All the mailing lists at @dragonflybsd.org have been converted over to Mailman. The old archives are still functioning, and will continue to update until I can find enough old material to retroactively complete the Mailman archives.
Whee!
- deadweight, “Find unused CSS selectors by scraping your HTML”. I’ve needed something like this for years. (via)
- The same sort of thing for pkgsrc: pkg_leaves. Worth running at least yearly, or at least before any significant pkgsrc upgrade. There’s no point in updating a package you don’t use or need.
- GNU Coreutils cheat sheet, plus the instructions to make it. There’s other cheatsheets linked in the article that may be useful.
- Compiler benchmarks, comparing gcc and clang versions. For a complete benchmark, I’d want to compare what number of programs build with each, too. (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
- When ‘your mom’ and Unix jokes collide.
- Distraction-free writing with Vim. (via)
- Also, there’s a “Modern Vim” book on the way. Will it be good? I have no idea; I don’t know of any prior books by the author or who the publisher is. Those facts might help.
- For a known author and publisher, here’s a status report on Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition. If you don’t know what a BOFH is from his last sentence, read the original stories.
- Quadrilateral Cowboy, a cyberpunk hacking game that actually involves non-boring programming and not just a pipe-matching game under the guise of hacking.
- While I’m linking to games, GUTS, sorta like Diablo but more… roguey? It’s turn-based. Also, an excuse to use the roguelike tag.
- 4 UNIX commands I abuse every day. Having done a fair amount of Perl programming, I am entertained by having side effects being the intended goal. Also, the author pays attention to what runs on BSD. (via)
- “Disks lie. And the controllers that run them are partners in crime.” Marshall Kirk McKusick describes just how hard it is to know when your data has really made it from memory to disk. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week. Dubgif. Random animated gifs and dubstep clips. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes it’s perfect. (via) If that’s too random, there’s also this .
If you’re on any of the dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, I’m converting them over from bestserv to Mailman. I’ve done bugs@, commits@, hammer@, and test@ so far, and I’ll move the old archives over to the same format as soon as I find an actual mbox file with the old messages in it. The remaining lists should be tomorrow.
(If you got a note tonight from a list you were sure you were unsubscribed from, that was my fault; sorry! I didn’t understand the format of the bestserv user lists.)
DragonFly user varialus has created a page on the DragonFly website (it’s a wiki, after all) with all the notes taken from trying installation, etc. There’s far more notes than I expected there, so it’s worth a read.
Much of this new document has been around in other forms for a while, but now, there’s a brief guide on porting drivers to DragonFly in the source tree.
LOPSA East is happening next May in New Jersey. I haven’t seen mention of this on any BSD list, but there’s definitely Unixy things happening there. The call for papers is out.
The September issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as usual. Visit the site to find out the table of contents.
David Gwynne talks for 31 minutes about OpenBSD on BSDTalk 219. Also, Will Backman, the host of BSDTalk is heading to Tbilisi, Georgia next month. Say ‘hi’ if you’re a Georgian.
This recent question asked on-list about creating your own file system meandered into good reference books. This so far was “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System“, “Modern Operating Systems“, and the paper “Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX“. Looking for links on those things led me to this Unix filesystem history paper from IBM, which is fun reading.
I’m saying that unironically! It really is an interesting document to read, for historical and general knowledge. I am a nerd.
Adrian Chadd has apparently been smushing FreeBSD onto MIPS systems for some time, and he’s going to talk about it tomorrow night at the NYCBUG meeting. I’m noting it because I’ve always found it interesting how much can be stripped out of a kernel and userland and still have a functional system.
BSD Magazine has a “Best of 2011” issue out for purchase; it has updated versions of various articles published over the last year in BSD Magazine. The price is not clear on the website.
I hope you like your links eclectic this week.
- DragonFly is a popular project name, but this is unrelated to DragonFly BSD.
- Russian Tea HOWTO. I know there’s at least a few vigorous tea-drinkers in DragonFly other than me. The tl;dr version is “make a syrup and dilute”, but it’s more enjoyable to get into the paperphanalia of it all.
- I don’t know what Xombrero is, but someone submitted patches for it to build on DragonFly. What a nice thing to do!
- A Generation Lost in the Bazaar, by Poul-Henning Kamp. Even if you don’t agree with his cathedral vs. bazaar generalizations, this description sums up a problem well: “Sam Leffler’s graphics/libtiff is one of the 122 packages on the road to www/firefox, yet the resulting Firefox browser does not render TIFF images.” (via)
- Fourmilab.ch, the site of John Walker, co-author of AutoCAD. The site looks like something from the late 90s but is surprisingly modern. The Unix Utilities section has some interesting programs. I’d link to it directly, but it’s a framed page on the site. (See what I meant about “90s”?)
- Beyond lies the wub: a history of dubstep. You may or may not be interested in the music, but I like these long-form articles coming from the Verge.
- 150 Troma films for free on YouTube. (via) The most famous one isn’t free, but it’s there.
- Oh my goodness, the “thagomizer” is a real thing.
- Racing modified electric kid vehicles. I had a coworker who put a wheelchair battery into his daughter’s Barbie car. He said it doubled the speed and made it able to drive on two wheels. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Flux Machine. Be patient; the images are animated to good effect.
Because here’s some recommendations on good models, and here’s a way to check SSD health. Seriously, they’re great.
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 3.0.3 disk images, both ISO and IMG. They should start appearing on a mirror site near you in the next 24 hours. This took a while after the tagging, I know, but I wanted to make sure every one of them booted. I didn’t on a previous release, and regretted it.
If you have a LSI RAID card, meaning you are using the mfi(4) driver, Sascha Wildner has added /proc/devices to linprocfs, so that LSI’s MegaCLI configuration utility will run.
Sascha Wildner has pushed smart battery support, based on a patch from Dmitry Komissaroff and FreeBSD. He asks people to try it out. It apparently provides for more accurate battery charge level readings?
Francois Tigeot benchmarked several different operating systems using Postgres 9.2b3, including DragonFly, and published the results. I have a local copy of the PDF since the attachment didn’t really survive the archiving. Follow the thread for discussion. The Linux results look abnormally high, so it is possible that something different is happening on that platform…
There’s certainly no theme to this week’s links. I even manage to avoid my usual git and vim links, strangely.
- Ethernet’s Future: How Fast Is Fast Enough? The article doesn’t answer any questions, but I like the IEEE-supplied graph it opens with that shows the trend of overall network traffic doubling yearly. (via)
- Anti-open source propaganda in Disney kids’ TV show. I’m actually more bothered by trying to hyphenate a phrase made from separate words. Anti-‘open source’? Esoteric grammar issues appeal to me.
- Bash One-liners Explained, part 3.
- Perl hex and bit pack formats were added to fix the Magellan satellite’s output. A neat origin for something I’ve used trivally. Of course, I suppose any use is trivial compared to fixing output from a broken spaceship. (via many places)
- Here’s a DragonFlyBSD article from 2010 linked on Hacker News. The ensuing conversation in the Hacker News comments is lucid and useful, and not a single bit of whining about BSD being dead. That’s so refreshing to see!
- Looks like there will be a new version of ADOM. Will it run on DragonFly? It should, since the previous version is in pkgsrc.
- Do you like set theory? Then read this. I don’t understand a word of it, but I like seeing the mathematical characters encoded on the page, apparently using MathJax.
- I also enjoy reading about BSD users’ origin stories. In this case, Dru Lavigne.
- CDE has been open-sourced. There’s a good chance it will show up in pkgsrc soon. Seeing this interface will make you nostalgic if you are the right age.
- If you’re a fan of the Hammer filesystem, does that make you a hammerhead? That’s my weak attempt to segue to this comic.
- Artisanal, hand-crafted unsigned ints. Read the bottom of the About page for an explanation. This may not make sense to you if you haven’t encountered the trend it’s making fun of, which seems to be centered in Brooklyn. (via)
- I hope you enjoy scrolling, because this history of computers and history of computer graphics are very long single documents. I like seeing the early computer art. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Cul De Sac. The strip is ending due to the creator’s health issues, but what he has done is marvelous. This is one of the few newspaper strips that is both visually interesting and often abruptly laugh out loud funny, without being patronizing.
Do you happen to have the saved messages for one or more @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists sitting around? Hopefully in mbox format? I’m working on getting Mailman installed to replace bestserv, and being able to bring in the old messages would be nice.
DragonFly had a successful Google Summer of Code even this year. It marks our 5th time participating, 7th if you count Google Code-In events.
Mihai Carabas worked on adding SMT/HT awareness to the DragonFly scheduler. This project was very successful. The original goal was just to take advantage of threading with the scheduler, but the benchmarks published by Mihai show in general a 5% speedup from these scheduler changes. His work has already been committed.
Vishesh Yadav implemented an inotify interface in DragonFly. inotify is an originally Linux-based system for monitoring files and directories for changes. A specific use for this is an inotify-aware locate program, so that a list of file locations can be kept ‘live’. His code for the inotify interface should be committed to DragonFly very soon.
(This was written in part for Google to use on their Open Source Blog.)