libpcap has been updated in DragonFly by Matthew Dillon, and file has been updated by Peter Avalos.
I’ve linked to Wizzywig (free complete book PDF at that link before, as a sort of early semi-fictional history of personal computing. I met the author at TCAF this weekend; his Brain Rot comics about the start of hip-hop are enjoyable too. There’s about a zillion more books I wanted to buy at TCAF, too…
- Arabic programming language artwork. “At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text.” (via)
- How babies are like Unix.
- Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator. (via)
- How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch. From the man himself. (via)
- The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop. Diving into language use and data analysis. (via)
- The Quest for Randomness. (via)
- Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. An AD&D module and map, illustrated and turned into a complete narrative. (via)
- Recreational Mathematics Magazine. Someone will find this deeply satisfying. (via)
- Practical Alternatives to systemd?
- The operating system: should there be one? (PDF) Smalltalk, lurking. (via)
- Found via that previous link: The Interlisp Programming Environment. (PDF) Notice it says ‘environment’, not ‘language’. Lisp implementations seem to be considered both the operating system and the programming language.
- Again found via: Go is more UNIX than UNIX.
Your unrelated link of the week: Memorex. As a friend from years ago said, “Eiiiiiiiiighteeeeeees”. (via)
Short week, cause I’m on the road…
- The NetBSD Foundation 2013 Financial Report. (via)
- PC-BSD Digest 27 – they’re mushing pkg and PBI management together.
- Decent VPS providers with BSD images. There’s more out there than I realized.
- FreeBSD Foundation newcons highlight.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/05/05.
I’ve seen Atlassian Confluence, a Java-based wiki program, in a few places. Atlassian apparently offers their software at a discount (free?) to qualified open source projects. I set up Confluence 5.4 on DragonFly as a test run, and it generally worked. That’s great! I tried to set up version 5.5, and it will not start.
May 08, 2014 7:24:41 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase startInternal
SEVERE: A child container failed during start
java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.InternalError: platform not recognized
at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.report(FutureTask.java:122)
This is annoying. DragonFly (or any BSD) is not supported by Atlassian for Confluence, so it’s not a surprise… but I was so close! Their product has a very nice interface and I was planning to replace Mediawiki at my workplace with it, for some internal documentation. This FreeBSD bug report is the closest fix I can find, but it’s old enough it shouldn’t matter now.
It’s Day Against DRM, and O’Reilly and No Starch Press are having significant sales on – of course – DRM-free ebooks. That represents a good slice of the BSD-centric books out there.
NYCBUG has a presentation from John Baldwin, happening on the 7th (tomorrow!), all about Bhyve, the BSD hypervisor.
Wojciech Puchar noted with some surprise that DragonFly uses less CPU than expected for high-packet-rate traffic. This has been going on for a while, and apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has even more improvements planned.
Busy week, but lots to read.
- My brush with Oulipo. Thinking far harder about language patterns than I thought possible.
- The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was. Follow the links, and feel disappointment.
- BASIC turns 50. I like BASIC – specifically AppleBASIC – in a way only nostalgia can cause. (via)
- More secure than telnetmallows. (via)
- The Great Works of Software. “…works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.” An accurate description. UNIX is #4. (via)
- GitHub monoculture. Git is decentralized, GitHub is not. (via)
- Novena’s hackable bezel. A spiffy way to hold a keyboard.
- “Here’s my favorite operating systems war story, what’s yours?” Some excellent, old-school war stories in the originating link.
Your unrelated link of the week: Doc Brown on My Proper Tea. Language warning.
Updated late this week because of circumstances.
- Michael W. Lucas is appearing at PenguinCon.
- Do you use Kerberos or SRP in libssl? Ted Unangst wants to know. (Thanks, Amit Kulkarni)
- Speaking of which, OpenSSH no longer requires OpenSSL.
- OpenBSD 5.5 is out.
- BSD for embedded devices?
- The FreeBSD Foundation has a spring fundraising campaign started.
- PC-BSD has a FAQ up for their new Lumina desktop environment.Writing your own desktop environment is a lot of work. Supporting all the Linuxisms in the existing ones is possibly worse…
- pkgsrc Perl package status is now automatically generated.
- Peek and poke freely on FreeBSD.
- PC-BSD’s new AppCafe handles package management – or at least the interface. I haven’t looked hard enough to know if it’s using pkg.
- CheriBSD is feeding back.
- OpenSSH is getting pulled into parts?
- /dev/full is always what it says it is. (related: lindev(4) is gone.)
- OpenBSD 5.5 is out. Here’s the signing policy that goes with it.
The reaction I have heard a number of times from new DragonFly users: hey, this runs really fast, even when I try to load it down!
ATM support is gone in DragonFly, and frankly, I’m surprised it was still there.
BSDTalk 240 is 35 minutes with George Neville-Neil talking about NTP and the precision time protocol.
BSDNow 035 is up with a whole lot of pf content, including an interview of Peter Hansteen, of “Book of PF” fame. There’s a 3rd version of that book coming out soon.
Sascha Wildner’s updated ACPICA to version 20140424. Will that help you? Perhaps with newer motherboards; otherwise check the changelog.
The pkg tool, used in DragonFly (and FreeBSD) for ports, is at version 1.2. Version 1.3 will apparently be able to solve the problem where one port is ended and replaced with another. This is a problem that’s been around forever, and I don’t just mean with pkg. I don’t know how soon 1.3 will be out, or what version FreeBSD is at.
Just so nobody’s surprised: DragonFly process IDs now go an order of magnitude higher.
Settle back, there’s a lot to read.
- CERN Terminal font. I mentally expect the characters to be printed in green or amber, just from the shape. (via)
- Systems Programming at Twitter. (via)
- Richard Garriot’s D&D #1; his first game written in BASIC, long before Ultima. There’s a contest involved, but that’s not the important part. (via)
- Unix: Counting chickens or anything else.
- Matul Remit, a Dwarf Fortress story. Yeah, I know, third Dwarf Fortress item in three weeks. This one is about the story itself, not the gameplay. (via)
- The Pac-Man Dossier, Obsessive notes and details about Pac-Man. (also via)
- “…nothing worse for the future of home lighting than having to remember whether the lights in the bedroom were made by Sylvania or Philips before I can turn them off.” The Internet of (proprietary) Things.
- The Modern Perl book, 2014 edition, is out and is a free download.
- Your favorite 2-piece keyboard.
- The Novena laptop, has a crowdfunding campaign. It even has stretch goals, now. It sounds fun, but you have to be seriously interested in hardware twiddling. There’s a contest for a new logo, too.
- Worst common denominator programming. You can guess the source.
- Technology Monoculture as threat. It’s about OpenSSL, but I’d argue that Linux represents another monoculture problem.
- go in go. (via)
- A discovered quirk is just [a] few steps away from becoming a feature.
- Microsoft Word is not a terminal emulator. :wq
- Using Vim as a writing environment. (via)
- boycottsystemd.org. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Agatha Heterodyne & The Sleeping City. It’s a kickstarter for the 13th volume of a long-running story – which is also free to read online. As I have mentioned before, the artist Phil Foglio drew the original BSD daemons.
Another active week.
- RetroBSD recently moved to Git and GitHub, and is now buildable on Mac OS X.
- ALTQ is gone, at least for the OpenBSD version of pf.
- So I’ll bring up this point again: pf is fragmenting, and we should do something about it.
- The EdgeBSD presentation from FOSDEM 2014. (via)
- OpenBSD could use some VLAN testing.
- FreeBSDNews is running an swag contest.
- netbsd.fi replaces onetbsd.org.
- Here’s a GSoC project that could help everyone. (thanks, Tomáš Bodžár)
- I’ve linked to some parts of this work, but Undeadly has a summary of the man page search improvements in OpenBSD.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/04/14 summary.
- LibreSSL started because of a leaky water heater.
- I always like threads about small hardware.
- FreeNAS hardware unboxing.
- Man, everybody likes pfSense.
- Lua in pkgsrc is getting versioned.
- Why would you do this?
The plugin I use for posting to Twitter managed to silently stop working after a recent WordPress upgrade. It’s fixed now. Thanks to alert reader TJ for telling me. If you are picking up articles here through Twitter, you have some backlog waiting for you.
BSDNow 034 is about Network Attached Storage – specifically with an interview of John Hixson at iXSystems about FreeNAS development.