Category: UNIXish

I have possibly two weeks worth of Lazy Reading built up here, so sit down and get with the clicking:

• The Internet with a Human Face.  Maciej Ceglowski’s recent talk.  This is the you-should-read-it link of the week.  (via)
• I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome.  Bunnie Huang finds the best place in the world to smash your cell phone.
• The Art of UNIX Programming.  Prompted by this.
• Alert Design.  The design of network monitor warnings, not designing alertly.  (via)
• UNIX History Repository.  On GitHub.  So much is on GitHub these days…  (via)
• A Trip Down UNIX Memory Lane.  A lot of UNIX links this week; I don’t know why.
• “Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketech platishforms?” Funny but sorta realistic.
• Presenting Data and Information, taught by Edward Tufte.  Might be both interesting and local to some reader.  (via)
• Python 3 is killing Python.  This sort of thing has happened before, called “Perl 6”.  (via)
• The Design of SQLite 4.  The more I use SQLite, the more I like it.  (via)
• Relics of Technology.  How many of these things have you actually used?  (via)
• tetris-bsd: the most basic version of tetris I’ve ever seen.  (via saved Google search)
• That previous link led me to taipan, which is a game I loved on my Apple ][.  Wait, I can still play it now?
• Apple phone and tablet models from the 80s.  I remember shaping and painting models out of that sort of foam, years ago, before CAD ate it all.
• Notepad: more dangerous than you thought.
• Not necessarily the wrong way to look at tech blogs.
• 2000 or so Unicode characters.  What common fonts actually implement everything in Unicode?  Cause that would be a heck of a lot of designs.  (via a Kickstarter newsletter)
• Beyond the stack.  This way of setting up systems has taken over computing firms that are producing software for the Internet… but I don’t think people realize that isn’t all companies.
• The current Humble Book Bundle includes some Top Shelf comics publications, including semi-fictional-early-hacking-history Wizzywig which I’ve mentioned before, and the colossal not-related-to-computers work From Hell.  Hopefully will still be up when you read this…
• If I can run an arbitrary program, I can do arbitrary things.
• Sun stories.  Remember, it used to be BSD, back when Sun did was growing.  One thing everyone seems to agree on: the workstations were great.  (via)
• What’s going on with TrueCrypt.  Since DragonFly has a truecrypt-compatible implementation, I’d certainly like to see it continue.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: The End of Garfield. I don’t know if this is the original source for the image.

Lots to read this week – enjoy!

• Stories from net.rumors.  War stories about old, big hardware – the file is from USENET in 1989, so many of the stories are about UNIX or pre-UNIX.  It’s a long read, but worth it.  (via)
• Via the previous link: olduse.net.   “Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago.”  Also available via NNTP.  The web page simulates a terminal news reader, down to the key commands.  I’ve mentioned it before.
• SSH Tunnel – Local and Remote Port Forwarding Explained With Examples.  Partially for my own benefit, since I’ve always intended to set up forwarding but never had enough of a dire need to do so.  (via)
• Windows in video games.  A neat description of how video games simulate building interiors, and a near-perfect usage case for animated GIFs.  (via)
• Go for sysadmins.  Go seems to approach problems in a different way than Python/Ruby, but I don’t have enough experience to quantify that yet.  Also, we need to document PFI better to show how you can already do exactly what the presenter does, with DragonFly.  (via a mailinglist)
• The 12-Factor App, noticed in the video in the previous link.
• Building a homebrew USB device.  (via)  related: I wish lobste.rs would let you link directly to a story even if there weren’t comments yet.
• UNIX: Database connection testing.
• The future that everyone forgot.  I always liked what Danger did.  (via)
• Arcade Story.  I used to be that good with Black Tiger, though it wasn’t as flashy a game.  (via)
• RFC7258.  “Pervasive monitoring is an attack”.  (via many places)
• Problem of the Week at the Harvard Physics Department.  (via)
• Notation, notation, notation: a brief history of mathematical symbols. (via)
• An Open Letter on Feminism In Tech.  Related: I am still trying to hire a system admin at my workplace.  (via several places)
• Microservices and the migrating Unix philosophy.  As the first comment in the source link says, “They’ve not read Brooks enough.”
• A curated list of open source sysadmin resources.  Interesting set of links, though it seems silly to have this list as a Github project.  (via)
• Everything is Broken.  (via many places)

Your unrelated link of the week: Well, not really unrelated, but this thought occurred to me.

I’ve linked to Wizzywig (free complete book PDF at that link before, as a sort of early semi-fictional history of personal computing.  I met the author at TCAF this weekend; his Brain Rot comics about the start of hip-hop are enjoyable too.  There’s about a zillion more books I wanted to buy at TCAF, too…

• Arabic programming language artwork.  “At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text.”  (via)
• How babies are like Unix.
• Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator.  (via)
• How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch.  From the man himself.  (via)
• The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop.  Diving into language use and data analysis.  (via)
• The Quest for Randomness.  (via)
•  Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.  An AD&D module and map, illustrated and turned into a complete narrative.   (via)
• Recreational Mathematics Magazine.  Someone will find this deeply satisfying.  (via)
• Practical Alternatives to systemd?
• The operating system: should there be one?  (PDF)  Smalltalk, lurking.  (via)
• Found via that previous link: The Interlisp Programming Environment.  (PDF)  Notice it says ‘environment’, not ‘language’.  Lisp implementations seem to be considered both the operating system and the programming language.
• Again found via: Go is more UNIX than UNIX.

Your unrelated link of the week: Memorex.  As a friend from years ago said, “Eiiiiiiiiighteeeeeees”.  (via)

Busy week, but lots to read.

• My brush with Oulipo.  Thinking far harder about language patterns than I thought possible.
• The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was.  Follow the links, and feel disappointment.
• BASIC turns 50.  I like BASIC – specifically AppleBASIC – in a way only nostalgia can cause.  (via)
• More secure than telnetmallows.  (via)
• The Great Works of Software.  “…works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.”  An accurate description.  UNIX is #4.   (via)
• GitHub monoculture.  Git is decentralized, GitHub is not.  (via)
• Novena’s hackable bezel.  A spiffy way to hold a keyboard.
• “Here’s my favorite operating systems war story, what’s yours?”  Some excellent, old-school war stories in the originating link.

Your unrelated link of the week: Doc Brown on My Proper Tea.  Language warning.

This is the first Lazy Reading in a while that I hadn’t already started before the previous week’s Lazy Reading was displayed.

• Eventually, Javascript will eat everything.  (via)
• Wrong and Right Reasons to be Upset about Oculus.   Gets at something that’s been bothering me: too many new companies have acquisition as an exit strategy.  Over time, that becomes the only strategy.  (via many places)
• How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40%.  I can confirm this works, via the small sample of the class I taught recently.  (via I lost track, sorry)
• Toward a better programming.   Makes some good points about programming, though it unfortunately ends not with solutions but with a ‘buy my stuff’ push.  (via)
• Michael W. Lucas reviews “Applied Network Security Monitoring”, the book.
• 7 Habits of Highly Successful UNIX Admins.
• thread patterns, about surviving mailing list overload.  You will recognize exactly what’s being described if you’ve read any mailing list for more than a year of your life.  (via #dragonflybsd)
• How pinball and boardwalk amusements gave rise to video games.
• RPN calculation, a description and history.
• I don’t know if this conspiracy theory with Red Hat, systemd, and the military-industrial complex is even realistic, but it’s kinda fun to see, in a “look at that mess over there in that other operating system” kind of way.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the day: The Very Hungry Rust Monster.

Pardon me as I wander through a lot of topics.

• Where to keep your pubic hair.  I worry about this (syntax, not hair storage) when I’m writing titles here.  (via)
• Top 100 most searched for out-of-print books in 2013.  This is a UK site, so it’s UK-specific, I assume.  I am thinking of it because I saw copies of the entertainingly illustrated “UNIX System Administrator’s Handbook” at NYCBSDCon.  I have copies of the 3rd edition; the 4th edition in print now is the “UNIX and Linux…” version, and I don’t know if the illustrations survived.  (via)
• Also found while looking at the previous links: UNIX Systems Advanced Administration and Management Handbook.  No idea of the contents, since it’s nearly 20 years old, but the cover hints that it might be interesting more for the style of how it was assembled and what it covers, rather than the technical aspects.  I am entertained by ‘first edition’ AD&D manuals the same way.
• It’s about time.  DDOS attacks and NTP.  A summary of the recent trend.
• Ten Things We Forgot to Monitor.  The authors very kindly include the scripts they use to monitor these things now.  (via)
• Less Commonly Used UNIX Commands.  From a variety of places, so only a subset of this list is available on any given system.  (via)
• The Death of Xenix.  That was Microsoft UNIX, for those who don’t remember.  (via)
• Unix: Using pushd and popd for faster navigation.  One of those habits I’ve never been able to establish.
• Introducing BPasswd2.  By Alex Hornung, one of the DragonFly developers.  I’ve been meaning to post this for some time.
• Typeset In The Future, examining typefaces all through a sci-fi movie, down to the buttons.  (via)
• World War G.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Top Shelf is now selling their excellent comics without DRM, so they can be stored/read however you like.

The Internet overfloweth with good links, lately.  Nothing this week that requires a lot of reading, but plenty of things to click.  Enjoy!

• The “Basket of Remotes” problem.  An area where standards are never applied.
• Dice portraits.  I like the images.  (via)
• Who made that dial tone?  (via a mailing list)
• Simple Git workflow is simple.  (via)
• Bunnie Huang talks about his open laptop project, Novena.  (mentioned here before.)  They sound really neat, but I can imagine you need to be ready for a certain amount of manual work.
• Speaking of machines, Michael W. Lucas got a beefy new desktop system from iXsystems, which is is not a product they advertise… but it makes sense if you want to run a BSD.
• How I built a Raspberry Pi Tablet.  Here’s how the author did it.  It wasn’t cheap or easy.  (via)
• A History of Programming Games, 1961-1989.  Not games programming, but games where you program robots as part of the game.  I remember being horribly confused by Robotwar on the Apple ][.  (via)
• A LISP interpreter, written in Bash.  Is there one written in Javascript yet?  There must be.  (via)
• You use SSH keys, don’t you?  If not, read this primer.
• On compiling 34 year old C code.  Getting Unix V7 ed/sed working.  As the article points out, “ed is already using a legacy interface in 1979.”  (via)
• Most pedantic bug ever.  (via somewhere on Twitter, of all places)
• Also on Twitter: I am devloper.
• Facebook is launching a newsfeed reader.  I agree with the person who originally posted this link – it’ll probably be a one-way street where Facebook scarfs up content from the rest of the web via RSS, but everything on Facebook will stay locked away.
• I am looking forward to replacing my Windows desktop with a non-Windows tablet – it’s getting closer.
• Remember: if it’s not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it’s not really yours.
• The curse of the leading zero.
• The Hidden Backdoors to the City of Cron.  (re)Infection via cron.  (via)
• The Internet is better referred to as “the Stacks”.  It’s 5 companies, and everything revolves around what they do.  That end-of-2012 article is talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft…  though Microsoft seems to be on the way out.  Anyway, startups plan for buyout these days, which should tell you that it’s easier to take cash from one of a few large companies than try to compete with them, however indirectly.

Your unrelated link of the week:  Fail Forward, a collection of writing about pen and paper RPGs.  (via)

This was a loooooong week, with me working 24 of the last 48 hours.  It didn’t get in the way of the link-gathering, though!

• This report on what’s new in Unicode 7 is stranger than you’d expect.  (via)
• gzip + poetry = awesome.  This is a great way to visualize compression.  (via)
• The Internet Archive now lets you run old software via in-browser emulation.  Of course, all the screenshots are of games because everyone wants to revisit childhood.  (via)
• I tell people a Leatherman is one of the best computer tools you can have.  Here’s multitool overkill.  I’m mentioning a specific brand for a reason, by the way.  (via several places)
• Fixing UNIX filenames.  It’s a bit older, so you may have seen this.  (via)
• UNIX: the Art of Being Lazy.  Remember, the Three Virtues of a programmer, from Larry Wall: Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience.
• A Mac Plus running System 7 – in Javascript.  One of my first computers; even the control panels seemed to hold promise.  (via)
• Lets Blather All Over… Quadrilateral Cowboy.  A hacking game that actually involves code.
• What I do when I’m not on here.  Rotary phones dialing through an electromechanical exchange to reach between Asterisk VoIP server.  I love watching the gears go.  (via)

Your unrelated animated image of the day: (via via)

Whee!

• Commodore 64 and Spectrum keyboards – USB versions.  Not interesting to me, but I bet at least one person reading this just got excited.
• The Horrible World of Web Hosting.  Unfortunately quite an accurate article, especially in his quote translations.  (via)
• Getting an Apple 1 to run.  Note that the circuit board is mounted in a wall frame.
• Interactive Fiction Competition 2013 recommendations.  This can eat up a few hours if you have them to spare.  (via)
• Where shutdowns are not disasters.  An exploration of the shutdown command.
• Mail backups using newsyslog.conf for rotation.  A clever idea.
• What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?  That story and the link on Hacker news where I found it have some entertaining floppy disk anecdotes.  I originally wrote “old floppy disk” but realized that was redundant.  Almost all floppies are old at this point.
• Don’t Copy That Floppy!  Why haven’t I linked this before?
• Don’t Copy That 2.  Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a sequel?

Your unrelated link of the week: Deep into Youtube, the top-rated films.  You may want to turn your volume down, and make sure nobody is around.  Not for NSFW content, but because some of those films are so confusing that it’s impossible to explain to someone else why you are watching them.  (via)  There’s some Nico Nico Douga-sourced stuff in there, which I thought I’ve mentioned before, but I can’t find it now.  Why do I even know these things?

Whee!

• The Shady Characters blog talks about alternate phone dial layouts.  I’ve mentioned those here before, but Shady Characters links to this video describing the testing that went on for the keypads.  Check at about 2:40 for the story on how AT&T figured out the ‘correct’ length for the phone handset cable.
• The Youtube channel for Numberphile, the source of that previous video link, has some pretty entertaining math videos…
• The UNIX as a Second Language blog has an article up about using strace.
• The Roland SP-808.  I didn’t know these had a built-in Zip drive.  (via)
• The ICT 1301 runs again.  This is what big computers are supposed to look like, with large cabinets, and spinning tapes, and oversized operator consoles.  (via)
• Cryptogeddon, a sort of augmented reality game where I think you sneak your way across real systems.  ‘Real’ as in not someone else’s computers, but real systems set up for this game.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Here’s a weird coincidence.  I was looking at this list of pixelated iconic album covers.  The #3 item is “Trout Mask Replica”, from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.  I scanned that specific image back in 1994, on a Mac IIsi in my college lab.  For whatever reason, I’ve seen copies of my scan (color corrected much better than I did) many times since.  I know I’m not hallucinating because I still have the record, with the same wear pattern on the album cover.  It’s odd to see a 20-year-old copy of a 40-year-old album scan you did just pop up out of nowhere.

By the time you read this, I’ll have already been sitting on an island for a few days.  There’s so much stuff to post lately I’m scheduling material a week out.

• Have you used the grep replacement ‘ack‘?  There’s a Twitter feed of tips for it.
• A horrible programming idea, so bad I can’t tell if it’s trolling.  (via multiple places)
• Links at the previous item led me here: Breaking Systems for Fun and Profit.
• A tiny fatmac.  It’s adorable.
• Beautiful Code, from Rob Pike, described by Brian Kernighan.
• That previous link was found via this reimplementation of Pike’s grep in Go.  The “Practice of Programming” book mentioned is one of my favorites.
• The SCUMM Diary.  The SCUMM engine could arguably be as big an influence as the Quake engine on game history.  (via)
• This is a very nice keyboard.
• Managing sshd in Ansible, cross-platform.  A sequel to last week’s Ansible/Lucas link.
• UNIX pioneers remember the good times.  These anecdotes seems to illustrate the personalities of their tellers/perpetrators.  Or at least I imagine they do.  (via)
• NTP reference clock statistics.  (also via)  When milliseconds matter.  Also, yay graphs!
• WTF Visualizations.  A counterpoint to the previous well-illustrated link.  I read through a bunch of the nonsensical graphs and started to feel disoriented.  (also also via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Scout, by Malachi Ward.  A self-contained sci-fi story.

So many links came up recently that I had already finished this week’s entry when last week’s Lazy Reading was posted.

• The FatMac cooler.  Cooler as in place to keep drinks cool.
• I always like seeing what people use for home BSD hardware.
• Note the embroidered dragonflies.
• Early mobile and video phones.  Decades early.  Look at the slideshow.
• Looking for evil in your firewall logs.
• Best Open Source games.  Dunno how many work on any BSD.  (via)
• The 2-clause BSD license and the ISC license are considered functionally equivalent?
• The GREP test, an excellent standard for code.  (via)
• What if your klacky keyboard is too klacky?  (also via)
• Soldering is Easy, the comic book.
• People are really starting to pile on Microsoft.  (I already started)  Unix-like systems are resuming their dominance of the market.  Maybe ubiquity is a better word?

Your unrelated link of the week: Release the Kraken!