Category: UNIXish

Enjoy!  I am going to have irregular network access over the next week, so this may be the only post for several days.

• The Eternal Mainframe.  (via)
• Compilation and Hyperthreading.
• Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool.  (via)
• Removing the PowerShell curl alias?  (via)
• Whatever Happened to Wordstar?  (via)
• Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default.  (via)
• 80’s motion graphics.  So very eighties.
• Sitting Up: A brief history of chairs.  (via)
• More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization.  (via)
• The Amiga Boing Ball Explained.  (via)
• THE GIF IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE GIF.  (via)
• The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer.  (via)
• The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book.  I really like what happened there.  (via)
• Network operating system for a Linux-like file server.  “Hey, I’ll write my own operating system” – a common reflex.
• The Internet of Poorly Working Things.  This is sort of what the OpenBSD project has been about for a long time.  The story links to important stuff, which led me to this little genius trick.

It’s a nerdy Lazy Reading today.  Well, nerdier than usual, I think.

• Favorite Networking Links? Help a TA!  Multiple good links there.
• UNIX Helps Put Out Fires.
• How to Write a History of Writing Software.  (via)
• Canonical’s Snap: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  PC-BSD already did similar packaging – and stopped.  (via)
• Acorn and Amstrad.  (via)
• Dudley Buck’s Forgotten Cryotron Computer.  (via)
• Unix for Poets.  (PDF, via)
• Remembering Roger Faulkner, UNIX Legend.  (via)
• The Megaprocessor.  That’s the biggest CPU ever I seen.  (also via)
• Biohacking for Newbies: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Getting an NFC Chip Implant.
• bug.n.  For those who like wmii, i3, Xmonad, and so on, but are stuck on Windows.
• Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor.

Half of this was done while trapped in day 3 of a 3-day planning and training meeting at work.

• Start multi-tasking with your virtual reality headset.  (via)
• My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project.  (via)
• The quick and simple editor for cron schedule expressions.  (via)
• Here is why Emacs uses Meta key.  (via)
• CP/M development environment setup.  (via)
• Rm -rf / in Windows Subsystem for Linux reveals sharp set of teeth.  Well, duh.  (via)
• How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History.  (via)
• Building your own ISP hardware.
• verifying copies – find, xargs, du, ls, md5sum, and diff, oh my!  (via)
• The Moral Economy of Tech.  “Machine learning is like money laundering for bias.”  (via many places)
• Xerox Alto Restoration Part 2: Firing up the monitor.  (via)
• “My God, it’s full of yaks!!”  (via)
• Oh My God(s): Dwarf Fortress’s Creation Myths & Magic.
• Cryptographic Storage Cheat Sheet.  (via)
• Related to last week: Tea Pi.  (via)
• Tiny Unix Tools for Windows.  (via)
• The Chronicles of George.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• BREXIT(3).

Your unrelated video link of the week: Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2016.  Scroll down for the videos, embedded and linked.

Did this early too, but ended up with lots of links.

• The cost of things is getting out of control.
• We’re pretty happy with SQLite.  (via)
• A Research Unix Reader, by Douglas McIlroy.  (via)
• Twenty years of free software, part 1: Ikiwiki.  (via)
• Spaceship Generator: A blender script that procedurally generates 3D spaceships.  (via)
• Evolution of C programming practices – Unix 1973–2015.  (via)
• The Rise of New Operations.  This all seems oriented towards a very specific type of company.  (via)
• The Forrest Gump of the Internet.  Open internet vs. closed.  (via)
• The RC2014 Retro Computer.  (via)
• Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer.  (via)
• The Greek clock.
• Episode 3: A New Breed of Intellectual Property.
• Dennis Ritchie’s cousin.
• vmtouch – the Virtual Memory Toucher.  (via)
• Why determining location by IP is often wrong.
• Comet photos + GIFs.

I got me a retro Teasmade, so as you read this, I’m probably waking up to a fresh cup.  It’s not very practical, but it is fun.

• Mastering Programming.  (via)
• Should you be scared of Unix signals?  (via)
• The earliest versions of the very first C compiler.  (via)
• Typosquatting programming language package managers.  Well, there’s a new worry I never had before.  (via)
• Programmable hardware: Barefoot Networks, PISA, and P4.  (via)
• Episode 2: Shenzhen and the Maker Movement.
• Choo-choo-choosing a new every day machine.
• Unix Auth against AD or LDAP Suggestions.
• Why the hype for docker?
• “Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4”.  Two tracks, one stable, one breaking API every 6 months.  (via Rolinh on IRC)
• David Li code-based animations.  Prettier than I make it sound.  (via)
• IF Only: Text Adventures For People Who Hate Guessing The Verb.

Your unrelated video of the week: 2016 AICP Sponsor Reel.  (via)

Covering all the bases – history, UNIX, D&D, editors.  No tea links, so I guess I’m not scoring 100%.

• “Are there any good SSH clients for Windows?“
• Fermenting in server room.  A bad idea.  (via)
• The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card.  (via)
• Fifty shades of open.  (via)
• The many different (incompatible) types of “mbox”.  (via)
• D&D, resurgent, plus a comic.  (via I forgot, sorry)
• Every one unique.  Book covers created programmatically.  (via)
• My open-source, do-it-yourself cellphone.  (via)
• Decentralised Web Summit, plus notes from an attendee.  (via)
• Vim Tmux Navigator.  (via)
• Elite for Emacs.    Equal time, plus geez.  (via)
• Consolite, a Tiny Game Console on an FPGA.  (via)
• The evolution of C programming practices: a study of Unix 1973–2015.  (via)
• Shenzhen.  Exploration of cheap hardware and where it comes from.
• Man page.
• Cracking Broderbund’s Gumball for the Apple II.  Scroll to near the end to hear about a 30+ year old easter egg that probably has never seen the light of day before.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Exploring Abandoned Mines.  (via)

This week is Esoterica week, for Lazy Reading.

• secho: “a hypothetical FSF-style implementation of echo“.  Spot-on.  (via)
• IPv6 excuses.  (also via)
• Have any of you switched to Bash on Windows?  It worries me in a subtle way that bash is the only necessary part of UNIX-like systems for some people.
• The Bargain That Revived Bell Labs.  The Eero Saarinen-designed building where Unix was invented, I think.  I like what’s being done with it.  (via)
• WTF IS OPERATIONS? #SERVERLESS.  Also part two.  Points out that moving operational items to cloud services doesn’t get rid of operational functions.  (via)
• The History of Mac Gaming.  (via)
• Common Lisp: The Untold Story.  (via)
• Harvey OS – A Fresh Take on Plan 9.  (via)

What are people using for a web framework these days?  I was messing with Fat Free Framework, and there seems to be about a zillion options, for many languages, these days.

• Reverse Engineering A Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel.  (via)
• Is it worth learning vim?
• Security through lying.
• Pre-ASCII ASCII art.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 5.35.  Interesting history description too.
• The Many Uses of Net-SNMP and Extending Net-SNMP.  (via)
• Shadow leaks.
• Swiss – Unix in a Box for Windows and Minoca OS.  Busybox for Windows.  (via)
• Your Occasional Reminder to Use Plain Text Whenever Possible.  (via)
• Pico Processes.  AKA, Microsoft reinvents jails or maybe vkernels, except with more code names for the concepts.  I see this over and over again.  (via)
• John Blankenbaker and the Story of the KENBAK-1.  (via)
• Whither Plan 9? History and motivation.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: The Digital Comics Museum.

Cinco De Mayo is coming up.

• Why I run my business like an open source project.  The contractors I use at work that take this approach are much easier to work with.  (via)
• Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side.  Even more evidence of what a bad idea that strategy can be.  (via)
• Developer Certificate of Origin versus Contributor License Agreements.  Boring, but I understand the reasoning.  (also via)
• Creating Magnetic Disk Storage at IBM.  (via)
• The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem.  Displaced by Winbuntu.  (via)
• What happened to _why.
• Email Isn’t The Thing You’re Bad At.  I see so many people with this problem.  (via)
• Baby UNIX.
• Dyson’s Maps & Cartography.  Hand-drawn D&D maps.  (via)
• Related: The Dice You Never Knew You Needed.  Buy here.  (via)
• 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script.
• GEOS, an operating system I never really knew about.
• when i wore a younger fool’s cap.  GitHub uber alles.
• O Reader! My Reader.  I’ve gotten used to tt-rss.

Your unrelated link of the week: What was the weirdest 911 call ever received?  (via)

All over the map this week.

• VT100 Terminal Art: old text-based animations you can run in your terminal.  (via)
• Free security advice.  Generally correct, and not so in-depth you can’t hand it to most anyone.  (via)
• A project to resurrect Unix on the PDP-7 from a scan of original assembly code.  (via)
• Refurbishing A 1927 Switchboard.  I like the way very old electronics smell, strange as that may seem.  (via)
• Y2K Futurism, or what people thought the future would look like 1996-2002.  (via)
• NexDock, or a phone/laptop dock device.  This is getting pretty close to the ‘seamless’ device version I have in my head.  (via)
• The Five Stages of NoSQL.  (via)
• GNU complexity 1.5.  Someone run this on a BSD.  (via)
• The past and future are here. It’s just not evenly distributed (yet).  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: teasmades, 50% off with the code ‘MOTHERSDAY2016’ until March 9th.  Given the difference in US – UK voltage, I don’t know if this would be a good investment for me, but I’d sure like to have one.

UNIX tools are this week’s unintentional theme.

• The many load averages of Unix(es).  (via)
• So you want to write a package manager.  (via)
• Headshot: A visual history of first-person shooters.  (via)
• Tolkien Ipsum.  (via)
• Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions.  (via)
• The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal.  Insert comment about stuffy old newspaper here.  (via)
• “Newton fax modems as packing material“
• The Ephemeral Software Collection.
• Are there any nice Unix shells newer than fish?
• An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities.  (1989, via)
• What was the first terminal command that really wowed you?
• Do Artists Need Websites?  This is why businesses only on Facebook bother me.  (via)
• How I Vim.  (also via)

Your unrelated robot link of the week: Every new Boston Dynamics robot is creepier than the last.

I am prewriting most of this post because I have a significant hardware changeout happening this weekend at work; let’s hope for quiet.

• The Website Obesity Crisis.  The Digest is <300K, which isn’t too bad.  (via)
• 2015 CCC Videos.  (via)
• Bourne Basic – a BASIC interpreter implemented in pure Bourne shell.  From 1987, originally in comp.sources.misc.  (via)
• The NLNOG Ring – join if you qualify.
• The Apple ][ Library: The 4 AM Collection.  Indirectly linked to before, but worth it again.  (via)
• From the same location, the BurgerTime crack.  (via)
• 2015 Year In Review.  The “The Coffee” section is important.
• Linux and Unix SysAdmins New Year’s Resolutions.  (via)
• The Long Death of CGI.pm.  (via)
• Synchronise remote SSH authorised_keys.  (via)
• How to C in 2016.  (via)
• The story behind casual contributors.  Relevant to open source.
• D&D Meets the Electronic Age.  (via)
• All of UNIX.  (via)
• Piet.  (via)

Your unrelated food link of the week:  The teas to make you forget all about coffee.  Not as smug as the usual tea article, thank goodness.