Lazy Reading – Page 29 – DragonFly BSD Digest

The Open Source Financial Developers Association has a very complete calendar of open source events around NYC. (via)
Google Code-in 2014 has announced its mentoring orgs.
Also, Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
Facebook’s New Data Center Is Bad News for Cisco. Somewhat free of technical data, but I do like the idea of more software-defined networking. (via)
NSA vs. encryption, 40 years ago. (via)
schmutz. Ah, the joys of Unicode. (via)
Sort of related: this is just mean. (via IRC, I think)
SSHelper. I’m going to buy a new phone just so I can use this. I want my handheld computer to actually be a computer, darnit. This is from the guy who created Apple Writer, of all things. (also via)
List of Physical Visualizations. (via)
After Docker. Docker and similar items appear to be an attempt to change an operating system from a place where you work to a thin wrapping around a program you run. Dunno if I like that. (via)
Barbie, computer engineer, which has created more responses.
A brief history of graphics. Video game graphics, specifically.
The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion. Similar. (via)
I like the concept behind “Let’s Encrypt“, though I quibble with the tools selected. (via)
A video about the Internet in 1995. (via)
“With varying degrees, everyone has this drawer in their house.“
IFComp winners will provide a great deal of reading/playing time.

Your unrelated link of the week: Snowpocalypse 2014. I grew up there and now live not too far away. That’s really not that much snow for the area; it’s just that it fell so quickly.

2014/11/162014/11/16

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/16

Snow snow snow!

DoomRL, a Doom roguelike. From Hasso Tepper, who correctly pointed out I haven’t been linking enough roguelike material lately.
Unix: Catching up with Unix errors.
True Stuff: Build Your Own Propeller Car. Not so much about the car as about the building part.
Making Internet Local. A deep dive into what everyone calls ‘mesh networking’ and what that really means.
“The alternative Windows Store” I guess sounds better than win64 package manager. Anyway, the idea of a ports collection is becoming universal.
Command-line Unix-style note taker.
Sample the Amen Break. Hey, a Squarepusher video gets in there. (via)
Receiving NOAA Weather Images with SDR. Sounds fun to build, though I know I won’t get to it. (via)
What is the URL to your technical blog? More things to read there.
New Found Sounds, early synthesizers. (also via)
XScreenSaver 5.31. “To make this work I had to add a UTF8 parser to my VT100 implementation”
100-year-old mechanical computer. It does Fourier analysis. (via)
A bread-slicing machine. Looks dangerous and useful. (via)
Stupid Hackathon. (via)

Unrelated link of the week: Lenny Kravitz – Fly Away (lyrics) Watch to the end. “just like a dragonfly” (via)

2014/11/092014/11/09

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/09

For some reason, more historical links this week than usual.

Thinking Forth. It sounds to be – though I haven’t read it yet – one of those books that transcends the target language. (via)
Fuzix, a “new” OS. (They should just try something else small, like RetroBSD.) (via)
The Best Small Computer in the World – 1968. (pdf, via)
Vim after 11 years. (via)
Terms of Service. I have other comics from the artist. (via)
Recalculating Odds of RAID5 URE Failure.
A brief history of spam and email crypto, from a former GMail worker.
Kerberos Papers and Documentation (via)
Amazon Echo, which continues the long trend of companies reinventing existing open source projects and making them creepier.
Or making lovable things annoying. Seriously, phone alerts and “where are you?” alerts from a teddy bear? I hate it when people pepper me with that. (via)
Noisy dead satellites. (via)
Old UNIX releases/source
Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network. I just barely remember seeing this hardware in the wild, so to speak. It was awful. (via)
The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing (via) Lose some time on this one.
Forth in the USSR. (PDF, via)

Unrelated link of the week: Cartozia Tales. It’s a print comic in a limited series. Many stories, many artists. I’ve been getting the issues and it’s a lot of fun. Here’s an interview with the person coordinating the whole thing.

2014/11/022014/11/01

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/02

Short this week because of the amount of time I was at work, but what I have is good.

System/360, older computing pictures. (via)
Everyone wants a ports system. EVERYONE.
Salto, the Xerox Alto emulator. For those who saw the Alto code release last week. (via)
Hidden Histories of the Information Age. (scroll all through for links)
Goblins: The Fungal Body Politic. Fun if you are the right kind of nerd. (via)
Why You Should Never Use MongoDB. Not a diatribe against MongoDB as you might expect, but an excellent, extended talk about data structure. (also via)
I thought I had linked this already: Internet Arcade; many old games re-implemented in Javascript.
Beginning to Observe Network Management Practices as a Third Party. (via)

2014/10/262014/10/25

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/26

Lots of light topic links this week.

A 50 Year-old Teletype Powered by a Raspberry Pi. (via)
Found via the same link: teletype restoration.
Also found: the rotary VoIP phone. I’ve made rotaries work again via ATA, but only for inbound. This, I would love to do.
How SimCity came to Unix. It’s available now as Micropolis.
Which reminds me: Magnasanti, the biggest SimCity 3000 city ever. (video)
The Xerox Alto source code has been released. There’s a nice history at that page. (via)
Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
The great thing about regular expression languages is that there are so many to choose from!
Computing is women’s work, in 1967.
An interview with Tom Limoncelli. (About LISA)
Why Hypercard had to die. I taught a Hypercard class to older students during college; it was surprisingly easy to get people with no computer experience to build things. I miss the old “computer as tool” approach Apple had back then.
Shall we fork Debian? (via)
Hints for writing Unix tools. (via)
Vimswitch.
curl | sh. (via)
PSA: don’t run ‘strings’ on untrusted files (via several places)
An excellent description of the social ‘littlenets‘ concept. (via)
Web frameworks from Wal-Mart. Not a sentence I thought I’d type.

Your unrelated animation of the week: Karateka. I remember discovering this, and laughing and laughing…

2014/10/192014/10/18

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/19

Writing this now, and hoping I’ll get the server apart and back together fast enough nobody notices.

BlackBerry: The Endgame. Points out that QNX is/was a problem for the ecosystem.
Breaking Madden: Edge of Tom-morrow. I love these despite being indifferent to football.
Measure your open source community’s age to keep it healthy.
The Bot of Mormon.
Trouble at the Koolaid point. Rethink the “ignore it and move on” response. (via)
How tilde.club came together. There’s a potential tilde.club on every BSD machine.
Live coding in VR with the Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript and Three.js. That’s pretty much what I always envisioned the future to look like. (Youtube, via I forget)
Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals. (via)
The Imminent Decentralized Computing Revolution. (via)
slfsrv, a GUI wrapper for command line programs. (via)
NTK, the archive.
The Shen of Programming. (via, via)
TinyScreen, another Kickstarter project, with hardware so small it’s adorable. (via)
My Philosophy on Alerting. (via) Linking for myself at some point.

2014/10/122014/10/08

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/12

Whee!

A talking car dashboard from the 1980s.

Argos Catalogs. Count how many of the pictured items have been absorbed by cell phones. (via)

Features are Faults.

King of click. More Model M stories.

2014/10/052014/10/04

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/05

I spent a good chunk of this weekend at work for various reasons, so it’s a slightly less long list. On the plus side, I know a bit more about setting up fiber links now.

On the Design of Editors for Small Computers. Pre-vi, pre-emacs. (via)
Rob Pike: Reflections on Window Systems. Video. (via)
Writing a Simple Operating System – From Scratch. PDF. (via)
tilde.club, an effort to resurrect the ~/username web page. Wish I had got in. (via many places)
The “Mark I“, (one of) the first programmable computers, designed in 1937.
Cool-retro-term, another analog terminal simulator. (via)
A progress update on the Novena computer, with significant manufacturing detail.
An interesting paper on Alan Turing. (PDF)
disk seeks are slow don’t do them. SQLite internals. (via)
BadUSB, which naturally leads to USB Condom.

Your unrelated image of the week:

I’m getting a new pet tomorrow.

2014/09/282014/09/26

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/28

I have an excellent mix of links this week, I think. I like to have multiple links on multiple topics.

Xenix 1.0, stuck on the 286. The second operating system licensed from Microsoft by IBM, and it was a type of Unix. (via)
50 Years of Moog. (via)
Uselessd. (via)
The End of Linux. (via)
Revitalizing the Perl Power Tools. AKA the Unix Revitalization Project. It’s possible to contribute; this is something I’d like to see modernized. (via)
Culture Stories: Introduction and Milk. I like the “I gave stuff away and eventually everyone did” part of the story. (via)
mdp, a Markdown-based presentation maker. I like the concept and the animated gif used to demonstrate it.
Remarkable, a Markdown editor with a WYSIWYD (what you see is what you did) component. Does it run on BSD? Dunno. Markdown is one of those deceptively good ideas that’s becoming accepted in part because it’s unowned.
Edit: A Relaxing Mix of Vi and Acme. This is going to be the exact blend someone wanted and didn’t know it. (via)
From Vim to Emacs+Evil chaotic migration guide. It’d be better as “Chaotic Evil”. You know what I’m alluding to, nerd. (via)
Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car. Is building Faraday cages for your own things going to be a lucrative business 5 years from now? (via)
Forth Salon. (via)
The Craft of Text Editing. (via)
Programming Sucks. (seen many places but this time via)
Current Status: (via)

2014/09/212014/09/21

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/21

Lots of links this week.

Device names. (via)
xscreensaver 5.30 is out, along with a story of how much work jwz put into the first version of Lament.
One Thing Well mentions toybox, which I think is similar to busybox, but BSD-licensed.
This hard drive still worked. (via)
Unix: Scripting with templates.
Road to Rust 1.0 (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Intel Edison. Processors have become a sort of monoculture in the last 5-10 years; it’s good to see variety coming back at the small scale. (via sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Bézier Clock (via I forget, sorry)
Bézier Method. (via)
wasavi, vi in most any web browser text area.
How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist by Gerard ‘t Hooft. (via)
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile. (via)
HPN-SSH – high performance SSH, as anyone who has scp’d a large file would want. (via)
Lost Lessons from 8-Big BASIC. BASIC programming was very … immediate.(also via)
Booting directly into Vim. (via)
Memory Management Reference. (via)
ENIACinaction.com, about the first modern computer, in the 1940s. (via SIGCIS)
The Ig Nobel prizes for 2014 are announced.
XScreenSaver on YouTube.
World’s longest traceroutes.

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)

2014/09/072014/09/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/07

I finished almost this entire thing just on September 1st. I blame school season restarting. Speaking of which, O’Reilly’s running a 50% off ebooks sale.

VAXen, My Children, Just Don’t Belong In Some Places. (via)
Taking it to Th’emacs. (via)
Running old UNIXes on the Raspberry Pi. (via)
In the Mind of the Fractal King. A reconstructed Benoit Mandelbrot interview. Does each question match the structure of the overall text? (via)
How I Start: Go. (via)
How to Secure SSH with Google Authenticator’s Two-Factor Authentication. Can you do this on BSD? I hope so. (via)
A 4-minute film about IBM culture – mostly before computing as we’d know it, from a longer 2011 film. (via SIGCIS)
Unix: Better network connection insights with mtr.
It’s a trap! Employment documents that require you to violate company policy. I had a similar situation once, handling abuse@ email for a Time Warner affiliate. I have some horrifying stories from that…
The truth about 2 spaces after the end of a sentence. (via)
Classic Papers in Programming Languages and Logic. Set aside some time for this. (via)
Building my own home router, part 1. I can figure out the other hardware – I just need a low-cost 24-port gigabit ethernet card so I can build a home switch. Yeah, yeah, I know. (via)
thx nsa.
The things that will last on the internet are not owned. (via)
Why do you think tech books don’t sell like they used to? (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: the final answer on how to say GIF . (video source – watch the outtakes, too.)

2014/08/312014/08/30

Lazy Reading for 2014/08/31

A relatively trim list for the holiday weekend.

You have ruined HTML. (via)
Do you want to enjoy this? (via)
Useful Unix commands for exploring data. (via)
The most unintentionally tragic tech advert we’ve ever seen.
Doom 3 in Ada. (via)
The Beauty of Roots. (via)
Shift Happens. Notable for the revenue difference between Apple and IBM.
Distributed big balls of mud. Microservices are not the answer. (via)
Unix/Linux trick: ‘cd’ back to the previous directory. I forget this. (via)
The LISA14 schedule is out.
30 layers of NAT. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Submarine Cable Map 2014. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: “Horse.” One of my favorite single panels of all time.

2014/08/242014/08/23

Lazy Reading for 2014/08/24

I hope you like your links eclectic!

A Tale of Postmortems. As a work strategy, this strategy can restore trust that would otherwise be lost when people outside IT/Engineering experience problems. (via)
Unix: Viewing your processes through the eyes of /proc.
“Writing Aliens”, or, “Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt” Data patterns as seen by a science fiction author, and how it comes out in history and twitter. Really, a good presentation just for the range it covers. More bits on the author’s blog. (via)
A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. I was just thinking the other day about how much I hated PS/2 connectors, especially because I encountered a KVM switch in a rack that didn’t do USB. (via)
How Flash changes the design of database storage engines. It’s funny that when people say “Flash” nowadays, they mean the disk product, not the software.
Tweetable Mathematical Art. (via)
RGB LEDs that change color if a Server has a problem/is not responding. (via)
Not Rocket Science. An astonishingly good idea. (also via)
Years later, this image still gives me a mild jolt of panic.
Halfassed implementations of SSH are no fun.
Thursday, IRL. I just like the expression he makes.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: John Pound, one of the original Garbage Pail Kids artists, nowadays creates his art by coding it – mostly by writing out Postscript. He doesn’t draw sketchbooks – he generates them. (via)