BSD magazine site up

As mentioned here before and now on FreeBSD – the Unknown Giant, there will soon be “BSD Magazine“. It’s due out in 2Q 2008.

Digging around on the site shows some promotional material that says “Linux” where it should say “BSD”. This is probably because it’s repurposed from one of Software Media LLC’s other publications.  It should be interesting.  If you have a itch to write, they are taking submissions, though it sounds like they’ve already got the first issue ready.

2.0 release dated

2.0 will be branched on the 9th and released on the 23rd of this month.  If you have something you want in that release, hurry!  HAMMER will be included in an alpha state.

rsync vs. cvsup

Vincent Stemen did a good amount of testing of cvsup vs. rsync in terms of update speed. Rsync came out way ahead, though as a few people noted, rsyncd’s load relative to cvsupd on a server serving many clients is unknown. In any case, cvsup does not build on DragonFly via pkgsrc, so it looks like rsync is generally a better choice, plus most mirrors are using it now. HAMMER may provide a better alternative, in any case.

While on the topic: Ulf Lilleengen’s blog post about improving csup.

Modding by non-modders

An experiment in Barcelona, last year, took a number of people with no coding experience but plenty of graphic design experience whatever and got them to modify a version of the old game Breakout. The results were quite interesting. You’ll need Flash to see the video of the abstract results. (Via waxy)

Why do I mention this? Open source systems tend to assume users are either very experienced or totally inexperienced. Looking for people who don’t fit either of those categories is a much more useful goal, as it produces new methods and ways of looking at things.