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Lazy Reading for 2014/02/16

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!

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.  

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Lazy Reading for 2014/02/09

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.

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Lazy Reading for 2014/02/02

Lots of randomness this week.  That’s great!

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

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Lazy Reading for 2014/01/26

Finally, a relatively quiet week.

Writing more efficient shell scripts.

.  Piped shell commands seen as a set of relations.  This is the most analysis I’ve ever seen of a command line.  (via)  Also related.

Perl Secret Operators.  (via)

As a followup on last week’s Curse of the Leading Zero link, Thomas Klausner points out Python 3.0 explicitly stopped reading leading zeros as the prefix for octals.

The current Humble Weekly Sale (through the 31st) is all roguelikes.  Dunno how many of them run on non-Windows. though.

Mastering Vim in Vim.  Lots more ‘learning Vim’ suggestions where I found this link.

Not possible to have happen; I don’t believe it.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: 50 years of tape.  Cassette audio tapes, that is.  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2014/01/19

The Internet overfloweth with good links, lately.  Nothing this week that requires a lot of reading, but plenty of things to click.  Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week:  Fail Forward, a collection of writing about pen and paper RPGs.  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2014/01/12

There’s a lot this week, so let’s get started:

Git Reference.  Not that there isn’t a lot of other documentation out there, but much of what you find is people asking specific questions rather than explanations of procedure.  (via)

Movie Code.  At least most of these are using legit code, even if it’s often the wrong application.  It’s been worse.  (See ‘state of the art video’ item)  (via)

Unix: 14 things to do or stop doing in 2014.  These tips are actually useful and contain no buzzwords.

TrewGrip, another item in my quest for interesting keyboards I don’t use.

4043 bytes to recreate a mid-80s IBM PC.  There are less bytes of data in the program than there were transistors in the CPU that it emulates.  It can run MS Flight Simulator.  It was for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, which should surprise you not at all.  (via)

The World’s Most Pimped-Out ZX81.  I don’t think it can run Doom, though.

The Unix Shell’s Humble If.  For once, an article that doesn’t just pretend bash is the only shell that exists.  (via)

Unix Shell RPG Tutorial.  It’s exactly what that combination of words means.  (via)

Scientists tell their favorite jokes.

Best programmer jokes, found here where there’s more.

I find these animations slightly hypnotizing.  (via)

Technology used to suck even when it was cutting-edge, and we’ll still feel that way in the future.  (via)

How did we end up with a centralized Internet?

Software in 2014.  The summary is: server side is great, client is not.  (via)

Able to be turn on, and that is it.  Sci-fi movies ignore where technology comes from.

True Nuke Puke Story.  My mine coworkers once did something similar to a copier repairman; got him so worried about going underground that he had a panic attack when he had to step on the hoist.  We had to get a new repairman.

Your unrelated link of the week: BIG ENDING FACES!  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2014/01/05

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?

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Lazy Reading for 2013/12/29

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.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/12/22

Still quiet out there, but I found some good reading.

PHP functions originally named for string length and sorting.  Yeesh.  (via)

A great old-timey game programming hack.  There’s an initial speed hack in this story, and then there’s another clever trick to fix memory corruption.  (via)

My hardest bug.  This was a pretty fiendish problem.  (via)

Gitdown: don’t commit when drunk.  I’ve done that.  Actually will use an Arduino-based breathalyzer.  (via)

Another Perl One-Liners review.

Zeno of Elea, a game.  It’s based on a classic… (via)

Vim plugins you should know about.  From that One-Liners author.

Speaking of Perl, here’s a Larry Wall interview.  An old-school hacker – he wrote patch, too.

Moonpig: a billing system that doesn’t suck.  An in-depth review of system design.  More Perl, too.

Three Books You Should Read…  Mostly BSD content.

How to use Tor wrong, in multiple ways.  It’s not for petty crimes, and it’s not any use when you’re using it from a monitored network.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cookie Puss.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/12/15

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.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/12/08

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.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/12/01

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.

 

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Lazy Reading for 2013/11/24

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.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/11/10

I spent this entire week saying things like “Wait, today’s Tuesday?” and “I thought this was Wednesday, not Thursday.”

  • Welcome to my GUI Gallery, a whole lot of different GUI screenshots.  This mention of the “Salto” Alto emulator brought me there, and there’s some material I’ve never seen before.  Also, there’s Bob.  Not “Bob” the prophet, but Bob, the computer mistake.  Speaking of problematic designs, see the Windows 8 page.
  • 5 Cool UNIX Hacks.  Sounds linkbaity, but it’s useful.  I didn’t realize that CTRL-a is the non-destructive version of CTRL-u.  (via)
  • This seems strange, but I never heard of PLATO, even though it seems to be the precursor to so much.  (via)
  • “Goodbye Google“, in terms of switching to your own platform, seems to be a new trend.
  • arkOS, a similar idea.
  • Finding Files Your Way.  I can never remember all the arguments to ‘find’.
  • Google has a Shell Style Guide.  Which equates to a Bash Style Guide, but that’s OK.  Shell scripts are sometimes considered the most disposable form of programming, so it’s good to see a full guide.  (via)

Your unrelated animation of the week: late for meeting.  A followup to going to the store, which I think I posted here years ago.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/11/03

This was a loooooong week, with me working 24 of the last 48 hours.  It didn’t get in the way of the link-gathering, though!

Your unrelated animated image of the day: (via via)

tumblr_muu6bsK7rS1qedb29o1_500

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Lazy Reading for 2013/10/27

Whee!

Your unrelated link of the week: Deep into Youtube, the top-rated films.  You may want to turn your volume down, and make sure nobody is around.  Not for NSFW content, but because some of those films are so confusing that it’s impossible to explain to someone else why you are watching them.  (via)  There’s some Nico Nico Douga-sourced stuff in there, which I thought I’ve mentioned before, but I can’t find it now.  Why do I even know these things?

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Lazy Reading for 2013/10/20

Whee!

  • The Shady Characters blog talks about alternate phone dial layouts.  I’ve mentioned those here before, but Shady Characters links to this video describing the testing that went on for the keypads.  Check at about 2:40 for the story on how AT&T figured out the ‘correct’ length for the phone handset cable.
  • The Youtube channel for Numberphile, the source of that previous video link, has some pretty entertaining math videos…
  • The UNIX as a Second Language blog has an article up about using strace.
  • The Roland SP-808.  I didn’t know these had a built-in Zip drive.  (via)
  • The ICT 1301 runs again.  This is what big computers are supposed to look like, with large cabinets, and spinning tapes, and oversized operator consoles.  (via)
  • Cryptogeddon, a sort of augmented reality game where I think you sneak your way across real systems.  ‘Real’ as in not someone else’s computers, but real systems set up for this game.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Here’s a weird coincidence.  I was looking at this list of pixelated iconic album covers.  The #3 item is “Trout Mask Replica”, from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.  I scanned that specific image back in 1994, on a Mac IIsi in my college lab.  For whatever reason, I’ve seen copies of my scan (color corrected much better than I did) many times since.  I know I’m not hallucinating because I still have the record, with the same wear pattern on the album cover.  It’s odd to see a 20-year-old copy of a 40-year-old album scan you did just pop up out of nowhere.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/10/13

This week just built up and built up.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nimona.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/10/06

I’m going for pull quotes and dedicated paragraphs this week, just to mix it up.

The Slow Winter.  It’s about the history and trends of chip design, if you can believe it.  “Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO.” I love it so much.   (via)

Richard Stallman on 30 years of GNU.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but the basic point is correct.  “If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. ”  (via multiple places)

When Pipes Get Names.  For some reason, I’ve never had to deal with named pipes – directly.  I’ve used them via other programs, of course.

The person who invented Whack-A-Mole also created dedicated email terminals in the 80s/90s called Anti Gravity Freedom Machines.  All those smaller ‘Maker‘ projects seem unenthusiastic compared to this guy.  Anyway, his warehouse full of robots blew up.  I haven’t found pictures yet.

Joblint, a job description checker.  This has more value than I thought.  I’m curious about statistical results over a large number of jobs.  Take a look at those warnings, too – they’re mentioning the possible dark side of a lot of job ‘benefits’.  (via)

This XOXO presentation by Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Pinboard, makes some good points about work, going against countervailing wisdom to some extent.  “You can work on a lot of projects, but you will only get a couple of opportunities to work on something long-term.”  Pinboard is one of those businesses that remains relatively successful without having to get bought by Google to return any profit.  That’s a sort of success I find fascinating.  (via)

CERN has created an in-browser version of… the first web browser.  It accurately displays like a green-screen terminal, including key clicks.  Watching the screen draw gives me flashbacks to playing MUDs.

Adding Vi To Your Zsh.  Can you add vi-like keybindings to tcsh?  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Art comics links.  It’s a link to more links, but it’s all worthwhile stuff.  Be prepared for difficult but rewarding reading.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/09/29

Moved 20 servers to new hardware this week.  Normally my workplace doesn’t get very active until snow hits.  Normally.  Anyway, going for the long sentences this week.

Your unrelated link of the week: Proper Opossum Massage.  Yes, it’s a serious video, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously.