Category: Lazy Reading

A public service announcement: Check your backup power systems when the weather is bad.  It has been so cold that the always-running heater blocks cooked away the coolant in my workplace’s backup generator in between the weekly inspections, and when the power died a few days ago, the generator failed to start.  This led to the paradoxical sensor warning: “High coolant temperature” when the outside temperature was below freezing.

• Scott Hanselman wrote “Microsoft killed my Pappy“, where he attributes dislike to Microsoft to being old anger from antitrust suits, etc.  Those were more the outcome of frustration over Microsoft quality, as I recall.  Microsoft is doing some things right nowadays – generally using open source techniques and sorta working with standards – but then again, so are all the other large tech silos.
• Those who do not know jails are doomed to reinvent them.  That’s my description of these container/docker/etc ideas floating around Linux.  Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying.  (via)
• speaking.io, about public speaking.  Posted mostly for my own future edification.  (via)
• UNIX: Making better use of the find command.
• More history on stpcpy(3) than you ever knew.
• Unix: How to get along with your coworkers.
• James Iry’s History of Programming Languages.  Some the jokes aren’t exactly new, but it made me laugh.  (via #dragonflybsd)
• The End of Facebook.  I know I should have the Digest on Facebook, but I’m not sure how much of an audience I’d be able to reach without paying to play. (via)
• I Still Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem.  I find the lack of adherence to standards – or even agreement on common formats – very frustrating. (via)
• Twitch Plays Pokemon, the explanation.
• A brief history of one-line fixes.  Written in honor of Apple’s recent blunder.  The conclusion is good, too.

Your unrelated link of the week: Muppets, NYC, and tea.  I know it’s an ad, but it fits my interests perfectly.

Trivia fact that I told someone about at NYCBSDCon: the habit of using (via) to correctly attribute links comes from a still-online-but-not-functioning site called The Nonist.  The fellow putting it together had the most wonderful ability to find esoteric, interesting items to read about.  I can’t match his talent for images.  The Wayback Machine has a copy of the Nonist site so you can see it in its original glory.

To the (text-only) links!

• English minus the non-Germanic words.  (via)
• ‘Tainted Love’, played via floppy drive.
• Unix: When to look for a new job.
• The Dreamliner’s latest in-flight emergency.  I’m not that interested in the article, but I like the quote from the place where I found it linked: “The Internet of Rebooting Things”.
• Android is becoming unforkable.  (via)  The article doesn’t mention Cyanogen or Replicant when it’s talking about ‘alternative’ strategies for Android development; I’m curious what to make of them.
• Broken by design: systemd.  (via)
• A followup: Why systemd is winning.  (via)  ‘winning because nobody else showed up to the game’.  Not a direct quote, but a summary.
• Bunnie Huang’s Name That Ware February 2014 is a mystery to me, but it’s oddly pretty.
• 3D versions of D&D Monster Manual creatures from Patrick Farley.  (via)
• A Vim tutorial and primer.  (via)
• ICMP types in IPv6.
• An objective points-based system for keyboards.  “KLACKY keyboards feel great but they will get you knifed in the back by the people who work near you.”
• Hello boss… Something happened…
• All IBM training videos should be this awesome.

Your unrelated link of the week: If I met you at NYCBSDCon last week, did I seem like a mature adult?  I’m not.  Here’s Deer Fart.wmv.  

A low week this week, but I have been on the road… I will hopefully have a large NYCBSDCon report up later today, to make up for a skimpy Lazy Reading.

Bit rot, circa 1998.  Enjoy looking at the old technology options and prices.  (via)

The Industrial Internet of Things.  Most of what’s out there that should be wired isn’t, and it’s because the companies making the equipment like to pretend the Internet never happened.  Also, modbus is horrifying.

Bluetooth Low Energy: what do we do with you?  I’m surprised more people aren’t excited about BLE; it has a lot of potential.

Your unrelated link of the week: a new Cyriak film!  Starts cute, ends horrifying, but that’s no surprise.

Lots of randomness this week.  That’s great!

• Facial animation, then and now, and now.  (via)
• accessmaincomputerfile.net.  Some of these are real, or at least made with ‘real’ parts.  (via)
• Writing more maintainable shell scripts.  (again, Bash-specific.)
• Nancy Householder Hauge’s stories about working HR for Sun Microsystems relatively early in the life of the company: parts one, two, three, four, five, six.  (via)
• The Descent to C. C programming for people not used to C.  Written by the fellow responsible for PuTTY.  (via)
• Access Windows through SSH.  It’s confusing.
• It’s not a bug, it’s a…  (found via)
• The Magic of Strace.  (via)
• SSD Reliability.  Not really a statistics-based study.
• The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art.  It goes far deeper than you’d expect.
• Related: ‘ascii art’ tagged on Tumblr.  (via)
• Amiga nostalgia, via the Apple app store.
• Why I like Java.  This is perhaps the best description of the language I’ve seen.

Your unrelated link of the week: it’s two links, for the two very rare German episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The holiday break for most people at the end of the year translated to a lot more material showing up now.  We all benefit!

The Year Megaplatforms Ruled The Internet.  Online companies aren’t ‘disruptive’ any more; they are the establishment.  That didn’t take long.  Is it a cycle?  I hope so. (via)

Intel XDK.  Should be cross-platform enough to work on DragonFly, I bet.  (via)

On Hacking MicroSD Cards.  Bunnie Huang from 30C3, so it’s in-depth.  “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.”  The microcontroller on the cards is exploitable.  (via)

Speaking of 30c3, the recordings are up.  (via same place)

Bignum Bakeoff contest recap, from 2001.  512B to return the largest number possible.  (via)

Owlbears, Rust Monsters, and Bulettes, oh my!  The origin of some of the AD&D Monster Manual monsters.  (via)

The Postmodernity of Big Data.  I don’t know about the text, but I like the punchcard images.

You are going to be using IPv6, whether you are ready or not.  (via, with good discussion)

End Paper Maps.  This is ephemera that shan’t survive the Internet, I suppose – but I always did enjoy it.  (via)

Understanding the Galaga No-Fire Cheat.  I would have loved to do this as a child, but surviving 15 minutes in a coin-op video was nearly impossible, barring (for me) one strange exception.  (via)

Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking.  (also via)

Remember, The Cloud means that even if companies last, their services may not – even if there’s no other service to replace it.  (via)

Eventually, will every program have its own internal upgrading and management code?  It seems like it.

New Year’s Resolutions for Sysadmins.  Some of these resolutions look forward, some look backward.

Mommy, why is there a server in the house?

Last of the year!  You’ll want to take some reading/watching time this week.

Can you be arrested for what’s on your computer?  Yes, of course.

Making SSH connections easier.  If you don’t know it, you should.

Ansible vs. Salt and Creating a new Ansible node.  BSD-focused.

Vim in the hands of a Real Maniac.  Damian Conway, the speaker, is a man of complicated skill, and a good speaker.  It gets pretty crazy by the end.  (via)

The Saddest Moment, James Mickens talking about Byzantine fault tolerance.  (via)

The via link on that last one led me to Dadhacker, with some excellent entries like this Eject button at Apple or Fuctuation.

Digital restoration and typesetter forensics.  Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, and Joe Condon reverse-engineering hardware because the vendor won’t reveal how it works – in the 1970s.  The letter to the vendor is hilarious.  The story of how it was recovered, also linked there, is a good read, too.  (also via)

Over-Extended Metaphor for the Day.  Could quibble, won’t.  I like the Emo Phillips followup joke quoted here, where I found it.

Oldcomputers.net.  There’s some neat old things there – and they’re selling/buying!  (via)

Console Living Room; more old game systems resurrected via JSMESS.  First reaction was that it was neat, second reaction: these old games were horrible, compared to what we have now.  (via multiple places)

exabgp, human-readable BGP messages.  (also also via)

The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition.  I had a student who excelled at this, involuntarily.  (via)

We’ve run out of closed-source things to re-implement as open source, and now we’re reinventing the open-source wheel.

How open source changed Google – and how Google changed open source.  Their open source group is essentially about license compliance, not evangelism.  That is the way it should be.  The last paragraph about Summer of Code is spot-on.  (via)

Readers of a certain age will recognize the global vector map theme.  (Here’s more.)  It makes me think of the old Apple ][ game, NORAD.  (incidentally, I was way better at it than the player in that video.)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: not a comic, but a magazine that includes comics: Mineshaft.  I’ve heard about it many times, and I keep meaning to get a subscription.

Halfway to Christmas; time to buy presents if you haven’t already!

DragonFly on Hacker News.  I haven’t read through the comments fully.

The Meaning of “Doom”.  This article makes a very good point; Doom was one of the first game that encouraged user participation in the creation of the game.  Not the creation when it was first made, but the endless recreations as mods.  It’s sort of the same mechanism as open source, but as an activity and not a license.

Alphabet of the Obsolete.  Also known as “Things my children don’t know and don’t care about.”

Now is a good time to donate to the Internet Archive.  (via many places)

The Development of the C Language.  Dennis Richie was good at telling stories about some otherwise very dry subjects; his histories are enjoyable.  Maybe you have to have a certain kind of temperament or interest to really like them.  (via)

The Birth of Standard Error.  It was a smelly typesetting machine where it first started.   (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)

There’s some other interesting articles on that site, including “Programming Languages vs. Fat Fingers” and “The Importance of Being Declarative“.

Better and Better Keyboards.  Continuing the keyboard theme from previous weeks.  (via)

Building the Commodore C-128.  I never used one of these, but I’m sure there’s a few readers that will be gripped with nostalgia.  (via)

The Amiga 500 as a Chrome add-in.  Nostalgia, again.  (via)

Running 4.3BSD Quasijarus with simh VAX.  It’s apparently 4.3BSD for Vax hardware.  I did not know of this, or at least I don’t remember it.

When a Bash script asks, “Where am I?”.

Have you heard the axiom that every program grows in scope until it reads email?  It’s really all programs grow in complexity until they have their own auto-updater.  (Also, XScreenSaver is awesome.)

Vim, in Javascript.  Or maybe the axiom should be ‘Everything eventually is rewritten in Javascript’.  (via)

“Did you see that interstitial?  It was dope!”  (via I forget, sorry)

Your unrelated animated gif of the week: Happy talking boat.

Links are a bit rushed this week cause I’ve been on the road, but here you go.

explainshell – help for arbitrary shell commands.  It’s a really good idea, implemented in a pretty way.  (via)

True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows.  I’m also saving this for later, just like the person who found this link.

From the same place: The ARPANET IMP Program: Retrospective and Resurrection.  Recreating the entire Internet, when the Internet could be summed up as a list of 5-6 locations.

How ALL CAPS and punctuation is now used to communicate mood.  Communication methods still tied down by ASCII, and then UTF-8.

I miss USENET.  (via)

A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility.  Watch the video at the end.   (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: There are more comics and illustrated works out there than there ever have been.  A decade ago, I could buy a few art comics and a reprint each month and feel like I was keeping up.  Now, it’s like a firehose of minicomic, self-published books, and prestige reprints that completely refreshes every week.  The Comics Reporter 2013 Holiday Shopping Guide is huge but barely touches on it all.  Read through and order something you aren’t familiar with; I can almost guarantee there’s several items in there you’ve never heard of.

Now that I’m going into more descriptive detail with these, I’m going to try without the bullet points.  It’s less of a Wall Of Text that way.

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code.  Really, very good advice.  (via)

‘vr’ mentioned the Space Cadet and Symbolics Macivory keyboards in comments for last week’s Lazy Reading keyboard links.  I didn’t know what they were, so searching around found me this Symbolics keyboard image (the model itself is apparently dearly missed)and the inevitable Wikipedia Space Cadet entry.  I also found this study of keyboards that mentions some other ‘special’ modern models I’ve heard of in passing – Das Keyboard and Happy Hacking models.

Also found as part of that search: one man’s quest to get his own Lisp Machine.  That appears to be about 10 years old, so my guess is that you’d go for emulation these days.

Sorting information that isn’t quite numeric.  This bites everyone sooner or later.

The death and life of great Internet cities.  “Whatever we may ultimately make of our move towards sites like Facebook, it’s almost certainly the case that, for the average netizen, it was a movement away from online literacy.”  An excellent article about how communities are no longer built online – at least not through social networks.  (via)

Farming hard drives: 2 years and $1m later.  Data-driven analysis of hard drive prices, and how they’ve recovered poorly from the Thailand floods.  I always like it when a company takes data from doing something on a large scale – something very few people are doing or could do – and releases it.  (via)

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant.  Rob Pike pointing out how the system ecosystem was becoming monocultural.  It’s over 10 years old, so some of the problems have changed.  The interesting thing is to look at it and see which parts were identification of upcoming trends.  (via)

DragonFly 3.6 video review.  This person doesn’t realize the shell is tcsh, not bash, and it really, really messes him up.  I had to stop watching about 6 minutes in.  (via blakkheim on IRC)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Church of the Subgenius is selling 2-for-1 deals on ordainment.  It’s really a legal ordainment, too, at least in the U.S.  You can perform weddings, funerals… circumcisions?  Not sure about the legal restrictions on that, and maybe I don’t want to know.  Anyway, you get an entertaining pack of literature which you can take either completely seriously, or not at all.