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Lazy Reading for 2012/10/07

DragonFly 3.2 branches tomorrow if all goes to plan. Until then, I have a lot of reading here for you.

Your unrelated link of the week: Dog Shaming.  I have a parrot, rabbit, and lizard.  They seem like easy, normal pets compared to some of these stories.

 

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Lazy Reading for 2012/09/16

Yay!

  • What will you have: tea or chai?  Mapping out all the names for tea around the world.  I love etymology and tea, and I know there’s some tea drinkers reading…  (via)
  • Speaking of tea, this London universal tea device sounds awesome.  (via)
  • Uncle Miod’s machineroom.  There’s some pictures of some old hardware buried in there that was incredibly expensive when it first came out…   (via)
  • This security issue is interesting because it’s a new kind of problem, but also depressing because it’s a new kind of problem.  (via)
  • Apparently a packaging system is always a good idea.  (explanation)
  • A patient explanation of /usr/local and a bit of UNIX file system history, too.  (via)
  • The history of Unix from where it happened, Bell Labs.  I’m pretty sure I haven’t linked to that before.  Interesting trivia note: playing the original Space Travel game in 1969 cost $75 for the computer time.(via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf is having their annual $3+ comics sale.  There’s some really good books for cheap, there.  Of special note: From Hell, about Jack the Ripper, drawn by my favorite artist.  Wizzywig, mentioned here before as a fictional mishmash of real stories and rumors about hackers and BBSes and other things people need to be a certain age to remember.  The Ticking, drawn by Renée French, whose art should be familiar to fans of Plan 9 or Go.

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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 .

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Some more books to read

This recent question asked on-list about creating your own file system meandered into good reference books.  This so far was “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System“, “Modern Operating Systems“, and the paper “Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX“.  Looking for links on those things led me to this Unix filesystem history paper from IBM, which is fun reading.

I’m saying that unironically!  It really is an interesting document to read, for historical and general knowledge.  I am a nerd. 

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Lazy Reading for 2012/08/26

There’s certainly no theme to this week’s links.  I even manage to avoid my usual git and vim links, strangely.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Cul De Sac.   The strip is ending due to the creator’s health issues, but what he has done is marvelous.  This is one of the few newspaper strips that is both visually interesting and often abruptly laugh out loud funny, without being patronizing.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/07/01

It’s summer, and I’m too warm.  I’m whiny but still making with the links:

Your unrelated link of the day: The Kleptones are great, and this collection of the music that influenced Paul Simon’s Graceland is a wonderful find.  A happier album I’ve never heard.  I feel nostalgic for the days when you had to actually search for music.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/05/27

Let’s get right down to it:

  • Hey, Nmap 6 is out.  It’s one of those always-useful tools, similar to wireshark.
  • Biculturalism, a fair assessment.  (via)  The generalizations are a little extreme (1 Unix-based author who Got Religion, vs. a diffused Windows developer stereotype) but still has value.
  • A Git Horror Story.  (via)  Not a true story, but useful for describing how git commits can be GPG-signed.
  • A recent Google Doodle, a playable Moog synthesizer, done for Bob Moog’s birthday.  The Moog Music site has instructions.  I happened to notice they’re using FreeBSD as the server – cool!  Maybe it’s just the hosting org?  Anyway, I link to it because Bob Moog’s cousin was for a while my father’s employer.
  • “Google is transitive, whereas Facebook is reflexive.”  (via)  This sums up the practical difference between Google and Facebook rather well.
  • I did not know this existed: OpenBSD Network Shell.  (via)  Interface like a Cisco-ish router, internals are OpenBSD.
  • There’s been recent news articles about how programmers over 35 tend to not get hired.  Here’s one of the reasons: younger programmers discount the value of their own time.  Anything where all the benefits (cheaper labor, more products) accrue to the company, and all the costs go to the employee (time lost, extra work) is not a good idea in the long run.
  • “Now I’ve met the other DragonFly BSD user, too.”  That’s two more than I expected for any given project, really.
  • Undeadly.org has an extensive interview/article about OpenSMTPd.  It’s OpenBSD’s implementation of a SMTP daemon, which is something I haven’t heard much about before.  Compare with DragonFly’s much-smaller-in-scope dma.
  • Van Jacobsen Saved the Internet.  Or just fixed a timing bug.  Depends on whether you listen to Wired or to him.  The interesting part is that he had to build the tools to troubleshoot the problem.
  • Here’s something I don’t think anyone’s noticed yet: Microsoft is responsible for half of Google’s DMCA notices last month.  My employer recently was audited by Microsoft (technically by Accenture contractors for Microsoft) for license compliance.  My Dell sales representative, when I asked him for a list of what Microsoft-licensed OEM devices we had bought, said many of his customers were asking for the same thing.  He joked that Microsoft was trying to improve its profitability numbers for the quarter.  Given that they are trying to push to Windows 8, that might just be true, and they are trying to enforce their way to it, not sell their way to it.

Your unrelated link of the week: MAD GOD, the film.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/05/20

There’s been so much activity this week in DragonFly that I’m having a hard time keeping up.  There’s always time for Lazy Reading, though.

Your unrelated link of the week: Captain Forever.  A game. Mentioned most recently on Verge, but read Rock, Paper, Shotgun for context.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/05/13

I’m starting to pack these full enough that I might have to go biweekly.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wizzywig.  A self-contained comic about the early days of phone phreaking and hacking, written and drawn by Ed Piskor.   The first two chapters are available as a PDF.  Read and if you like it, order the whole thing.  Also: Steve and Steve.  If you know your history, you’ll get the cartoon.

Ed Piskor is currently cartooning the origin of hip-hop at BoingBoing; it’s a good read.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/04/22

Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: One Thing Well.  The BSD tag might be the most useful.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/04/15

It’s a good week when I can start collecting new Lazy Reading material right after posting the previous week’s summary.

Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley’s Cabinet Followups.  There’s about a bazillion links there to follow about weird history.

 

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Lazy Reading for 2012/04/08

The links are all over the map this week, which is fine.  Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: memepool.  It’s seen some activity lately.  It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/02/26

Hello new DragonFly 3.0 users!  This is my not-about-DragonFly weekend link roundup.  I’ll be back to regular DragonFly-ish stuff tomorrow.

  • Vim anti-patterns, Gnuplotting, and Computing History At Bell Labs.  I’m combining what would normally be 3 separate points because I stole them all from Christian Neukirchen’s blog.  I wish I had found them first.
  • I mentioned Dungeons & Dragons last week, which led Michael Lucas to point out Dungeon Crawl Classics in the comments.   Along that same theme, here’s some 70’s role playing game illustrations.  (via)  There’s a parallel between computing in the late 1970s and fantasy; expert programmers were called wizards, understanding computers was an esoteric art…  I could develop the heck out of that thesis, but let’s just look at the pictures and feel nostalgic instead.
  • And then everything got a lot more weird-looking, 20 years later!  (via)
  • Hey, that time zone lawsuit mentioned here before was dismissed.  That’s good news.  (via lots of places)
  • Hyperpolyglot: Scripting.  Look for your favorite scripting language and compare it side-by-side with others. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • The text of the DragonFly 3.0 announcement gets copied around to a lot of sites, far more than I’m linking here.  However, I found this one entertaining because it kind of makes it sound like DragonFly is just what I happened to come with.
  • Custom 3D printing is becoming accessible enough that I’m trying to think of things I could get printed that way, even though I don’t need it.  (via I lost it, sorry)

Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley’s Cabinet.  Read her books if you have a fascination with old dead things.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/02/05

It’s like early spring here in the northeast US.  Which would be fine if it was actually spring.  I miss snow.

  • An explanation of the classic UNIX hierarchy.  (via thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)  I’m behind any explanation that uses the phrase “accretion disk” to describe an organization.
  • Hipster BSD.  If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s based on this.
  • Would you like to have DNSSEC upgrading explained to you?
  • Hooray for Unicode!  (via)
  • What Commons Do We Wish For?  I was, briefly, technically, an AOL employee after the Time Warner merger in 2000.  I didn’t like the notion of working for a walled garden then, and I think that’s why Facebook and other companies irk me now.  Anyway, read that article for a good explanation of why that feeling is important.

Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf 2.0.  A small comics publisher that has put much of their comics online to read.  Their stuff on paper is worth buying too, as I have been doing for a while now.

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Lazy reading for 2012/01/29

This is the week of the funny, apparently.

Your totally unrelated video link of the week: The Necronomicon.  Pitch perfect.

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Book review: The Linux Command Line

I received an email from No Starch Press about reviewing this book, and my first reaction was to say no.  I assumed this was essentially a book about using Bash, and therefore probably not useful to people reading the Digest.

I read it despite my knee-jerk reaction, and I didn’t need to reject it so suddenly.  Almost all of the book will apply to any Unix-like system.

My first real experience with something that wasn’t Windows or a Mac was at a summer job during college, sitting in front of a SparcStation 5 editing files and processing data for real estate.  Much of my muscle memory about vi and file manipulation dates from then.  This book, even though it’s technically for a different operating system, would have been just what I needed.  There’s no system administration in the book, just making your way around a filesystem and the tools you need to get results.  It’s the kind of skills I think people lose out on when they boot to a graphical interface in Ubuntu, for example, and then never experience these tools.

Negatives: a few areas won’t be of use to most BSD users, like the section on packaging, or the bash-centric instructions in the shell programming area.  There’s the occasional off comment, like that OpenSSH originates from “the BSD project”.  There’s surprisingly little of this however, and I had to think a bit to write this negative paragraph.

Positives:  The book puts the proper focus on some complex but rewarding aspects of command line use, like using vi (alright, vim) and understanding regular expressions.  Much of what it covers is the same material I’ve learned to use over time, and explained to others.

There’s clearly two areas to the book; the first half is about using the command line to accomplish work, and the second is about shell programming.  Making it at least through the first half will result in being able to work at a prompt with little issue, with the shell programming a nice bonus.  It’s not the normal mix of admin tasks and introductory text; it’s about working at the command line.  I imagine giving it to new software testers in a lab, or to a Windows user that has to deal with the occasional unfamiliar environment.  There isn’t an equivalent BSD-centric book like this, so it wouldn’t hurt a BSD user, either.

It’s available now at the No Starch website.

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Lazy Reading for 12/11/11

Last week was low on links, but this week is great!  I hope you have some time set aside.

  • This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11.  I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before.  (via)
  • Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
  • Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet )
  • nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently.  Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
  • This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point.  Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run.  (via)
  • Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
  • “Don’t Be a Free User” (via)  The last paragraph is the best.
  • An expanded grep and diff.  ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds.  Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult.  (via)
  • A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright.  This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference.  It doesn’t.
  • So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like.  You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI.   (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
  • I like this indicator light setup.  (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)  There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too.  I wish there still were computers like these.
  • While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station?  Here’s some pictures.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?