Matthew Dillon’s committed a bunch more Hammer2 work. No, it’s not usable yet. Look at the commit messages for details on how he’s setting up multi-master volume information, though.
It’s been a quiet week, but that’s OK. I have sick kids, sick coworkers, and a certification test this Monday…
- Playing at the World is apparently a good book. The author has a blog where he dives into old RPG minutiae. You will either find that not very interesting or super interesting. No halfway point.
- Teleglitch, a roguelike top-down shooter with pixel graphics. I was happy at the word “roguelike”, of course. (via _hasso_ on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A review of Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition.
- “I’m writing my own OS“. I think Dominic Giampolo said once that everyone in computer science goes through a phase where making your own operating system can’t be too hard and why not try it etc etc. (via)
- This picture makes me happy.
- An entire book of studies based around a single line of C64 BASIC code. It’s available as a free download.
- Teach Your Children Groff. It’s sort of the opposite of the do-without-needing-to-understand practice that most people assume Steve Jobs wanted. (via)
- Your Objects, The Unix Way. (via)
- Getting your computer work done in 1973. Given the hardware, I don’t think this is Unix, but it’s still neat to see it work. Punch cards! (via)
- Here’s how arcade cabinets were first planned out. I like seeing the old-school marker rendering.
- This notebook seems like a bad idea. (via)
- This secure bootloader, on the other hand, could be useful. (via)
- A hypnotic data visualization. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A Star Wars roguelike on GitHub. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: GET LAMP. I thought I had linked to it before, but I’m probably thinking of It Is Pitch Dark. It’s a documentary by Jason Scott of textfiles fame about text adventures.
Michael W. Lucas announced his next book will be about DNSSec, which is good. It’s also self-published, which I like to see. I don’t know if it necessarily makes him more money, but I like to see more exploration of this new way of publishing.
If you look at his announcement, there’s a link to something else: vendor-free SSL certificates. These are possible? That’s one of those things I didn’t even realize I wanted; having to deal with a certification authority is annoying.
BSDTalk 220 is up. It’s a conversation with Eric Oyen, OpenBSD user. It’s about 20 minutes and I don’t know the subject past “OpenBSD” cause I haven’t listened to it – yet.
NYCBUG is joining up with a whole bunch of other software user groups (Linux, Lisp, Puppet, etc.) for a holiday party on December 11th. This may not do you much good unless you live within a few hour’s travel, but I like seeing that sort of cross-group get-togethers, with no sponsor other than the desire to talk and drink.
This discussion of cryptographic hardware for FreeBSD may include hardware that would work for DragonFly too. Can someone verify?
Do you use ndis(4) for a network card that would otherwise not work? Are you running DragonFly 3.3? Are you willing to run USB4BSD and see if it works? If you do, tell Sascha Wildner if his changes worked.
It’s ‘old week’!
- Your team should work like an open source project. It’s not as complete a possibility as I think this person paints it, but there’s principles outlined in that article that could apply to any office. (via)
- An IBM PC Model 5150 – in Javascript. (via)
- World’s oldest d20. If you told me it was, say, a few decades old, I’d have believed it. (via)
- World’s oldest digital computer turned back on. From 1951. I like the name “Harwell Dekatron”.(via)
- Speaking of old, Windows 95 Tips, Ticks, and Tweaks. (via multiple places)
- A horrible computing idea from the 1960s. (via)
- Old computer art updated to work in Processing. You know what Processing is, right? If not, you may be in for a treat. (via)
- xmonad layouts for netbooks. I’ve thought that a tiling window manager is a good solution when low on screen real estate, but I never got this detailed. (via)
- Remember the complaints about Linuxisms last week? ITWire followed up on this with Marc Espie of OpenBSD. He makes the good point that computers are complex systems, and when you stop thinking about compatibility, everything – including Linux – gets crappier. (via)
- Vi-style shortcuts appear everywhere, including on Tumblr. (slightly related: I have a Tumblr with images from the mine where I work.)
Your unrelated link of the week: Disused Rochester Subway. I used to work about half a mile from one end of this structure, and have been in several of the locations pictured. (via)
Shopping! This is the big holiday shopping weekend in the US, and I usually put together something here.
- Buy an SSD for someone who doesn’t have one – including you if that’s the case. There’s better and worse SSDs out there, but you’ll get a speed benefit no matter what, and other bonuses are possible.
- The Tea Bag Buddy, which also comes in a color-changing version. Because tea.
- My perennial Science! suggestions: ThinkGeek, American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear, The Bone Room, and Skulls Unlimited.
- The Best of BSD 2011 and Last Year in BSD Security, from the BSD Magazine publisher.
- For more BSD, there’s always the orgs themselves. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD – no DragonFly, though there ought to be. Also, ISC.
- For lists of gifts, there’s the Verge Gift Guide, which has some interesting offshoots.
- Another long list: The Comics Reporter’s Shopping List.
If you have suggestions, please comment!
Dan Langille runs BSDCan and PGCon. He also went to EuroBSDCon and described how he put together these conferences. The PDF containing his presentation slides makes a good checklist of what you might need for your own event, even if it’s not on the scale of his conventions.
If you are one of the few people still wanting to read an OS/2 HPFS drive, support for it in DragonFly has been updated by Antonio Huete Jimenez. It’s read-only, but writing didn’t work well, and I’d be surprised if there’s any hpfs disks that aren’t archival, out there.
Also, Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the pktgen program to generate even more packets, even at relatively low CPU clock speeds.
Sascha Wildner recently brought in support from FreeBSD for HighPoint’s RocketRAID 4520 and 4522 SAS/SATA RAID cards. It’s in the hptiop(4) driver.
The initial download of pkgsrc via Git on DragonFly is a little bit faster now, with the ‘make pkgsrc-create-shallow’ option recently added by John Marino. Note that there’s a similar option for src. It skips downloading file history.
Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD. Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on. For example:
smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006" smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. " smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "
This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.
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)
Because of the recent good results for pgbench on DragonFly 3.2, Phoronix has a new benchmark of DragonFly using other (possibly unrelated) tests. There’s not a lot of information to glean from them; they are testing operations different than what was optimized for pgbench in 3.2. I’d like to see DragonFly 3.0 tested the same way to see how much improvement there was between versions.
While we’re talking about cross-pollination of BSDs: going by licenses, there’s some DragonFly code in the iPhone – at least the fairq scheduler. (Noted by several people on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
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.
We (as in DragonFly) are not participating in Google Code-In this year, but I’m happy to see there’s another BSD in there – NetBSD. (There’s only 10 participating organizations, so it’s not easy.) Look at their page if you’re in the right age range to do projects.
MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a ‘liveUSB’ distribution of DragonFly with software preinstalled, has been updated to run using DragonFly 3.2.1 as a base. The linked page contains screenshots and a description of what comes out-of-the-box. (mentioned previously here.)