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Lazy Reading for 2012/11/18

Apparently this is history week for Lazy Reading.

  •  You know what I like about older retail games?  Not the playing, but the paraphernalia that came with it – maps, histories, stories on printed paper.  This Empire for Apple ][ description even has pictures of a hand-drawn timeline.
  • Remember when Enlightenment was considered too graphically intensive to run easily?  Now E17 is in alpha!  (via multiple places including here.)
  • The regular expression that’s the equivalent of a shrug and a handwave.
  • “Why BSD is better than Linux” (2002).  It’s an old PDF presentation, but a good history overview.  I got a kick out of slide 40.
  • Rob Pike on why object-oriented programming isn’t always awesome.  Slightly related: I wish Google+ pages had RSS feeds.  (via)
  • The GPL is usually described as a defense for users against companies.  What if it’s being used as a bludgeon by one company against another?
  • Remember in last week’s Lazy Reading, I pointed at complaints about Linuxisms; changes that assumed Linux was the only Unixlike system.  The problem continues even within distributions.  There’s a common thread of the people involved.
  • When In Git, different animated gifs set to different git habits and events.  This is the next stage after rage comics.

Your unrelated link of the week: The Useless Web.  Random single-purpose sites, and oddly compelling.  (via)

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Ecumenical BSD

A person labeled only as ‘wicked’ sent me a link to this conversation about BSD unification.  I’ve seen the topic brought up before, and I’d argue that it’s already happening, slowly.  DragonFly has code brought in from FreeBSD, pkgsrc from NetBSD, pf and dhclient from OpenBSD, etc.  ‘bmake’ is used in NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonFly now.  Clang works across the board, I think (dunno the status on OpenBSD).  There’s more of that cross-pollination going on if you think about it.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/11/11

The 3.2 release seems to have gone well.  Who has tried the new USB support?  I’m curious to see how it’s going.

Your unrelated link of the week: This roundup of ultrarealist human sculpture.  You’ve probably seen Ron Mueck‘s art before, at least.

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MSI-X for the masses

Sepherosa Ziehau is switching a number of network cards over to use ifpoll, which means they will have capabilities similar to MSI-X, even if the network card doesn’t support it.  My suspicion is that it will make these cards perform better in busy situation where they would otherwise get bogged down… but that’s based on hunch rather than empirical testing.  As Sepherosa Ziehau pointed out, it certainly can’t hurt.

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Binary package removal for DragonFly 2.11 and below

On the 10th of November, I’m going to remove the binary pkgsrc packages from mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org for DragonFly 2.8 through 2.11.  They are closing in on 2 years old at this point, and are from a pkgsrc branch that hasn’t been updated for that long.

If you are actually using version of DragonFly that old, you can continue building from pkgsrc normally; these are just prebuilt packages.

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Clang-Day today for FreeBSD

Today is the day that FreeBSD moves to using clang by default.  This is not necessarily a surprise, but I like the finality of calling it “Clang-Day”.   I think Clang will probably be the next compiler brought into DragonFly’s base system, instead of the next release of gcc.  Don’t make any bets on my statement, though, cause I certainly won’t be the one doing it.  (It’s hard.)

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Lazy Reading for 2012/11/04

I’m glad 3.2 is out the door.  I think I spent more time on release notes and watching package builds than any other release.

Your unrelated link of the day: Sir, You Are Being Hunted.  I link to the Kickstarter for this game for no other reason than I think it would be fun to play.

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Chaos Communication Congress and DragonFly

Every year, the Chaos Communication Congress tends to gather at least a few DragonFly-using people, and this year is no different.  The event is being held in a much larger arena this year, in Hamburg, Germany, so there’s a good chance a DragonFly ‘assembly‘ could be held.  Speak up on the users@ mailing list, or EFNet #dragonflybsd, if you’re going too.  It’s happening on the last few days of this year, December 27th through 31st.

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If we only had the spiffy name…

I mentioned this before in the Lazy Reading from last Sunday, but it’s worth a second look: Apple’s new Fusion Drive product appears to be very much like DragonFly’s swapcache.  DragonFly doesn’t have exclusive right to the idea of caching on a faster disk, clearly, so I’m not complaining that it’s “ours”.  It’s frustrating to see product announcement/press releases stumbling all over this like it’s a new thing.

Then again, having new ideas about technology ideas and making sure they spread is one of the points of the BSD license, so perhaps there’s no good reason to complain at all.

(Before anyone reads too much into this: No, I don’t know of any direct relationship between swapcache and Fusion Drive; they may have no common background other than structure.)

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Whoops

I lost Internet access because of Hurricane Sandy, and couldn’t get my machine to recover until I power cycled.  I think it’s because my external IP changed, and pf doesn’t seem to handle that well for NAT or just in general.  The recommended fix, putting the interface name in parentheses, doesn’t seem to work.  Anyone have advice?

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Lazy Reading for 2012/10/28

Life is busy, busy, busy.  But there’s always time for Lazy Reading!

  • Sometimes Google searches turn up DragonFly BSD in odd places.
  • Wayland reached 1.0.   That’s great, except it isn’t ready for use yet, it’s just feature-stable.  I’d argue that means it’s ‘beta’, not 1.0, but there’s no hard and fast rules about that.  In any case, does it run on any BSD?  I don’t think so.
  • OpenSSH server best practices.  Nothing too groundbreaking, but they include “BSD” (i.e. pf) examples.  I always like articles that don’t assume Linux is the only platform.  (via)
  • The little SSH that (sometimes) couldn’t.  A heck of a network debugging exercise.  (via mat in #dragonflybsd)
  • The AN/FSQ7, a computer I’m sure I’ve seen in movies a number of times.  (via)
  • Here’s the OpenBSD slides from EuroBSDCon 2012.
  • Oh look, Apple’s got “Fusion Drive“.  The cool people call it swapcache and have been using it for years, so there.
  • Here’s an essay that starts out talking about Quantum Computing and moves into the ambivalence that quantum computing seems to entail instead of just noting the general scientific description and leaving it there.  It’s really quite enjoyable.
  • Hey, maybe this is why Facebook reported earnings are up: they’re holding your own data hostage.  (via)
  • Rob Pike on The Setup.  He makes a very good point about how we should access computers.  Also, here’s a recent, long slide show he put together about Go.  It describes solving some language problems that have been around a long time.   (via)
  • I was halfway through reading that last slide show link and realized there’s no way I can explain how it was an worthwhile read to someone who hadn’t done some programming.  No link or conclusion, just an observation of how esoteric this is.  I hope you enjoy it.
  • Essential Vim and Vi Skills has hit a 3rd edition.  I have this as a Kindle edition, and I’m not sure how that happened.
  • Zork in Duplicity, or a bizarre finding of old UNIX history in a completely unrelated place.  (via)
  • These OpenBSD thin clients are a neat idea.

Your unrelated link of the week: Delilah Dirk.  It’s a comic, and the story available to read online is about a tea merchant, which makes it exactly right.