The 24th Chaos Computer Congress is at the end of this year in Berlin, and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert is going to be there, along with other DragonFly folks like Sascha Wildner and Nuno Antunes. Here’s a chance to mix with other DragonFly users (and a lot of other people…)
I’d love to see a binary update system for DragonFly, similar to this alpha version of ‘haze’ for NetBSD. (Via)
Here’s two articles for your persual: First, this Guardian Unlimited article attacks one of those ‘well-known facts’ that Betamax failed despite being better than VHS. The title says it explicitly: Why VHS was better than Betamax. The author even manages to mention the Windows vs. Unix idea that is an offshoot of this.
Second, a New Yorker article for those who care about patents and copyright: The “Piracy Paradox” describes how a lack of copyright in fashion design had led to better business – perhaps this could apply to software design too?
Both links via things magazine. So, do you all (the readers) like when I go off the beaten path for related material like this?
The 386 processor is no longer officially supported for DragonFly. I say “officially” because it probably didn’t work anyway, as I doubt anyone was crazy enough to try it in the last few years.
Hasso Tepper has added some USB to serial drivers: uticom(4) for TI TUSB3410, moscom(4) for the MosChip Semiconductor MCS7703, and uchcom(4), for WinChipHead CH341/CH340. Dmitry Komissaroff contributed to the uticom(4) driver.
Some entertainment: This article at American Scientist talks about programming language choice and the arguments that have come up over the years. The bibliography at the end of this 5-page essay is worth special attention, because of the links to early documents describing these battles over languages and choices nobody thinks of these days, like PL/I or Cobol.
Some specific links to articles cited:
- How do we tell truths that might hurt? (Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1975)
- On holy wars and a plea for peace (Danny Cohen, 1980)
- Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language (Brian W. Kernighan, 1981)
- Computer Languages History (Éric Lévénez, 2006)
- Programming languages and their relationship styles (Meredith L. Patterson, 2006)
All the citations are worth investigating – take some time to read them.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made more changes to ipfw, which means a more complete rebuild is required for bleeding edge users when upgrading. This is in addition to the earlier ipfw/dummynet changes.
Hasso Tepper updated the root servers list to accomodate an IP change. The interesting part of this is Hasso linking to something I didn’t know existed: the ICANN blog.
Gregory Neil Shapiro has updated Sendmail to version 8.14.2.
Peter Avalos has upgraded libarchive to version 2.4.0, which apparently eats much less CPU than earlier, inspired by benchmarks comparing it to other tar implementations.
Sepherosa Ziehau has removed IPFW1; IPFW2, which is already in the system, is generally compatible from a configuration point of view. Check the ipfw man page to find out what’s different.
If you are running bleeding edge code, Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to ipfw and dummynet that require a more complete rebuild of code on the next update.
Matthew Dillon warns of struct vattr changes being done to support his new filesystem, HAMMER. This may cause problems in userland, though of course this can only affect you if you are running the bleeding edge of code.
This Associated Press story about a teacher assigning Wikipedia article writing as a project for students notes that “Knowing their work was headed for the Web … helped students reach higher”. I’d draw a parallel to open source, since knowing your code (or perhaps your news blog…) will be viewed by multiple people encourages harder work. (Via)
This recent “Puffy’s Marathon” article covering the OpenBSD 4.2 release, on OnLAMP.com, mentions that the new OpenBSD support for Broadcom AirForce/AirPort Extreme devices (bwi(4)) came from Sepherosa Ziehau’s work in DragonFly.
Dmitry Komissaroff has done his own port of the bluetooth stack from NetBSD to DragonFly; check his early version out if you have suggestions, as he’s still working on some of the devices involved.
A recent PDF of an “About FreeBSD 7” presentation by Kris Kennaway includes DragonFly 1.8 results in some of its graphs. The graphs show results with sysbench and MySQL/PostgresSQL – unfortunately, DragonFly performance is still comparable to FreeBSD 4 because of the presence of the Giant Lock. (Thanks, Pieter Dumon)
MeetBSD is happening in about a month in Warsaw, Poland – registration is open now. (Via.)Â There’s already a good slate of speakers lined up.