There’s a bug with shared libraries in pkg(), which may bite you when upgrading. It’s present in version 1.10.1 at least, so you may want to wait for this fix to be applied before your next upgrade.
It’s Lazy Reading Science week!
- RC40 card cipher
- mplayer ktracing “In my ongoing quest to find the most inefficient software that still appears to work…”
- How New York City Gets Its Electricity. Smart meters have been possible for years… Electricity companies are just not interested. (via)
- Posix Has Become Outdated. Note that I don’t necessarily agree. (PDF, via)
- Computer Science Professor Stages a Play to Teach his Family Perl 6. (via)
- Why Wang went wrong.
- swayvm, a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, for Wayland. (via)
- I LOVE PROGRAMMING, the sticker. (via)
- Laws of the Universe: Perlin Noise.
- Undefined Behavior != Unsafe Programming.
- A new version of Producing Open Source Software is out. (via)
- JS/UIX, “an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers”. (via)
- newspaper subscription experiment
- How I got three errors into one line of code and followup.
- Same author and related: Automatically checking for syntax errors with Git’s pre-commit hook
- Pipelining your laundry, and the ensuing silliness
Your unrelated link of the day: Assault Trombone. Even if this was lethal, I couldn’t take it seriously. (via)
DragonFly-master (i.e. 4.7) now disables DSA keys by default. If you are using a DSA key for SSH/SFTP/whatever, you should change it anyway. Otherwise, it won’t work without workarounds after your next 4.7 upgrade, or by the time of the next DragonFly release.
Imre Vadasz has added the ability to create a UEFI bootloader in DragonFly. Can you use it? I don’t know; I haven’t tried it yet and I can’t tell from the commit.
Imre Vadász fixed top so that hitting ‘c’ filters displayed processes by command name. I am mentioning this not because it’s a huge change, but because I forget about all the interactive elements that are possible with top.
Does that count as alliteration? Anyway, Matthew Dillon has increased the size of the starting window in TCP. If you are on a higher-latency link and/or fetching lots of small files, you should notice better performance.
You can now get temperature readings from your Radeon card under DragonFly.
At the last minute, as usual.
- Contributing to OpenBSD. “I spent two days hunting through Xenocara & graphics card driver code Finally found a good workaround: get a wife.” (via)
- Invented by OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD 5.7 highlights.
- Raspberry Pi 2 support in NetBSD. (via)
- AMD Catalyst might be coming to FreeBSD. Comments are more useful than the article, so I’m just linking to them.
- FreeBSD and beadm.
- The History (and Future) of FreeNAS & TrueNAS.
- flashrd, for creating embeddable OpenBSD images. (via)
- OpenBSD window manager discussion.
- A bounty for OpenBSD/Xen.
- A gdb script for printing routing tables on FreeBSD.
- Bitrig and pkgsrc.
- PDF presentations possible on PC-BSD.
- PC-BSD now has a “ISCSI replication configuration wizard“.
- NYCBUG has an OPNSense mirror available.
Lastly: nvi2, a multibyte folk of nvi, seen in multiple places. This may be good for every BSD to adopt. (every other BSD, I mean.)
powerd now can be adjusted on DragonFly, for quicker returns to high CPU frequencies, or slower … slowdowns? It’s quickly quick or slowly slow. That’s not the best explanation, but I like rhymes. For a less stupid description, look at the man page, which now includes usage examples.
Less links than last week, but still lots. Alliteration!
- “Google’s autonomous cars, meanwhile, have never even seen snow.” Or ice, or deer? Uh oh.
- Bits Sysadmins Should Know. (via)
- Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim. The title is misleading; it’s Emacs vs. Vim. (via)
- How vi came about – Bill Joy in 1984. Compare to the previous link. (via)
- Defensive Bash Programming. Just because it’s Bash doesn’t mean you should be sloppy. (via)
- Why you should love nmap.
- Dwarf Fortress updated – first update in two years. Too scared to play it.
- The Unix Spirit set Free: Plan 9 from Bell Labs. As PDF. (via)
- How It Works… The Computer. A Ladybird book, sorta.
- Will this frustrate you as much as it does me?
- Freedom. Is there an open source/works -on-nonMacOS-BSD version of this idea?
- Old UNIX source, at unix.superglobalmegacorp.com. (via Antonio Huete on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Awesome 80s computing kids magazines. I had Enter, I think it was.
- ADOM is alive again.
Your unrelated link of the week: Carpets for Airports. Requires Flash, unfortunately.
There seems to be a lot of ACPI-related updates lately: Sascha Wildner has updated ACPICA in DragonFly to what I think is the very latest version. See his commit for the differences.
For once, I got this mostly done before late Friday night!
- OpenBSD on the Beaglebone Black.
- DiscoverBSD’s January 28th roundup.
- Automated FreeBSD Panic Reporting. More people need to do this.
- A report from the n2k14 OpenBSD hackathon.
- New to me: CHERIBSD. Capsicum, implemented in hardware, is a rough summary.
- Python is going to 3.x by default in pkgsrc.
- OpenSSH 6.5 is out.
- PC-BSD 10 is out. (release announcement)
- FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Final.
- Sendmail is moved to 8.14.8, and bmake to 20140101 in FreeBSD.
- NetBSD has announced several 5.x and 6.x patch level changes.
- Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower, 2014 Edition.
Remember the ‘mini roadmap’, mentioned last week yesterday? John Marino put together a Google Docs spreadsheet to track the task status; several items are already cleared off. Take a look and tackle a task.
There’s some in-depth items to look at this week; pull up a chair and get something warm to drink. You will be rewarded.
- James Mickens, who you may remember from The Slow Winter a few weeks back, has written again with The Night Watch. Gonzo tech writing is the best. Note to self: a ;login: subscription might not be a bad idea, as apparently there’s more like that.
- Another note to self: watch the USENIX blog. There’s some interesting things on there.
- Citation Needed. There’s a plausible claim in this that the reason we have 0-based indexing in most languages is because of yacht-racing. Seriously, read the article, and follow some of the links in it. (via)
- Engelbart’s Violin. Because “a computer system should maximally reward learning.” Found in that previous essay; good enough I had to break it out.
- Found in the comments from that previous link: SiWriter. One-handed phone typing, simulating a chorded keyboard.
- History of T. I was wondering if it was something about tea, but no, it’s a discussion about a Lisp implementation. Lisp all seems to originate from a magical time, when computers were faster, dragons were common, and elves hadn’t retreated across the sea yet, or at least all the stories have that mythical vibe. See the ycominator link for additional discussion about system languages like Rust, of which I have only heard in passing so far.
- The video and audio from LISA 2013 has been posted. There’s lots there; I’m sure you’ll find an interesting topic.
- I wasn’t kidding about this being a dense week for links, was I?
- This should have been in yesterday, but I only read about it this morning: Darwin/BSD on ARM. More ARM work everywhere, please; there’s a tidal wave of these processors washing about. (thanks, J.C. Roberts)
- Why I use a 20-year-old Model M keyboard. See the ycombinator discussion for alternatives. They all may seem expensive, but it’s equipment you’re going to smash your fingers against for many years; it should be good.
- That discussion link in the previous item led me to this image. An old-style Thinkpad keyboard? Now that would be pleasant to use. Apparently these existed, though the Lenovo keyboards section doesn’t have anything exactly by that name; the keyboards there look generic. There’s some on eBay. Anyone ever used one?
- The Homebrew Computer Club reconvenes. A computer club nowadays is “we downloaded some of the same software”, while back then it was “I built a computer.” A bit more hardcore.
- chibitronics. It’s ‘circuit stickers’, and a good idea.
- mattext, a matrix-style pager. Does it work on DragonFly? Haven’t had a chance to find out. It needs a video demo. (via)
- More UNIX script debugging. Still Bash-specific, but still useful.
- Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt. A useful comparison for those not familiar with these types of tool. (via)
- UNIX Proves Staying Power as Enterprise Computing Platform. Gives a short history of commercial UNIX platforms.
- I find stories about closing cloud companies compelling. I’d probably feel different if it was my problems to sort out.
Your unrelated link of the week: Mr. T PSA. It’s a parody of the real thing. I explicitly mention it because you, the reader, might not be just the right age to remember this.
If that’s not confusing enough, watch this.
There’s a number of pkgsrc packages that have a combination of security vulnerabilites and lack of updates for more than a year which is placing them on the chopping block. (Follow the discussion to see which ones make it off the list.) The removals will happen after the next branch, pkgsrc-2011Q1, which is itself due in two days.