Category: UNIXish

I am all over the map this week.

• How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive.  I learned D’Nealian; my mother wrote Spencerian. Technical lettering in college and signing labs as a grad student destroyed my style.  Anyone know a good source of fountain pens that are cheap/usable?  I don’t want to go down the crazy route.  (via)
• Triple redundancy in a Boeing 777.  An Ada program compiled with 3 different compilers and run on 3 different processors.  (PDF, via)
• If you’re curious about gold (the software, not the metal) and how linkers work, given DragonFly’s recent switch, the author of gold, Ian Lance Taylor, wrote a 20-part series about the topic.  (Linked here before some years ago, but it’s worth reading now.)
• “We got around three“.  A lesson in the persistence of Fortran.
• Former Atari Employee Posts Work Email Log from 1982-1992.  The source of the link has many choice comments pulled out.
• Four examples of excellent interface design.  In games, of course.  The only one I’ve tried is Brogue, previously linked here, and its terminal controls don’t feel like terminal controls.
• The Storage Engine: Timeline.  History of data storage, an online exhibit at the Computer History Museum.  There are some delightful pictures and stories.  (via)
• Raspberry Pi Zero: The $5 Computer.  Pretty soon it’s going to be possible to sneeze and accidentally lose several computers because you blew them off the table.  (via, also here)
• Also, a comparison of price between similarly-powered computers: everything circa 1980 and the Pi Zero now.
• C.H.I.P. vs Pi Zero: Which Sub-$10 Computer Is Better?  Topical!  “Which runs BSD better?” is the question you should ask, cause price is almost immaterial.  (via)
• A browser-based optics sandbox.  Funny how this used to require a standalone program.  (via)
• The Software Freedom Conservancy is looking for your support.  They provide infrastructure to software you use.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Sunday Comics Kickstarter.

Your unrelated open source game of the week: 0 A.D.  Works on FreeBSD and OpenBSD and can run on DragonFly if you can fix gloox.  (via)

Somehow I managed to find mostly articles with long headlines this week.

• Getting work done while you’re fishing – with expect.
• Linux workstation security checklist.  Most of this would apply to a BSD system too. (via)
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Fsync().  From the POSIX point of view.(via)
• There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: (via I lost the source, sorry!)
• The somewhat surprising history of chroot().  (via multiple)
• Modern *BSDs have a much better init system than I was expecting.
• The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community.  (via)
• The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies.  I found this out the hard way over last winter.  (also via)
• The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy.  Can’t top this.  (via)
• Unix Administration Horror Stories.  (via)
• Roguelike Tutorial in Rust.  (via)

There’s some meaty reading this week, so get settled in and start clicking.

• Haunted Machines An Origin Story.  I love this sort of intersection of ideas.  (via)
• Our Friends, the Bots.  (via previous)
• Futures of Text.  Why wasn’t this ever done at the command line, too?  (via previous)
• Cybernetic Serendipity.
• The Verge’s Web Sucks.  A followup to “The Mobile Web Sucks” that I linked to previously.
• How Does Level Generation Work In Brogue?  The animated gifs work very well here.
• Surfing the Internet from My TRS-80 Model 100.  (via)
• The Itanium processor, parts 2, 3, 3b, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.  Here’s part 1 if you missed it last week.  Windows-centric, but probably still interesting for the hardware.
• Ever wonder why they used “that key”?  (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Pronunciation guide for UNIX.  (via)
• Forgotten Quests from the golden age of adventure games.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales.  It’s a comics series where different comics artists start a story, then hands the story off to a different writer and artist for each issue after that.  I’ve been getting individual issues as they make them, and I want more people to subscribe, so they can get enough cash to print the last few issues.  (Independent comics is a hard business.)  Order the complete series, for yourself or as a unique present for a smaller person.

Be ready for the latent craziness in some of the links for this Lazy Reading episode.

• Unix Meets Prime Numbers.
• The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up.
• Google INTERCAL Style Guide.  (via)
• Before Spelunky and FTL, There Was Only ASCII.  “Procedural Death Labyrinths” sounds fun.  (via)
• How Pinterest simplified, compartmentalised and scattered the web.
• “actually a hat“.
• GMO biology transformed by “Inventor of Email”.  There’s a reason that last part is in quotes.
• What’s Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It: Interview With Internet Pioneer John Day.  A 6-month interview.  (via)
• Running TSS/8 on the DEC PiDP-8/i and SIMH.  It’s not just a software simulation; it’s a Raspberry Pi inside a PDP-8 shell.  The front panel actually works.  (thanks, Remy van Elst!)

Your off-topic movie link of the week: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.  (via an internet cult.)  Originally titled Invention For Destruction and released by a Czech director, then subtitled to English.  Looks like a strange mix of steampunk content and Monty Python-style animation.  That may seem only mildly interesting until you notice it was filmed in 1958.

I don’t know why I’ve been finding so many roguelike links lately, but it’s to our benefit.

• The Open Container Project.  No mention of a BSD.  I don’t know if that’s necessarily bad.
• Random Numbers in the original Doom.  Is that true?  That seems a bit crazy.  (via)
• The NANOG65 call for presentations is out.
• More falsehoods programmers believe about time.  A followup to a previous link.
• @Play 82: The Talks of the International Roguelike Developers Conference US, 2015.  Some fascinating links/talks on video there.
• Stick to 64-bit counters.
• LIFE IS TERRIBLE: LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WEB – James Mickens.  I don’t think I saw/linked to this one before.  Why is a Microsoft researcher one of the funniest nerd people online?  (via)
• The first port of UNIX.  (PDF, via)
• Vim Colors (via)
• Releasing a Commercial ASCII Roguelike, a Post-Mortem.  (via)
• Cold brew tea.
• From TextMate to Vim.  (via)
• Shortest network cable evar.  I once had a coworker confuse inches (“) and feet (‘) when ordering, so we ended up with a box of 200 6-inch Ethernet cables.  (via)