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Lazy Reading for 2011/11/20

Hey, the date’s sorta palindromic!  Sorta.

  • “Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors” – a video description of the physical parts of the Internet.  Remember when MAE-East or MAE-West would have a bad day and half the Internet felt it?  Really, half.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating. (via)
  • Google has a verbatim search mode now, for those of you who regret the loss of ‘+’ as a required search term designator.  (via and also sort of via)  There’s always alternatives.
  • “The expr program is a real piece of crap.”  Laser-focused complaining about a small program that’s had 4 decades to improve, and hasn’t.
  • “Mechanics for Pure Aesthetics”  The videos are interesting, and I’m linking to this because so much of what I post here and deal with is focused computer work.  Everything is a tool, with a purpose, and a result that you expect.  This idea of machinery or even software having a purpose other than result generation is underexplored.  There’s lots of tools to create art, but there’s little that is art itself.  Even with that general lack, we still get excited when the edge of some sort of aesthetic appeal nudges its way into the materials we use.  You could argue that Apple’s success (for instance) comes from being the one company that consistently thinks about what a product is, instead of what it does.
  • If you use fastcgi, you may need the patch that this blog post talks about.  Also, apache-mpm-prefork is the better choice for Apache on DragonFly.
  • “DragonFly mug shot“

Your random comic link of the day: Calamity of Challenge.  Also here.  And here.  If this artist’s way of drawing grabs you like it grabs me, he has pages and commissions for sale.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/11/13

I’m going for more verbose linking.  Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it?  If not – too late!

  • NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care“.  He was one of the more colorful speakers at NYCBSDCon 2010, so this should be good.
  • It’s Slashdot, so whatever, but this “In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop” linked story had a few good comments – BSD hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from Linux.  “BSD: In Need of a Narrative“.  Or perhaps, “Who cares if it’s clang or it’s gcc – what do you build with it?“
  • I read this essay about social networks (via), and the last paragraph is an excellent summation.  Read it, then cancel your Facebook/Google Plus/whatever accounts.
  • Xv6 is a modern version of Sixth Edition UNIX, used at MIT for teaching operating system design.  (via)   The source is available via git, and as a numbered PDF.   The book for the class should make interesting reading.  Oh, you can see the class details, too.
  • FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, February 5th, 09:00 – 17:00: “Open Source Game Dev”.   Get on the mailing list if this interests you.  Microsoft operating systems still rule the market for games, really, even indie work, so it’s neat to see something that is both open source and game oriented.  There will be BSD “devrooms” there, too.
  • If you are looking for a particular Unicode character (and there’s lots to choose from), Shapecatcher lets you draw what you are looking for and looks for matches.  (via)  I’ve needed that here a few times for people’s names, and it’s fun just to see what comes up from a random scribble.

Your unrelated link of the week: The New Shelton Wet/Dry.  Titles, content, and images are all picked from unrelated sources, but it forms an oddly compelling digest of multiple topics.  Slightly NSFW, sometimes.

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Potential job available

A position opened up for a junior systems administrator at my workplace.  You have to be willing to live near Rochester, NY, administrate a mix of Windows and unixy machines, do desktop support, and network management.  (e.g. everything possible)  The work environment is neat, informal, and somewhat adverse.  I’ll have a job description soon, I hope.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/08/14

This is a shorter version of a Lazy Reading post, but it’s linking to some extensive writing.  Yay for having other people make up for my brevity!

Your unrelated link of the day: the comics of Lucy Knisley.  (follow the ‘Previous’ links for more)

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Lazy Reading for 2011/07/31

Posted in the past, for the future.  I always build these up over the week, so if the links seem dated (as in more than 24 hours old), that’s why.  My commentary will add the flavor.

  • This NYT story about Dwarf Fortress has been linked lots of places, but I want to point out the one paragraph:

    Growing up, Tarn was enamored of Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien, but he has never been a lockstep member of the geek culture so much as a wanderer on the fringes. He didn’t read superhero comics as a kid, and later, he never became obsessed with the “Game of Thrones” books, say, or with “Lost.”

    Are you over 35 or so?  Then maybe you remember a time when there wasn’t a designated ‘Geek Culture’.  It’s something specific to a period in time, like when pay phones were still common, or when people were on average still thin.  It strikes me that the interviewer assumes that a computer programmer should become consumed with a TV media event; that it’s part of what makes them what they are.   It’s as if all accountants need to have brown shoes, and all artists have to wear berets and ‘get’ abstract art.  Maybe I’m just hipster complaining.

  • “...while Bell Labs’ parent company AT&T flatly refused to believe that packet switching would ever work” – Have I linked to Shady Characters before?  I think so.  Anyway, this is part 1 about the @ sign, and it’s of course talking about email and the early days of the Internet, back when it was the ARPANet.  Be sure to check the references at the end of the article; it contains gems like this ad for a 65-pound portable TTY.
  • Tim Paterson has a blog.  DOS is his fault.  Worth reading, for the early hardware details.  (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
  • Removing the Internet’s relics. An article about how FTP should die.  It will…  once there’s no place where it’s needed.  Like gopher!
  • Comparisons like this are usually cheesy, but this one made me laugh: Text editors as Lord of the Rings locations.
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Lazy Reading for 2011/06/26

Somehow, I ended up with the most concise link listing I’ve ever done, even though I have a pretty good batch here.  Go figure.

 

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Lazy reading for 2011/06/12

A nice big pile of links this week.  Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/05/22

This week, the links are generally fun.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/05/15

This week: lots more reading!

  • Michael Lucas describes an extra layer of protection for when you can’t force public key usage on every SSH user.
  • Cool, but obscure Unix tools (via)  The screenshots are all from a Mac… How many of the 24 tools listed are in pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip?   Almost all of them.  (tpp sounds entertaining.)
  • NYCBUG, in addition to having a really fun convention, has been regularly posting audio of the presentations they host.  The most recent is “William Baxter’s NYCBUG presentation on The Unix Method of Development Management”.   See the BSD Events tweet for the download.
  • What Ubuntu means.  (via)
  • Here’s a nice explanation of Intel’s new Tri-Gate design and with it, an incidental explanation of the processor market.
  • This ycombinator post about Hammer2 work has an in-depth comment from Venkatesh Srinivas about DragonFly’s network setup, memory allocator, and token use.  (Ignore the trolling in other comments.)
  • Michael Lucas’s next No Starch Press book is Absolute OpenBSD, second edition.
  • Pictures and video are starting to show up from the just-passed BSDCan 2011. (via this and also thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • My first experience of The Internet was very similar to this.  It should be bizarrely unfamiliar to anyone under 20 or so.  (via)  Get this: I typed ‘exit’ instead of just closing the browser window when I was done messing with it, because some habits cannot be broken.
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Lazy Reading

I’m going to just title these “Lazy Reading” – I end up with too much diverse information/links to fit within the title.

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Lazy Reading: cheatsheet, disks, pkgsrc, more

Normally I hold this for Sunday, but I’ve got a good batch of links already.  Something here for everyone, this week.

  • A git cheatsheet, and another git cheatsheet.  I may have linked to the latter one before, as it looks vaguely familiar.  Anyway, bookmark.  (Thanks, luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • What should you do about bad blocks on a disk?  Get a new disk.
  • If you ever wanted to port software, there’s a pkgsrc developer’s guide (thanks Francois Tigeot) that shows you how.
  • It’s NOT LINUX, for the billionth time.  It’s BSD UNIX (certified, even) under there!
  • “Children of the Cron“.  An entertaining pun.  (via)
  • Nothing to do with BSD, or even computers, really: Gary Gorton, interviewed about the recent financial crisis, at a Fed bank website (!?).  Interesting because I like economic matters, and because it’s the first web page where I’ve ever seen pop-up links added usefully, as a sort of footnote that you don’t have to scroll.  (via)
  • Michael Lucas recently had a machine broken into.  Since everything on the machine is suspect, he’s using Netflow data to figure out when it happened, and how, which is not surprising given his most recent book.  He has two posts describing how he backtracks his way to the probable source.
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A super-simple install

I was reading this Perl Advent Calendar (that would be good for DragonFly, come to think of it) post about ack, and came across a interesting line:

curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3'

fetch’ would work just as well on a BSD system. The interesting thing is that it’s a one-liner for installing software that doesn’t make any assumptions about having an existing framework like pkgsrc or aptitude or anything like that – it just grabs the code and plops it in place.  It wouldn’t work for more complex software, but the simplicity is intriguing, to match the Unix-like single, chainable program idea.

For those who haven’t seen it, ‘ack‘ is a grep replacement that automatically takes care of common activities around searching – skipping files that would cause duplicate matches, binary files, etc., handles a larger range of regular expressions, and runs startlingly fast.