It’s that Opera thing again. “Sigh“.
Messylaneous for 2010/02/16
It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!
- PkgsrcCon 2010 is May 28th to 30th, in Basel. The date’s been declared, but not much else – yet.
- Chunks of KDE in pkgsrc are now updating to the KDE4 versions by default. This only affects pkgsrc-current users, not pkgsrc-2009Q4.
- An interesting story about computer manufactuing and MicroSD problems.
- In Praise of Online Obscurity – this article makes me think of communities like DragonFly and the other BSDs. In essence, growth causes smaller independent groups to form out of a larger membership, because a social group can only be maintained to a certain size. Perhaps this is why FreeBSD’s evolved a core group, or other groups form, like Wikipedia ‘editors’. (via) I’m catering to my own interests in group dynamics here.
- Jan Lentfer’s brought in his hostapd and wpa_supplicant work, mentioned previously.
BPF problem fixed
Guy Harris found a problem with non-blocking reads from a BPF device that’s common to DragonFly, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. It’s fixed in DragonFly.
A BSD cartoon
Brought to you by iXsystems: a BSD-themed cartoon. We haven’t had one since the one that ran on bsdnews.com… 5 years ago? (via) Updates each Friday.
A week’s worth of posts for you
I can’t keep up with all the things to post. I desperately want to clear my inbox, so here’s a week’s worth of posts all smushed together. Enjoy!
- Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work is almost ready to go.
- Francois Tigeot is looking to find supported RAID hardware for DragonFly; the LSI1068e isn’t useable. Freddie Cash listed a number of different and fully supported cards, and Francois listed some other potential choices.
- While talking about hardware, Steve O’Hara-Smith reported excellent results with a particular Atom 330-based board and DragonFly.
- Stathis Kamperis has added to ‘hammer snapls’ output; an example is in his submit@message.
- The 2.6 release of DragonFly, scheduled for March, will have version 4 of HAMMER. 2.4 has version 2. Upgrading from version 2 to 4 can happen in place, live, and only needs to happen once per volume, not per PFS. That’s about as easy as it gets. More details are available.
- The default sshd config has been updated; this shouldn’t affect your normal operations unless you’re using one of the mentioned options.
- Oliver Fromme linked to more discussion of SSD durability.
- Also, Matthew Dillon posted more notes and benchmark numbers for his swapcache work. There’s been some side benefits too. A man page for swapcache is now available.
- Aggelos Economopoulos’s libevtr has been added, for event tracing. He’s posted some additional notes on this work-in-progress.
- We now have /var/log/daemon, too.
- Notes on prepping for Google Summer of Code 2010 from the GSOC Discussion list; I don’t know if that link is readable for nonsubscribers.
- The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD is out at the end of this short month. Dru writes good books.
- Did you know FreeCiv (a Civilization clone, of sorts) is playable in a web browser? Goodbye free time! Details are available at my favoritest game site.
Phew.
Jeff Roberson on BSDTalk
That was fast – there’s another BSDTalk already! BSDTalk 186 has Jeff Roberson, FreeBSD committer. He’s talking about schedulers and softupdates for a good half hour.
BSD Magazine online now
The first online-only free version of BSD Magazine is out! It’s good, but there’s no DragonFly, darnit. Anyway, it’s worth reading if for no other reason than it’s in pleasant, colorful PDF format.
BSDTalk 185: James Nixon and PC-BSD
James Nixon, iXsystems employee and PC-BSD developer, is interviewed for 16 minutes on BSDTalk 185.
Messylaneous for 2010/02/05
I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:
- Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
- Red Hat did it: opensource.com. Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
- Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
- Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget) Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal. (via)
- The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
- Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache. Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
- More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
- The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.
Jobs jobs jobs
The economy, at least in the U.S., seems to be improving. With that in mind, I’ve seen some traffic on the freebsd-jobs mailing list lately. BSD-specific jobs are harder to come by, so take a look if you’re ‘in the market’.
OSBR: Success factors
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the topic being “success factors”. Many of the articles focus on participation, and it’s an interesting read. February’s theme is “Startups”, with articles due by Jan. 20th if you’re contributing one.
Messylaneous for 2009/12/30
It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I’ve built up over the past few days.
- Hubert Feyrer posted notes on how to mount fixed disks in KDE. This probably works on NetBSD, but I bet it would work on DragonFly too…
- pcc is now able to build an OpenBSD i386 kernel. Will it work for other BSDs? I hope so, eventually.
- The FreeBSD Foundation is in the last hours of donation for 2009 – give if you get a chance. Did you know they get Bad Code Offsets, like carbon offsets? I did not know such a thing exists, though it makes sense.
- Brian Kernighan talking about Elements of Programming Style, in video. (via) Kernighan’s book, “The Practice of Programming“, with Rob Pike, is an excellent read.
pfSense on a podcast
BSDTalk was recently linked here interviewing Randal Schwartz. Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte, who create a podcast called “FLOSS 101 Weekly”, now have an interview with Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler about pfSense. (via) It’s a nice bit of symmetry, and Scott was an early contributor to DragonFly – specifically, the installer.
BSDTalk 183: Randal Schwartz
BSDTalk (4 years old!) has 24 minutes of talk with Randal Schwartz, talking about a whole pile of different subjects. I met Randal before – he’s a decent guy.
BSD hacker job available
A recruiter found me through my administrative role for DragonFly in Google’s Summer of Code, and passed along a job description. I’ll paste it after the cut. If you’re looking for a job (or know someone who might match this job), contact me and I’ll pass contact information around.
Edit: The recruiter has a similar but non-BSD job also available…)
Man, I hope this works out. In the job climate we’ve had the past year or so, helping someone get a job is very fulfilling. Plus, the job sounds cool…
BSDTalk: Josh Paetzel, iXsystems, FreeNAS
BSDTalk 182 offers a very timely 12 minutes of talk with Josh Paetzel of iXsystems, talking about the recently not-BSD then BSD-again FreeNAS. (see previous item)
Speaking of iXsystems: they have a new facility.
Vi, nvi, vim, variety
Alexander Polakov has suggested that nvi (what you get when you type vi) should be replaced with traditional vi, since that would deliver UTF-8 support, and nvi appears to no longer be updated. Other than one objection on split screens, I daresay everyone who needs more features treats the system vi as a fallback and has moved to a new editor. (or that)
New BSD Magazine issue out
The 2010Q1 issue (Is that their numbering now? I’m not sure.) of BSD Magazine is out. (via) Subscribe or pick it up in a local store. Back issues are still available online, too.
Two twitters and a source
If you can produce an article on open source success factors by December 20th, the Open Source Business Resource would like to hear from you. Also, the audio of a recent NYCBUG meeting is available online. Both of those links come from Dru Lavigne’s excellent BSD Twitter feeds. It’s worth watching the BSDEvents one because there’s literally daily BSD-themed events coming up, and she seems to catch every one.
AsiaBSDCon Call for Papers
AsiaBSDCon, which is happening the 11th through 14th of March, 2010, has issued the normal call for papers. (and they nicely posted it to users@) This looks to be the 4th year of this convention – have any readers here been to it?