The presentations from BSDCan 2012 are up in video form. I was going to link to this in a Lazy Reading post, but there’s a lot of video there. (via) Of interest: Intro to DNSSEC and FreeBSD’s new package manager. Check the list, cause there’s a lot more.
The links are all over the map this week, which is fine. Enjoy!
- This makes me laugh every time. (via)
- Etsy has an astonishingly good internal development practice. And open source code? (via)
- For contrast, Facebook’s release engineering process. (via I lost it, sorry) Not as interesting but I can’t tell why.
- Mosh, a program designed for the persistence of screen but differently. (via) Dunno if it builds on DragonFly, but it looks neat.
- I’m getting more paranoid as I get older. Things like this Javascript ad injection on hotel wi-fi may be a reason. (via)
- “I just ran emacs. LOL!“
- 0x10c, a sci-fi game set in the future with spaceships running a 16-bit CPU. That you can program.
- I wish I could write here with the same mix of loathing and excitement found in this comics review. Warning: mildly… gonzo?
- The journey from user to contributor, a NYCBUG talk in mp3 form. (via)
- I’ve mentioned RetroBSD before, but here’s an example of it being installed on a Duinomite board. 2.11 BSD on a super-cheap, super-small Arduino-style board! (via) I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want one. It even has keyboard and VGA ports.
- At some point, this CPU database will be handy. (via)
- A new, slow form of brute force ssh attack. (via) What I find interesting here is not so much the new attack itself, but Peter Hansteen’s careful gathering and analysis of data around it.
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.
I’m making sure I post this Lazy Reading on the right day. A nice full week’s worth of stuff.
- Bandwidth used when loading different web pages. (via) The largest one is also the most surprising.
- Do you have an IBM x3550? Turn ACPI off.
- The recent TCL presentation at NYCBUG is available in audio form.
- Did you want to know a lot of detail on how to do journaled soft updates in UFS? You want detail, you got it. (via, via) (Is that a repeat link? I don’t think so…)
- This is totally useful if you’re using ssh from a Windows machine.
- SSH is used as a noun and a verb, I just realized. No link, it’s just me noticing verbification.
- BSDCan 2012 registration is open. (via Michael Lucas’s Twitter feed) Conventions are awesome. You should go.
- Michael Lucas talks about book promotion with his recent book. There’s a graph, so it’s automatically great.
- Speaking of books, Modern Perl: The Book is free to download in PDF form.
- A story about _why. (via) I’m not so interested in his identity, but in what he did to get people to program.
- My git habits. (Not mine; that’s just the title.) Speaking of learning, I’ve always thought the next steps past learning the basics of anything is to then see how experienced people approach it, idiomatically.
- Why Juniper Gives Back to the FreeBSD Community. I link to this because I like what they are doing, and also because in a perfect world I would rather have a BSD-ish interface on my networking equipment than fiddle with IOS. Oh well.
- Bunnie Huang always builds neat stuff. This time it’s a Geiger counter. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Neo Scavenger. (via) It’s a game, in Flash, and in beta. If you like postapocalyptic survival, it may be for you.
I’ve seen notices in the past 24 hours for 2 different BSD events: BSD-Day, at UAS Technikum Wien in Vienna, Austria on May 5, 2012, and EuroBSDcon 2012, in Warsaw, Poland, October 18-21. The Call For Proposals is out for EuroBSDcon, for submission by May 20th.
Take a look at the schedule if you’ve been thinking about going… (seen via multiple places) This is as good a time as any to point out, once again, the very valuable BSD Events Twitter feed.
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.
There’s a single day between BSDCan and PGCon, May 13th. That day will be the 2012 Joint Documentation Summit. People from BSD projects and Postgres will get together to discuss documentation tools, projects, and so on. If you are going to either convention, I’d recommend visiting this too. This sort of cross-project pollination leads to good things.
The deadline for submitting papers for BSDCan has been extended, since the convention’s site suffered some downtime this past weekend. Submit proposals by tomorrow, the 31st, now.
Getting back into the rhythm, here…
- Jeff Vogel, who is a funny and smart guy, wrote this article, essentially about crowdsourcing. It’s another way of saying “bikeshed“. Plus: D&D!
- Michael Lucas, sometimes BSD author, has a new fiction collection out. He’s working on a SSH book too.
- Hey, AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, BSDCan in May. I don’t know about EuroBSDCon or NYCBSDCon, though. Plan ahead!
- Did you know there’s a bsd.org? Very old-school: here’s a list of commands, get going.
- GNU Tar doesn’t have a man page. (via) Weird. I didn’t verify that, but I’m not sure how to.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: there’s a Freddy, and a dragonfly, but it’s not DragonFly BSD. It’s still fun though.
BSDCan 2012 is happening on the 11th and 12th of May, 2012, with 2 days of tutorials beforehand. It’s at the University of Ottawa. The call for papers is out. These are proposals for talks, not academic papers. The deadline for submissions is Jan 29th, unlike what the site says as of this writing.
Are you going to Chaos Communication Congress 28? There’s going to be a number of DragonFly developers there, so it’s a good time to meet up. They’re in EFNet #dragonflybsd IRC, so speak up there if you want to find them.
The FreeBSD Foundation is putting out their end of year donation notice. Donate if you can; the support for active developers there helps everyone.
As Brooks Davis kindly posted to users@, FOSDEM 2012 will have a “BSD Licensed Operating System Developers Room”. This has the most value to you if you’ll be near Brussels, February 4th and 5th.
I’m going for more verbose linking. Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it? If not – too late!
- NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care“. He was one of the more colorful speakers at NYCBSDCon 2010, so this should be good.
- It’s Slashdot, so whatever, but this “In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop” linked story had a few good comments – BSD hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from Linux. “BSD: In Need of a Narrative“. Or perhaps, “Who cares if it’s clang or it’s gcc – what do you build with it?“
- I read this essay about social networks (via), and the last paragraph is an excellent summation. Read it, then cancel your Facebook/Google Plus/whatever accounts.
- Xv6 is a modern version of Sixth Edition UNIX, used at MIT for teaching operating system design. (via) The source is available via git, and as a numbered PDF. The book for the class should make interesting reading. Oh, you can see the class details, too.
- FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, February 5th, 09:00 – 17:00: “Open Source Game Dev”. Get on the mailing list if this interests you. Microsoft operating systems still rule the market for games, really, even indie work, so it’s neat to see something that is both open source and game oriented. There will be BSD “devrooms” there, too.
- If you are looking for a particular Unicode character (and there’s lots to choose from), Shapecatcher lets you draw what you are looking for and looks for matches. (via) I’ve needed that here a few times for people’s names, and it’s fun just to see what comes up from a random scribble.
Your unrelated link of the week: The New Shelton Wet/Dry. Titles, content, and images are all picked from unrelated sources, but it forms an oddly compelling digest of multiple topics. Slightly NSFW, sometimes.
Francois Tigeot recently presented a set of slides about Hammer at a recent Irill conference. PDFs of the slides are available at his site, in English and French.
Did you know that there’s a BSDDay 2011 in Bratislava, Slovakia, on November 5th? Well, I do thanks to a random Google search and now you do too. You and I both need to keep watching BSD Events.
Go, look at the BSDday Argentina 2011 site. Follow the appropriate link for the languages you understand – it’s a console simulation! (via)
The Call for Papers for the 28th Chaos Communications Congress is out, as Matthias Rampke noted. Each year, there seems to be at least a few DragonFly people there…
Ferruccio Zamuner is doing a lightning talk about DragonFly at the sixth annual Italian Perl Workshop, September 9th in Turin, Italy. I mentioned this back in May, but now there’s a concrete date, and it’s about a week and a half away.
This week has taught me one thing for sure: Always make sure your backup generator is working. And over-plan battery capacity. That’s actually two things, but what the heck. I’m tired, for reasons that can probably be inferred! I’m not the only one suffering these problems, it seems.
- There is a certain subset of readers here that will find this fascinating: a video of a game postmortem. Specifically, Elite. (via) Needs Flash.
- This is as good an article as any I’ve seen describing where the tablet computer market is going, at The Economist.
- Remember RetroBSD, mentioned here previously? Here’s some discussion of it.
- EuroBSDCon’s 2011 conference is open for registration, but the early bird discount only lasts until the end of August, so jump on it soon if you’re thinking of going. It’s the 10th anniversary of the event!
- PHP 5.3 is coming to pkgsrc as default, soon? The PHP 5.2 -> 5.3 transition seems to mess up a lot of code because of some changes in the way things are handled, or at least that’s my experience, so watch out.
- Make sure you aren’t running mod_deflate on your Apache 2.x server.
- Kristaps Dzonsons, the fellow behind mdocml (which is in DragonFly now and mentioned here before) is working on a mdoc manual. It’s an actual book, with examples. It’s titled “Practical UNIX Manuals: mdoc”, which sounds like part of a series, though I don’t know if there’s anything else. I’d sure like it if there was. (via Undeadly.) Look very closely at the mdoc web page and you will see the markup, too. Neat!
- Breakout treated as a musical instrument, in 1983. That’s too glib a summary of this explanation of an old book studying the game Breakout and playing it. Really, read the article, and remember that the book described would just be lost in a sea of
blog postsnoise today. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella. This is the comic that ruined Batman for me. I can’t unthink it.