How to grind that axe, for donations

Whomever submitted this story to Slashdot really doesn’t like FreeBSD; they’re describing FreeBSD’s annual end-of-year fund drive as failed.  The month-long drive is only about a week old and has already picked up donations at a faster rate than any previous year’s donation drive, but apparently the poster – and Slashdot’s editors – can’t be bothered to do math.  While we’re on the topic, donate to the FreeBSD Foundation; they do good things.

(There’s DragonFly too, though we’re not as ambitious or officially 501(c)(3) non-profit.)

Ecumenical BSD

A person labeled only as ‘wicked’ sent me a link to this conversation about BSD unification.  I’ve seen the topic brought up before, and I’d argue that it’s already happening, slowly.  DragonFly has code brought in from FreeBSD, pkgsrc from NetBSD, pf and dhclient from OpenBSD, etc.  ‘bmake’ is used in NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonFly now.  Clang works across the board, I think (dunno the status on OpenBSD).  There’s more of that cross-pollination going on if you think about it.

Lazy Reading for 2012/10/07

DragonFly 3.2 branches tomorrow if all goes to plan. Until then, I have a lot of reading here for you.

Your unrelated link of the week: Dog Shaming.  I have a parrot, rabbit, and lizard.  They seem like easy, normal pets compared to some of these stories.

 

Lazy Reading for 2012/09/23

The weather is finally turning cooler, which makes me happy.

  • I don’t think I’ve seen this before: Very old UNIX releases, listed for running in emulation.  (via)
  • Where the red-black tree name came from.  A red-black tree underpins Hammer 1’s data structures, though it does not in Hammer 2.  (also via)
  • Someone with a HP passport login want to help this guy?  He just needs to reinstall Windows in IDE mode, or perhaps find the right sysctl to toggle.
  • The acme editor, from Plan 9.  I didn’t realize it’s 20 years old.
  • Speaking of editors, Replace in Multiple Files with Vim.  I haven’t seen the argdo command before, or the Vim Ninjas site.  Their color schemes article is useful just for the screenshots. (via)
  • Adbuntu.  It’s not as bad or as inconsequential as most reactions would lead you to believe, but advertising within an OS seems heavy-handed.  The BSD model has been to use the operating system as a vehicle for selling hardware, and that’s been much more successful.  (see iOS, PC-BSD.)
  • Where Did the Internet Come From?
  • The map for Adventure.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Victorian Sci-Fi.  It’s not just a reference list, it’s a link to a lot of the original material, since copyright no longer applies.

SYSV shared memory vs. mmap

Francois Tigeot benchmarked the recent Postgres 9.3 release.  Postgres apparently switched to using mmap instead of SYSV shared memory, and Francois has done this to show the performance differences.  (view the PDF in his post.)  Of course, work has continued since this was posted, so there should be new numbers soon, and new changes I’ll document in a future post.

I haven’t found a reference to the exact decision Postgres made on how to handle memory; please post a link in comments if you know a good source.