Google Code-In – DragonFly BSD Digest

2020/06/142020/06/12

Lazy Reading for 2020/06/14

Wide topic range, again.

Pie Marches On, the best book about pie making I’ve ever read – and it’s about 80 years old.
The Success and Failure of Ninja. (thanks, Tse Gratis)
Google Code-In is finished. Summer of Code and Summer of Docs is still running.
Remembering John Conway’s FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language. (via)
Jagged Little Tapes. One of the few things VHS did well.
Miniature cardboard synthesizers. (via)
Why sysadmins don’t like changing things, illustrated.
ADM-3A Dumb Terminal Home Automation Hub. “because why not?”
The Symbolic Links Virtual Machine. (via)
Wireless is a trap. I have come to agree with this.

2015/10/182015/10/16

Lazy Reading for 2015/10/18

Accidental topic this week: very, very old computers.

Computer Show. Modern show, looks like it’s exactly from the mid 1980s. (via multiple places)
Computing Britain. From the BBC, freely downloadable computing history audiofiles, quite worth it. (via)
Phones for the People. I don’t think it’s as egalitarian as it is described, but it is interesting to see the variety. (via)
RTC Quickstart. RTC is an alternative to the not-private-and-not-open Skype. Why don’t more people use it?
More secure Wi-Fi routers. This would be the best Internet of Things approach. (via)
You Wouldn’t Base64 a Password. (via)
Blue screens of death, some of which you’ve surely seen before. (via)
The first Apple ][ viruses. (via)
Dark Castle and Macintosh System 6 Emulator. (via)
Vim and Composability (via)
A Simpler Vim Statusline. (via)
Vim: Convenient Code Navigation for Your Projects. (via)
Unix commands: The joy of curl
Ohmu. I like the visualization.
Wander (1974) — a lost mainframe game is found! (via)
Lost mainframe games (also via)
The lack of historic knowledge is so frustrating. AKA “learn from past mistakes”.
The SCELBI, rebuilt. (via)
CSIRAC, the oldest computer that’s still physically assembled – from 1949! (via)
Cardboard computers. (via)
Long long long term data storage. (via)
Google Code-In starts on my birthday, and Google Summer of Code 2016 has been announced.
INOC-DBA: dial an ASN, get the network operations center responsible for it. One of the ways people make the complex creature called the Internet continue to function. (via)
sandstorm.io, self-hosting which I’ve linked to before, and known, which I haven’t. More tools that people will eventually regret not using. (via)

Your comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales #1, with more added. I subscribed to this series long ago, and it’s a lot of fun.

2014/11/232014/11/23

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/23

Lots to read this week.

The Open Source Financial Developers Association has a very complete calendar of open source events around NYC. (via)
Google Code-in 2014 has announced its mentoring orgs.
Also, Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
Facebook’s New Data Center Is Bad News for Cisco. Somewhat free of technical data, but I do like the idea of more software-defined networking. (via)
NSA vs. encryption, 40 years ago. (via)
schmutz. Ah, the joys of Unicode. (via)
Sort of related: this is just mean. (via IRC, I think)
SSHelper. I’m going to buy a new phone just so I can use this. I want my handheld computer to actually be a computer, darnit. This is from the guy who created Apple Writer, of all things. (also via)
List of Physical Visualizations. (via)
After Docker. Docker and similar items appear to be an attempt to change an operating system from a place where you work to a thin wrapping around a program you run. Dunno if I like that. (via)
Barbie, computer engineer, which has created more responses.
A brief history of graphics. Video game graphics, specifically.
The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion. Similar. (via)
I like the concept behind “Let’s Encrypt“, though I quibble with the tools selected. (via)
A video about the Internet in 1995. (via)
“With varying degrees, everyone has this drawer in their house.“
IFComp winners will provide a great deal of reading/playing time.

Your unrelated link of the week: Snowpocalypse 2014. I grew up there and now live not too far away. That’s really not that much snow for the area; it’s just that it fell so quickly.

2013/10/092013/10/09

Google Code-In 2013 and Summer of Code 2014 announced

Google has a post up about the 10th anniversary of Summer of Code, with next year’s version of the event getting some changes – an increase in the students allocated and in the student stipend, and more events. I’m planning to apply for DragonFly, for 2014.

Google is also doing the Code-In, for 13 to 17-year-old students, again. DragonFly participated in the first year (the only BSD to do so), but sat out last year. I’m not currently anticipating DragonFly being involved for 2013, cause of reasons. (It’s a lot of work!)

2013/02/072013/02/06

Google Code-In 2012 winners

DragonFly didn’t participate this year, but it’s worth looking at the winners of the Google Code-In work for 2012 – there’s two people that were working on NetBSD in there.

2012/09/252012/09/25

Google Code-In: participants?

Google Code-In 2012 has been announced. I’m not going to be able to coordinate it for DragonFly this year… anyone want to step up?

2011/10/21

Google Code-In for 2011

Google’s running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects. DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done. However, we need ideas, the more the better. Please add whatever comes to mind.

2011/05/30

Trying out deduplication

I moved to DragonFly 2.10 over the past few days, and I tried out deduplication, to see what kind of results I would get. The procedure is outlined below. I’m using /home here as an example, just to reduce the amount of text pasted in.

/pfs/@@-1:00004 966000640 566434576 399566064 59% /home

Move my various Hammer pseudo-file systems to version 5, which supports deduplication.

# hammer version-upgrade /home 5

Issue a deduplication simulate command, to see what it guesses will be the savings:

# hammer dedup-simulate /home Dedup-simulate /home: objspace 8000000000000000:0000 7fffffffffffffff:ffff pfs_id 4 Dedup-simulate /home succeeded Simulated dedup ratio = 1.22

That ratio turned out to be pretty accurate for the actual deduplication. I didn’t time it, unfortunately. I don’t know if the time taken is proportional to the amount of deduplication or the total volume of data, though I suspect the latter.

# hammer dedup /home Dedup /home: objspace 8000000000000000:0000 7fffffffffffffff:ffff pfs_id 4 Dedup /home succeeded Dedup ratio = 1.22 462 GB referenced 378 GB allocated 14 MB skipped 6869 CRC collisions 0 SHA collisions 0 bigblock underflows

The end result?

/pfs/@@-1:00004 966000640 505887504 460113136 52% /home

That data space is shared across all file systems, and it’s a 1TB disk, so it’s 7%, or 70GB. I was hoping for more, but I don’t have any obviously duplicated data (no local mail store, no on-disk backups), so perhaps this is normal. 70GB that I didn’t have before is no bad thing, though.

Incidentally, I was able to upgrade my installed software from pkgsrc-2009Q4 to pkgsrc-2011Q1 entirely using pkg_radd -u <pkgname>. Remarkably quick and painless, though pkgin may have been able to do it even faster since it would pull from the same place.

2011/05/05

Hammer and the future

Matthew Dillon’s been thinking about Hammer, and how to implement clustering well enough to work as a sort of RAID replacement. He’s written up a document describing his plans. Some highlights:

writable history snapshots
quotas and accounting
live rebuilds of data from mirrors
and the same history, mirroring, and snapshots as before.

It’s going to be a while before this “Hammer 2” becomes a finished product, though, so don’t count on it for the next release.

2011/02/14

Google Code-In winners listed

The winners of Google Code-In have been posted. They win a trip to Google (remember, they are 13-18 years old) and an impressive item on their resume. And yes, some of those names there worked on DragonFly projects.

2011/02/062011/02/06

More Google Code-In work arrives

Samuel J. Greear committed some more code that happened to come from DragonFly/Google Code-In projects. There’s a surprising large amount of code that came from those projects…

2011/01/26

Google Code-In wrap-up write-up

Samuel J. Greear has written a summary of DragonFly’s experience with Google Code-In 2011, noting that the students tacked harder projects than expected, and relatively easy documentation projects were less popular than expected. He has hard numbers on tasks done, too.

I think this article holds the “number of hyphens in a title” record for this blog.

2010/12/23

Google Code-In, and sysctls too

Ed Smith was thinking of working on sysctl documentation, but as it turns out, a lot of it has already been done via Google Code-In; Samuel Greear recently committed a lot of it. (Though there’s more sysctl work possible.)

While on that topic, Samuel Greear also posted a lengthy summary of all the Code-In work done so far. We need more code-related tasks! The existing ones have been so popular that they’re all getting done, quickly.

2010/12/14

libfsid created

Another Google Code-In project arrives: libfsid. It’s used to get the volume label for a given file system. (see man page) It makes me happy to see more Google Code-In projects coming to fruition and getting committed – suggest more, if you have them!

2010/12/10

Google Code-In so far

Samuel Greear wrote up a nice summation of Google Code-In progress. 30+ tasks are done now, which is great! Except! We need more projects, as we’re about halfway through the total. Suggestions are welcome, here or on the mailing lists. Recently finished projects include a devattr tool and vkernel usage documentation.

2010/12/072010/12/05

GCI work continues: sysctls

There’s now descriptions for a number of the net.inet.* sysctls, thanks to Taras Klaskovsky as part of Google Code-In.

2010/12/04

SHA256 for passwords

Another Google Code-In task completed: passwords are now created using SHA256 (PDF link) by default, and libcrypt also now supports SHA512.

2010/12/04

Visual update for bugs

Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.

2010/12/03

2.8 Installation Video

Another piece of work by one of the fine students participating in Google Code-In is a new 2.8 installation screencast/video. Check it out at the following link:

DragonFly BSD 2.8 Installation Screencast on YouTube

If you have been following along but have not yet tried DragonFly, this should evidence how easy it is — wait not a second longer!

2010/12/02

Google Code-In progress

The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there’s new pages in the new handbook, plus code commits from various finished projects. 14 tasks are done, and there’s 10 more in progress, out of… I think 50? This is a good rate, considering there’s more than a month left.