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Lazy Reading for 2015/05/24

I guess the accidental theme this week is Unix.

Your unrelated link of the week: svblm.  Found via a link to Infinideer and Forest Ambassador.

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Lazy Reading for 2015/05/17

Get clicking!

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Finished page at the Toronto Comic Jam.  I missed TCAF this year, dangit.  It is awesome.  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2015/05/10

Accidentally very roguelike this week.

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Lazy Reading for 2015/03/22

As you read this, I am probably watching a storage processor reboot.

I’d love to see fewer developers demanding superficial perks, and more of them asking to have more time to contribute to the open source products we use, mentor young developers, and learning more about the space they occupy. All of those result in us growing as developers in more than just our coding skills.

Your unrelated link of the week: National Corndog Day.  Has audio.  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2014/12/14

Minimal link text this week.  It just happened that way.

 

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Lazy Reading for 2014/11/16

Snow snow snow!

Unrelated link of the week: Lenny Kravitz – Fly Away (lyrics)  Watch to the end.  “just like a dragonfly”  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2014/06/08

Less links than last week, but still lots.  Alliteration!

Your unrelated link of the week: Carpets for Airports.  Requires Flash, unfortunately.

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Lazy Reading for 2014/04/27

Settle back, there’s a lot to read.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Agatha Heterodyne & The Sleeping City.  It’s a kickstarter for the 13th volume of a long-running story – which is also free to read online.  As I have mentioned before, the artist Phil Foglio drew the original BSD daemons.

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Lazy Reading for 2014/04/20

This is another week where I find neat stuff at the start of the week, start the post, and by the time the post date rolls around, those links have been seen everywhere.  Yes, I’m complaining I don’t get “First Post!” the way I want.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Heads or Tails.  Chris Ware’s comics are all about using the comic as a way of expressing the movement of time, in so many ways.  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2014/04/13

I am all over the map this week.

Your unrelated animated image of the week: a seal with hiccups.

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Lazy Reading for 2014/03/09

This week blew up with links fast.

Your unrelated video of the week: This trailer for Crawl.  This is a roguelike multiplayer cross-platform game, though I don’t know if it would work on BSD.  The important thing: the voiceover narration is fantastic.

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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 2013/06/23

I was going to make excuses for a low link count because of being on the road this week – but somehow I managed to find a lot to read anyway.  We all win!

Your unrelated link of the week: Who you gonna call?  This kills me because there was some obvious prop work and setup just to create this 7 second joke.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/06/09

Not as wordy this week, but still wordy.  And linky!

  • Max Headroom and the Strange World of Pseudo-CGI. A discussion of how old fake CGI can look better than modern, real CGI. This is an opinion I’ve had for quite a while, and my children pretty much ignore it every time I bring it up.  (via)
  • The Colby Walkmac, which predates the Mac Luggable.  Linked to because it includes good pictures of what the (external) hardware was like.  I find all the old ports interesting, since it’s all USB and the occasional eSATA these days… not that I’m complaining!  I’ve never had a good experience with a 9-pin serial port.  (via)
  • A brief education on escaping characters.
  • I get worried when remotely rebooting a server in a different town or even state.  In Praise of Celestial Mechanics covers much more stressful circumstances: interplanetary reboots.  Does Voyager 1 or 2 have an ‘uptime’ function?
  • The equivalent of what you are doing right now, 20 years ago.  I personally never got to see this; my experience was MUDs.  Speaking of which…
  • The Birth of MMOs: World of Warcraft’s debt to MUD.  MUD == MMO, Roguelike == Diablo/Torchlight, Doom == almost everything else.  There’s a number of game archetypes that haven’t changed in some time.  (via)
  • Playing with powerlines.  I used to work at a company that used these lines for data transfer.  It was neat technology, but it sure wasn’t easy to set up.  Imagine wiring a city but only being able to use Ethernet hubs.  Not switches, hubs.  That, combined with undersized ARP caches/MAC tables, made it really difficult.
  • OpenVPN on FreeBSD, which will come in handy for at least several readers, I’m sure, as the directions should apply to any BSD.
  • Is there anything DNS can’t be used for?  Cause now it’s domain-based mail policy publishing.  (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • “Have you tried DragonFly?” posts on various forums seem to pop up with some regularity.
  • Uses of tmux, explained.  A slide show talking about how tmux works.  (via)

Unrelated link of the week: I’ve had several deadlines and a mail server with issues this week at work, so this is all I got.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/06/02

Last week was a lot of very brief links.  I’ll go for verbosity this week…

  • Regular expressions and regular grammar.  I hope you like detailed explanations.  I’ve said it before: you should understand regular expressions.  The difference between knowing and not knowing is sometimes the difference between knowing how to finish a project, and being hopelessly swamped.  (via)
  • A plea for less (XML) configuration files.  From the same place.  I don’t advocate rejecting XML files out of hand like some people, but I think you need to have a certain existing level of complexity already in your program before you use XML.  For example, so complex that nobody will notice some XML sprinkled in there too.
  • Where Looks Don’t Matter and Only the Best Writers Get Laid, a talk about the Internet from roughly the late 90s to the 2000s.  Some parts of this get farther into political notes than I usually care to read, but I like the point made with “Many women and men alike are using, not building, the web.”  I am frustrated by how the Internet is effectively one-way transmission for so many, like TV.  (via I forget, sorry)
  • Bringing Unix commands to a Windows world.  It’s about Cygwin.  I’ve installed Cygwin a number of times, but it’s such a strange hybrid I eventually stop after using it for whatever specific reason caused the first install.  These days, it’s almost easier to set up a virtual machine on a Windows system and just switch over as needed.
  • The Weird Stuff Warehouse.  How much does this look like your basement?  I like looking in stores like there cause there’s always some hardware item that seems to be worth resurrecting.  (via)
  • Open Source Game Clones.  I feel iffy about these things.  This tends to be viewed as “I want a free game”, not “I want the right to modify a game”.  Also, you could argue it takes revenue away from the original artists who work on a product when it copies the original game methodology, reducing the incentive to produce.  That could be debated, but I am certain of this: I wish people tried original rather than rehashed ideas in open source, because it has a much lower threshold for success.   You don’t need a studio to tell you when you can be published…  which is sort of the idea behind “indie gaming“, I suppose.  (first link via)
  • Remember those old not-a-desktop-not-a-laptop computers?  They looked like this image I saw recently.  I actually learned to use vi in a mild panic on a Sparcstation Voyager, which would be another device in that land between categories.
  • SSH Tricks, found by accident while I was searching for how to do per-host configs in ssh, so that I only had to type a short name and leave off the long suffix (like dragonflybsd.org) when connecting to a server.  Someday I might even get remote port forwarding over ssh correct.
  • USSR’s old domain name attracts criminals.  Somehow I doubt you can identify a criminal site by domain suffix that easily.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Massive Chalice, a Kickstarter for a new strategy and tactics game.  It’s by Double Fine, who has made some fantastic stuff, and it has permadeath, turn-based combat, randomly generated maps… it’s a roguelike!  It’s cross-platform, apparently, though I don’t know if it will work on any BSDs.

 

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Lazy Reading for 2013/04/28

These are getting denser and denser with links, in part because I’m looking harder and in part because Hacker News is becoming a better and better source of links; there seems to be a new go-to site for tech links every 8-12 months.  Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News…

  •  Intel has published a HTML5 development environment.  I don’t even know if it would work on DragonFly or even any BSD, but I feel efforts to make tools that are actually, genuinely, crossplatform should be looked at.  Defensive platform-specific content seems to still be a thing.
  • Slightly related: Building a Roguelike in Javascript.  There’s several parts to this.  (via)
  • The Eternal Mainframe.  The argument is a little wild-eyed, but the underlying thesis: “Cloud == Mainframe” is valid.  (via)
  • A Primer on IPv4, IPv6, and Transition.  I signed up for an IPv6 tunnel recently, but I’m not directing traffic over it.  I should be.  (via)
  • How to make Your Open Source Project Really Awesome.  The title is linkbaity, but the steps listed are correct.  You will look at the “If you want to completely screw your users…” notes and nod to yourself, recognizing something that bit you.  (via)
  • There’s still Apple ][ software being sold.  I vaguely feel like I bought from there before…  (via)
  • Everything’s being put into a git repo these days.  (via)  Wait, spoke too soon.  (thanks, ‘bla’ in comments)
  • Scaling Pinterest.  I like seeing what technology is used as a site transitions from “oh yeah, running on leftover hardware in my basement” to “we need to hire yet another person to keep this all running”.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Sometimes, repeated variations on a single theme can lead to some entertaining humor.  Therefore, Dog Snack.

(Did I just sneak in two unrelated links?  Yes I did.)

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Lazy Reading for 2013/04/14

We are very close to the next release.  As always, it comes down to building third-party software.  Lots of material here to read, until then.

Your unrelated link of the week: A bunch of monster models, all taken at a convention called Monsterpalooza.  A bit grody, but still some very good construction work.  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2013/03/17

You know what stinks?  I find a really cool thing online somewhere, early in the week, or even in a previous week, like today’s unrelated link.  Between me finding it and this always-on-Sunday post, other people encounter it, the link gets reposted everywhere, and it’s old hat by the time you see it here.  Yeah, I’m complaining like it’s hipster linking!

Your unrelated link of the week: I almost can’t tell this is a parody.  Actually, it’s more like a double level of parody.  Seen on this inexplicable, wonderful Tumblog; found via arts inscrutable.

Bonus link: Dog Snack Episode 3.

 

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Lazy Reading for 2013/03/10

I managed to come up with a lot of links this week, somehow, despite the start of the class I’m teaching in addition to normal work.  And Summer of Code’s coming up!  And we’re due for a release relatively soon!  I may appear somewhat… stretched over the next few weeks.

Your unrelated link of the week: I’m the Computer Man.  I always thought the mid-1990s were sort of a Internet/computer teenager phase.  Everything had potential but everything was also awkward.  (via I forget, sorry!)

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Lazy Reading for 2013/03/03

I am all over the place with links this week – some of them pretty far off the path.  There’s a lot, too, so enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: I’ve already been offbeat enough in this Lazy Reading; I don’t have anything else.