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Lazy Reading: Clouds, cookies, bugs, more

A catch-up week.

  • Ivan Voras askes for the ‘anti-cloud‘, a true decentralization of resources instead of the cloud-as-a-central-service-from-one-company, which is what it’s becoming now.
  • How not to design a protocol, about HTTP cookies.   (via)  I’ve heard from far more people worried about cookies and the need to clear or block them, than, say, people who realize the risks that programs like Firesheep expose.  Such is life.
  • Will be needed: a SSH VPN.  (via)  Did I link this already?
  • ‘radek’ sends along news of Giant DragonFlies.  Not the most scientific of articles, but a fun thought.
  • sshd, given actual form.
  • Dru Lavigne’s got a nice summary of MeetBSD, complete with pictures, audio, and video.  More conferences should be covered this completely, and quickly.
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Lazy Reading: Cute films, app stores, boom boxes

Whoops!  This should have gone up last night.  I’m almost waxing nostalgic for this one.

  • Two words you never thought you’d see together: “heartwarming” and “single system image computing”.  I think this is how we should document everything for DragonFly.  (via)
  • Apple’s bringing the App Store to the Mac platform, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Ani Dash has a writeup of the various “app store” platforms out there.  pkgsrc (and FreeBSD/OpenBSD ports) would certainly count.  Surprisingly, the application count for pkgsrc exceeds most of the other stores he lists.
  • Aw, no more cassette Walkmans. (via)  Nowadays, it’s difficult to not take music with you wherever you go.   In the 1980s, there was no other way to bring your music with you, except maybe a lot of batteries and this.  I loved my crappy JVC dual tape deck.

Not quite the same model, but still crap

I am totally stealing the horizonal evocative image idea from things magazine.

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Lazy Reading: puzzles, git, old things

Something for everyone this week.

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Lazy Reading:books, talks, games, games

    This Lazy Reading post actually has some good lengthy reading in it.

    • Modern Perl: The Book: (actually a pre-print draft)  Even if you don’t know Perl, I’ve always liked the way the author, chromatic, writes.  Many articles about a language or other technical subject tend to either wander about loosely or become a ‘shopping list’ of actions, but chromatic’s work retains focus.
    • Robert Watson presents Capsicum; a recent USENIX talk on Youtube. (via a number of places)
    • 12 Forgotten Games – the slideshow is of most interest.  (via)  Online games that predate the vast swarm of today’s titles.  MUDs, MUSHs, roguelikes, etc.  The nice thing about the slideshow is the link on each slide to a still-running, still-accessible online version of that game.
    • Kieron Gillen‘s moving away from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a gaming review site that has some honest to goodness decent writing.  (My Lazy Reading posts are similar to their Sunday Papers for a reason.)  One of his articles was all about ZangbandTK.  I was all set to link to that in pkgsrc, but it’s not there – just games/angband-tty and games/angband-x11.  Darnit.  Anyway, read his article and then go play something roguelike.
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    Lazy reading: toeplitz, forking, curating, Nethack

    I totally meant to post this yesterday.  Oops!

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    Lazy reading: the return of ACID, SSI, weirdness

      A smaller set of links, but still the same volume of reading material.

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      Periodical frenzy!

      There’s several publications with new issues out.  It’s a long weekend (in the U.S.) so you can catch up on the reading/listening:

      BSD Magazine has a new issue out, on OpenBSD.  There’s also the happy news that they’ve managed to more than double their circulation.

      The July issue of the Open Source Business Resouce is out, with the theme “Go To Market”.   Next month is “Interdisciplinary Lessons”, and submissions are due in the next two weeks.

      BSDTalk 192 is out with an interview of Colin Percival, the FreeBSD Security Officer.  It’s another interview from BSDCan 2010.  Colin Percival is also responsible for, among other things, tarsnap.com, which I find interesting because of its clear and modern business model.

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      Messylaneous: Reviews, packaging, installers, etc

      Link catchup!

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      Things to eat up your day

      It’s a holiday weekend, at least in the United States, so I’m posting few things that take time to view.

      Murray Stokely mentioned this in a comment, but it’s juicy enough to warrant a post: the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube has all 17 of the recent AsiaBSDCon 2010 presentations, plus a lot more from other conferences.

      Phil Foglio, the fellow who drew the original BSD Daemon, has several comics strips, all of which are available for free – Buck Godot (complete), MythAdventures (in progress), What’s New with Phil and Dixie (in progress), and Girl Genius (in progress and in print).

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      Messylaneous for 2010/05/27: destroying flash, Unix, programming

      I had a sudden buildup of things to link to.  It’s three items, but there’s enough info here to eat a few hours…

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      Things that are done

      There’s a number of things that all came together in the last 24 hours or so, which means: bullet points!

      • Jen Lentfer took my suggestion and ran with it.  He’s got an update to Sendmail 8.14.4 on the way too.
      • Binary pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.4.x/i386 are all uploaded.
      • I finished a build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.5.x/x86_64 – take a look and fix some of the broken items, if that interests you.
      • Weekend reading: check out this Trivium post as there’s some interesting historical items.  I may try that LackRack idea in a environment that doesn’t fit a normal rack well…
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      The best way to do open source.

      It’s the weekend, so it’s a good time for a digression.  This blog post from Matt Trout describes a lot of the code work he’s done for Perl, and what he thinks the best contribution is.  The important part is the end of the post.  He notes that for all the code he’s added, the best return has come from encouraging others to contribute.  The net result has been a magnification of effort, as more people donate time.

      The reason I’m posting this is to note that DragonFly, as a community, has been excellent so far at providing a low-drama environment for people to have ideas and contribute work.  Keep this in mind; the best benefit to DragonFly isn’t lines of code, but people welcomed.

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      License reading

      Here’s some lazy Sunday reading about software licenses.  Before you panic and quickly click away to something more fun, these are not flamewars.

      This InformIT interview with David Chisnall of Étoilé talks about various things, but has an interesting note about BSD code and Apple about halfway down.

      I think this is a much better way of encouraging corporate involvement in open source than legal bludgeons like the GPL. The BSD license is easy for even a non-lawyer to read and understand, so there is no confusion when using BSD-licensed code.

      I’m thinking about this because there are people who still can’t figure out the difference.

      Along the same lines, I was surprised by the number of open source programs found just by license listing in the new Palm Pre.  I wish I had a spare $200.

      Wandering even farther off topic, is Étoilé what Windowmaker should have evolved into?