BSDTalk 181 has a 16 minute conversation with Dan Langille, mostly about the upcoming BSDCan and PGCon.
Please welcome the newest committer for DragonFly: Jan Lentfer.
If you can produce an article on open source success factors by December 20th, the Open Source Business Resource would like to hear from you. Also, the audio of a recent NYCBUG meeting is available online. Both of those links come from Dru Lavigne’s excellent BSD Twitter feeds. It’s worth watching the BSDEvents one because there’s literally daily BSD-themed events coming up, and she seems to catch every one.
The end of year shopping season is on many of us again. I did this last year, and it seemed useful, so here’s another geeky holiday shopping guide.
For DragonFly material, there’s a number of places that will ship you a CD/DVD.
If you want a computer hardware gift, but your friends/family don’t know that much about hardware, point them at Newegg. Tell them the general type of item you want, and the reviews can help them pick.
For general geek gifts, there’s the ever-popular ThinkGeek. Wandering farther off the beaten path, there’s American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear. Creepier: The Bone Room or Skulls Unlimited.
A good gift for the technically minded: a Leatherman Wave. I’ve tried Gerber multitools and Swiss Army Knives, but I’ve been carrying a Leatherman Wave for so long people turn to me whenever something needs to be cut or opened, because they know I’ll be able to do it.
I’m linking to this even though it’s completely unrelated to this blog’s normal content: The Comics Reporter Holiday Shopping Guide. It’s comics, through and through, and some wonderful stuff is noted there.
Unlike many other blogs, I don’t get kickbacks or commissions off this. You can ascribe this to me “keeping it real” or that I’m bad at monetization. You pick.
It’s a dry-sounding topic, but the articles are interesting: The December issue of the Open Source Business Resource is now available, with “Value Co-creation” for a theme. I’ll point out “A Social Vision for Value Co-creation in Design“, because it has charts!
BSDCan 2010, coming up the 13th-14th of May, has put out the call for papers. The website says proposals start December 19th, but I suppose that’s just the day you start handing them in.
BSDTalk episode 180 is a 25-minute conversation with Girish Venkatachalam about … stuff. (I am posting before listening.)
Welcome DragonFly’s newest developer with commit access: Antonio Huete Jimenez, also known as ‘tuxillo’ on EFNet #dragonflybsd via IRC.
Jon Birrell, a contributor to a number of BSD projects (primarily FreeBSD), has died. His friend and coworker Craig Rodrigues has posted a notice about his death, along with some memories. It’s always awful when someone dies, but it always strikes me about how when an open source contributor dies, it’s noticed, quietly, worldwide.
YONETANI Tomokazu wrote up a nice bit of explanation about compiling src and pkgsrc as non-root. He even explicitly names some useful variables to set.
Several people have been working on having DragonFly compile with clang. Alex Hornung’s updated the clang page on the DragonFly site for details; if this interests you, a conversation on EFNet #dragonflybsd may be in order.
Linkbloggy, briefly:
- A view of Bell Labs, where that other Unix flavor came from, in the 1960s. (via) Best sideburns ever.
- IRC, as explained by American prime time television. (YouToooob, via) Remember, #dragonflybsd is available on EFNet.
- Stallman, Torvalds, and Knuth walk into a bar… (via)
This blog post from Peteris Krumins lists all the publicly available Introduction to Algorithms lectures from MIT, and links to his summary for each, so you can find out what it’s like before investing in over an hour of lecture. Very specific but very valuable stuff.
Matthew Dillon is making some changes to sockets; these should make the code significantly more simple. Look at the first patch, for instance.
Jan Lentfer has put together a test upgrade of BIND in the base system from 9.3 to 9.5.2. Give it a test run, especially if you are on 64-bit DragonFly.
Saifi Khan asked some questions about using git; I link to two sets of answers, because these little things are useful when you are starting with git. Or, in my case, don’t use it frequently enough to remember.
OpenBSD developer Jacek Masiulaniec gets 14 minutes of airtime in the most recent BSDTalk podcast.
Saifi Khan ran Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s make parallelism test on a dual-cpu system, and the theory holds up: ‘make -j N’ where N == the number of CPUs, plus 1, will give the fastest build time. (graphed again!)
Do you have a SMP system, running DragonFly 2.5? Stathis Kamperis needs you to test something, to see if another set of system calls can be made multiprocessor-safe.
Update: An additional step.
The first one of the Open Source Business Resource Co-Creation issues is out. Read this if any of the open source software you use has a commercial component. (Chances are, yes, it does.)