This is interesting: Verisign is sponsoring a new BSD convention (PDF link) in October, in Dulles, Virginia, USA. Apparently the use of BSD systems at the company is increasing, and they want to host something for it. The pkgNG presentation may be very interesting for DragonFly users. See the announcement. A new convention to support increased BSD uptake is really a nice surprise.
NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge is this weekend, 4/20/2013. Fancy as it sounds, it’s really a single-day hackathon around open software and hardware, with the problems to fix coming from NASA and therefore probably very unique. It’s happening in a bunch of places around the world, but there’s one right here in my town.
Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.
We are very close to the next release. As always, it comes down to building third-party software. Lots of material here to read, until then.
- E-TeX: Guidelines for Future TeX Extensions – revisited. It’s interesting to look at a software project that has had 20 years to run, with a very specific problem domain, and see that there’s always something more that could be done. (via)
- You SHOULD CONSIDER RFC6919. (via)
- The largest computer ever built. Why are there no SAGE emulators? (also via)
- The newlisp.org logo is a dragonfly, similar to ours. I don’t know why. Oh, wait: I bet it’s parentheses for the wings, which makes sense for Lisp. (thanks, Charles Rapenne)
- UNIX V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU coreutils implementations of echo.c. Not necessarily a fair comparison, but interesting; there’s some useful links in the comments, such as this similar exercise for cat.c. (via)
- Top 10 reasons I Like Postgres Over SQL Server. SQL Server is not that bad a product, but I do wish Postgres was run more often.
- Our Regressive Web. A story on how we’re losing the tools that let us focus on content on the web. The author doesn’t say, but should, that this is partially because we’re using platforms owned by other companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of talking on our own. (email, blogs) (via)
- The earliest known version of D&D, the “Dalluhn Manuscript“, is on display at a museum right around the corner from me. (via)
- Workflow in Tmux. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: A bunch of monster models, all taken at a convention called Monsterpalooza. A bit grody, but still some very good construction work. (via)
Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:
- We have the ability to use pkgsrc or dports (building from source in either case) now
- Several people have committed the remaining last-minute fixes
- I’m not going to have pkgsrc binaries built for the release.
- dports binaries – John Marino and Francois Tigeot are uploading now.
I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.
DPorts is based off of FreeBSD’s ports, but it’s possible to add software packages to it that don’t exist in FreeBSD’s ports system and have them build as any other packages. This is briefly detailed in this GitHub bug report, along with a number of the ports that already exist that way.
Matthew Dillon wrote a note about SSDs, HDDs, and swapcache that may be useful for anyone building a system soon. Conversations about SSDs, swapcache, and so on have happened before.
For anyone who is a student considering Google Summer of Code this year: this timeframe we’re in right now is listed by Google as time for “students discuss project ideas with mentoring organizations”. This is the perfect time to find out what the people in an organization are like, and get early feedback on your project ideas.
Chances are, if you’re submitting a proposal for an idea from an org’s project list, you’re one of a number of students all trying for the same thing. The best way to get accepted instead of any other applicant is to be the person they already know.
BSDTalk 244 is Marshall Kirk McKusick and George Neville-Neil talking about the FreeBSD Foundation, for a generous half-hour.
The very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD (2nd edition), signed by Michael W. Lucas, is being auctioned off in a charity event for OpenBSD. There’s 5 days left to bid, though the price is already somewhere north of $2 per page.
Peter Avalos has updated ftp in DragonFly. It’s actually tnftp, which is the same base ftp client used in FreeBSD/NetBSD/Mac OS X/etc. It’s the 20121224 version, and the 3.4 release branch has it too.
The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)
If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)
We’re accepted! The application requirements, etc. will be up on the Google Summer of Code site as soon as I can fill out the forms.
It’s a week past Easter and I’m actually tired of eating chocolate. I never thought I’d say that.
- On fat men and jellybeans, about how the press is reporting DDOS attacks. Related: Reporting on tech stories is very difficult; there’s very little photogenic material. I’d love to have more pictures on the Digest, but what would I show?
- Lisp: A Language for Stratified Design. (PDF) There’s got to be a few readers that will find this a very enjoyable read. (via)
- If you’re using Google Chrome, check your extensions list. Even though it’s not supposed to be possible, I had an spyware extension auto-install itself, from a page that I was going to link here – but now will not.
- Music From Mathematics. Electronic music created with an IBM 7090. (via)
- At first I was like “Yeah, yeah, another terminal emulator”, but then I watched the demo movie for Terminology and was quite impressed. It doesn’t seem to exist in dports/pkgsrc yet. (also via)
- April 1st always leads to a number of announcements of varying quality. I like OpenBSD’s announcement, though.
- The Untold Story behind Apple’s $13000 Operating System. The article hypes up something that wasn’t that exciting, but I like the pictures of the old Apple ][ material. (via)
- Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me To Use Vim Was Wrong. Spoiler: he uses Vim. But: The author makes a very good point about how to get there. (via)
- How the Chess Set Got Its Look and Feel.
- HOWTO turn your shell prompt into a hamburger. The advice is for a Unicode-friendly Mac shell; don’t know if this works on DragonFly. (via)
- Start talking about nail polish, finish by talking about the limited 16-color palette of early PC computers. (via)
- Hello World cake. Based on a programming language called Chef where programs look like recipes. I can’t even make these things up. (via)
- Dragonflies are Monsters.
Your unrelated link of the week: nothing. I didn’t find anything off-the-wall enough to use here. Geez.
It looks like Postgres versions less than 9.0 are going to be removed from pkgsrc soon. Be ready to update, if you are running one of those extremely older editions.
The upcoming DragonFly 3.4 release will not include the USB4BSD port from Markus Pfeiffer; he’s hoping for it to become default in the next release after 3.4.
You can still try it, as it’s present in DragonFly but not on by default. Help with driver porting is always welcome, of course.
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin has put together a new site, bxr.su. His announcement to users@ goes into a lot of detail, but here’s a preview: it’s an OpenGrok site that has a forked version of OpenGrok that’s both speedy and takes BSD into account, along with other nice features.
Here’s the catch: it’s currently IPv6 only. IPv4 will be on as a test just today, and on for good shortly after. Read that announcement I mentioned for details.
John Marino has posted about the state of dports: over 19500 ports built, build logs available, and patches to add even more can be sent through github. XFCE4, KDE3, and KDE4 are building, though he could use some help with GNOME2.
Man, I’m stretching it to make that “Over nine thousand!” joke, now.
If you have a DragonFly 3.2 system and you want to try the 3.4 release candidate, you can delete your local source, edit the Makefile to pull down 3.4 instead of 3.2, and run it.
cd /usr
rm -rf src
vi /usr/Makefile;
(in vi) :%s/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_2/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4/g
(save, quit vi)
make src-create-shallow
… then proceed to make buildworld and so on, as normal.
The caveats: I haven’t tested this yet, and this assumes you don’t have any local changes in /usr/src that you want to save. The usual warnings about lighting your computer on fire, etc., apply.
The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.