UNIXish – Page 10 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/06/302013/06/29

Lazy reading for 2013/06/30

Some of the links this week go pretty in-depth. Enjoy!

This short story from 1954 might serve as a reason to avoid single system image computing… (via Sascha Wildner)
Vim and Ctags tips and tricks. (via)
Psygnosis game box designs. Nostalgia for some, neat art for anyone else. (via)
50 years of ASCII, and here’s the table it comes from. Some other neat links there, too. (via)
Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. If you like stories about Feynman, who was a very interesting person, you may want to read Feynman, the comic book. I met the writer, Jim Ottaviani, years ago, and he was very energetic about both science and comics. Look up his other work if that sounds interesting – which it should. Here’s a sample from the Feynman book. (via)
Back to the Future: Preserving the History of Video Games. This is right around the corner from me. The game museum is as neat as it sounds (yes, they have games out to play), but the article doesn’t mention that it’s attached to a fantastic and huge kid’s museum.
Building a Cray at home. Similar to this previously-linked idea. (via)

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Candy Box and A Dark Room. Both are text-only games, but they use HTML5 for animation. They start minimal, and build up – be patient; there’s a lot of gameplay in there. These minimal games fascinate me. It’s like reading a book, where it goes from just static text to an entire world being built. (somewhat via)

Your bonus unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby double-page spreads. It’s not an exaggeration to say this artwork crackles. (via I forget)

2013/06/17

An X tip on terminal switching

Switching terminals in X with ctrl-alt-Fx requires a not-on-by-default option. This could catch anyone used to the old behavior, so I might be doing you a favor by mentioning it.

2013/06/162013/06/13

Lazy Reading for 2013/06/16

This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post. Enjoy!

SELinux’s toxic mistake. If people aren’t using something you built because it frustrates those same people, it’s not their fault. (via)
Contrary to popular belief, QWERTY was not designed to slow the typist down. (via)
VMS will finally reach end of life in 2020. VMS was a contemporary operating system to UNIX, and started on nearly the same hardware. (the PDP-11) Aw, I feel bad. Not so bad that I’d actually use it again, but still: Aww. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
“At the point all my hardware undeniably works on BSD, I will probably move there.” This article is in no way scientific, but it makes me a little happy. (via a Google search)
The Deepest Uncertainty. A surprisingly enjoyable description of set theory and other math bits. (via)
8 months in Microsoft, I learned these. None of these are a surprise, really, but point 5, “not giving back to the public domain is the norm” is really sad. The example given isn’t even code – it’s just describing a solution on a web page, publicly. (via)
Trillian is publishing the specs for their IMPP communication service. A quote from the announcement: “…our commitment to run a business whose primary focus is its communication products, not advertising”

Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser. Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)

2013/06/022013/06/01

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.

2013/05/262013/05/25

Lazy Reading for 2013/05/26

A really packed week, this week.

Interview with Donald Knuth (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Garry’s Mod on DragonFly. We need that linuxulator working on x86_64. (thanks, tuxillo)
Exxon used to be in the processor business? (via)
PDP-11 in your pocket. (via)
I’ve mentioned before how news aggregators go in cycles: Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News, which might be reaching the peak of its cycle. (via)
Another review of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition.
And I don’t think I’ve noticed that Unix column before.
Dennis Ritchie’s earliest known C compiler, now on GitHub. (via)
Why makefiles indent target lines with a single tab character. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Computer Beach Party, with backstory and interview (via) Not recognizably Unixish.
A very in-depth exploration of SSH keys. (via)
The Real Origins of Tumblr. Related: I often link here to Trivium. (via many places)
UK readers may find this ZX joke funny.

Your unrelated link of the week: Superman’s Ultimate Crotch Kick.

2013/04/212013/04/21

Lazy Reading for 2013/04/21

I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades. Time to move to 64-bit! Anyway, lots of links this week. These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…

For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies. I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future. (via several places)
Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies. It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing. (via)
Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend. This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well. My favorite was always the BeOS set.
On benchmarks. It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”. The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly. See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone. Exactly two years before I was born! At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy. There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz. It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future. I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone. More Spacewar links here.
Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP. “Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.” (via)
Ancient computers in use today. I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before, but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new. Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware. (via)
Yahoo Chat! A Eulogy. The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message. (via)
The $12 Gongkai Phone. Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license. (via)
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance. Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
A Complete History of Breakout. It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK. It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles. (via)
Ack 2.0 is out. It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
Space Claw, Flickr via BBS. You’ll need telnet. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out. If you liked those links, you know what to do next.

2013/04/142013/04/13

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.

E-TeX: Guidelines for Future TeX Extensions – revisited. It’s interesting to look at a software project that has had 20 years to run, with a very specific problem domain, and see that there’s always something more that could be done. (via)
You SHOULD CONSIDER RFC6919. (via)
The largest computer ever built. Why are there no SAGE emulators? (also via)
The newlisp.org logo is a dragonfly, similar to ours. I don’t know why. Oh, wait: I bet it’s parentheses for the wings, which makes sense for Lisp. (thanks, Charles Rapenne)
UNIX V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU coreutils implementations of echo.c. Not necessarily a fair comparison, but interesting; there’s some useful links in the comments, such as this similar exercise for cat.c. (via)
Top 10 reasons I Like Postgres Over SQL Server. SQL Server is not that bad a product, but I do wish Postgres was run more often.
Our Regressive Web. A story on how we’re losing the tools that let us focus on content on the web. The author doesn’t say, but should, that this is partially because we’re using platforms owned by other companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of talking on our own. (email, blogs) (via)
The earliest known version of D&D, the “Dalluhn Manuscript“, is on display at a museum right around the corner from me. (via)
Workflow in Tmux. (via)

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)

2013/03/192013/03/19

Another sh(1) update

Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD. I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point. Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old. The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.

Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use? I don’t know the answer.

2013/03/172013/03/16

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!

Has anyone noticed how there’s been an explosion in nontraditional peripherals lately? Seriously, follow those links. I know there’s more.
A Roguelike Primer. An excellent overview of a lot of different roguelikes. I didn’t know NetHack had an isometric view. (via)
There’s a programming language called Quylthulg. That makes me happy, in a D&D/roguelike kind of way.
Abandoned Apples. I feel bad about the Apple ][ units, and the fatmacs. (via I forget)
yes `yes no`. The comments on the linking page note how the linking description is all wrong (and here’s corrections), but one comment is fun: shell Russian Roulette: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click* (via)
A note about Google Reader’s demise from an interview with one of the creators. It strikes me that there aren’t more people mad that RSS feeds are hard to find. There’s lots of conversations on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus and other places, and I can’t see them without getting an account for each, and logging in. The overall effect of this separation is that it’s hard to follow any one source.
The Thing, an art BBS.
Here’s a chart of possible Google Reader replacements, plus my query earlier this week let to a number of comment suggestions. tt-rss looks like a good candidate, because I don’t have to worry about someone deciding not to run it anymore. There’s also newsbeuter, though maybe that’s too minimal.

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.

2013/02/242013/02/24

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/24

A calm week, for once.

Via Michael W. Lucas: Absolut OpenBSD.
Another ‘How I customize Vim’ style post. These things always sound great, but I worry that it’s not something that can be duplicated. If you had to rebuild or duplicate your Vim environment elsewhere, you’d have to write out your own instructions. Not impossible, but I don’t have to do that for anything else. (via)
Twine, a game creation tool that really requires only writing. (via)
The Oxford Comma, or how it doesn’t matter. (via)
The Story of the PING Program. I could have sworn I linked to this before. I remember having someone explain ping to me when I was young and had little experience of IP networking; it seemed like magic where the computers would actually talk. (via vsrinivas on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
ARPANet, 1971, as a tattoo. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. All the early issues, available in electronic form, for pay-what-you-want. (And I advise paying; it’s a fun comic) Look at a sample page if you are curious.

2013/02/102013/02/11

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/10

For once, I didn’t accidentally post this too early. I hope you have some spare time; there’s a lot of meaty links this week.

“Keep the workload off the pinkies.” is a good recommendation for any keyboard layout. (via)
Dan Langille started doing some price comparisons for various hard drives; see the comments on his article for some specialty sites that do the same.
“It was open source because we didn’t have any choice.” Spacewar, the first computer game. Or at least the first computer game like we’d expect it to be.
If you read the details, Ethernet and Microsoft Word came from almost the same place. (via)
YouCompleteMe, a Fast, As-You-Type, Fuzzy-Search Code Completion Engine for Vim. (via) Haven’t tried it.
This article about the correct pronounciation of “GIF” is mostly a historical rehash, but I really like the last two sentences.
This Wired article does a good job of describing what’s special about Flickr compared to all the other big photo services, and also has an excellent metaphor for Facebook buried in there. (via)
This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of being a “nerd” and how it has changed recently.
Well, that’s a bizarre translation. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
My favorite part of this excellent Economist article about Voyager 1 and 2 is this note: “Most ingeniously of all, Dr Stone’s team equipped the probes with an advanced bit of hardware called a Reed-Solomon encoder. […] The rub was that in 1977 a way to decrypt Reed-Solomon corrected data had yet to be worked out. Luckily, by the time Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, it had been.“
An HTML5-based roguelike. I’m sure there’s others. I like that HTML5 is starting to make things Just Work. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Anthony Clark of Nedroid.com is selling his sketchbook; 101 pages as a digital download, for $1. Look at his strip or his Tumblr doodles if you want to know more before, but that’s quite a deal. Nedroid is the source of one of my favorite character names: Beartato. Also makes a good shirt.

2013/01/272013/01/26

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/27

Whee!

This is a good thing.
This is a (description of) a bad thing. (via)
Linux is becoming the opposite of UNIX. (via makx on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Found via the previous article: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.“
Arch/FreeBSD. This mixing is still weird. Don’t take this stuff seriously, yet. (via)
Gygax Magazine, a reinvention of gaming magazines that no longer exist. It’ll apparently include What’s New with Phil and Dixie, from the original Dragon magazine.
What does the middle initial “B” stand for in “Benoit B. Mandlebrot”? Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
So that’s where Markov chains came from.
The first computer image of a person, and of course it’s porn. (via)
Hey, that’s my haiku!

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Kyle Baker comics, available as PDFs for free. Go, read.

2012/12/302012/12/30

Lazy reading for 2012/12/30

The last of the year.

Outgrow.me, a list of successfully funded Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects. There’s some neat technology doodads in there. And a zillion hipster iPhone tripods.
Remember when you could find program source code printed in magazines, for you to type in? Here’s an interesting story about that. (via)
Some good news: despite the completely hostile (and wrong) story on Slashdot, the FreeBSD Foundation has exceeded their pledge goals for the year by a wide margin.
A very early pre-Internet story about packets. (via)
Relational shell programming. (via)
History of the Microwriter. I remember seeing a version of this called the Twiddler. (also via)
How to Host a Dungeon. Follow some of the links at the bottom. (also also via)
Early Apple computer designs. I link not because it’s Apple but because it’s very much 1980s industrial design, which is both wonderful and awful. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Marlo Meekins’ Tumblr. Her lettering is refreshingly expressive. That may sounds strange to single out, but so many people place words as an set block of text rather than as part of a graphic layout.

2012/12/232012/12/23

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/23

I started this Lazy Reading early, since I had so many links it overflowed into the next week. Merry almost Christmas!

Here’s an in-depth review of Guilded Youth, an interactive fiction game that hearkens back to the old days of BBS usage. (Do I need an interactive fiction tag to complement the roguelike one?)
Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk. I really think part of DragonFly’s success, despite being such a small, esoteric project, has come from being generally tolerant.
Vmail, a Vim interface to Gmail. This seems pretty slick. Looking further, the author has a number of other Vi/Vim-related projects, like a Vim wiki, Vim newsreader, Vim iTunes controls, and more. Also something really clever: the equivalent of ‘tail -f twitter.com‘ (via)
How I got four errors into a one-line program. All via git.
Go for C programmers. (via)
Mars Code. I like the statistic that the lines-per-hour of code was <10; it points out that not all metrics apply, all the time. (also via)
I never thought I’d actually see e17 come out.
XKCD has a good summary of the recent Instagram licensing mess, and perhaps a good summary of social media in general. I’m always surprised when I see a business using Facebook or something similar as their primary customer contact method.
Why is grep always fast? Here’s a very technical explanation of why. There’s more.
Bunnie Huang is building a laptop. All the extra headers and analog bits remind me of the dearly departed BeBox. (Bunnie mentioned previously here) (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: I work at a salt mine. One of the highlights of my job is when I’m in the mine and need to get somewhere quickly; I use a 4-wheeler to drive. (I’m licensed to operate it.) There’s no stop signs, no stoplights, and generally a whole lot of straight roads with no obstacles or traffic. It can be a fun drive. However, it’s not as cool as driving on the moon. (via)

2012/12/162012/12/16

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/16

I hope you like links, and lots of history. It’s been a bumper crop this week.

The Radio Shack catalog from 1983. Including such gems as 156,672 characters of storage per $600 disk. For perspective, that’s about $4 per kilobyte. A randomly-picked SSD is about 0.000001 cent per kilobyte. Previously linked here: Radio Shack 2002. (via)
Hey, O’Reilly has a comprehensive list of all their open-licensed book titles, for download. Found from a link to Unix Text Editing. I bet much of that book still applies, despite being from 1987. (indirectly via)
The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World.
Shady Characters Miscellany #20: On Typewriters. The ancestor of the TTY. It’s still just barely possible to buy a new typewriter. I worked for a printer cartridge remanufacturer for a few years; the highest-profit items were typewriter ribbons, because nobody else made them.
The UNIX philosophy and a fear of pixels. I think the author’s conflating philosophy and style. (via)
Bell Labs CSR Selected Technical Reports. (via) Warning: they’re all in Postscript. Includes Brian Kernighan’s “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language“, and I’m linking there to a non-Postscript version to make your life a little easier.
If the idea of non-standard hexadecimal breaks your brain a little bit, go a little bit farther and read The Story of Mel. I had to read the solution twice to get it.
Nostalgia for the more open web of 10 years ago. It’s true, and also makes me feel sad. (via)
Google60, Google via punchcard and printer. It’s more stylistic than literal, but still fun. (via)
If you’re near San Francisco, a hackerspace there called Noisebridge wants more open source people – including BSD users – showing up.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Said the Gramophone and The New Shelton Wet/Dry. The first one’s a music blog, and the second’s more general. Both have a somewhat random feel with the images used – completely random in the New Shelton’s case. It’s interesting that there’s such a flood of text and images on the Internet that you can reassemble content out of all of it. You can’t push over a bookshelf and call it a library, but you can build a whole new narrative from random assembly of Internet data.

2012/12/092012/12/08

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/09

This is a mini-theme Lazy Reading, where I find small groups of related things.

Exploratory data analysis with Unix tools. The command line is a far better place to mangle data than you’d expect. Well, maybe not your expectations, given that you’re reading this site.
“The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive” Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in 1982. I found that after reading “Open Source Guilt & Passion“, which is a quite accurate description of working on open source, or perhaps any volunteer work. (via).
While talking about people of that generation: Here’s Rob Pike’s Go slideshow (linked previously) in a single-page text format. (via)
And we can get even older with this article about the Computer History Museum in California. There’s a lot of pictures of hardware ‘firsts’, like a light tracking, self driving robot from the 1940s, or the first mass-produced transistor radio. Look for the hardware that shows where ‘core dumps’ came from. (via)
Found on the previous link: Rebuilding the IBM 1401. I like looking at the old “fill-up-a-room” computers, since they look like supercomputers. I wouldn’t want to actually possess a mainframe; they aren’t powerful, eat electricity, and so on. Well… I can think of one that would be OK.
The Enduring Object. I find it oddly reassuring when hardware doesn’t change because it works so well. It’s sort of like an inherited tool from an older relative; something worn from use but distinctly better than buying new.
The 2012 Good Gift Games Guide. There’s some really neat board games in there.
Along the same lines, Designing Board Games with Perl.
The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection. An in-depth dive with Wireshark and an explanation of RSA. My cup of nerditry runneth over! (via)
It wouldn’t be a Lazy Reading post without some Git thingie. This time, it’s “Git: Twelve Curated Tips And Workflows From The Trenches“. (via)
The DuckDuckGo command line. (via)
Exploring Emacs. Posted mostly in the interests of equal time to vi-ish stuff. (via)
“What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor“. A Jason Scott article about emulating old monitors in software, with videos showing the difference. I’ve seen the hardware difference he’s talking about. I’m distressed just knowing my children probably don’t recognize analog static. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. Also known as ‘old weird crap’, but that’s OK – still interesting.

2012/12/022012/12/01

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/02

It’s been a quiet week, but that’s OK. I have sick kids, sick coworkers, and a certification test this Monday…

Playing at the World is apparently a good book. The author has a blog where he dives into old RPG minutiae. You will either find that not very interesting or super interesting. No halfway point.
Teleglitch, a roguelike top-down shooter with pixel graphics. I was happy at the word “roguelike”, of course. (via _hasso_ on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A review of Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition.
“I’m writing my own OS“. I think Dominic Giampolo said once that everyone in computer science goes through a phase where making your own operating system can’t be too hard and why not try it etc etc. (via)
This picture makes me happy.
An entire book of studies based around a single line of C64 BASIC code. It’s available as a free download.
Teach Your Children Groff. It’s sort of the opposite of the do-without-needing-to-understand practice that most people assume Steve Jobs wanted. (via)
Your Objects, The Unix Way. (via)
Getting your computer work done in 1973. Given the hardware, I don’t think this is Unix, but it’s still neat to see it work. Punch cards! (via)
Here’s how arcade cabinets were first planned out. I like seeing the old-school marker rendering.
This notebook seems like a bad idea. (via)
This secure bootloader, on the other hand, could be useful. (via)
A hypnotic data visualization. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A Star Wars roguelike on GitHub. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: GET LAMP. I thought I had linked to it before, but I’m probably thinking of It Is Pitch Dark. It’s a documentary by Jason Scott of textfiles fame about text adventures.

2012/10/282012/10/27

Lazy Reading for 2012/10/28

Life is busy, busy, busy. But there’s always time for Lazy Reading!

Sometimes Google searches turn up DragonFly BSD in odd places.
Wayland reached 1.0. That’s great, except it isn’t ready for use yet, it’s just feature-stable. I’d argue that means it’s ‘beta’, not 1.0, but there’s no hard and fast rules about that. In any case, does it run on any BSD? I don’t think so.
OpenSSH server best practices. Nothing too groundbreaking, but they include “BSD” (i.e. pf) examples. I always like articles that don’t assume Linux is the only platform. (via)
The little SSH that (sometimes) couldn’t. A heck of a network debugging exercise. (via mat in #dragonflybsd)
The AN/FSQ7, a computer I’m sure I’ve seen in movies a number of times. (via)
Here’s the OpenBSD slides from EuroBSDCon 2012.
Oh look, Apple’s got “Fusion Drive“. The cool people call it swapcache and have been using it for years, so there.
Here’s an essay that starts out talking about Quantum Computing and moves into the ambivalence that quantum computing seems to entail instead of just noting the general scientific description and leaving it there. It’s really quite enjoyable.
Hey, maybe this is why Facebook reported earnings are up: they’re holding your own data hostage. (via)
Rob Pike on The Setup. He makes a very good point about how we should access computers. Also, here’s a recent, long slide show he put together about Go. It describes solving some language problems that have been around a long time. (via)
I was halfway through reading that last slide show link and realized there’s no way I can explain how it was an worthwhile read to someone who hadn’t done some programming. No link or conclusion, just an observation of how esoteric this is. I hope you enjoy it.
Essential Vim and Vi Skills has hit a 3rd edition. I have this as a Kindle edition, and I’m not sure how that happened.
Zork in Duplicity, or a bizarre finding of old UNIX history in a completely unrelated place. (via)
These OpenBSD thin clients are a neat idea.

Your unrelated link of the week: Delilah Dirk. It’s a comic, and the story available to read online is about a tea merchant, which makes it exactly right.

2012/10/212012/10/20

Lazy Reading for 2012/10/21

I had some interesting home network troubleshooting over the past week…

What’s the “scroll lock” key on my computer for? The article almost identifies it: it’s to allow scrolling up in the hardware terminal, if you’re on BSD. Or for changing how navigation via arrow keys works in Excel, on Windows, as I’ve had to show to people a few times. (via)
“systemd requires HTTP server and serves QR codes” – not really, but it’s a long discussion of just what balance to strike between minimal and excessive for an operating system. Also, it’s Linux, so it’s messy. (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
Why I Two-Space. I thought this would be about two-space tabs, but it’s about something I care about more: space after the period at the end of the sentence. (via)
Simplify Your Life with a ssh config file. I keep meaning to do some of these things. (via)
9 Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity. The last one, about keeping your config files in a git repo, is a good one. Read the comments for some exceptional ideas. (via)
Huh. 42 really is the answer. (via)
CSRG‘s SCCS history brought to svn. I like that old code can be revivified, so to speak. (via)
Commanding Your Text Editor. Text editor tips in a ecumenical style. More specifically, Textmate, Vim, and Emacs tips side by side. (via)
An Introduction to Graphviz via R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” Hip Hopera. That… is one of the odder tutorials I’ve ever read. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Terrorism as Art. An extended profile of Survival Research Laboratories at The Verge. Even if you don’t like the content, the focus of the artist is remarkable.

2012/10/142012/10/13

Lazy Reading for 2012/10/14

I lost 12 18 hours of my life fighting with an Exchange 2010 upgrade this week. To compensate, I will never complain about Sendmail wonkiness ever.

Homebrew Cray-1A. Duplicating the internals is interesting in a “that’s crazy/difficult” way, but the case is the best part. (via dfcat on #dragonflybsd)
If you understand the structure of haiku, you can contribute to Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Ed.
Here’s a browser-based roguelike called Second Wind, and another called Epilogue. No particular reason to link to them other than I haven’t had much roguelikes linked recently.
“The role of the troll in social media is to ruin that product.” There’s a line that can be drawn to connect the idea of being esoteric enough that social networks (i.e. Facebook) don’t intrude on your interests, and the idea of being interested in BSD operating system creation. What I’m saying is that BSD is less hyped, and thank goodness.
Another social media caution: it’s their space, not yours, and they can boot you at any time. (via)
Yeah, I’m getting curmudgeonly. I’ll stop now.
Go By Example.
git-ftp, when the files you are working on are in a location only accessible by FTP – no git or ssh access. This appears to copy them in and out as part of the commit/change process. I can imagine a very specific workflow where this would be useful. (via)
Bash One-Liners, part 4.
OS Upgrades powered by Git. That’s a neat idea. I don’t think you actually have to follow the link; that’s the whole concept right there.
The Ultimate Vim Distribution. (via) I like how slick the single-line install methods are on these things… but I want the number of packaging/install methods on every computer I administer to equal exactly 1, not (1 x number of installed programs).
Why is Linux more popular than BSD? Some of the answers are just plain wrong, or don’t understand causality… but that’s no surprise. (via)
Oh, hopefully this will solve the UEFI secureboot issue for DragonFly too. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: A CD that comes with its own turntable and record. Kid Koala scrapes over culture to find mentions of vinyl and DJing the same way I scrounge the Internet for mention of BSD. His “Nerdball” from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is an astonishing display of turntable skill.