Here’s your reminder: SemiBUG meets tomorrow, for any BSD users in the Detroit / Michigan area.
Typed early while contractors drill holes in my house.
- VimWiki – A personal wiki for Vim (via)
- RFC 7764 – Guidance on Markdown. Let’s take a moment to appreciate how successful Markdown has been, without anything pushing it but innate utility. If you don’t agree, try SGML for a while. (via)
- Related: note that code out of that RFC is considered BSD licensed? I don’t know if that’s the case for all RFCs, but it’s a ‘license win’ in any case.
- Also related: CommonMark.
- Where does 9600 bps come from? (via)
- Defending Accounts Against Common Attacks. Not using 2-factor auth seems to be a common theme in the various email disclosure events out there. (via)
- Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and its discussion.
- EMPs and electronics.
- Unix tip: Cleaning up your files
- Dubious security vulnerability: Discovering the salt
- Another Git catastrophe cleaned up
Your unrelated link of the week: arguments over bread terminology.
Much better this week; I actually have links.
- Man, ‘splained: 40-Plus Years of Man Page History. Doesn’t mention it, but BSD is the place for original, and good, man pages. (via)
- “What’s stopping someone from writing a Cisco CLI shell for Linux or BSD?“
- who even calls link_ntoa? Multiple BSDs had this issue.
- Booting Android-x86 under FreeBSD bhyve (Work in progress) (via)
- New stable version: HardenedBSD-stable 10-STABLE v46.18 (via)
- “TIL the soviets made their own BSD” (via)
- “Which BSD is good for me?“
- OPNsense 16.7.11 released, OPNsense 17.1-BETA
- LibreSSL documentation status report
- watt time is left
- openbsd changes of note 3
- Disk I/O Performance Under Filesystem Journaling on FreeBSD 10.3
- LISA 2016 Recap. From a BSD vendor point of view.
- OpenBSD 6.0 VPN Endpoint for iOS and OSX (via)
- 802.11n MIMO support in OpenBSD -current (via)
BSDNow 172 has an interview with Rod Grimes, the usual news roundup, plus a feature on a tool called smenu.
You know about swapcache(8), the DragonFly-specific trick of caching disk data on an small SSD, meaning you get mostly the speed benefits of an SSD while still using a cheaper, slower drive? Whether you did or didn’t, Matthew Dillon’s updated the documentation for it to account for recent hardware changes.
I mention this because people don’t realize there’s a console screensaver: ‘vidcontrol -t XX’ will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren’t lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.
The post-holiday rush of links has slowed.
- Getting smarter and faster with vi
- Escape key alternatives in Vim (via)
- Actually using ed (via)
- Advent calendars: Advent of Code, Perl Advent 2016, QEMUAdvent, SysAdvent, and more. (via and via)
- Eaten by a Grue: podcast on Infocom games, text adventures and interactive fiction (via)
- History of the Click of Death
- FreeDOS, still going
- How to get a C64 on WiFi and start BBSing again (via)
- NeTV2 FPGA Reference Design. Read the last paragraph and get irritated.
I have no BSD-themed links this week. Sorry! It’s been hectic. We return to normal tomorrow.
BSDNow 171 has no interview this week, but more in-depth news articles than normal, including something interesting about bsdiff.
I know the title’s not that helpful, but I like rhyming. The i915 driver in DragonFly now matches what’s in the Linux 4.5 kernel, for a more complete description. (Here’s the Linux changelog to match.) This is good news for anyone with Skylake, Broxton, or Kabylake processors.
This is another one of those events that’s coming up too soon to wait on my normal BSD Saturday summary post. FOSDEM 2017 is looking for ‘BSD devroom’ talks, with the suggested length being 45 minutes. The deadline is December 10th, in 3 days. Submit a proposal if you will be there.
This is a minor thing, but I bet someone will find it useful: Chromium in dports has been patched to remove the forced dependency on dbus, which will be useful to anyone using DragonFly and a ‘lighter’ window manager. You still need to specify this preference in your make.conf to have it happen.
Matthew Dillon has made a number of locking improvements, that speeds up performance on systems with multiple processor. Here’s his commit with some numbers. Note that he’s testing with these built-in utilities. This probably helps multiple cores too, and some attention is shown to Hammer, too.
Dig up more on James Burke (linked below) if you can, and if you have the time. His Connections show was a delight.
- “This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Design” This clickbaity title is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley journalism… but I digress. (via)
- QoS when there is no congestion. (via)
- “Blame is apportioned appropriately.”
- James Burke and Connections kickstarted app. (via)
- “Weird, fun, wonderful, or useful automated phone numbers to call?” 1-800-444-4444 I use often at work, with a recorded message from a company that ceased to exist years ago. (via)
- Monads: Programmer’s Definition (via I think)
- The BASIC Issue with Retro Computers
- Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
- A vi-centric family tree of editors (2000) (via)
- Making umask work for you
- No more Solaris 12. A rumor. (via)
I have a pretty significant backlog of links for this week – to the point I had to open a separate browser window to sort out open tabs.
- TMUX Config Help on FreeBSD
- FreeBSD Foundation Contributions, Fundraising, and More
- Donating to the OpenBSD Foundation
- The Insecurity of OpenBSD. The article is from 2010 so reading comments at the source link may be better.
- BSD now 169: Scheduling your NetBSD, plus a comment. A followup to the second-most-recent BSDNow.
- Apple Releases macOS 10.12 Sierra Open Source Darwin Code. I don’t cover enough of the BSD side of MacOS, but it’s hard to separate from the Mac part.
- “Does OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD ship with binary blobs?” A perennial religious issue.
- Kristaps Dzonsons on pledge(2)
- TrueOS Pico – FreeBSD ARM/RPi Thin Clients (via)
- openbsd changes of note 2
OPNsense 16.7.9 releasedOPNsense 16.7.10 released See my note about backlog.- LiteBSD Brings 4.4BSD to PIC32 (via)
- Start the holidays off with FreeNAS 10 BETA 2!
- EuroBSDcon 2016 Presentation Slides (via)
- OpenBSD on PC Engines APU2 (via)
- The Saga of Concurrent DNS in Python, and the Defeat of the Wicked Mutex Troll (via)
If you are moving to the newest 1.8 version of Go, the language, you need to be on at least the last release of DragonFly 4.4, or 4.6. You’ve probably upgraded by now anyway, or at least I hope you have.
The cohabiting part of this week’s BSDNow is about someone running FreeBSD and Gentoo on the same ZFS drive. No interview but lots of material from the recent EuroBSDCon and MeetBSD conventions.
Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
Tennessee area BSD user group KnoxBUG is meeting tomorrow, and Warren Block will be the guest speaker. He’ll be talking about documentation. Going by the linked announcement, there will be both prizes and blame, so something for everyone!