Michael W. Lucas needs people who know DNSSEC, BIND, have some time, and are willing to criticize him. He’s finished his first draft of DNSSEC Mastery, and needs reviewers.
BSDTalk 223 is out, with 23 minutes of conversation with Michael Dexter about bhyve.
The fine folks at the New York City BSD User Group have created a mailing list specifically for using The Onion Router on BSD. Please join if you are interested in TOR, and especially if you are using something other than FreeBSD, since that’s the only ‘supported’ BSD TOR runs on right now.
The February 2013 issue of BSD Magazine, available as a free PDF, talks about VAX/VMS ‘rehosting’, has a PC-BSD preview, and other things. The teaser paragraph for the “Fear, Loathing and Misunderstandings” article (shown on that linked page) is perfect.
This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.
- An oldie but goodie. ENHANCE. This will make anyone who has done photo/video editing twitch. Check the author’s Tumblr for more supercuts. (indirectly via)
- Many people complain about regular expressions (and more recently), but they are an insanely powerful tool if you know them well. If you do, figure out this crossword. (PDF) (via)
- Followup on the first two links in that last item: xkcd drives a lot of traffic!
- If you are on Windows, you probably use PuTTY for ssh. It saves everything in the registry, which can occasionally mean losing all your configuration. There’s manual ways to save it, but there’s also PuTTYtray. (I’ve used portaPuTTY in the past, but it seems to be missing/no longer updated.)
- Actually, holy crap there’s a lot of variations/addons for PuTTY.
- That makes sense given how many terminal emulators there are, really.
- Why piping something off the Internet right to a shell isn’t a good idea. (via)
- Remember when the computer section in bookstores had books that involved programming? (unfair, I know.)
- “Don’t Be A Stranger“, musing on how there isn’t enough meeting strangers through the Internet any more. Here’s the odd thought I had while reading that article: I couldn’t pick most of the other DragonFly developers out of a lineup, but I’ve been working and talking with some of them for a decade.
- You could build Photoshop version 1 yourself – just substitute the original Mac libraries.
- Related: Photoshop is a city for everyone.
- Some of the oldest color film footage. Not the oldest,but possibly some of the earliest commercial film. Of course, the first thing filmed are young, attractive women. This is a re-occurring theme.
- Hey, a comprehensive year-end BSD roundup.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server. Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it. (via)
Wait, this is better! That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry. At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever. Even better than Elemental!
Or is it ‘statii’? English is wonderfully inconsistent. Anyway, Michael W. Lucas has posted an update on his two upcoming publications: the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD and DNSSEC Mastery. Both are in progress, and you can download the ‘pre-release’ version of DNSSEC Mastery now.
Remember I mentioned FOSDEM a few days ago? The X.Org presentation slides are up, and the mostly-about-BSD “The future of X.org on non-Linux systems” presentation slides are included.
No theme evolved this week, but that’s OK.
- Here’s a good coincidence: I already had a link to post from Ycombinator about the rather scary Ken Thompson compiler hack. Note that the Ycombinator answers are generally, “Nah, this hack is extremely unlikely to happen.” Except Christian Neukirchen happened to note separately that this really happened as recently as 2009, with Delphi.
- This poster doesn’t understand that “removing the license” is not a legitimate use of BSD-licensed code.
- That crazy anti-BSD ranter on phoronix is getting a fan club – just what every troll desires, unfortunately.
- OpenBSD is actually looking at paring down ports, which makes sense when you read why.
- LearnYouAHaskell.com – a free tutorial on the programming language Haskell. It’s entertainingly written. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Javascript is the new Perl. I can see that. (via)
- Courier Prime, a new version of the ‘traditional’ Courier monospace font. (via) Reading about Courier Prime to the end leads to a mention of Inconsolata as a good ‘coding’ font. Anyone tried it? Sans-serif monospace fonts are the most subtle way you can make your xterm look modern, I think. Update: Thomas Klausner just added courier-prime to pkgsrc, so you can try it now. Inconsolata is already there.
- Who hasn’t thought about doing this with the computers in their house, really?
- “Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them.“
- A modem from the 1960s, communicating. I’d like this even if it didn’t work; the box is nice. I remember watching text scroll on screen like that with a 1200-baud unit. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Related to that: The sound of the dialup, pictured. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: MeTube: August sings Carmen ‘Habanera’. Might be NSFW, probably will make you mildly confused or uncomfortable. Here’s the ‘making of’ video which is all in German, I think. If that’s too much, try a recent Cyriak-animated video. I never thought I’d recommend a Cyriak video as the less disturbing thing to watch.
The Phoronix benchmark has been pretty Linux-specific over recent history. However, whatever your feelings about benchmarks in general, it looks like there’s a distinct effort to improve BSD support.
FOSDEM is happening this weekend in Brussels, Belgium. Among the other talks there, OpenBSD developer Matthieu Herrb will be talking about X.org on non-Linux systems. That’s I think meaning “BSD”. (via)
Michael W. Lucas is working on a DNSSEC book that he’s self-publishing, similar to SSH Mastery. He’s making an early draft available for purchase, at a discount. You get access to the updates, so you effectively get the book for less, plus you can offer feedback before the publishing date.
This is a familiar concept for software, where early purchasers get access to a ‘beta’ version of software for testing… It’ll be interesting to see how it works for a book.
Will Backman has a new BSDTalk episode up, with a bit of Peter Salus from BSDCan 2011 and a bit of Raspberry Pi on FreeBSD.
We need more fiddling-with-BSD-on-hardware stuff out there. That would be a good thing for Youtube – hint, hint.
Here’s an unsolicited testimonial for a BSD-based company. My employer recently bought some of the assets of another company, in another state. I showed up not sure exactly what I’d encounter, since the facility had never had anything better than out-of-state IT support via phone, and there had been very little time to plan.
The facility had 3 different network gateway devices from varying manufacturers, all old, and mostly dead. The one working ancient Linksys small business gateway wasn’t physically able to work the way I wanted for extending our corporate network. So, in a mild panic, I grabbed one of the defunct machines there and installed pfSense – a FreeBSD-based firewall/gateway solution, for those who aren’t familiar with it. This is not unlike Michael W. Lucas’s BSD Origin Story.
It worked wonderfully. It was very easy to configure. I had exactly one problem: certain protocols like RDP would drop every few minutes. I bought the basic support tier for pfSense – and had a working answer immediately. Even with the support purchase, this has been cheaper and less work than purchasing the Cisco equipment my workplace normally uses.
Peter Avalos has updated m4 for DragonFly. This will bring us a little more in sync with the other BSDs. Also, John Marino has updated flex, which is apparently 17 years old? Meaning it hasn’t been updated in DragonFly ever, and then not in FreeBSD before that, for a long time. Looking at the timeline on the flex web page appears to match.
If you have a BSD Certification, and it’s nearing the end of its 5-year term, the BSD Certification Group has published the guidelines for re-certification. Has it really been 5 years since the first certifications happened? Geez.
I found this off of the NYCBUG mailing list, so hat tip to them.
It’s a very short week this week. I was on the road for work, so I didn’t see anywhere as much of the Internet as I may have liked. Count my dports writeup yesterday as part of this and it averages out to a good amount of reading.
- Favorite Linux Commands. Not all of them are Linux/bash specific. (via)
- Advanced Vim Registers. Or buffers, or clipboards, if you want to get messy with terms. (via)
- “I hate BSD so much!”, he yelled at his spittle-flecked monitor.
- TOME, a roguelike. Read through the comments for discussion of many other roguelike games.
Your unrelated link of the week: New Tokyo Ondo. via Jesse Moynihan, whose Forming comic on that site is an epic read. Epic, as in it’s actually telling a NSFW world creation story.
January’s issue of BSD Magazine has something I didn’t expect: an article on panoramic photography on BSD – among other material.
BSDCan 2013 is looking for papers, all due by the 19th. I mentioned it before, but a reminder went out and Michael W. Lucas wrote up a lengthy explanation of how and why you should present that paper.
Are you anywhere near Italy? BSD-Day is happening April 6th, 2013, in Naples, Italy, and it would be nice to have some DragonFly representation. (seen on #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
As seen on OpenBSD Journal, the videos for EuroBSDCon 2012 are online. There’s a lot of sessions there, so set aside some time.