Justin Sherrill – Page 194 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/03/05

Patch cross-pollination

I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently DragonFly’s version of patch(1) comes from OpenBSD and NetBSD. FreeBSD’s old version of patch is being replaced by this and modified to match the old one’s behaviors. It would be worthwhile to bring these changes back, if possible, just to reduce the differences in a utility that’s already been around the world, so to speak.

As an aside, I always thought patch was one of Larry Wall’s unsung successes, and I’m entertained by any program that has “Hmm…” as one of its official outputs.

2013/03/032013/03/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/03

I am all over the place with links this week – some of them pretty far off the path. There’s a lot, too, so enjoy!

Puctuation obscurantism, punctuation humor; I like it all. (via)
Exporting your git repository. Found while looking for something else.
I want CTRL-D at a terminal to make something like this to happen.
Visual Representation of Regular Expression Character Classes. I like visual ways of classifying complex data.
Speaking of which: Anatomy of Data. Not sure how I found it.
Digital Files and 3D Printing – In the Renaissance? The title sounds a bit linkbaity, but the story of the 14th century map designed to be recreated with a graphing tool is pretty neat.
Postgres: The Bits You Haven’t Found. Advanced/odd Postgres usage. (via)
Breaking your arrow keys is the latest idea in improving Vim usage.
PC-BSD is moving to a ‘rolling release’ format, and also using the new pkg tools that are also in DPorts. Historic details on this new setup are available.
Fred, taking off.
Ten hours with the most inscrutable game of all time. I like the idea of Dwarf Fortress more than I actually like playing it. I’m somewhat afraid of it. It looks like this sounds.
That last comparison wasn’t necessarily fair, but it was fun.
If I’m going to talk about music like that, I should link Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.
The Wizard of Pinball. I just want my own standup pinball or arcade cabinet game. Yes, yes, I know, MAME cabinet.
Appropriately this week, “Ball Saved”, page 1 and page 2 of a 2-page comic about pinball.
UnReal World, an Iron-Age roguelike. Apparently pretty brutal, and two decades in development. Runs on several platforms, but not BSD. (via)
You Are Boring. Some of the ‘boring’ items made me laugh. (via)
The first review of Michael W. Lucas’s Absolute OpenBSD, Second Edition is available.

Your unrelated link of the week: I’ve already been offbeat enough in this Lazy Reading; I don’t have anything else.

2013/03/02

Pkgsrc mysql now 5.5 by default

As the title says, if you install MySQL from pkgsrc-current, you’ll now get version 5.5.

2013/02/27

Software RAID options

Following this recent thread, it looks like the best answer for software RAID is: buy hardware. I’d be interested to hear what people have experience with in the realm of cheap but OK RAID hardware.

2013/02/25

Help with a Firefox plugin

Michael W. Lucas is looking for someone to improve the Extended DNSSEC Validator. Specifically, add BSD support. It’s an idea worth supporting, because the standard it works with makes self-signed certificated perfectly feasible.

2013/02/252013/02/25

3 very different commits

Here’s 3 recent and different commits to DragonFly that I’m commenting on all at once:

Peter Avalos upgraded libarchive in DragonFly to 3.1.2, with a note of the changes. An ordinary and appreciated update.
Sascha Wildner updated the ISO639 file to include the newest update: “Standard Moroccan Tamazight”. There’s no particular utility to that; I just like saying “Standard Moroccan Tamazight” out loud.
Work on poudriere, the utility for bulk-building DPorts packages, has caused some nice speedups for DragonFly in extremely stressful situations. See one of Matthew Dillon’s recent commits.

I really wish the other BSD projects would include commit lines in the mail message subjects, so it was easier to catch things like these.

2013/02/242013/02/24

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/24

A calm week, for once.

Via Michael W. Lucas: Absolut OpenBSD.
Another ‘How I customize Vim’ style post. These things always sound great, but I worry that it’s not something that can be duplicated. If you had to rebuild or duplicate your Vim environment elsewhere, you’d have to write out your own instructions. Not impossible, but I don’t have to do that for anything else. (via)
Twine, a game creation tool that really requires only writing. (via)
The Oxford Comma, or how it doesn’t matter. (via)
The Story of the PING Program. I could have sworn I linked to this before. I remember having someone explain ping to me when I was young and had little experience of IP networking; it seemed like magic where the computers would actually talk. (via vsrinivas on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
ARPANet, 1971, as a tattoo. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. All the early issues, available in electronic form, for pay-what-you-want. (And I advise paying; it’s a fun comic) Look at a sample page if you are curious.

2013/02/232013/02/23

DPorts packages for 64-bit DragonFly available

If you want to take advantage of the binary packages of DPorts, and have a x86_64 system with a recent DragonFly 3.3 on it: Francois Tigeot has you covered. There’s no i386 packages yet, which are the ones I could use right now, darnit.

If you want to try DPorts, see my earlier article.

2013/02/222013/02/22

Read shortcut, buffer cache improvements

The new vm.read_shortcut option has been turned on by default by Matthew Dillon, which should lead to some performance improvements. That improvement has been measured for tmpfs, at least. There’s also some buffer cache improvments that help on x86_64 systems, too.

Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out, tmpfs also no longer uses the mplock, so it’ll take better advantage of multiple processors.

2013/02/22

New man page source, abbreviated

Constantine A. Murenin has put together a new man page resource for all the BSDS: mdoc.su. The options for shortened URLs are entertainingly diverse.

2013/02/21

More vkernel options: MACs, disk serials

Thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez, it’s now possible to set the MAC address for each interface and specify the disk serial number in the command line for a vkernel.

2013/02/212013/02/20

DNS(SEC)administrators needed

Michael W. Lucas needs people who know DNSSEC, BIND, have some time, and are willing to criticize him. He’s finished his first draft of DNSSEC Mastery, and needs reviewers.

2013/02/202013/02/20

BSDTalk 223: Michael Dexter and bhyve

BSDTalk 223 is out, with 23 minutes of conversation with Michael Dexter about bhyve.

2013/02/20

World backups when upgrading

John Marino proposed a method for backing up world when upgrading, for those rare but catastrophic cases where the installed programs can’t run. After some discussion, he committed an automatic backup method, and there’s a ‘restoreworld’ target to take advantage of it.

The kernel already gets renamed to kernel.old as a backup, if I remember correctly.

2013/02/202013/02/19

Summer of Code ideas, please

If DragonFly is going to participate in Google Summer of Code for 2013, we need project ideas, and lots of them, at any size. There’s an existing project page that anyone can add to, especially if you’re a student and looking to add your ideas.

2013/02/19

Tor-BSD list created

The fine folks at the New York City BSD User Group have created a mailing list specifically for using The Onion Router on BSD. Please join if you are interested in TOR, and especially if you are using something other than FreeBSD, since that’s the only ‘supported’ BSD TOR runs on right now.

2013/02/19

More IP forwarding stats

Sepherosa Ziehau has posted more statistics on his ifnet/ifaddr per-CPU stats work. It’s doing so well that he’s very close to reaching the maximum physical capacity of the 4x gigabit ethernet hardware he’s using.

2013/02/18

BSD Magazine: Rehosting

The February 2013 issue of BSD Magazine, available as a free PDF, talks about VAX/VMS ‘rehosting’, has a PC-BSD preview, and other things. The teaser paragraph for the “Fear, Loathing and Misunderstandings” article (shown on that linked page) is perfect.

2013/02/18

Two pkgsrc changes

There’s two changes in pkgsrc recently that might affect you: graphics/png was updated, so many dependent packages will require recompilation. Also, editors/emacs was moved to a general package instead of being specifically named by version, so now you can install ’emacs’ instead of ’emacs24′ or whichever version.

2013/02/172013/02/16

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/17

This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.

An oldie but goodie. ENHANCE. This will make anyone who has done photo/video editing twitch. Check the author’s Tumblr for more supercuts. (indirectly via)
Many people complain about regular expressions (and more recently), but they are an insanely powerful tool if you know them well. If you do, figure out this crossword. (PDF) (via)
Followup on the first two links in that last item: xkcd drives a lot of traffic!
If you are on Windows, you probably use PuTTY for ssh. It saves everything in the registry, which can occasionally mean losing all your configuration. There’s manual ways to save it, but there’s also PuTTYtray. (I’ve used portaPuTTY in the past, but it seems to be missing/no longer updated.)
Actually, holy crap there’s a lot of variations/addons for PuTTY.
That makes sense given how many terminal emulators there are, really.
Why piping something off the Internet right to a shell isn’t a good idea. (via)
Remember when the computer section in bookstores had books that involved programming? (unfair, I know.)
“Don’t Be A Stranger“, musing on how there isn’t enough meeting strangers through the Internet any more. Here’s the odd thought I had while reading that article: I couldn’t pick most of the other DragonFly developers out of a lineup, but I’ve been working and talking with some of them for a decade.
You could build Photoshop version 1 yourself – just substitute the original Mac libraries.
Related: Photoshop is a city for everyone.
Some of the oldest color film footage. Not the oldest,but possibly some of the earliest commercial film. Of course, the first thing filmed are young, attractive women. This is a re-occurring theme.
Hey, a comprehensive year-end BSD roundup.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server. Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it. (via)

Wait, this is better! That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry. At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever. Even better than Elemental!