In Other BSDs: 2013/08/17

Not just source links, this week:

A book review somewhere else: Network Security Monitoring

Michael W. Lucas has a review up of Richard Bejtlich’s “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring“.  Both of them are long-term BSD users, and Bejtlich, if I remember correctly, was part of the design of Capsicum, the security framework that is serving as a Summer of Code project for DragonFly right now.  So it’s worth looking at his book.  And/or looking at his blog, for those who want more.

vBSDCon registration open

Registration is open for vBSDCon, happening in Dulles, Virginia, USA, on October 25th through 27th. There’s some neat-sounding presentations listed.

I think that is the same location where I went to a rather spectacular pre-dotcom-crash presentation from Time Warner/Road Runner back in 1999.  The hotel was great; the presenters were befuddled.  An internal account manager ran up a $3,000 bar tab in one night on a company credit card…  I still have the fancy Guinness glass he bought me.  I don’t think this convention will work exactly the same way, but unlike my 1999 trip, the speakers at this one will actually know what they are talking about.

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/11

Again, lots of links.  Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”

Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads.  Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA.  It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’.  I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.

Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times.  You may want to turn down your volume.

In Other BSDs for 2013/08/03

How many tags can I fit on this post?  I think I’ll aim for Saturday for these BSD catchup posts.  In theory, I can prep this and the Sunday Lazy Reading posts ahead of time, since they tend to be all-week items, and have the whole weekend covered.

 

In Other BSDs summary

Here’s what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:

I’m going to have to set a specific day of the week aside for these.

Sales stats and books

While these aren’t his BSD books, Michael W. Lucas has an interesting post up about the sales on his two recent books, SSH Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery.  I’m always interested in seeing how self-publishing models work, whether it’s software or books or music.  He points out that the point of his DNSSEC book is to see if a very difficult subject can be covered in a book like that – which it is.  There’s very few published books that go that in-depth.

(I’m hoping for a whole “Mastery” series covering topics other writers don’t, especially in a BSD-friendly way.)

BSD, Playstation 4, and disk storage

Supposedly it’s FreeBSD 9.0 under the hood on the new Playstation 4 systems.  What does this mean for FreeBSD, or driver support, or BSD in general, or what you can run on that hardware?  Possibly nothing other than a vague sense of superiority.

On the other hand, this BoingBoing article makes a good point about commodity hardware and its immediate utility.  It’s an effective network storage device and it doesn’t even mention FreeNAS.

Julio Merino and NetBSD, and volunteerism

Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why.  I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project.  I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.

I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done.  I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”.  All the BSDs could use that.  (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)

Lazy Reading for 2013/06/16

This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post.  Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser.  Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)

Lazy Reading for 2013/06/09

Not as wordy this week, but still wordy.  And linky!

  • Max Headroom and the Strange World of Pseudo-CGI. A discussion of how old fake CGI can look better than modern, real CGI. This is an opinion I’ve had for quite a while, and my children pretty much ignore it every time I bring it up.  (via)
  • The Colby Walkmac, which predates the Mac Luggable.  Linked to because it includes good pictures of what the (external) hardware was like.  I find all the old ports interesting, since it’s all USB and the occasional eSATA these days… not that I’m complaining!  I’ve never had a good experience with a 9-pin serial port.  (via)
  • A brief education on escaping characters.
  • I get worried when remotely rebooting a server in a different town or even state.  In Praise of Celestial Mechanics covers much more stressful circumstances: interplanetary reboots.  Does Voyager 1 or 2 have an ‘uptime’ function?
  • The equivalent of what you are doing right now, 20 years ago.  I personally never got to see this; my experience was MUDs.  Speaking of which…
  • The Birth of MMOs: World of Warcraft’s debt to MUD.  MUD == MMO, Roguelike == Diablo/Torchlight, Doom == almost everything else.  There’s a number of game archetypes that haven’t changed in some time.  (via)
  • Playing with powerlines.  I used to work at a company that used these lines for data transfer.  It was neat technology, but it sure wasn’t easy to set up.  Imagine wiring a city but only being able to use Ethernet hubs.  Not switches, hubs.  That, combined with undersized ARP caches/MAC tables, made it really difficult.
  • OpenVPN on FreeBSD, which will come in handy for at least several readers, I’m sure, as the directions should apply to any BSD.
  • Is there anything DNS can’t be used for?  Cause now it’s domain-based mail policy publishing.  (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • Have you tried DragonFly?” posts on various forums seem to pop up with some regularity.
  • Uses of tmux, explained.  A slide show talking about how tmux works.  (via)

Unrelated link of the week: I’ve had several deadlines and a mail server with issues this week at work, so this is all I got.