Someday you will need this – Page 14

2013/02/172013/02/16

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/17

This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.

An oldie but goodie. ENHANCE. This will make anyone who has done photo/video editing twitch. Check the author’s Tumblr for more supercuts. (indirectly via)
Many people complain about regular expressions (and more recently), but they are an insanely powerful tool if you know them well. If you do, figure out this crossword. (PDF) (via)
Followup on the first two links in that last item: xkcd drives a lot of traffic!
If you are on Windows, you probably use PuTTY for ssh. It saves everything in the registry, which can occasionally mean losing all your configuration. There’s manual ways to save it, but there’s also PuTTYtray. (I’ve used portaPuTTY in the past, but it seems to be missing/no longer updated.)
Actually, holy crap there’s a lot of variations/addons for PuTTY.
That makes sense given how many terminal emulators there are, really.
Why piping something off the Internet right to a shell isn’t a good idea. (via)
Remember when the computer section in bookstores had books that involved programming? (unfair, I know.)
“Don’t Be A Stranger“, musing on how there isn’t enough meeting strangers through the Internet any more. Here’s the odd thought I had while reading that article: I couldn’t pick most of the other DragonFly developers out of a lineup, but I’ve been working and talking with some of them for a decade.
You could build Photoshop version 1 yourself – just substitute the original Mac libraries.
Related: Photoshop is a city for everyone.
Some of the oldest color film footage. Not the oldest,but possibly some of the earliest commercial film. Of course, the first thing filmed are young, attractive women. This is a re-occurring theme.
Hey, a comprehensive year-end BSD roundup.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server. Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it. (via)

Wait, this is better! That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry. At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever. Even better than Elemental!

2013/02/162013/02/16

Pulling authorized_keys from LDAP

Michael W. Lucas has put together a script for pulling a user’s authorized_keys file for SSH out of LDAP. It’s a very good idea, though he hints pretty clearly that he could use feedback/feedback – there’s already some in the comments.

Updates: from discussion in IRC about this sort of distributed authentication (maybe ‘authentication distribution’ is a better phrase): Tools like puppet or FreeIPA may also be useful. From seeing other conversations about this, it looks like there’s a lot of solutions to pick from, of varying difficulty, and none canonical. That’s both good and bad.

2013/02/122013/02/11

Python and rebuilding pkgsrc

Pierre Abbat noticed that when using pkg_rolling-replace, his Python packages would fail to be built/replaced. This is because pkgsrc puts the version number into the name of the package, and he was moving from Python 2.6 to 2.7. OBATA Akio and Greg Troxel had suggestions/explanations.

2013/02/052013/02/02

Dealing with problematic git upgrades

If you have git installed, and you are trying to upgrade it, you may have problems. The scmgit-docs package dependency requires some DocBook files that aren’t always accessible. If you do run into this problem, there’s 3 separate options:

You can just install scmgit-base and ignore scmgit-docs. The program ‘git’ still runs.
You can download the prebuilt DocBook files separately.
You can rebuild some XML-related dependent files and then rebuild without issue.

2013/01/19

Extra rebuilding step for 3.3 users

Based on this bug report on the recently updated m4, you may need to perform some extra steps to update m4 as part of a normal upgrade:

# cd /usr/src/usr.bin/m4
# make
# make install clean

2013/01/152013/01/15

Git and DragonFly on IPv6

If you are a brave soul and have an IPv6-only DragonFly installation, there’s now a git mirror of DragonFly that is available on IPv6.

2012/12/19

Linux and cpdup, plus a note

I could have sworn I noted it before, but as Venkatesh Srinivas points out, there’s a port of cpdup to Linux. Also, if you’re using cpdup to copy material out of a Hammer volume’s history, use the -VV switch.

2012/12/012012/11/30

New book forthcoming on DNSSec

Michael W. Lucas announced his next book will be about DNSSec, which is good. It’s also self-published, which I like to see. I don’t know if it necessarily makes him more money, but I like to see more exploration of this new way of publishing.

If you look at his announcement, there’s a link to something else: vendor-free SSL certificates. These are possible? That’s one of those things I didn’t even realize I wanted; having to deal with a certification authority is annoying.

2012/11/27

Crypto card possibilities

This discussion of cryptographic hardware for FreeBSD may include hardware that would work for DragonFly too. Can someone verify?

2012/11/242012/11/24

Holiday Buying Guide

Shopping! This is the big holiday shopping weekend in the US, and I usually put together something here.

Buy an SSD for someone who doesn’t have one – including you if that’s the case. There’s better and worse SSDs out there, but you’ll get a speed benefit no matter what, and other bonuses are possible.
The Tea Bag Buddy, which also comes in a color-changing version. Because tea.
My perennial Science! suggestions: ThinkGeek, American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear, The Bone Room, and Skulls Unlimited.
The Best of BSD 2011 and Last Year in BSD Security, from the BSD Magazine publisher.
For more BSD, there’s always the orgs themselves. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD – no DragonFly, though there ought to be. Also, ISC.
For lists of gifts, there’s the Verge Gift Guide, which has some interesting offshoots.
Another long list: The Comics Reporter’s Shopping List.

If you have suggestions, please comment!

2012/11/19

SMBIOS access now possible

Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD. Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on. For example:

smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006"
smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. "
smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "

This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.

2012/11/112012/11/10

Lazy Reading for 2012/11/11

The 3.2 release seems to have gone well. Who has tried the new USB support? I’m curious to see how it’s going.

:syntax Off, about working without syntax highlighting. (via)
The previous link led me to this .vimrc with by-line explanations. I never get tired of looking at these things, though I also never implement anything out of them.
102 FreeBSD Tips. It’s really the contents of the FreeBSD fortune file. Almost all these tips apply to DragonFly, too, and often the other BSDs.
A tcpdump primer. Always a good tool to know. It’s not as easy to use as Wireshark, but it’s certainly possible to end up with access to tcpdump and not Wireshark, right when you really need to see what’s happening on the network. (via)
An HTML5-based terminal in your browser. Displays images, runs vim, etc. All that technological growth since 1972 has come full circle to replicate an 80×25 screen again. (I kid; it’s pretty neat.)
A 6-week cryptography course, free of charge.
Nothing to do with this operating system, but: Robot DragonFly, an Indiegogo project. (via)
When you’re young and getting paid to work on open source, you can be surprisingly naive. (via several people)
I agree with this sentiment about Linuxisms coming from an OpenBSD developer. (via Tomaz Bodzar)
Someone want to work on ssh-ldap-helper for BSD? It sounds like a very good idea.
A bunch of free computer books. Ignore the Linux ones; there’s free books for Ruby/Python/Perl there. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: This roundup of ultrarealist human sculpture. You’ve probably seen Ron Mueck‘s art before, at least.

2012/10/24

Remember: bin-install

A thread on pkgsrc-users@ reminds me: adding a specific line for bin-install will save time when rebuilding packages; pkgsrc will use existing binary packages instead of rebuilding from source when possible, when this is set. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it does.

2012/09/092012/09/07

Lazy Reading for 2012/09/09

Whee!

deadweight, “Find unused CSS selectors by scraping your HTML”. I’ve needed something like this for years. (via)
The same sort of thing for pkgsrc: pkg_leaves. Worth running at least yearly, or at least before any significant pkgsrc upgrade. There’s no point in updating a package you don’t use or need.
GNU Coreutils cheat sheet, plus the instructions to make it. There’s other cheatsheets linked in the article that may be useful.
Compiler benchmarks, comparing gcc and clang versions. For a complete benchmark, I’d want to compare what number of programs build with each, too. (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
When ‘your mom’ and Unix jokes collide.
Distraction-free writing with Vim. (via)
Also, there’s a “Modern Vim” book on the way. Will it be good? I have no idea; I don’t know of any prior books by the author or who the publisher is. Those facts might help.
For a known author and publisher, here’s a status report on Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition. If you don’t know what a BOFH is from his last sentence, read the original stories.
Quadrilateral Cowboy, a cyberpunk hacking game that actually involves non-boring programming and not just a pipe-matching game under the guise of hacking.
While I’m linking to games, GUTS, sorta like Diablo but more… roguey? It’s turn-based. Also, an excuse to use the roguelike tag.
4 UNIX commands I abuse every day. Having done a fair amount of Perl programming, I am entertained by having side effects being the intended goal. Also, the author pays attention to what runs on BSD. (via)
“Disks lie. And the controllers that run them are partners in crime.” Marshall Kirk McKusick describes just how hard it is to know when your data has really made it from memory to disk. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week. Dubgif. Random animated gifs and dubstep clips. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes it’s perfect. (via) If that’s too random, there’s also this .

2012/06/172012/06/16

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/17

I have such a surplus of links these days that I started this Lazy Reading two weeks ago.

Setting Up spamd(8) With Secondary MXes In Play In Four Easy Steps. Reprinted from bsdly.
A Brief History of Videogames. (via) A 3 minute movie.
Networking by Example with the Packet Construction Set. An mp3 of the NYCBUG presentation from George Neville-Neil. I wish I was just a little closer to NYC so I could attend these… but then I’d be in Syracuse or Albany, and that’s not as cool as Rochester.
I knew Interix existed, but I had never looked at it. Apparently there’s community-created bundles of software to go with it. I think pkgsrc works with it too.
SSD prices appear to be crashing. Now may be a good time to buy. Having a SSD is possibly the bestest part of my work laptop.
Buffers, Windows, and Tabs in Vim. A good explanation for terms unfortunately used somewhat differently in Vim that you’d expect. (via)
Magenta, Darwin/BSD (so sorta FreeBSDish?) on top of Linux. Quoted from page: “This is a very weird project.” As time goes on, what you would think of as BSD goes through new mutations and growths. (also via)
Some selected BSD desktops. XFCE seems to be the most popular; that may not be a surprise in an environment where you are compiling or installing yourself. Various Linux distributions coming with a set desktop hide the pain of compiling all of GNOME/KDE from the user. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of debate.
I never heard the term troll-hugging before, but this description of how a caustic software community will become a smaller software community makes sense. (via)
This emulated VMSCluster setup cost probably close to $150. It would have cost a quarter million or more when I was in college. (via)
It’s a Learning Perl book, from Wrox. But the whole thing appears to be available online at O’Reilly’s site for free? I’m not sure what that is.
Zork 1 played via Twitter.
The Interrupted Unix FAQ. (via) Funny, but probably also a good thing to memorize.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Elfquest, every issue ever. The dialogue is cheesy but the original art is fun, in a way that grabbed me when I read it at 10 years of age.

2012/06/11

Secure your MySQL setup

This was going to go into a Lazy Reading post, but then I realized it shouldn’t. Here’s the source: “A Tragically Comedic Security Flaw in MySQL” (via)

The short version: MySQL, compiled a certain way, will allow 1 out of 256 root login attempts to work no matter what. I was going to link to this for the startlingly large number of MySQL installations found allowing connections from the public Internet, which means breaking into any affected servers would be easy. Then I thought about it… I don’t see a my.cnf installed by pkgsrc for at least MySQL 5.1 by default.

To fix this for your own installation, put

[mysqld]

bind-address=127.0.0.1

in /usr/pkg/etc/my.cnf to disallow remote connections. I don’t know if MySQL on DragonFly from pkgsrc is vulnerable to the issue, but it’s a good idea to not allow remote connections to the database, and ought to be on by default.

Or just use Postgres, if possible.

2012/06/102012/06/16

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/10

I got to use the ‘roguelike’ tag again this week, which always makes me happy. Surprisingly, it’s not about… that roguelike.

RSA encryption explained. (via)
Someone from Google went to BSDCan 2012 and blogged about it. The takeaways are interesting, especially something I’ve seen elsewhere: “Don’t buy systems that can’t take registered RAM in a bazillion sockets”.
Occam’s Razor applies here, but still: trust nobody. (via)
Bash One-liners Explained, part 1.
They’re switching from ‘cvs import’ to ‘cvs add’ in pkgsrc. Now if they’d just switch the ‘cvs’ part out…
Not even vaguely computer related: Please won’t someone make these commercially available? Wait, someone did!
The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound. (via) I feel nostalgic, but on the other hand… nobody missed 14.4 kbaud.
Advanced Vim Macros. “As is typical in Vim, the rabbit hole of functionality goes much deeper than most users will ever plumb.” (via)
Also at the same place: Vim Koans.
Hey, there’s a DragonFly page on the Wine Wiki. It’s short but probably very useful if you want to run Wine.
Also, an OpenCV fix for DragonFly, pushed upstream by a pkgsrc developer. That’s always nice to see.
Fish, a new shell with some nice features. (via) Does this compile on DragonFly?
Found near the same place: a screen saver that auto-plays Angband. OS X only, unfortunately. There must be an easy way to do the same with xscreensaver.
CLANG, but not the compiler. Watch the movie.

Your unrelated link of the week: I happen to work at a salt mining operation, which leads to some unique problems (more). Mining in the US is regulated by MSHA, which has been cracking down since the Upper Big Branch incident. MSHA issues ‘fatalgrams‘ every time a miner dies. MSHA also shows up on site as soon as possible, which means they are there taking pictures within a few minutes, with equipment still running. It’s essentially crime scene photos, and a little worrying; many of the deaths are of people around my age with similar experience.

2012/06/032012/06/02

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/03

So many links this week I’m already working on next week’s entry. Enjoy!

git aliae so that you never lose work (part 2). (via) Aliae is the plural of alias?
The Setup; people’s work environments. I’ve linked to it before, when nabbing links from Trivium, but I never realized how many people there were to look at. People like Chet Faliszek, Gabe Newell, ‘bunnie’ Huang, _why the lucky stiff, Lee Hardcastle, Joel Johnson, MC Frontalot, Derek Yu, Eric Meyer, Anil Dash, Jordan Mechner, Andy Hertzfeld, and Ryan North. There’s a lot more. If any of those names are unfamiliar, you should go look them up and be pleasantly surprised.
How to use DragonFly to troll Amiga users. Funny/sad, like most trolling.
One does not simply run Unicorn in DragonFlyBSD. Not sure what Unicorn is, but I feel bad that it crashed.
Become a Vim Master By Learning these 30+ Key Bindings. Well, it’s vim, not vi, but oh well. It’s the standard list of commands that normally makes up articles like this, but I still look, in the hopes that I’ll permanently absorb another movement pattern and get that much faster.
Which hashing algorithm is best for uniqueness and speed? (via) The colorized hash maps are a pretty interlude in a technical discussion.
Speaking of Vim, here’s the M command, implemented for a web page. (via) The only better thing would be a vertical split screen view.
End of a Fishing Expedition. Makes a good point about the recently-lost-by-Oracle lawsuit about copyrighting APIs: if that was possible, most Unixish operating systems, including BSD, would suddenly have legal problems. Also, the judge in the case apparently knows how to program, and actually established a point of law instead of shrugging and saying “These kids and their newfangled Internets confuse me.”
CPU wars. (via) A trump cards game based on CPUs. Super-nerdy!
Oops.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Make Good Art. (via) The comic version of Neil Gaiman’s recent commencement speech, cause comics are more fun than video.

2012/06/01

How to upgrade pkgsrc packages

DragonFly has a page on updating pkgsrc, and so does NetBSD. I don’t think I linked to the latter before, but even if I didn’t, it’s still useful.

2012/05/03

Debugging RANCID

Michael Lucas has a writeup on how he debugged his RANCID setup. I link to it for the technical details, and also because if you have to manage more than a few switches or other network devices, RANCID is very useful.