HAMMER2 recently gained the ability to be used as the root mount for your DragonFly system. Live deduplication of data is also now possible, which means fast copy operations, less space used, and no need to wait for an overnight batch process to do it. If you want to try it, you need a bleeding edge DragonFly system and the WANT_HAMMER2 option. It’s still not ready for production use, so don’t try it with any data you want to keep.
Historical platforms week, quite by accident.
- NADCOG, North American Data Center Operators Group. A new list similar to NANOG but for those who have to manage multiple servers.
- MIT has a Platform Studies series of books on systems like the Amiga, Atari, and so on. The latest is on the Nintendo Entertainment System, titled “I Am Error“. (via)
- The Lives of Bots. We don’t have AI, but we do have non-human actors on the internet. (via)
- Unix and Windows Hell. The I HATE EVERYTHING response. (via)
- Do math with awk.
- A Salute to Solo Programmers. Follow the links for some interesting historical stories.
- The Ship Date Predictor. For Windows 95.
- Wired Style: A Linguist Explains Vintage Internet Slang. I still have HotWired Style on my shelf, which I guess would be a companion book. (via)
- Fred Brooks: “A Personal History of Computers”. (via)
- The MUD Connector. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby would have been 98 today.
Put together at the last minute.
- NeXTBSD, a video presentation. (via multiple places)
- Why FreeBSD should not adopt launchd. Sort of commentary on the previous item. (also via multiple places)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/08/24.
- OPNSense 15.7.10, 15.7.11 released.
- Beyond the Fork, an OPNSense status report.
- OpenBSD 5.8, Another Song.
- Kernel W^X extended to i386 on OpenBSD.
- SSLv3 removed from LibreSSL.
- Call for Testing: Using tame() in userland.
- OpenBSD’s tame gets a path list parameter. (via)
- DistroWatch introduces PC-BSD’s new Enterprise package repository. (via)
- Why 32-bit MIPS isn’t interesting. (via)
- FreeBSD gains an ioat(4) driver.
- Summer of Code 2015 just finished, and the code is starting to appear.
- Lumina-fm gets a major update.
- pkgsrc as non-root, a discussion. (follow the thread)
BSDNow this week is titled “Beverly Hills 25519”, which is a play on an older U.S. TV show if you missed the reference. There’s the normal news, back this week, plus an interview of Damien Miller about OpenSSH.
Francois Tigeot has stepped i915 support in DragonFly even farther, this time bringing it to match Linux 3.17. This may be most useful for those with Broadwell and Cherryview chipsets.
I’ve gradually been leaning towards two opinions:
1: Having the Digest load as fast as possible is a benefit for everyone, and
2: I want to get off the PHP/Wordpress vulnerability merry-go-round.
Does anyone have specific experience with static site generators? Ideally there’s something out there as polished/unfiddly as WordPress, but I don’t know what. The Digest started using the Movable Type product, and I’m tempted to return.
Update: People have been recommending Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll. It looks like comments would end up going into Disqus, which is an external not-under-my-control application. There are other plugins for comments, but none of them as straightforward. What are people’s thoughts on using an outside service?
I don’t note it enough, but Tomohiro Kusumi has been making constant updates to HAMMER, the version we have now. Often they are the sort of update that makes the code more readable, or fixes possible problems, and so on. Very essential, but hard to post about it. In any case, I’m using his recent improvements to hammer volume-del to note his contributions, of which there are much more than the day’s worth I link here.
Francois Tigeot has pushed in some significant updates from Rimvydas Jasinskas, updating the radeon driver to match Linux 3.17. Try it if you have the corresponding hardware.
If you are near thoughtbot at 7 PM tonight in New York City, “The search for truth: the `true` and `false` programs” is happening there. It’s a code reading group, so there will be comparisons of each program and its history in the various BSDs and other less important operating systems. This sounds neat, plus food and drinks will be served. (via)
This is the week for entertainment, not deep thought.
- Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security (with slides) – James Mickens. I am always up for more Mickens. (via)
- Ferrolic. A sort of dali clock in real life, except crazy expensive and fragile.
- Inside The Machine, midcentury graphic images of computing.
- 80s computer hacking: a supercut. Here’s some good discussion. (via)
- Everything is turning into a service mediated by other companies. Everything. (via many places)
- Amiga 30 and the Unkillable Machine. (via)
- Touching the Internet, a story about MAE-East. (also via)
- The Big List of Naughty Strings. Good for testing input. (via)
- “Means Well” Technology and the Internet of Good Intentions. (via)
- Illuminascii, stretching the definition of roguelike.
- An excerpt from the new book Dungeon Hacks. (via)
- The Name Game: Rebranding the Roguelike. (also via)
- A Brief History of Character Codes. Relevant for all the locale work going into DragonFly right now. (via)
- “RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags“. See first answer. (via)
- The 8th Underhanded C Contest is now open. (via)
- The ARM processor architecture: Somebody else’s introduction.
- CSVfix. This will be handy to someone.
- Cameron’s World. A concentrated dose of Geocities. (via)
Some catchup here from stuff I missed last week:
- RaspBSD.org. Raspberry Pi FreeBSD images. (via)
- VMware vs. bhyve Performance Comparison. (via)
- OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales. (via)
- Tarsnap $1000 exploit bounty. It’s since doubled to $2000. (via)
- Book review: The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System.
- An interview with Marshall Kirk McKusick on the most recent Design & Implementation book. (via)
- BSDCan 2015 Trip Report: Koop Mast
- FreeBSD 10.2 is out.
- PC-BSD 10.2 is out.
- NetBSd 7.0_RC3 is out.
- Broadwell support in openbsd/dragonfly bsd.
- What are your thoughts on GhostBSD?
- Quick run down of major BSD differences?
- OPNsense 15.7.9 Released.
- More c2k15 reports.
- OpenBSD 5.8 preorders are open.
- “Resflash is a tool for building OpenBSD images for embedded and cloud systems in a reproducible way.” (via)
- On “unpleasant truths” in tech books.
- pkgsrc-wip is migrating away from CVS.
- OpenBSD on EdgeRouter Lite.
- 4-count cross–pollination.
I was on the road last week and didn’t post a link to the BSDNow episode “May Contain ZFS“. It has an interview with Peter Toth about iocage, among other things. This week’s episode is the spectacularly-named “Ubuntu Slaughters Kittens“, with an interview of Bryan Cantrill from Joyent, so there’s conversation about pkgsrc and various Sun-based things.
Why buy ECC RAM? This is a discussion I’ve seen many times. I’ve always heard that without the error checking, you can’t tell if a random bit was flipped by a cosmic particle. That seems like a very remote threat. Over the last week, I went to Science North in Sudbury, Canada, and saw the Diffusion Cloud Chamber. I took a photo myself. Both of those picture represent an instant in time, and each of those squiggles in the chamber in that instant represents some particle zipping through space that miiiiiight scramble your RAM. That’s… a lot more common than I thought.
Matthew Dillon posted an extended description of how to run Firefox in a way that completely locks it away from your user account. As a side effect of this, the current crop of dports binaries has been updated.
My links are haphazard – but that shouldn’t get in the way of reading.
- The 14 Deadly Sins of Graphical Adventure Design.
- makefiletutorial.com. Unfortunately probably gmake-specific, but still a good idea. (via)
- Postmortem of an outage caused while rebooting the (EVE Online) universe. (also via)
- There are still game releases for the Amiga 500. (via)
- Awesome Emacs. Emacs add-ons that people deem worth trying. (via swildner)
- A Weekend at KansasFest, the Sleepaway Camp for Apple II Fanatics. (via)
- Tricks to play with vim.
- Unions as a solution to stack ranking in tech companies. Not sure if that’s the answer, but most people just take fat paychecks and ignore the problem. (via I lost it, sorry)
- The new Devil’s Dictionary. To see quotes from the original, search for “Bierce” in /usr/src/games/fortune/datfiles/fortunes . (via many places)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Bird and Moon.
A short week, cause I’m short on time. Sorry!
- The case for checksumming filesystems. (via)
- How to use fw_update for Radeon on OpenBSD.
- FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s iwm(4) driver.
- FreeBSD supports more parts of the Cavium ThunderX, which I link to in part because “Cavium ThunderX” sounds like a thoracic problem.
- FreeBSD has updated apr, sqlite3, serf, and svnlite in base.
- NetBSD gained ARFE.
- The c2k15 report keep coming!
Did you know that AT&T maintains a regex library and test suite? I did not, but now DragonFly has both, in part for better multibyte character support.
(corrected to note that the regex library is not from AT&T – thanks, anonymous commenter)
Most of the news is about Intel video support, but Radeon direct rending improvements are coming too. ‘zrj’ have brought up drm/radeon support to match what is in Linux 3.12. Worth trying if you’ve had problems with your Radeon and audio, going by what I’ve seen people report in IRC.
The vi in any BSD is not the original Berkeley vi – instead it’s usually nvi. However, thanks to John Marino, DragonFly has the up-to-date, multibyte-supporting nvi2. (I know I’ve made reference to the nv/nvi difference before.)
If your DragonFly-running c720p (the touchscreen model) occasionally decides to go perma-bonkers, Matthew Dillon has added a method to reset it, either on reboot or by setting debug.atmel_mxt_reset=1.