added BoF sessions to the schedule. (Early registration ends soon!)
Of course, for about a zillion more events, watch the BSDEvents Twitter feed.
The November issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Economic Development.” I like the microcredit article, but perhaps that’s just my special interest.
The December issue’s theme is “Humanitarian Open Source” and the guest editor will be Leslie Hawthorn. She’s currently Open Source Outreach Manager at Oregon State University Open Source Lab, but some may remember her as the face of Google Summer of Code for the past several years.
The BSD Show! has a 20-minute interview with John Hixson, known for working on pc-sysinstall. (See also)