Justin Sherrill – Page 169 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/02/022014/02/02

Lazy Reading for 2014/02/02

Lots of randomness this week. That’s great!

Facial animation, then and now, and now. (via)
accessmaincomputerfile.net. Some of these are real, or at least made with ‘real’ parts. (via)
Writing more maintainable shell scripts. (again, Bash-specific.)
Nancy Householder Hauge’s stories about working HR for Sun Microsystems relatively early in the life of the company: parts one, two, three, four, five, six. (via)
The Descent to C. C programming for people not used to C. Written by the fellow responsible for PuTTY. (via)
Access Windows through SSH. It’s confusing.
It’s not a bug, it’s a… (found via)
The Magic of Strace. (via)
SSD Reliability. Not really a statistics-based study.
The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art. It goes far deeper than you’d expect.
Related: ‘ascii art’ tagged on Tumblr. (via)
Amiga nostalgia, via the Apple app store.
Why I like Java. This is perhaps the best description of the language I’ve seen.

Your unrelated link of the week: it’s two links, for the two very rare German episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

2014/02/012014/01/31

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/01

For once, I got this mostly done before late Friday night!

OpenBSD on the Beaglebone Black.
DiscoverBSD’s January 28th roundup.
Automated FreeBSD Panic Reporting. More people need to do this.
A report from the n2k14 OpenBSD hackathon.
New to me: CHERIBSD. Capsicum, implemented in hardware, is a rough summary.
Python is going to 3.x by default in pkgsrc.
OpenSSH 6.5 is out.
PC-BSD 10 is out. (release announcement)
FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Final.
Sendmail is moved to 8.14.8, and bmake to 20140101 in FreeBSD.
NetBSD has announced several 5.x and 6.x patch level changes.
Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower, 2014 Edition.

2014/01/31

BSDNow 022: Journaled News-Updates

The latest BSDNow video is up, with the normal array of recent events and an interview of George Neville-Neil. The interview is about the new FreeBSD Journal, which should be out… today? The site says “Coming in January”, so it must be soon.

2014/01/30

Better ACPI C-State support

If you have an Intel-based system, and are running DragonFly master, there’s new c-states (power-saving modes) for you to try. Sepherosa Ziehau posted a note about testing and feedback.

2014/01/28

Did I mention new USB?

There’s been periodic commits updating the USB4BSD support in DragonFly; I haven’t been linking to them because they are generally incremental. However, it’s good to (re?)mention just how you can build DragonFly with that new USB support.

2014/01/27

Intel video users, please note

xf86-video-intel-2.21.15 should now work on your DragonFly system. I don’t see it in dports, yet, though.

2014/01/27

Time zone changes

Recent updates to tzcode apparently fixed a long-standing time zone bug in DragonFly. POSIX says the America/New_York timezone is picked as default if nothing else has been selected. That didn’t happen in DragonFly – until recently. If your timezone seemed to suddenly jump to U.S. Eastern time, that’s because you never picked before.

2014/01/27

Installfest, NYCBSDCon tickets tonight

There’s a (rescheduled) BSD installfest happening in an impromptu fashion at Suspenders Bar in New York City, tonight at 6:45. You can also buy tickets for NYCBSDCon there, for less than the online price since it’s direct. There’s another chance to buy them for less on Wednesday at Ear Inn, nearby. (See first link for details.)

2014/01/262014/01/26

Lazy Reading for 2014/01/26

Finally, a relatively quiet week.

Writing more efficient shell scripts.

The Occultation of Relations and Logic: Exposing the Hidden Meaning from within Shadows and Unix Command Lines. Piped shell commands seen as a set of relations. This is the most analysis I’ve ever seen of a command line. (via) Also related.

Perl Secret Operators. (via)

As a followup on last week’s Curse of the Leading Zero link, Thomas Klausner points out Python 3.0 explicitly stopped reading leading zeros as the prefix for octals.

The current Humble Weekly Sale (through the 31st) is all roguelikes. Dunno how many of them run on non-Windows. though.

Mastering Vim in Vim. Lots more ‘learning Vim’ suggestions where I found this link.

Not possible to have happen; I don’t believe it. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: 50 years of tape. Cassette audio tapes, that is. (via)

2014/01/252014/01/26

In Other BSDs for 2014/01/25

Back to relatively normal volume, this week.

FreeBSD 10 is out.
OpenBSD got electrical funding, and is now holding a funding drive.
new openssh key format and bcrypt pbkdf. A new key format for OpenSSH, and how to switch to it – only available in OpenBSD as of this writing.
I did not know this: There’s a pfSense store, with shirts, preloaded USB sticks, and various appliances – I have one of the Netgate FW-7541 models, notable in that I’ve never had to do anything with it after initial setup; it just runs and runs. There’s a pfSense hangout/webcast for paid support customers this Friday the 24th, too.
Open Source FreeBSD 10 Takes on Virtualization. From a saved Google search.
Undeadly has an explanation of the new signed packages setup for OpenBSD.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/01/14 roundup.
FreeBSD now has OpenSSL 1.0.1f.
NetBSD now has a wscons/Intel GMA driver.
PC-BSD 10 is almost out, and here’s their weekly digest talking about it. Also, apparently PC-BSd and GhostBSD share some installer code? I’m not clear on this.
CBSD – FreeBSD jail management. (via)
Slides and audio from Brian Callahan’s recent OpenBSD presentation at NYCBUG are up.
OpenBSD has a qla(4) driver, for Qlogic fiber channel HBAs, and ubcmtp(4), a Macbook touchpad driver.

2014/01/232014/01/25

BSDNow 21: Tendresse for Ten

Episode 21 of BSDNow is up, with the usual variety of material. There’s an interview with Colin Percival, known for work on FreeBSD and Tarsnap, along with other content.

2014/01/22

ACPI update

There’s a new ACPI version in DragonFly, and Sascha Wildner wants you to update your BIOS, just to be sure.

2014/01/22

DragonFlyBSD.org status page

Antonio Huete set up a DragonFly status page on status.io.

2014/01/21

Go testing for DragonFly

Brad Fitzpatrick showed up on the users@ list and mentioned that for DragonFly to be supported in Go, it needed to show up in the Go Dashboard with building reports. I now have the Go builder running on pkgbox32/pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org. Check the builder page to see status.

Note: Installing the port of Go from Dports works just fine; this is the mechanism for testing Go on a per-commit basis for the people who work on Go – so a ‘fail’ notice on the builder page doesn’t necessarily mean anything, unless you are developing Go itself. This may already be clear to you.

2014/01/20

DragonFly has ASLR

Address Space Layout Randomization, since 2010. Carsten Mattner asked, and Alex Hornung answered. (Set the sysctl vm.randomize_mmap to 1 to enable it.)

2014/01/202014/01/21

BSD Installfest in NYC tomorrow

If you happen to have a laptop, some flavor of BSD on media, and are near New York City tomorrow night, there’s an impromptu installfest happening at Suspenders at 6:30. NYCBSDCon tickets will be available there, and you can now register online.

Update: canceled!

2014/01/19

BSDCan 2014: last chance for paper submission

I missed this for the “In Other BSDs” section yesterday, so I’m adding it today. It’s time dependent. BSDCan 2014 is happening May 14-17 at the University of Ottawa, with those first two days being tutorials. If you want to get a paper in, you have to do it today.

2014/01/192014/01/19

Lazy Reading for 2014/01/19

The Internet overfloweth with good links, lately. Nothing this week that requires a lot of reading, but plenty of things to click. Enjoy!

The “Basket of Remotes” problem. An area where standards are never applied.
Dice portraits. I like the images. (via)
Who made that dial tone? (via a mailing list)
Simple Git workflow is simple. (via)
Bunnie Huang talks about his open laptop project, Novena. (mentioned here before.) They sound really neat, but I can imagine you need to be ready for a certain amount of manual work.
Speaking of machines, Michael W. Lucas got a beefy new desktop system from iXsystems, which is is not a product they advertise… but it makes sense if you want to run a BSD.
How I built a Raspberry Pi Tablet. Here’s how the author did it. It wasn’t cheap or easy. (via)
A History of Programming Games, 1961-1989. Not games programming, but games where you program robots as part of the game. I remember being horribly confused by Robotwar on the Apple ][. (via)
A LISP interpreter, written in Bash. Is there one written in Javascript yet? There must be. (via)
You use SSH keys, don’t you? If not, read this primer.
On compiling 34 year old C code. Getting Unix V7 ed/sed working. As the article points out, “ed is already using a legacy interface in 1979.” (via)
Most pedantic bug ever. (via somewhere on Twitter, of all places)
Also on Twitter: I am devloper.
Facebook is launching a newsfeed reader. I agree with the person who originally posted this link – it’ll probably be a one-way street where Facebook scarfs up content from the rest of the web via RSS, but everything on Facebook will stay locked away.
I am looking forward to replacing my Windows desktop with a non-Windows tablet – it’s getting closer.
Remember: if it’s not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it’s not really yours.
The curse of the leading zero.
The Hidden Backdoors to the City of Cron. (re)Infection via cron. (via)
The Internet is better referred to as “the Stacks”. It’s 5 companies, and everything revolves around what they do. That end-of-2012 article is talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft… though Microsoft seems to be on the way out. Anyway, startups plan for buyout these days, which should tell you that it’s easier to take cash from one of a few large companies than try to compete with them, however indirectly.

Your unrelated link of the week: Fail Forward, a collection of writing about pen and paper RPGs. (via)

2014/01/18

Convention addendum

I’ve got a buildup of convention dates to mention, so I’ll do it now: John Marino, one of the folks behind dports, is talking about Ada and BSD at FOSDEM, in Brussels, February 1-2. George Neville-Neil is talking about BSD to NYLUG in of course New York City, on I think February 13th. Ike Levy will be talking to the Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyokai Group, on February 17th, about pfSense. And of course, NYCBSDCon is happening February 8th, and I think I’ll be there.

2014/01/182014/01/18

In Other BSDs for 2014/01/18

I didn’t even need to find source links this week.

Do you have a VAX laying around? Cool! Now, can you give/lend it to OpenBSD?
Along those lines, anyone have a Cray they don’t need? I don’t care if it works. It has to be full-size, though. (via)
I found out that the RetroBSD site now lists hardware that runs RetroBSD. Here’s a video of something doing just that. There’s more of it on little teeny boards. Someone build this into a watch.
The DiscoverBSD roundup for 2014/01/14. DiscoverBSD also has a new writer, Nur Agus.
Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example. Part 1. There’s a nice VFS explanation in there, too. (via)
Some OpenBSD videos from ruBSD.
Here’s a good explanation of OpenBSD’s new signify tool.
FreeBSD 10.0 is tagged.
PC-BSD 10 is also almost ready.
Unscrewed, a story linked in last week’s BSDNow presentation, in case you missed it.
Using Ansible to fix the recently-discovered NTP amplification attack – on BSD.
I assume he’s flying.