If you don’t know how to use regular expressions, and know it well, you are making your life harder in spectacular ways.
(posting now instead of for Lazy Reading cause it ought to be fixed by then.)
If you enjoy reading my posts, whether the DragonFly-specific material during the week or the weekend rollups, I have a Patreon account where you can effectively tip me.
I’m not trying to turn this into real income, so I haven’t been plugging it – but a number of people have been contributing and I really appreciate it. I have my own reoccurring Patreon pledges, and this is a good time to point you at Linda Medley (cause I have a number of her books), ABBADON (for Kill Six Billion Demons), and Cooking Issues (cause their podcast is fun). None of that is BSD or even computer related.
Mentioning it here because it’s timely: the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest is happening this weekend, and if I wait until the normal day I would post this – Sunday in Lazy Reading – it will be too late. Go if you are anywhere near. (Credit goes to joshua stein on the ChiBUG mailing list – don’t forget their meeting next Tuesday.)
Unrelated to BSD: GPS rollover is happening a few days from now. This affects most people very little, and a few people a lot, but I mention it also to make you think about the systems that underpin our technology.
Michael W. Lucas is reading from his ‘git commit murder‘ book tonight at 7 PM, in Clawson, Michigan.
Here’s one of the reasons to have your own permanent server: The New York Times has a daily feature called, not surprisingly, “The Daily“. It’s a short 15-20 minute news segment, ready by 6 AM. It’s available through Google Play Music or iTunes, but I leave for work by 6:15, and I don’t want to use up cell data downloading something that should arrive on my phone just before I leave the house. Of course, there’s no obvious way to tell Google Play, “I know it’s there; go get it right now”. I don’t know the iPhone experience, but I imagine it’s the same. I want to download on my time, not on Google or Apple’s schedule.
Luckily, there’s an RSS feed for this podcast. That, plus this simple script on my DragonFly system, means I can pull it down whenever I’m ready:
fetch -o – http://feeds.podtrac.com/zKq6WZZLTlbM | grep enclosure | cut -d ‘”‘ -f2 | xargs fetch -m
So, it’s a matter of running that script, and syncing off my own local storage, on my own schedule. FolderSync Lite will happily sync back to my phone using sftp.
Today’s the annual Bad Tech Joke, also known as April Fools Day. I don’t do those here, cause I think of them like this. This is your public service announcement to ignore most of what you read for the next 24 hours or so.
I’m saving up for one of those Acer c720p Chromebooks that people seem to be enjoying. If you have enjoyed the Digest for a long time and want to help, please do. Of course it’s to run DragonFly.
Thanks to the generosity of a bunch of people, I’ll get a C720 and an SSD too. Thank you all very much, people I have never met but would like to shake the hands of.
Matthew Dillon hasn’t committed anything to DragonFly in several days… cause he just got married! Congratulations to the newly married couple.
Just to remind people: I’m hiring a system administrator.
I’m hiring a sysadmin at my workplace:
Normally I’d save this for Lazy Reading, but I’m indirectly involved: the Rochester Institute of Technology now has a minor in Open Source and Free Culture. Here’s the press release. I taught one of the precursor classes, Humanitarian Free/Open Source Development (essentially open source development methods) last spring. Steve Jacobs was my advisor years ago and Remy Decausemaker was my (best) student from the HFOSS class. In any case, the courses are definitely worth it. (via)
This has nothing really to do with DragonFly. I’m hiring a report developer for work. Here’s the Craigslist job posting. I consider it very unlikely that there’s a local reader of this blog that also has the right skills, but what the heck.
One of the most-requested items for the DragonFly mailing list archives is reverse sorting by date. Mailman, which is what’s being used now for archiving, doesn’t have a ‘native’ way to do that. Has anyone seen a trick/patch to get that to happen? I already patch Mailman to get the message date to show in listings.
If you’ve been reading the Digest for a while, you’ve seen me talk about the value of hosting or running your own services. It’s not too much of a surprise in my case; if you are working on an open-source operating system, you want to run it. It’s good to get the experience, and you can run programs the way you want, instead of picking from whatever vendors happen to sell you.
The PRISM disclosure, which I am going to assume everyone is familiar with at this point, is another facet. Every time you use another company for your email, your entertainment, your software, and so on, their information on you can be accessed. This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by going from one webmail provider to another. You can shop around, but notice that the author in that link effectively throws his or her hands in the air and says, “there’s no way out” by the end of the article. This is because corporations work as collecting agents for the government, even if they don’t plan to do so.
That sounds drastic, but there’s legal frameworks in every country for governments to require companies to give up data on any person, on request. It happens. I’ve seen it myself; I worked for Time Warner for several years, tracking down cable modem user information and handing it over as compelled by law. I know the lawyers at TW Corporate didn’t like doing it, but they didn’t have a choice. (I have some horrifying stories about what people would do to themselves and each other.)
Companies are increasingly working to create services to sell, not products to buy. A service never stops being consumed, so it forms an ongoing revenue stream. I’m not saying this is bad; I firmly believe that a financial incentive to be paid improves services. However, as only a consumer, you can end up not owning what you use. Other people have pointed this out, and I don’t want to sound like a frothing crazy person… but it is relevant, though not necessarily as catastrophic as some people pronounce.
What I’m working towards here is a reminder that you should run your own software, and running it on DragonFly is the best way. (Or some other operating system, I guess. If you have to.) Instead of trying to figure out what the least-bad commercial option can be, run it yourself. Good for privacy, good for learning. I know that’s not an option for everyone; fighting with Sendmail (for instance) is not an activity that many people pick voluntarily. But, if you’ve been thinking of setting up a replacement for Google Reader, or hosting your own mail, or own blog, etc… there’s never a better time than now.
(Follow all those links for some good information; consider it an early Lazy Reading post)
Google Reader, which is what I use to track as much BSD stuff as possible, is being retired as of July 1. I need a new RSS reader – any recommendations? Something that I can access from multiple places (i.e. online app) is best.
Perhaps it’s not early morning where you are, but: if you go to Google’s 2013 Google I/O site, clicking on the I and O in particular patterns take you to various easter eggs. (see after break for spoilers).
This has nothing directly to do with DragonFly, other than this is a result from my trip to NYCBSDCon last year… I know I have a few New York City readers. I’m possibly making a short trip to NYC soon; any advice on where to stay/visit?
This is mostly unrelated to DragonFly: I need to get more Python experience in the next few months, mostly around the OLPC project. I’ve only messed with Python when needed to get an existing script running, etc. Any Python users that can point me at a good learning resource?