Lazy Reading for 2011/07/17

Man, it’s like the whole Internet decided to take a nap lately.  Warm weather in the northern hemisphere does that.

Disk encryption updates

Alex Hornung has made a pile of changes for disk encryption, including adding libdm, a “simple BSD-licensed libdevmapper“,and adding tcplay, a 100% compatible implementation of TrueCrypt.   This should make you very happy if you like running from an encrypted disk.

Update: Alex has written an in-depth explanation of this work.  It’s a huge change!

Update update: Hey, it’s showing on Hacker News too!

Summer of Code Doc Camp

One of the perpetual questions about Summer of Code is “Why can’t there be documentation projects?”, since most open source projects need docs as badly as code.  There’s various reasons that I’m too lazy to research and type out, I’m sure, but Google is sponsoring a “Doc Camp“, in October.  You don’t have to be in Summer of Code; you just have to be willing to spend the 17th through the 25th writing documentation.  Google pays for room and board, and you can apply for transportation cost coverage.  A classy idea, all around.  Someone participate and report back!

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/03

I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.

You probably heard of this already, but hey, look!  DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.

Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front.  This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.

While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself.  It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up.  Yeah, that worked out just dandy.  There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).

The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places)  Here’s my story.  It was, and still is, “Fupjack”.  Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack.  Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot!  Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway.  He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.

Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!”  I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one.  People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…