Lazy Reading for 2011/07/31

Posted in the past, for the future.  I always build these up over the week, so if the links seem dated (as in more than 24 hours old), that’s why.  My commentary will add the flavor.

  • This NYT story about Dwarf Fortress has been linked lots of places, but I want to point out the one paragraph:

    Growing up, Tarn was enamored of Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien, but he has never been a lockstep member of the geek culture so much as a wanderer on the fringes. He didn’t read superhero comics as a kid, and later, he never became obsessed with the “Game of Thrones” books, say, or with “Lost.”

    Are you over 35 or so?  Then maybe you remember a time when there wasn’t a designated ‘Geek Culture’.  It’s something specific to a period in time, like when pay phones were still common, or when people were on average still thin.  It strikes me that the interviewer assumes that a computer programmer should become consumed with a TV media event; that it’s part of what makes them what they are.   It’s as if all accountants need to have brown shoes, and all artists have to wear berets and ‘get’ abstract art.  Maybe I’m just hipster complaining.

  • “...while Bell Labs’ parent company AT&T flatly refused to believe that packet switching would ever work” – Have I linked to Shady Characters before?  I think so.  Anyway, this is part 1 about the @ sign, and it’s of course talking about email and the early days of the Internet, back when it was the ARPANet.  Be sure to check the references at the end of the article; it contains gems like this ad for a 65-pound portable TTY.
  • Tim Paterson has a blog.  DOS is his fault.  Worth reading, for the early hardware details.  (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
  • Removing the Internet’s relics. An article about how FTP should die.  It will…  once there’s no place where it’s needed.  Like gopher!
  • Comparisons like this are usually cheesy, but this one made me laugh: Text editors as Lord of the Rings locations.
More Java on DragonFly

Francois Tigeot has fixed wip/jdk16 to build on DragonFly.  Note that this is in pkgsrc-wip, not ‘normal’ pkgsrc.  The secret is to build lang/kaffe to bootstrap it, which requires CCVER=gcc41 to be set.  Apparently kaffe will not build under gcc 4.4.

Why did he do it?  To run OpenGrok, of course.  He’s posted instructions on getting OpenGrok running on DragonFly.  Note the Java crashes he reports in DragonFly 2.11 may already have been fixed.

p.s. I hated “Stranger in a Strange Land”.

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/24

Lazy reading is easy when it’s been this hot out.  In fact, I may melt before this article gets published.

  • Ecdysis – a NAT64 gateway program.  I link to it for two reasons.  1: You will probably need to NAT 6-to-4 sooner or later, and 2: it uses PF and so is BSD-compatible. (via)
  • Don’t not copy that floppy! (also via)  My original Apple ][ disk for Castle Wolfenstein is probably no longer functional.  Not that I have equipment to play it on…
  • World timezones, as a visible map.  (via)   I mention time zone updates here on occasion, and this is a immediate guide to what a strange patchwork of zones it is.  You can’t even see some of the really tiny/crazy ones.
  • A crappy way to start your day.  Nobody ever enjoys that call from work…

And now, a link that has nothing to do with this.

Practical Packet Analysis: a review

Background: You may remember some time ago, I posted a review of Michael Lucas’s Network Flow Analysis.  He’s written several BSD books and so I figured it was worth reading further, knowing that this network-specific book would be BSD-friendly.  Also, he made it easier by sending me a copy.

No Starch Press, the company that published all the books linked in the previous paragraph, asked if I’d read/review another book from them. This would be Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd edition.  (Review continues after the break…)

Continue reading “Practical Packet Analysis: a review”

2011Q2 binary builds finishing up

The builds of pkgsrc-2011Q2 are finishing up, so we have/will have binaries to download, for those who don’t want to build from source.  The uploads should be complete by now for everything except maybe 2.11/x86_64.  You’ll have to change $PKG_PATH to point at the new directories for now, though.  There’s also some build reports to look at.