diagrams and charts are great – DragonFly BSD Digest

2024/10/202024/10/18

Lazy Reading for 2024/10/20

BSD mini-theme.

Histories of the Greater West. Charts! Graphs! Excellent use of character encoding!
Cabinet of curiosities: A bunch of cryptographic protocol oddities. (via)
Trebuchet for sale. (via)
The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk. (via)
The uConsole, as recommended by you! Specifically this.
Filtered for time and false memory. Conspiracy theory, but fun.
Open-AMP: My OpenBSD Alternative to Devilbox/XAMPP.
EuroBSDcon 2024 in Dublin, Ireland: some notes after the conference.
OpenBSD Webzine 18.
Roguelike Celebration 2024 is happening now. See the merch and the Steam sale,
Plasma6 and FreeBSD 14. Probably applies somewhat to other BSDs.
Commoning. I opened 7 more tabs following up on what I read in that article, so it must be useful.
3rd Annual International Crisp Sandwich Day, this week on the 25th.

2024/09/082024/09/01

Lazy Reading for 2024/09/08

No mini-theme this week.

nmap in the movies. (via)
“This is the first image taken from space.”
“THE HIVEMIND SWARMED, an oral history exploring Gamergate’s aftermath”.
Roguelike Celebration Preview Event! September 8th, so in a few hours.
Related: Roguelike Celebration 2024 Speakers. Each individual speaker’s presentation sounds like an article I’d link here.
Email addresses almost became backwards to what we all know now. (notice the author)
Dead Media Project. More vanished technology than I’ve ever seen. (via)
Programming-related rants. (also via)
BRIEFLY NOTED: Non-Fiction That Could Be RPG Sourcebooks. (via)
Unraveling character webs. I love the diagrams and don’t know any of the books. (via)

2024/08/112024/08/07

Lazy Reading for 2024/08/11

Oddities this week.

Join the Interim Computer Museum. (via)
containerization moves the learning period from “before deployment” to “during outages” I’m quoting a quote of a quote there.
public.work, visually search public domain images. (via)
And if you like that, read The mining of the public domain, an excellent analysis of public.work.
A (Very) Brief Pictorial History of Beholders. Avery D&D-specific monster.
defrag98.com. Never a good screen to see. (via)
EuroBSDCon 2024 will be September 19-22 in Dublin.
Leap smears, a proposal. “My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this scheme would work for about half a millennium”
Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple. (via)
Visualizing Sound and Graphic Traces, both are.na channels. (via)
What the Microsoft Outage Reveals. Read it for the software engineering joke. (via)
Back to BASIC. (also via)
The Adler Archive of Underground Comix. (via)
Putting your phone to sleep with a pillow. (via)

Your unrelated music videos for the day: DRASS – Reaperman. Taking advantage of AI image generation’s inaccuracy, though you bet is more disturbing. (via)

2024/04/282024/04/24

Lazy Reading for 2024/04/28

No accidental theme this week.

DVD.yay.boo, found through a comment from last week.
All of yay.boo is fun to explore, really.
humans.txt. (via)
Memory remapping over 15 billion miles and 5 decades. (via)
Lecture as performance art. Or performance art in the form of lecture.
Ballmer Peak has been found. See page 48 – it’s about 0.05BAC. (via)
MS07-052: Code execution results in code execution.
FreeBSD SSDF Attestation. This is either nothing to you or fantastic, depending on where you work.
An IBM slide from 1979. (via)
Some inside details on how complex it can be to run open source orgs. (thanks, Paul Ivanov)
Experimental art tools. (via)
80’s RPG Fringeworthy. I love the charts of course.

2024/02/252024/02/22

Lazy Reading for 2024/02/25

You get to see a rabbit hole I went down just by following the links in order.

Today in “Daylight Savings Chaos Monkey”.
A description/history of Centrex phone systems.
How SSH port became 22. Surprisingly simple. (via)
Folk search engines. You’re sorta reading one now.
The Berkeley Software Distribution. (via)
Box109: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries. An excellent transcript of a talk about design and what it means.
Death, Lonely Death. 15 billion miles away and we’re still talking to Voyager 1. (via)
Say We Do, a broadsheet about game design. $1 to subscribe. Much more satisfying delivered like this than via Twitter or SubStack. (via)
This led me to some other treats like Social Generation of D&D Stats In the Time of Pandemic, and The Classroom Game of Cool Swords.
That then led me to MOSAIC Strict, a way of defining modular, minimal games.
Undying Dusk, a game inside a PDF. (via)

2020/01/192020/01/17

Lazy Reading for 2020/01/19

No theme, just lots of links.

1978 “Heathkit” D&D Digital Dice Tower. Homebrew, Nixie tubes, D&D dice; this was made for me to link.
VisiData, command line tabular data manipulation. (thanks, Paul Ivanov)
The History of Games conference Call for Papers is out. (via)
No leap second this year.
Related: Did you know there is a global institution covering the rotation of the earth? The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. They graph Earth’s spin. (via)
The Beasts of Europe. More graphs! (Thanks, brother)
Why are modern computers so slow? Scroll to the Technology section; there’s a collection of writeups about modern latency, some of which I’ve linked before but all are worthwhile.
2020 IGF nominees: puzzles, Shakespeare, topical games, interactive storybooks, and adventure plus.
The Roots of Doom Mapping. Goes with the ReDoomEd link yesterday. (via)
The Art of the Post-Internet.
Using Computer Modern on the web. For the TeX-lovers. (via)
Ganymede Series 01 Watch Arrived. A deliberately confusing interface.
Retro Review: Zeven OS. (via)
Opening up the Baseboard Management Controller. (via)
My review of the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM powered laptop. I want to see some in-depth BSD experiences on that hardware. (via)

2018/10/222018/10/21

Updated DragonFly multiprocessing benchmarks

The performance page on dragonflybsd.org has been updated with numbers on symmetric multiprocessing performance. (Scroll to the 2018 section.)

2018/09/162018/09/12

Lazy Reading for 2018/09/16

Unofficial history theme this week – but not UNIX-specific, for once.

Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape. Don’t tell the loaders at my workplace; they are crap. (via)
Making Ubuntu bug reports seems to be useless (or pointless).
Hex codes for all emoji. (via)
Mechanical keyboard / Cherry history.
Rise of the Stupid Network. (via)
A software archaeology screwup.
Dealing with a disclosure embargo in the 1970s. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, as programs. (via)
Realtime VGA ASCII Art Converter. It’s hardware, so it can work with any VGA output.
DevTube, developer talks on video. If you can get over universal partially bearded twentysomethings in t-shirts, you can find something useful here. (via)
Document comments as automatic GitHub issues. It’s not without problem, but this is a good solution to an ugly problem.
Knityak, computationally generated knitwear. (via)
Roguelike Universe: Visualising Influence. Neat charts! (via)
8 megabytes of RAM in this picture. Also 7 million dollars. (via)

Your unrelated baking video of the week: Round Cake Production with Unifiller Depositors and Decorating Equipment. I’m not recommending this as a food; it’s just somewhat hypnotic to watch the robot production of something you usually imagine as lovingly handcrafted.

2018/09/022018/09/01

Lazy Reading for 2018/09/02

Unofficial accidental “time” theme this week. Also charts!

“GlitchPEG is perhaps the first screen saver that’s excellent at detecting buffer overflow exploits.” XScreenSaver 5.4 is out.
Arguably the same topic: A Brief History of Generative Art. (via)
“Update: After 87 hours, I stopped waiting.“
On the Virtues of Terseness.
The Emperor’s New Tools?: pragmatism and the idolatry of the web. (via many places)
wideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games. Nice technical explanation. (via)
PaperTTY, an e-ink terminal emulator. Note that it’s running on solar power in some of the pictures. (via)
Time is crazy, part 1: Working with Timezones. With graphs! (via)
Time makes us crazy, part 2: Higgins Time.
Time is poorly defined even now, part 3: [tz] Mozambique officially uses LMT?
Takeaways from SIGGRAPH 2018. (via)
Related: Technical Papers Preview: SIGGRAPH 2018.
Metasploit+Amazon SES, or debugging Sendmail’s SMTP Authentication. Debugging SMTP when it’s encrypted. (via)
Dogbot.
The Curta Calculator, which I’ve mentioned before.
The Pudding, where I’ve linked before, but I didn’t realize how much data research/visualization there was on the site. (via)

2018/07/052018/07/04

Some package statistics

The article I linked yesterday about Ravenports got me wondering about what package are most popular. avalon.dragonflybsd.org is the default binary package archive for pkg, and it has httpd logs back to 2013, so I collated some information.

I read out a list of packages, and weighed them according to how recently they were downloaded. I also mushed together all the py/ruby/p5/php numbered packages, and excluded lib*.

After all that… there’s a lot of noise. One install of any desktop environment pulls in hundreds of packages automatically, so it’s hard to tell what’s installed by a human and what’s installed by dependency. That being said, here’s some highlights. This is me applying an arbitrary value and then arbitrarily snipping out a list… but it’s fun to see if nothing else.

18596 python27
13564 xorg-server
13499 perl5
13391 xterm
12098 xorg
8512 cups
8453 bash
8389 ffmpeg
8367 spidermonkey170
7884 python
7432 firefox
6997 sudo
6896 bind-tools
6702 openldap-client
5651 nano
5529 xfce4-conf
5052 xfce
4663 ruby
4447 vim
3133 tmux
2578 chromium
2248 zsh
2175 samba44
2132 python36
2007 mate-desktop
1765 mysql56-client
1699 fluxbox
1690 vim-lite
1517 CoinMP
1407 openjdk8
1395 samba46
1384 lumina
1367 kde
1355 mpg123
1353 spidermonkey24
1340 vlc
1338 thunderbird
1329 wpa_supplicant
1252 firebird25-client
1164 gimp
1103 zip
1083 youtube_dl
1044 php
941 freerdp
931 mercurial
927 lynx
866 evolution
848 gnome3
845 openjdk
842 openbox
842 epiphany
799 nmap
798 go
796 mutt
796 gnuchess
743 apache24
726 rxvt-unicode
722 irssi
652 firefox-esr
652 htop
649 rust
619 smartmontools
575 fvwm
529 windowmaker
477 openvpn
472 synth
451 fish
406 npm
403 inkscape
402 enlightenment
367 firefox-i18n
351 dwm
347 neovim
341 R
339 emacs25
320 emacs
320 unbound
312 tor
310 lua
300 cinnamon
300 wireshark
282 netcat
272 pidgin
258 postfix
258 joe
252 GraphicsMagick
251 dillo
249 icewm
242 mosh
236 rtorrent
225 weechat
219 audacious
218 smtube
216 calibre
190 xmms
187 pdksh
184 redis
184 openssh-portable
183 tk85
173 rdesktop
172 nedit
164 terminator
161 fetchmail
160 KeePassX
156 dnsmasq

2017/08/08

kcollect description

I should have linked this yesterday: a description of kcollect and its uses from Matthew Dillon, complete with example graph of a very busy machine.

2017/08/07

New mechanism: kcollect

There’s a new facility in DragonFly: kcollect(8). It holds automatically-collected kernel data for about the last day, and can output to gnuplot. Note the automatic collection part; your system will always be able to tell you about weirdness – assuming that weirdness extends to one of the features kcollect tracks. Here’s some of the commits.

2017/07/222017/07/21

In Other BSDs for 2017/07/22

It’s accidental how-to week!

OpenSMTPD under OpenBSD with SSL/VirtualUsers/Dovecot (via) and
OpenSMTPD and Dovecot under OpenBSD with MySQL support and SPAMD. (via)
Introducing anvil – Tools for distributing ssl certificates, plus examples of usage on FreeBSD.
OpenBSD on the Huawei MateBook X.
Add vmctl send and vmctl receive.
openbsd changes of note 625
BSDTW is in Taiwan, in November – and the call for papers is out. (via)
Watch out for wxallowed.
pfSense 2.3.4-p1 RELEASE Now Available!
Blog about my blog. Self-hosting and dogfooding, both good ideas. ~~Needs~~ Has RSS! (via)
BSD Pizza, a meetup in Portland, Oregon, on the 27th.

2017/03/16

AsiaBSDCon 2017 and DragonFly networking

Sepherosa Ziehau went to AsiaBSDCon 2017 and gave a talk on his work with DragonFly’s networking. He’s published a report of his trip, which comes with a link to his paper, his presentation, and pictures of who he met.

Note that the PDF and the Powerpoint slides links are different; one is the paper, one is the talk. The Powerpoint slides contain the benchmarks linked here in comments, previously.

2017/03/062017/03/06

Network performance comparison

In what can be described as perfect timing, Sepherosa Ziehau has produced a document comparing FreeBSD, several different Linux kernels, and DragonFly, for networking. He’s presenting it in the afternoon track of Day 3 for AsiaBSDCon 2017, starting later this week.

He’s published a snippet as a PDF (via), which includes some graphs. The one place Linux outperforms DragonFly seems to be linked to the Linux version of the network card driver being able to access more hardware – so DragonFly should be comparable or better there too, once the powers-of-2 problem is solved. (This already came up in comments to a post last week.)

Those graphs are available standalone, too, which means it’s easier to see the fantastic performance for latency – see the thin blue line – that seems exclusive to DragonFly. That, if anything, is the real takeaway; that DragonFly’s model has benefits not just to plain speed but to the system’s responsiveness under load. “My CPU is maxed out cause I’m doing a lot of work but I hardly notice” is a common comment over the past few years – and now we can see that for network performance, too.

2016/03/132016/03/10

Lazy Reading for 2016/03/13

I had too many links for this as early as Tuesday.

A perspective on the state of the SSLiverse as of early 2016. (via the author on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
In defense of Unix. (via)
The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science. (via)
SIGGRAPH 2016 – Computer Animation Festival Submissions. (via)
An interactive and audio history of interactive fiction. This can eat some hours. (via)
A Configuration Management Rosetta Stone. 1 program, 4 systems. (via)
An explanation of database indexes. Using PostgreSQL, but probably near-universal. (also via)
I knew but I didn’t really know there were so many named maneuvers in chess, and here’s a whole lot of visualization of them. (via)
Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors: “you take it for granted that someone, somewhere is breaking everything he possibly can” (via)
Announcing SQL Server on Linux. It was this, or losing relevancy within 5 years. (via)
A Robot That Has Fun at Telemarketers’ Expense. Similar to Lenny. (via)
Is group chat making you sweat? A good point on attention as a limited resource. (via)
@Play 84: The Rescue of Meta-Zelda. Randomized Roguelike Legend of Zelda is a somewhat crazy, exciting concept to me.
There’s a third game in the Infinite Space series out – Sea of Stars. The first game is one of the best space-theme roguelikes out there.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Rotoscoped Horse. Taken from the old Muybridge photos. (via)

2016/01/312016/01/29

Lazy Reading for 2016/01/31

I am proud of finding some of these links this week; they are not the usual “here’s what everyone else linked to” that you see.

Evolution of Ethernet Speeds: What’s New and What’s Next. I did not know about 2.5G/5G speeds over existing cat5. (via)
Why the Sun 2 has a message “Love your country, but never trust its government” (via)
#screensaverjam.
Most off-putting introduction to a new technology.
Sanos PDP-11 Simulator with UNIX V7e. Boot SanOS which runs a PDP-11 simulator, which then runs UNIX v7. (via)
best idea ever
***** – Five star cron job. Will run again. (via)
The Amiga Graphics Archive. (via)
The Bear Essentials: Developing a Commodore 64 Game, Part 1. (via)
The anatomy of an ssh session. (via)
Go 1.7 planning. I like peeking into other open source groups’ release planning.
The New Sound Of Music 1979 (Part 1) The fun part of computer history, and it talks about the Radiophonics Workshop! (via)
Your Development Environment is Probably an Eldritch Horror. (via)

Your unrelated graph link of the week: Visualizing HipHop trends from 1989 – 2015. (via)

2014/09/142014/09/14

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/14

I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.

Wee Ada Lovelace. From a wee series, though this is the only computer-related one.
Being Productive with Emacs, part 1. (via)
The guy who didn’t invent email but really wants everyone to think so. (via)
Git Pretty. It’s a chart! (via)
How is a binary executable organized? Let’s explore it! Linux binaries, but mostly still applies. (via)
The network nightmare that ate my week. (via)
In a weird coincidence, the person who wrote that last link, Garrett Wollman, used to be a FreeBSD core team member and also knows a former coworker of mine, Scott Fybush. No point, just a strange connection when a faceless web page on the Internet resolves into someone you know indirectly through other channels.
Modernizing “less”. I’d be happier if it improved function, and was sent upstream. (via)
Breaking Madden: Jadeveon Clowney’s quest for 201 sacks in a game. I’ve posted links to prior gamebreaking attempts by this author before. I like how he’s doing his best to subvert the digital world presented by the game.
The Semantics of Software. “There are many parts to a praise-worthy open source project”. Read that section especially. (via)
The math is a bit beyond me, but I’d like to model the wifi signal in my home this way. (via)
“I want a sensible phone, not a smart phone“. This is why I’m still using a 4-year-old HTC Incredible – though it’s showing its age. (via)
Sweat the small stuff. I like the attention to detail, and the animated examples of what he’s doing with his software. (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941. This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)