2014 – Page 16 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/04/062014/04/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/04/06

This is the first Lazy Reading in a while that I hadn’t already started before the previous week’s Lazy Reading was displayed.

Eventually, Javascript will eat everything. (via)
Wrong and Right Reasons to be Upset about Oculus. Gets at something that’s been bothering me: too many new companies have acquisition as an exit strategy. Over time, that becomes the only strategy. (via many places)
How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40%. I can confirm this works, via the small sample of the class I taught recently. (via I lost track, sorry)
Toward a better programming. Makes some good points about programming, though it unfortunately ends not with solutions but with a ‘buy my stuff’ push. (via)
Michael W. Lucas reviews “Applied Network Security Monitoring”, the book.
7 Habits of Highly Successful UNIX Admins.
thread patterns, about surviving mailing list overload. You will recognize exactly what’s being described if you’ve read any mailing list for more than a year of your life. (via #dragonflybsd)
How pinball and boardwalk amusements gave rise to video games.
RPN calculation, a description and history.
I don’t know if this conspiracy theory with Red Hat, systemd, and the military-industrial complex is even realistic, but it’s kinda fun to see, in a “look at that mess over there in that other operating system” kind of way. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the day: The Very Hungry Rust Monster.

2014/04/052014/04/05

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/05

Another week.

BSDCan 2014 will have the BSD Professional Certification exam available (as beta)
“The Design And Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” second edition, is up for pre-order. (comments are rude/funny.)
The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/31.
The PC-BSD Digest 24.
reop, an follow-up from OpenBSD’s signify
The FreeBSDNews link roundup.
Michael W. Lucas follows up on a prank with a description of how to get a BSD convention going.
Peter N. M. Hansteen wants feedback on his BSDCan tutorials.
Joystick support always sounds like a good idea.
The Playstation 2 is back as a NetBSD platform.
Turn partitions into disk images on FreeBSD.
You can possibly create x86 USB images with NetBSD. (you couldn’t before?)
NetBSD imported starsign, for signing data. Since it’s an external program, I tried searching for its origin… Google failed spectacularly, with astrology links galore.
NetBSD also added dust, which appears to be a sensible utility. (Update: both this and starsign apparently written by Alistair Crooks.)
I didn’t know serial ports could go this fast.
pkgsrc-2014Q1 is out.
Pkgsrc is looking at signing packages, too.
Some conversation about building machines with a bunch of network ports. From openbsd-misc, but probably applies across the board.
Video of the April 1 NYCBUG presentation on random number generation is available.

2014/04/04

Video cards on DragonFly

In a thread about video cards on DragonFly, Francois Tigeot listed good ATI cards to try, and pointed out the VESA driver is probably your best bet right now with NVidia cards.

2014/04/04

BSDNow 031: Edgy BSD Users

BSDNow 031 is online, with an interview of Pierre Pronchery of EdgeBSD and many other things.

2014/04/03

Thinkpad users: update for ACPI

The acpi_thinkpad module (section? code?) has been updated. Update if you are on DragonFly 3.7, or be patient if you are on 3.6.

2014/04/012014/03/13

Random Number Generators at NYU/NYCBUG

NYCBUG is presenting Yevgeniy Dodis at NYU (Warren Weaver Hall, room 101, 251 Mercer Street, NYC) at 7:15 PM tonight, speaking about building your own random number generator in both correct and incorrect ways.

2014/04/012014/04/01

Editor too big

Normally I don’t bother linking to things on/around April 1st, but these two are good and arrived early.

Update: apparently fake source changes is a thing.

2014/03/31

For the next DragonFly release

I wrote up some thoughts for the next release of DragonFly. There’s some project work in there for anyone interested. The next release should be near the end of May.

2014/03/31

Hiring a syadmin

I’m hiring a sysadmin at my workplace:

http://rochester.craigslist.org/sad/4400416990.html

2014/03/302015/11/04

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/30

I suddenly can’t remember if I pad my dates with zeros.

Certain people will love this: After Dark in CSS. Flying toasters! (via)
MicroMUSE, a story about Gopher and MUDs and nostalgia. Do any of the things I’ve built in MUDs still exist? I don’t know, but I kind of hope so. (also via)
Crafting link underlines on Medium. I find it interesting for the obsession over ‘doing it right’. (via)
Stupid UNIX tricks. Follow the email thread.
UNIX: More networking basics for the beginner.
Accidentally Turing-complete. This resembles the start of a number of science fiction stories. (via)
Why Facebook will never innovate. My title. (via)
Developers should know how to run their own server. Again, my title. (also via)
Hack ‘N’ Slash, where you are supposed to hack the game.
The Art of Atari. Art that describes a certain time and technology all at once. I’m sure I’ve linked to something like this before.
Explain Git with D3. Animations to show what happens in Git operations. (via)
The current Humble Bundle weekly sale is all ~~open source~~ games created with open source tools. I don’t know how many of them can run on a BSD, but it’s still nice to see them. Humble Bundles can be quite the deal, too.
The Ultimate Frontend Build Tool: make. I see articles like this every so often that can be summed up as “hey, make is reliable and hard to beat – on the specific tasks it is suited for.” (via)
AD&D cover art on Pinterest. (via) One of the artists involved in that just died. (via)
DNSSEC-verified SSL Certificates, the Standard Way. Michael W. Lucas explains something I wish was more common: a way to use SSL without paying money to a CA.

Your unrelated link of the week: The creepiest animatronic work I’ve seen yet. (via Orbital Operations)

2014/03/292014/03/29

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/29

A quiet week this week.

BSD author Michael W. Lucas has a project announcement mailing list.
OpenBSD after version 5.5 will no longer support FTP for installation of sets.
OpenBSD 5.5. preorders are available.
NetBSD has imported mDNSResponder-258-14.
OpenSSH 6.6 is out. I haven’t kept track of which BSDs have updated.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/03/24 summary.
Another RetroBSD device.
PC-BSD Weekly Digest 23.

2014/03/282014/03/29

BSDTalk 239: Baptiste Daroussin

BSDTalk 239 is 55 minutes of talk with Baptiste Daroussin at vBSDCon 2013 about ‘pkgng’ on FreeBSD. The BSDTalk post doesn’t mention it, but it is the same pkg tool that DragonFly uses, so Baptiste’s plans are relevant to DragonFly too. (I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet so I don’t know how much he talks about DragonFly, specifically.)

2014/03/28

BSDNow 030: Documentation is King

BSDNow episode 030 is out with an interview of Warren Block about FreeBSD documentation, along with a conversation on a number of other topics, including setting up a BSD machine as your access point (highly recommended, along with home router setup) and setting up a BSD (FreeNAS) as a Synology replacement. They also totally scooped me on Michael W. Lucas giving an OpenBSD talk – which might be because I forgot to sign up for his announcement mailing list.

2014/03/27

Timezones and political reality

Timezones are a human invention to describe the natural world, so they are changed according to human whims. That’s a grand way to note this change in timezones that is global but I noted in a DragonFly commit of tzdata2014b – look at the last entry.

2014/03/27

Various USB drivers added

I’ve been away because of some home construction taking up time, but this has actually been happening for a while: plenty of USB device drivers have been getting ported in to work with the new USB4BSD stack. My links for that are not comprehensive.

2014/03/24

NSS/LDAP and DragonFly

One of the requirements to get NSS/LDAP working on (most) any unixlike system is to have dynamic binaries; meaning they are dependent on various libraries to run. Since you’re talking about programs for login when you’re talking about NSS/LDAP, that means if the libraries aren’t available, you can’t log in. DragonFly has static binaries just to avoid that problem.

Francois Tigeot proposed switching to dynamic binaries and building a /rescue directory with static backups, as is the case with I think FreeBSD and NetBSD. If you follow the thread, it looks like the best path is to use initrd instead. Initrd stands for INITial Ram Disk, and is the first volume the computer sets up to boot from BIOS. Since initrd gives the computer enough space to load all the needed modules (like Hammer2…), it works without making the computer dependent on various libraries or having a bloated /rescue directory.

(Someone correct me if I have the details wrong.) As long as we’re talking about things that would help DragonFly in a larger environment, can someone work on a VM balloon memory driver, too?

2014/03/232014/03/22

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/23

Aaaaaaaaa link overflow!

The Story I’ll Tell at the Web’s 25th Birthday Party.
When Will the Next Dot.com Bubble Burst? The comment from Gary Helms is correct.
The truth about content management systems. It’s one of those basic mistakes that everyone gets to learn in some form. (via I lost track, sorry)
The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s do better. I agree with the sentiment that smaller communities are necessary, and that Facebook is an unsustainable place for them. I’m seeing more specific communities retreating from social media to mailing lists – and it’s better. (via)
UNIX: Network Basics for the Beginner.
Boulet takes on tech support. We’ve all gotten that call from an older family member.
The Turino XL, a computer with over 45 x 10¹⁷ bytes available.
Worse. Bundling and the negative effects that come with it. (via)
Hooray! More James Mickens! (PDF) It’s listed as his last column. Booooo. Anyway, he starts talking about web browsers, and perhaps accidentally gives the best description of Javascript ever. (also via)
This World of Ours, a James Mickens logout column from December 2013 that I missed.
Actually, if you look at his Microsoft Research page, he has links to his past articles at the bottom, plus a link to his 2011 presentation about why web browsers are horrible.
Why I Use Vim. Describes a “climbing up, sliding down” learning curve, which puts me in mind of one of my favorite diagrams. (via)
How to boost your Vim productivity. Some interesting tips in this, plus bits on tmux. (via)
Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep. Sort of a basic economics lesson. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Space Replay. A very good use of an Arduino board. (via)

2014/03/222014/03/28

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/22

I have a list of commits I’ve saved between the various BSDs of licenses getting corrected to the 2-clause BSD license; that would definitely be a good cross-BSD project to sync.

DiscoverBSD has a free KVM VPS for the taking – if you write about the BSD-specific thing you are doing with it.
Also, DiscoverBSD’s news summary for the 17th.
OpenBSD packages are generally up to date. The place I found this linked has comments noting the need to run multiple versions of Ruby to test – even multiple subversions, like different revisions of 1.9.x. I think that points at a different problem…
There’s mg, which is a ‘micro GNU/Emacs’, found in OpenBSD. There’s also apparently a portable version. (via)
OpenBSD’s upd(4) needs testing.
OpenBSD has switched to Unbound, and it is apparently easy to enable DNSSEC.
I didn’t expect rcp to be removed from OpenBSD, or a Thulsa Doom reference.
Two small package managers for OpenBSD: sqlport and pkg_mgr.
The hp300, mvme68k and mvme88k ports are gone from OpenBSD.
If you’re using pkgsrc, php-fpm may be a better module than mod_php.
FreeBSD has a faster SHA2.
pkgsrcCon 2014’s Call for Papers is up.
PC-BSD Digest 22.
Hubert Feyrer has linked some NetBSD-specific slides from AsiaBSDCon 2014.
Michael W. Lucas’s NYCBSDCon 2014 talk is up on Youtube.

2014/03/21

BSDNow 029: P.E.F.S

BSDNow episode 029 is up containing a full slate of material. There’s an interview of Gleb Kurtsou, along with a PEFS tutorial and several other items that are new to me.

2014/03/21

GUI images for DragonFly 3.6 sort of

If you noticed the lack of a GUI DVD image for the 3.6 release of DragonFly, I posted a followup note on the users@ list that talks about the steps to get X installed. It’s not much work, with pkg set up.