Francois Tigeot has pushed in some significant updates from Rimvydas Jasinskas, updating the radeon driver to match Linux 3.17. Try it if you have the corresponding hardware.
If you are near thoughtbot at 7 PM tonight in New York City, “The search for truth: the `true` and `false` programs” is happening there. It’s a code reading group, so there will be comparisons of each program and its history in the various BSDs and other less important operating systems. This sounds neat, plus food and drinks will be served. (via)
This is the week for entertainment, not deep thought.
- Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security (with slides) – James Mickens. I am always up for more Mickens. (via)
- Ferrolic. A sort of dali clock in real life, except crazy expensive and fragile.
- Inside The Machine, midcentury graphic images of computing.
- 80s computer hacking: a supercut. Here’s some good discussion. (via)
- Everything is turning into a service mediated by other companies. Everything. (via many places)
- Amiga 30 and the Unkillable Machine. (via)
- Touching the Internet, a story about MAE-East. (also via)
- The Big List of Naughty Strings. Good for testing input. (via)
- “Means Well” Technology and the Internet of Good Intentions. (via)
- Illuminascii, stretching the definition of roguelike.
- An excerpt from the new book Dungeon Hacks. (via)
- The Name Game: Rebranding the Roguelike. (also via)
- A Brief History of Character Codes. Relevant for all the locale work going into DragonFly right now. (via)
- “RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags“. See first answer. (via)
- The 8th Underhanded C Contest is now open. (via)
- The ARM processor architecture: Somebody else’s introduction.
- CSVfix. This will be handy to someone.
- Cameron’s World. A concentrated dose of Geocities. (via)
Some catchup here from stuff I missed last week:
- RaspBSD.org. Raspberry Pi FreeBSD images. (via)
- VMware vs. bhyve Performance Comparison. (via)
- OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales. (via)
- Tarsnap $1000 exploit bounty. It’s since doubled to $2000. (via)
- Book review: The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System.
- An interview with Marshall Kirk McKusick on the most recent Design & Implementation book. (via)
- BSDCan 2015 Trip Report: Koop Mast
- FreeBSD 10.2 is out.
- PC-BSD 10.2 is out.
- NetBSd 7.0_RC3 is out.
- Broadwell support in openbsd/dragonfly bsd.
- What are your thoughts on GhostBSD?
- Quick run down of major BSD differences?
- OPNsense 15.7.9 Released.
- More c2k15 reports.
- OpenBSD 5.8 preorders are open.
- “Resflash is a tool for building OpenBSD images for embedded and cloud systems in a reproducible way.” (via)
- On “unpleasant truths” in tech books.
- pkgsrc-wip is migrating away from CVS.
- OpenBSD on EdgeRouter Lite.
- 4-count cross–pollination.
I was on the road last week and didn’t post a link to the BSDNow episode “May Contain ZFS“. It has an interview with Peter Toth about iocage, among other things. This week’s episode is the spectacularly-named “Ubuntu Slaughters Kittens“, with an interview of Bryan Cantrill from Joyent, so there’s conversation about pkgsrc and various Sun-based things.
Why buy ECC RAM? This is a discussion I’ve seen many times. I’ve always heard that without the error checking, you can’t tell if a random bit was flipped by a cosmic particle. That seems like a very remote threat. Over the last week, I went to Science North in Sudbury, Canada, and saw the Diffusion Cloud Chamber. I took a photo myself. Both of those picture represent an instant in time, and each of those squiggles in the chamber in that instant represents some particle zipping through space that miiiiiight scramble your RAM. That’s… a lot more common than I thought.
Matthew Dillon posted an extended description of how to run Firefox in a way that completely locks it away from your user account. As a side effect of this, the current crop of dports binaries has been updated.
My links are haphazard – but that shouldn’t get in the way of reading.
- The 14 Deadly Sins of Graphical Adventure Design.
- makefiletutorial.com. Unfortunately probably gmake-specific, but still a good idea. (via)
- Postmortem of an outage caused while rebooting the (EVE Online) universe. (also via)
- There are still game releases for the Amiga 500. (via)
- Awesome Emacs. Emacs add-ons that people deem worth trying. (via swildner)
- A Weekend at KansasFest, the Sleepaway Camp for Apple II Fanatics. (via)
- Tricks to play with vim.
- Unions as a solution to stack ranking in tech companies. Not sure if that’s the answer, but most people just take fat paychecks and ignore the problem. (via I lost it, sorry)
- The new Devil’s Dictionary. To see quotes from the original, search for “Bierce” in /usr/src/games/fortune/datfiles/fortunes . (via many places)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Bird and Moon.
A short week, cause I’m short on time. Sorry!
- The case for checksumming filesystems. (via)
- How to use fw_update for Radeon on OpenBSD.
- FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s iwm(4) driver.
- FreeBSD supports more parts of the Cavium ThunderX, which I link to in part because “Cavium ThunderX” sounds like a thoracic problem.
- FreeBSD has updated apr, sqlite3, serf, and svnlite in base.
- NetBSD gained ARFE.
- The c2k15 report keep coming!
Did you know that AT&T maintains a regex library and test suite? I did not, but now DragonFly has both, in part for better multibyte character support.
(corrected to note that the regex library is not from AT&T – thanks, anonymous commenter)
Most of the news is about Intel video support, but Radeon direct rending improvements are coming too. ‘zrj’ have brought up drm/radeon support to match what is in Linux 3.12. Worth trying if you’ve had problems with your Radeon and audio, going by what I’ve seen people report in IRC.
The vi in any BSD is not the original Berkeley vi – instead it’s usually nvi. However, thanks to John Marino, DragonFly has the up-to-date, multibyte-supporting nvi2. (I know I’ve made reference to the nv/nvi difference before.)
If your DragonFly-running c720p (the touchscreen model) occasionally decides to go perma-bonkers, Matthew Dillon has added a method to reset it, either on reboot or by setting debug.atmel_mxt_reset=1.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted some information on a project for anyone interested: ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control. It’s an extension of p-state power management, and he’s already done a lot of groundwork to support that in DragonFly.
CDBUG is meeting today, at 6:45 PM at INOC, 80 State St., Albany. The speaker will be Jonathan Capra talking about DNS solutions other than BIND.
There’s been a bugfix-release to the release version of DragonFly, bringing it to 4.2.4. This is to fix a rare crash on issuing ‘shutdown -h now’. If you haven’t had this problem, there’s no rush to upgrade.
There’s some meaty reading this week, so get settled in and start clicking.
- Haunted Machines An Origin Story. I love this sort of intersection of ideas. (via)
- Our Friends, the Bots. (via previous)
- Futures of Text. Why wasn’t this ever done at the command line, too? (via previous)
- Cybernetic Serendipity.
- The Verge’s Web Sucks. A followup to “The Mobile Web Sucks” that I linked to previously.
- How Does Level Generation Work In Brogue? The animated gifs work very well here.
- Surfing the Internet from My TRS-80 Model 100. (via)
- The Itanium processor, parts 2, 3, 3b, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Here’s part 1 if you missed it last week. Windows-centric, but probably still interesting for the hardware.
- Ever wonder why they used “that key”? (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Pronunciation guide for UNIX. (via)
- Forgotten Quests from the golden age of adventure games.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales. It’s a comics series where different comics artists start a story, then hands the story off to a different writer and artist for each issue after that. I’ve been getting individual issues as they make them, and I want more people to subscribe, so they can get enough cash to print the last few issues. (Independent comics is a hard business.) Order the complete series, for yourself or as a unique present for a smaller person.
I missed this because it was only on the completely separate and rarely updated “News” section of the BSDNow site, but: they are selling a BSD shirt, for hitting the second year of production. It is only available this month. Proceeds go towards new equipment. (noticed via)
(There’s no DragonFly on their shirt… will they make a “The Unusual BSDs” shirt and put DragonFly on there?)
Terse link week!
- From distribution to project.
- Using OpenBSD as a FreeBSD Router. (via)
- More C2K15 reports on Undeadly.
- A new OpenBSD Foundation donor.
- OpenBSD now defaults to remote root logins permitted – with key.
- Quakecon runs on BSD. (via)
- BSD Magazine for I assume August.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/07/27.
- LibreSSL 2.2.2 is out.
- PC-BSD 10.2-RC1 Now Available.
- FreeBSD 10.2-RC2 Now Available. No, wait, RC3.
- Lumina Desktop 0.8.6 Released!
- BSDCan 2015 trip report from Mark Linimon.
The 101st BSDNow episode has the normal arrangement of news, plus an interview with Adrian Chadd after he made a decision he will regret forever.