I spent the last week on an island in Lake Huron in Canada, so I missed that the latest issue of BSD Magazine is out. I’ll catch up when I can. Anything interesting happen while I was gone?
I seem to include a vi/vim tip every week. It’s not on purpose, or at least it wasn’t until now.
- vimwiki – maintain a wiki within Vim. Not as extreme an idea as you’d think. (via)
- Oh yeah, something about git too. How about “10 Things I Hate About Git“? (same via)
- Revisiting the 2002 Radio Shack Catalog. Drop your phone/tablet and look at this. It’s only 10 years old. (via)
- The ELF Tool Chain project. This is a good idea. I found out about it by reading this description of the build system they are working on. (via)
- I’m sure anyone reading this is familiar with BSD – license, history, and so on. But are you familiar with the BSD battles with GRizzEAT?
- The apparently accidental origin of dotfiles, from Rob Pike. I wish his Google+ page had an RSS feed. (via)
- Speaking of Google things, did you know there’s a Google Store? Where you can buy such things as a light-up dog leash with the Google logo? And a Go Gopher Tote. Actually, the tote is kinda neat.
- Is the Go Gopher a Renee French illustration like Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny? Apparently yes. It’s from a WFMU t-shirt, and Renee French has a number of comics you can buy. Her Marbles in my Underpants book is one of the more disturbing things I’ve ever read.
- If you aren’t familiar with WFMU, you really should be. It’s my second-favorite radio station after my local college station, WBER.
- When I wander off track, I run.
Your unrelated link of the week: a thorough investigation of the history of the ‘long s’ character, via. If that’s too cerebral for you, try this video of a man making turkeys gobble, which made me laugh and laugh.
Hammer 2 (or is it HAMMER2?) is nowhere near ready to test. But! For laughs, I think it could be set up just so you can watch the messages go back and forth. Someone want to set up a few DragonFly-current VMs and try?
Pierre Abbat is curious about using Hammer on an SSD. The discussion that came from that has some useful points, including notes that a straightforward SSD as disk works for most anything with Hammer other than very intensive database use, due to the history retention. If space is an issue, swapcache on the SSD and attaching a normal HDD is a fine alternative. A SSD with Hammer can leave some features off, though I’d argue that dedup is totally worth is. Also, SSD speed is directly correlated with size.
Sascha Wildner’s added support (from FreeBSD) for the HighPoint RocketRAID 17xx, 22xx, 23xx and 25xx, via the hptrr(4) driver.
Noting this now cause it’s timely: O’Reilly is selling Perl ebooks at 50% off until the 9th, with the code WKPER5. (seen here)
Mihai Carabas has posted some more results from an 8-core system showing his efforts to make the scheduler multi-threading aware. The results are generally a 5% speed gain, which I think matches previous benchmarks on machines with less processors.
If you’re going to be near Warsaw, Poland, in late October, you can visit EuroBSDCon. Registration is open now.
(The logo makes me think of a certain meme.)
Sepherosa Ziehau’s added TSO support (that’s TCP Segmentation Offloading”, or “Large Segment Offload” going by Wikipedia) within IPv4 on DragonFly, pushing segmentation work from the CPU to the network card. There’s also some DragonFly-specific improvements.
There’s been a lot of commits from him lately focused around network card improvements; they haven’t been easily summarizable, but it’s worth watching if you are interested in high-bandwidth usage and the hardware to support it.
The ciss(4) device, if you don’t know offhand, is for a variety of SCSI-3 adapters – mostly ones labeled “HP Smart Array”. Sascha Wildner has imported a large number of driver updates from FreeBSD.
I’m back home and getting back into things, so here’s thing one: Michael W. Lucas was interviewed at BSDCan 2012 for 16 minutes about his recent and upcoming books.
Lucas also recently talked about a problem with port installation on FreeBSD. What he says there I think applies to pkgsrc as well.
(I haven’t even read my email yet, gee whiz.)
I may be on the road as you read this, so I’m trying to pre-pack this Lazy Reading entry. I also pre-apologize for any lack of posts from me.
- The Text Triumvirate: zsh, vim, and tmux.
- Continuing with the mention of zsh, zsh 5.0 is out, including in pkgsrc. (both via)
- For equal time vs. vim, Emacs chat with John Wiegley.
- Perl secret operators. I didn’t know any, and I thought I would! (both via)
- Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 is out, so we can all argue about/dismiss the results in a new way!
- Digital Archaeology: Recovering your Digital History. I have two containers full of Apple ][ disks that I’m not sure what to do with. I can’t throw them out, though, cause it makes me old school. (via)
- Always send patches upstream. John Marino is doing a good job with this.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. UK readers may already be familiar with this artist.
Sascha Wildner’s been working on his own DragonFly live images, in DVD or USB form. It uses XFCE along with a number of other packages listed in his post. They are .xz compressed, so they are nice and small for download, but make sure you have something that knows that format.
Not all flavors of Atom CPU support frequency scaling, as Sven Gaerner found out. This means more heat and more power usage. There’s further details scattered through the thread, but Sascha Wildner found what seems to be the definitive answer of which variants do and do not.
Mihai Carabas has posted his weekly results, showing a 5% improvement in pgbench resultswhen using his scheduler. Vishesh Yadav is working on IN_MOVED_TO/IN_MOVED_FROM flags (part of inotify, I assume). Ivan Sichmann Freitas I haven’t heard from yet. (Ivan, where are you?)
Pierre Abbat noticed that bc(1)‘s usage of GNU readline something that wasn’t GNU readline made it harder to use; Sascha Wildner changed it to use libedit. Pierre’s other complaint, that BSD man page output stays on-screen when completed, is a positive feature. Linux systems that clear man page output enrage me, because I expect to be able to take advantage of my scroll buffer.
Juraj Sipos wrote me to describe MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a live DragonFly image that has additional software preinstalled, and can easily be set to understand Sanskrit. It’s available in DVD and USB versions.
Remember my crazy theory from two weeks ago? Haha! It doesn’t actually prove my idea because it’s a one-time charge, but I feel vindicated.
- The TTY Demystified. (via ftigeot on EFNet #dragonflybsd) What time is it? It’s time to get SIGILL(1)!
- The evolution of PC games. Prepare for a wave of nostalgia when you hear a sound effect you haven’t heard in years. (via)
- Small Linux PCs. At least several of these should run a BSD, and a few are even x86. (via)
- Search the web from Vim. Must I have a Vim tip every time? Apparently so. (via)
Thanks to David Christensen of Broadcom, Sepherosa Ziehau was able to add BCM5718 and BCM57785 support in the new bnx(4) driver.