The pkgsrc-2013Q2 branch has been out for some days, but the official release announcement has now been published, with details on the number of ports. You should be able to pull it down from dragonflybsd.org via git, by the way.
A U.S. holiday and very warm weather has made this a less intense week. At least for links.
- Someone help. A problem I never anticipated. (via)
- Git Cheat Sheet. This one’s for printing. (via)
- Real Life Tron on an Apple ][gs. (via)
- Neocities, an excellent idea. Follow the suggested links. (via)
- Mandelbulber, a cross between Electric Sheep and Xaos. (via I forget)
- A drawing of the Internet (ARPANet) in 1977. The whole thing. (via)
- Bunnie Huang’s making an open laptop. Won’t be cheap or easy, but it’s still neat.
- Vim 7.4a hits beta.
Your unrelated link of the week: A new Cyriak-animated video, this time for the band Bloc Party.
The official announcement has gone out. You should be able to pull pkgsrc-2013Q2 via git from dragonflybsd.org within the next 24 hours.
While these aren’t his BSD books, Michael W. Lucas has an interesting post up about the sales on his two recent books, SSH Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery. I’m always interested in seeing how self-publishing models work, whether it’s software or books or music. He points out that the point of his DNSSEC book is to see if a very difficult subject can be covered in a book like that – which it is. There’s very few published books that go that in-depth.
(I’m hoping for a whole “Mastery” series covering topics other writers don’t, especially in a BSD-friendly way.)
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their second week reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
There’s a lot of progress for the second week, which is wonderful!
If you have an Emulex BladeEngine 2 or 3, or an Emulex Lancer, it should work in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner’s recent commit. Emulex has 10Gb network cards, in case you were like me and not familiar with the name.
(You thought I was going to type “Sepherosa Ziehau”, didn’t you?)
Some of the links this week go pretty in-depth. Enjoy!
- This short story from 1954 might serve as a reason to avoid single system image computing… (via Sascha Wildner)
- Vim and Ctags tips and tricks. (via)
- Psygnosis game box designs. Nostalgia for some, neat art for anyone else. (via)
- 50 years of ASCII, and here’s the table it comes from. Some other neat links there, too. (via)
- Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. If you like stories about Feynman, who was a very interesting person, you may want to read Feynman, the comic book. I met the writer, Jim Ottaviani, years ago, and he was very energetic about both science and comics. Look up his other work if that sounds interesting – which it should. Here’s a sample from the Feynman book. (via)
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Back to the Future: Preserving the History of Video Games. This is right around the corner from me. The game museum is as neat as it sounds (yes, they have games out to play), but the article doesn’t mention that it’s attached to a fantastic and huge kid’s museum.
- Building a Cray at home. Similar to this previously-linked idea. (via)
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Candy Box and A Dark Room. Both are text-only games, but they use HTML5 for animation. They start minimal, and build up – be patient; there’s a lot of gameplay in there. These minimal games fascinate me. It’s like reading a book, where it goes from just static text to an entire world being built. (somewhat via)
Your bonus unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby double-page spreads. It’s not an exaggeration to say this artwork crackles. (via I forget)
FreeBSD ports, and therefore Dragonfly dports, will drop KDE 3.5 items sometime very soon. It’s possible to continue to build them in dports, but it’s extra work. If you need them, volunteer, because otherwise they will be dropped. (An idea I fully support.)
Earlier this week, Daniel Flores posted the first-week report on his Google Summer of Code project, file compression in Hammer. He mentioned that the LZ4 algorithm he is using seems to have the best performance with repeating text data, as in logfiles. I asked for numbers, and he provided them. The important data in the results is the total compression column. It shows how many 64k blocks were able to be compressed, with that type of data.
If you have a mps(4) device (LSI Fusion-MPT 2 SAS disk controller), you may be interested in Matthew Dillon’s large commit of bugfixes from FreeBSD. Specifically, he notes that the drive gets ‘overtagged’, and performance can be greatly improved by reducing the number of tags used.
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, Netperf will now calculate Jain’s fairness index. That is a formula that is both interesting and unfamiliar to me. Not that I understand it, of course – it’s just because it has a neat name.
It looks like OpenJDK7 works in pkgsrc for DragonFly, thanks to Ryo ONODERA, and I think it’s working in dports too.
Because Sepherosa Ziehau changed mbstat, anyone on bleeding-edge DragonFly will need to rebuild world, or else netstat will become confused.
Supposedly it’s FreeBSD 9.0 under the hood on the new Playstation 4 systems. What does this mean for FreeBSD, or driver support, or BSD in general, or what you can run on that hardware? Possibly nothing other than a vague sense of superiority.
On the other hand, this BoingBoing article makes a good point about commodity hardware and its immediate utility. It’s an effective network storage device and it doesn’t even mention FreeNAS.
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their first week reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
If any of these projects are interesting to you, or if you have any tips for these students on work they are doing, please provide feedback.
Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why. I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project. I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.
I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done. I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”. All the BSDs could use that. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
I was going to make excuses for a low link count because of being on the road this week – but somehow I managed to find a lot to read anyway. We all win!
- Dragonflies with brain-tracking backpacks. Not DragonFly-relevant except for the subject creature. (via)
- Speaking of the actual bug, my daughter caught a dragonfly for me. That moth, incidentally, wasn’t as dead as I thought it was…
- Roguelikes breakdown. It’s an overview of roguelike games, which may not contain any surprises for you… the screenshots of graphical versions are nice, however, and there’s a lot of links to roguelike games at the end. (via)
- “If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?” Talking about APIs and how you should not trust your data to companies that won’t let you access it the way you want. Also, that’s a great pull quote, which is why I’m the second one to use it. (via)
- Great Works in Programming Languages. This is a list of titles but not links to the actual documents, though some (all?) are freely available. At least a few of you reading this just said, “Hey, I know what I’m doing this afternoon!” (also via)
- Rewriting history. It’s about shell history, though unfortunately Bash-specific.
- Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. Playable online. (via multiple places)
- I enjoy old analog computer(ish) pictures, so here’s two.
- Here’s another: the first stored program computer was 65 years ago as of yesterday.
- PDP-11 systems, still in service. Doesn’t saw what they are running. (via)
- Fax machine evolution, an animated gif. (via)
- The Pet Shop Boys don’t like BSD. Yeah, it’s a typo, but a funny one.
- Here’s an NSA/PRISM joke; one of many.
Your unrelated link of the week: Who you gonna call? This kills me because there was some obvious prop work and setup just to create this 7 second joke.
There’s already been some previous conversation about how much longer to support the i386 platform for DragonFly. It looks like PC-BSD will be the first ‘flavor’ of BSD to make the jump. Support for PC-BSD on i386 will be dropped after release 9.2. That includes ‘TrueOS‘, the version of PC-BSD for servers, which I did not know about until just now.
There’s support for a new timer mechanism in DragonFly 3.5, for x86_64 users: TSC. Sepherosa Ziehau added support and has described how to disable it – it’s on by default. It speeds up some very basic (and frequently used) system calls.
Whoops, I missed this when it happened, but: the freeze for pkgsrc-2013Q2 has started. That new quarterly release is anticipated for the end of the month.