Lazy Reading – Page 37 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/11/132011/11/13

Lazy Reading for 2011/11/13

I’m going for more verbose linking. Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it? If not – too late!

NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care“. He was one of the more colorful speakers at NYCBSDCon 2010, so this should be good.
It’s Slashdot, so whatever, but this “In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop” linked story had a few good comments – BSD hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from Linux. “BSD: In Need of a Narrative“. Or perhaps, “Who cares if it’s clang or it’s gcc – what do you build with it?“
I read this essay about social networks (via), and the last paragraph is an excellent summation. Read it, then cancel your Facebook/Google Plus/whatever accounts.
Xv6 is a modern version of Sixth Edition UNIX, used at MIT for teaching operating system design. (via) The source is available via git, and as a numbered PDF. The book for the class should make interesting reading. Oh, you can see the class details, too.
FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, February 5th, 09:00 – 17:00: “Open Source Game Dev”. Get on the mailing list if this interests you. Microsoft operating systems still rule the market for games, really, even indie work, so it’s neat to see something that is both open source and game oriented. There will be BSD “devrooms” there, too.
If you are looking for a particular Unicode character (and there’s lots to choose from), Shapecatcher lets you draw what you are looking for and looks for matches. (via) I’ve needed that here a few times for people’s names, and it’s fun just to see what comes up from a random scribble.

Your unrelated link of the week: The New Shelton Wet/Dry. Titles, content, and images are all picked from unrelated sources, but it forms an oddly compelling digest of multiple topics. Slightly NSFW, sometimes.

2011/11/062011/11/06

Lazy Reading for 2011/11/06

A bumper crop of articles to read this week.

Ruby went to a BSD license. That’s nice to see. Commence licensing argument in 3… 2…
DragonFly BSD on Ohloh hasn’t been updated in months – it should be noticing new commits automatically. Don’t know why. Any more vigorous users of Ohloh that know why?
“Which OSS clustered file system should I use?” The commenters point out something that many people mix up: RAID redundancy is not backups.
I always enjoy accounts of completely ineffective break-in attempts.
In praise of “crap” technology. I must admit, I love just looking at stuff like what Brando sells, or various surplus sites. It’s never high-end fancy, but that is part of the appeal, as the linked article notes.
Think of this speech the next time someone asks you for help online, no matter how accessible the answer.
20 years of Vim. Vim started on the Amiga, of all places. That would make vi itself about eleventy kajillion years old. Does it predate the release of 1BSD? I don’t know. Looking at a BSD family tree to see what I could learn, I also found that QNX was originally QUNIX. I didn’t know that either. Everything leads back to UNIX, really. I look forward to Jeremy C. Reed’s book about this early history…
This electronic music site entertains me, for it is also available in amber. (You have to have seen monochrome monitors circa 1982 or so to understand…)
Speaking of 1982, you may enjoy Nintendo Legend, CRPG Addict, and Blogging Ultima. (via trevorjk on #dragonflybsd IRC)

Random unrelated link for the week: “War Photographer“. This animation makes me so happy.

2011/10/302011/10/30

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/30

It’s snowing in the northeast U.S., which makes me happy! Keep going, sky!

Richard Stallman’s requirements when giving talks/lectures. (via) I read this not unreasonable but long list and thought about it. Every requirement on there probably has an experience/story behind it… (“If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad.” – so this)
Continuing the famous computer people trend of dying, John McCarthy died. He invented LISP (((insert parentheses joke here))) among other things, and wrote this story. (also via)
I mentioned issues over the time zone database previously, but there’s a new home, and we’re still getting updates in DragonFly.
And, it’s Dennis Ritchie Day. (via) That linked article does a good job of describing just how universal his influence has been.
64-bit ARM chips. (design PDF) This is just the announcement, but I bet these will be a good porting target in the next year or two if these designs wander out into the general market. (via many places)
I’ve linked to similar deals before, but this one’s quite cheap: the Power Squid power strip sold as surplus. I find the design and name both great.
Speaking of names, “I think Dragonfly is the coolest, cuz of the name.“
I like this article on web advertising just because it has blocked-out screenshots that show exactly how much space gets used up by ads.

Unrelated link of the week: Manly Guys Doing Manly Things. Most of the jokes revolve around games you may or may not know, with the occasional realistic experience that I’ve had myself.

2011/10/232011/10/23

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/23

Not a lot of links this week, for some reason.

The best obituary I’ve seen yet for Dennis Ritchie, where he’s contrasted with Steve Jobs.
The best paper abstract ever.
Michael Lucas documents his DragonFly update.
Our tcplay TrueCrypt implementation is getting noticed.
pkgin-0.51 is available in pkgsrc-current, though it’s not in the most recent quarterly release.

Your unrelated comics link for the week: Oglaf. This week’s OK, but it’s frequently NSFW, and frequently hilarious.

2011/10/162011/10/16

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/16

I build this up over the course of the week, so I’m never sure what to put here. Does it matter? The meat is the links.

The Binding of Issac. It’s a roguelike, with shooter elements. It’s also creepy. Here’s the Flash demo. (Windows and Mac only, aww.)
Why transparency is a good idea. (via… Michael Lucas? I lost track, sorry)
The JFDI Theory of Language Adoption. This applies to operating systems too; create the shortest possible path between people and what they want to do on that OS.
NetBSD has added SQLite to the base system. (via) Interesting… having a database(ish) always available leads to some new ways to keep data, outside of the usually “stuff in a text file” format.

Your totally off-topic link for the week: Fat Birds.

2011/10/092011/10/07

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/09

Getting close to 2.12 release…

Steam and Team Fortress 2 running on a BSD – PC-BSD with an NVIDIA driver, in this case, but it may apply to other cards and other games. Using Wine is always so intricate, it seems.
Remember how suddenly a large chunk of Internet traffic was suddenly routed through China, briefly in early 2010? Apparently it’s happened a few more times since then. This article at the Economist talks about that and the SCION project, in an accessible way.
The 2011 Interactive Fiction Competition has released this year’s entries, and almost all of them can be played online. (via) There goes a few hours of your life. Sorry.
Speaking of hours, there’s apparently a civil lawsuit that has rendered timezone data unavailable. Here’s a good summation. It’s a frustrating scenario. (via multiple places)
World’s best introduction to sed.

2011/10/022011/09/30

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/02

Yep, fall hits and it’s easier to find links.

DragonFly morphology. The insect, not the operating system, though that would make an interesting diagram.
Stick your pinkie in the corner of your mouth, Dr. Evil style, and say, “One MEEELion TCP connections on BSD!“. (via several retweets)
Sudo vs. SSH public keys.
The app store concept is taking over. Not that it’s a totally bad thing! We could implement one for pkgsrc, and should. (via)
A nice (OpenBSD-centric) walkthrough of routing. (via)
Ooh, decent disk benchmarks. I wish there were graphs, of course.
I think this happens to most CS grads; you sit around one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I could write an operating system!” This forum post shows someone getting that idea and then realizing it’s not necessarily the goal he wanted. Why do I link to it? I appreciate the optimism.
Or you can just build a functioning computer in Minecraft. This sort of thing has been happening for a while – this movie is just a link to the craziest example I’ve seen so far.

Your unrelated link of the week: Scientific Illustration. Not a comic, but still visually interesting.

2011/09/252011/09/24

Lazy Reading for 2011/09/25

This week’s Lazy Reading just built itself up quickly; autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere and suddenly a lot more activity starts going on.

9vx, Plan 9 as a user process. (sorta like a vkernel?) Via Sascha Wildner on IRC.
Found at the same location: You are not expected to understand this.
Michael W. Lucas, sometime BSD author, has 3 short horror stories available for free, for a limited time. Be warned; there’s no BSD in these stories, as far as I can tell. In fact, they contain genuine horror, not “and then… the server ran Windows ME!” kind of nerd horror.
Also from Mr. Lucas, it’s always nice to see DragonFly hit production.
A nice explanation of the recent TLS vulnerability. (via)
Chumby creator Bunnie Huang’s look at future hardware is optimistic, but I like it. If nothing else, it implies easier driver support. If that names seems familier, Bunnie’s MicroSD saga was previously linked here. (via)
This short Overcoming Bias post is about nanotech, but a certain sentence in there struck me as a good way to determine how you plan out your computer infrastructure (via):

There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement.

2011/09/182011/09/17

Lazy Reading for 2011/09/18

I might have a job open at my workplace soon, for a junior admin/support/network role. (Department is too small for narrowly defined roles…) I’ll post about it here if it happens.

libguestfs, ‘tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images’. (via) I can think of a lot of places that could be useful.
I did not know this, but FreshBSD tracks DragonFly commits, along with the commit logs of most (all?) other BSDs.
Bruce Perens set up a “Covenant” license for the HPCC database (powers Lexis/Nexis) that is actually pretty good at allowing something to be both open source and commerical; the ‘release notes‘ talk about it.
I agree with these sentiments on hiring exactly. If you really like what you do, you don’t just do it at work. (The author’s followup.) Putting it in a more positive light, showing work on open source, outside of your workplace, is a great thing to add to your resume. Never trust the graphic designer with sloppy handwriting.
The majority of the 10 most stable web providers out there are running a BSD. FreeBSD, in this case. (via, via) (why does Twitter make it so hard to link to things? Cause they don’t want you reading the web – just them.)
Usenet, as of 1981, with posts arriving in actual time (-30 years). (via) You can even use a NNTP reader to connect. Similar to but not as colossal as telehack, mentioned here before.
DragonFly deployment.
I am so proud of myself for coming up with this joke.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It used to mostly be violent and nonsensical, but recent strips are excellent, like this one or this.

2011/09/112011/09/11

Lazy Reading for 2011/09/11

Happy birthday to my younger daughter, Claire, who is 9 today. That’s a much better anniversary to celebrate today.

A musing about the waveform and how it’s the most iconic representation of music. It’s also a holdover from analog days, if you think about it. (via)
There seems to be a new kinda-improper activity from GoDaddy found every 6 months or so. Find yourself a new registrar, if you haven’t already.
Here’s how you know DragonFly is actually getting somewhere: exploits show up.
Not directly BSD related, but it’s from Colin Percival, writing as “FreeBSD Security Officer”. With the recent Diginotar news, he points out what’s the best secure certificate to forge.
Introduction to Arduino, a comic guide. (via)
“A jpeg is worth 1000kb“, talking about ZORK and other text adventures. Look for the twisty column of familiar phrases, all alike. The Interactive Fiction genre of game is still going surprisingly strong, so many years later.
That article about ZORK links to this excellent, excellent exploration of the original Colossal Cave game, which led to Adventure and so many other games. Oh yeah, the author was building ARPANet at the time, too.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Chainsawsuit.

2011/09/042011/09/01

Lazy Reading for 2011/09/04

It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America. About time, too! I don’t like the heat. Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…

Yet another git cheatsheet, this time for KDE. (Via TGEN on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
What’s wrong with sort and how to fix it. I will enthusiastically link to any article that mentions letters like þ. (There’s others that this stupid blogging software just eats when I write out the HTML entities.)
Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wonder if I could run some really old software. Like 4.1c BSD?” Well, today’s your lucky day.
Creating new Linux base and infrastructure ports on FreeBSD. Interesting to see just how complex it can be.
Distributed computing at Google. (PDF, via) I like the description of the error/failure rates and how they escalate as an architecture scales up.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday. I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.

2011/08/212011/08/20

Lazy Reading for 08/21/2011

Ah, August. The month where everybody goes on vacation. I’ve been gone off and on for the last few weeks, so my link collection has been slower, but I’ve been able to keep up something.

Friday was whyday. (via) I can certainly agree with the sentiment.
Panic panic panic panic panic panic panic
Not BSD or even software, but good to see: a kid, math, and solar power. (via Tomas Bodzar)
More BSD videos, this time from BSDCan2011 and Google Tech Talks.
The future’s gone meta: there are now game modifications which emulate real computer hardware in that virtual world. (via) It’s not turtles all the way down; it’s emulators.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nedroid. “Beartato” is one of the best names ever.

Yeah, unrelated links seem to always be comics. They offer the most reading.

2011/08/142011/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2011/08/14

This is a shorter version of a Lazy Reading post, but it’s linking to some extensive writing. Yay for having other people make up for my brevity!

Here’s part two of the excellently written story of @. Again, interesting because it mentions ASCII, and its unlamented predecessor BCDIC, among other things. Read part 1 if you missed it.
Stephen Ramsay’s blog – the most recent items are about command line usage. There’s some gems to glean from there, like Jekyll. (via)
Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes. The world needs more tutorials like this, or else this.) (also via)
Obsessive detail over emulation. (via)
Hey, that’s a good idea for passwords.

Your unrelated link of the day: the comics of Lucy Knisley. (follow the ‘Previous’ links for more)

2011/07/172011/07/16

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/17

Man, it’s like the whole Internet decided to take a nap lately. Warm weather in the northern hemisphere does that.

The Hidden Damage From Waste Data (And How To Deal With It) (via) My answer is more RAMdisks. That’s always my answer for everything, though.
A replacement for ALTQ.
Some developer who doesn’t use BSD says it’s not worthwhile. (via) Rather than argue, I’ll just note that the article was linked as “Developer says BSD not worth it” rather than “Interview with man who did PulseAudio” or “What’s happening with systemd”. That may show what people actually care about. Also, see this comment.

2011/07/032011/07/03

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/03

I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.

You probably heard of this already, but hey, look! DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.

Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front. This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.

While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself. It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up. Yeah, that worked out just dandy. There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).

The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places) Here’s my story. It was, and still is, “Fupjack”. Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack. Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway. He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.

Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!” I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one. People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…

2011/06/262011/06/26

Lazy Reading for 2011/06/26

Somehow, I ended up with the most concise link listing I’ve ever done, even though I have a pretty good batch here. Go figure.

Who doesn’t like the taste of BSD? Mmm, delicious.
“redundant array of inexpensive crap”
The invention of email. (via, via) It predates Unix.
The worst ‘hacking’ scenes ever. (via) Starts funny, then you get angry.
A nice explanation of the Lorenz Attractor, which I had only ever experienced as a screen saver. (via)
Possibly the smallest roguelike ever.

2011/06/122011/06/11

Lazy reading for 2011/06/12

A nice big pile of links this week. Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.

An interview with Dennis Richie about inventing Unix. (via) I like that he sounds just absolutely tickled that there’s a version of ‘his’ operating system on his phone.
A nice article describing Project Euler, for those who want to program; or program more. (via several places)
Michael Lucas points out something that isn’t new but still needs reinforcement: avoid SSH1.
Anecdotal evidence that SSD drives fail a lot. On the other hand, the bulk builds I’ve done of pkgsrc have worked the crap out of several SSDs and I haven’t killed a single one.
Weird things in IPv6 routing. (indirectly via this, via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd IRC)
Aw, Google’s BSD-specific search page is gone. Not that it was really needed at this point; I hadn’t seen a difference in the search results for some time. There’s more pressing issues.
The FreeBSD Foundation has a trip report from Sergio Ligregni and from Thomas Abthorpe, from sponsored trips to BSDCan 2011. I’d encourage everyone to make it to a BSD convention – it’s energizing to see others working on BSD, in person.
I don’t think you really need a guide for this. (via)
Emacs user at work.
Totally unrelated: best dubstep video ever.

2011/05/292011/05/28

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/29

Whee!

Do you like the Opera browser? Apparently all it takes is a little misspelling to confuse it with a U.S. daytime talk show host. The “Best of Oprah emails to Opera“. (via) Mistaken identity on the Internet is always fun.
Popular free software licenses, described. (via) One of the better, non-polemic descriptions I’ve seen.
For the opposite effect, the Free Software Foundation’s license recommendations. Somehow, the BSD license isn’t even mentioned. (via) A commenter at the source link notes that the GNU Free Documentation License isn’t even considered ‘free’ by Debian. Along those lines, I’ve always thought that GPL licensing creates a perverse incentive to keep your software undocumented.
The FreeBSD and NetBSD Foundations have acquired a license for libcxxrt from PathScale, which I assume is for C++ support in conjunction with clang. (or pcc?) This isn’t as much of an issue for DragonFly right now since we’re continuing down the GCC route.
Temple of the Roguelike, a searchable database of roguelike games. It’s an idea that you would totally expect for this genre. (via trevorjk on EFNet #dragonflybsd) Also: a roguelikedev subreddit.

2011/05/152011/05/14

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/15

This week: lots more reading!

Michael Lucas describes an extra layer of protection for when you can’t force public key usage on every SSH user.
Cool, but obscure Unix tools (via) The screenshots are all from a Mac… How many of the 24 tools listed are in pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip? Almost all of them. (tpp sounds entertaining.)
NYCBUG, in addition to having a really fun convention, has been regularly posting audio of the presentations they host. The most recent is “William Baxter’s NYCBUG presentation on The Unix Method of Development Management”. See the BSD Events tweet for the download.
What Ubuntu means. (via)
Here’s a nice explanation of Intel’s new Tri-Gate design and with it, an incidental explanation of the processor market.
This ycombinator post about Hammer2 work has an in-depth comment from Venkatesh Srinivas about DragonFly’s network setup, memory allocator, and token use. (Ignore the trolling in other comments.)
Michael Lucas’s next No Starch Press book is Absolute OpenBSD, second edition.
Pictures and video are starting to show up from the just-passed BSDCan 2011. (via this and also thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
My first experience of The Internet was very similar to this. It should be bizarrely unfamiliar to anyone under 20 or so. (via) Get this: I typed ‘exit’ instead of just closing the browser window when I was done messing with it, because some habits cannot be broken.

2011/05/082011/05/04

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/08

Let’s see, what do I have now…

Did you know we just released DragonFly 2.1? Neither did I.
The AppleCrate II (][?), a set of parallel Apple //e systems. It makes me so happy. I love to see how ~~simple~~ uncomplex the old Apple systems were, almost at the level of programmable logic controllers today. I was struck by the fact that the Apple //e requires less than 5 volts, which means it could run off a USB port. (via lots of places)
Removing the internet’s relics: a call to kill FTP now that it’s 40 years old. There’s no easy alternative, though…
20 years of Adobe Photoshop. (via) Obviously that’s not found on any BSD platform, but almost every raster-based image editor out there tries to emulate Photoshop in some way, on every platform. It casts a long shadow. Plus, I remember the Photoshop 2.0 loading screen, so now I feel old.
Is tech blogging becoming worse? i.e not really tech any more? I’ve mumbled about this before, since this site is arguably a tech blog. Sites tend to diversify and lose focus to grow their audience. You can see the same pattern in the magazine market, back when there was a magazine market. You don’t have to worry about the Digest – I’m targeting BSD users, so I’m totally not growing my audience! (Joking, joking. Readership is staying even to slightly up, over the last while.)

On a separate note that has nothing to do with DragonFly: if you live outside the United States and have a postcard handy, can you send it to “St. John Neumann School, 31 Empire Blvd., Rochester, NY 14609 USA”? My daughters’ school is collecting international postcards this month as part of their geography lesson. It doesn’t have to have anything specific, other than be interesting to 8-year-olds.