I happened to stumble on this: the DuckDuckGo search engine will take you directly to a DragonFly man page, if you type ‘!dfman’ at the start of your query. For instance, “!dfman hammer“.
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.
I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.
You probably heard of this already, but hey, look! DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.
Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front. This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.
While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself. It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up. Yeah, that worked out just dandy. There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).
The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places) Here’s my story. It was, and still is, “Fupjack”. Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack. Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway. He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.
Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!” I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one. People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out. The putative theme is “BSD Security”, but there also happens to be an article featuring Hammer deduplication on real-world data, by yours truly.
I posted before about changes to the commit template for DragonFly, but Alex Hornung has written up exactly what he did, with better details on how to use it.
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado really wants a port of DragonFly to Xen. He can’t do it himself, but he did a nice job of writing up the problem, and even found resources to help any developer wanting to take on this task.
Two completely separate and unrelated changes:
First, Alex Hornung has added a check to look for certain lines in a commit message, and add a MFC reminder note to the commit message if they are found. MFC, if you haven’t heard it, means ‘merge from current’, or moving a change from dragonfly-current to the last release version.
Second, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc coming up, there’s some old packages that will get dropped. Speak up if you need them to stick around.
If you’ve had a lack of emails from the DragonFly mailing lists lately, this SORBS listing event might be why.
Jeremy Chadwick donated an SSD to DragonFly developer ‘josepht’. Thanks, Jeremy!
Normally I’d take this moment to point out the other donations that could be useful for DragonFly developers… but there doesn’t seem to be any pending requests. Anyone working on a hardware driver that needs something physical to test against? Here’s the moment to note that.
There’s an update on Stéphanie Ouillon’s Google Summer of Code project, working on the virtio block device driver.
Pkgsrc bmake bootstrap, that is. There’s a new version of bmake, and it needs to be tested on every platform possible.
A light week. School’s nearly out in the States, so I expect the Internets to be quieter.
- Another open-source compiler suite. Maybe parts of it were open before? I don’t know; all I have to go on is a press release. Remember when there was GCC or nothing?
- Read this; it will show you just how amazingly intricate the Telehack project is. If that doesn’t convince you, read this.
- Incomplete man pages are no fun. Not this bad, but close.
- Do you use PuTTY as a SSH client on Windows? This PuTTY shortcut creator may be really handy. It also saves your settings in a sane location, instead of buried somewhere in the registry as PuTTY does.
- The origin of Pong. (via) It debunks some of the legends.
The pkgsrc ‘freeze’ in preparation for the pkgsrc-2011Q2 branch is coming up, starting this Sunday the 19th. This means the quarterly release will be tagged in about 2 weeks, and I’ll probably have binary packages built for DragonFly about a week or so after that.
It’s World IPv6 Day. You can go to IPv6 right now with your DragonFly system. If your ISP doesn’t support IPv6, you can try a sixxs or HE tunnel. Also, nag your ISP about it.
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)
The dragonflybsd.org network is going through some network changes; access may be spotty in the next… 24 hours?
Stéphanie Ouillon has posted extensive details on the Virtio Google Summer of Code project; a few questions are included for anyone who wants to jump in and offer feedback.
One of the Google Summer of Code projects that will be valuable for DragonFly even though it isn’t a DragonFly project: “Add other package formats to pkgsrc”, where pkgsrc can interpret rpm, dpkg, and FreeBSD Ports files. Anyway, the project has a Sourceforge site.
If you follow this thread, it has some discussion on how to handle a multi-disk setup and Hammer. If a disk is going bad, you can try mirroring, though you have to be careful how your pseudo-file systems are set up.