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Patch cross-pollination

I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently DragonFly’s version of patch(1) comes from OpenBSD and NetBSD.  FreeBSD’s old version of patch is being replaced by this and modified to match the old one’s behaviors.  It would be worthwhile to bring these changes back, if possible, just to reduce the differences in a utility that’s already been around the world, so to speak.

As an aside, I always thought patch was one of Larry Wall’s unsung successes, and I’m entertained by any program that has “Hmm…” as one of its official outputs.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/03/03

I am all over the place with links this week – some of them pretty far off the path.  There’s a lot, too, so enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: I’ve already been offbeat enough in this Lazy Reading; I don’t have anything else.

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3 very different commits

Here’s 3 recent and different commits to DragonFly that I’m commenting on all at once:

  1. Peter Avalos upgraded libarchive in DragonFly to 3.1.2, with a note of the changes.  An ordinary and appreciated update.
  2. Sascha Wildner updated the ISO639 file to include the newest update: “Standard Moroccan Tamazight”.  There’s no particular utility to that; I just like saying “Standard Moroccan Tamazight” out loud.
  3. Work on poudriere, the utility for bulk-building DPorts packages, has caused some nice speedups for DragonFly in extremely stressful situations.  See one of Matthew Dillon’s recent commits.

I really wish the other BSD projects would include commit lines in the mail message subjects, so it was easier to catch things like these.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/02/24

A calm week, for once.

  • Via Michael W. Lucas: Absolut OpenBSD.
  •  Another ‘How I customize Vim’ style post.  These things always sound great, but I worry that it’s not something that can be duplicated.  If you had to rebuild or duplicate your Vim environment elsewhere, you’d have to write out your own instructions.  Not impossible, but I don’t have to do that for anything else.  (via)
  • Twine, a game creation tool that really requires only writing.  (via)
  • The Oxford Comma, or how it doesn’t matter.  (via)
  • The Story of the PING Program.  I could have sworn I linked to this before.  I remember having someone explain ping to me when I was young and had little experience of IP networking; it seemed like magic where the computers would actually talk.  (via vsrinivas on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • ARPANet, 1971, as a tattoo.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman.  All the early issues, available in electronic form, for pay-what-you-want.  (And I advise paying; it’s a fun comic)  Look at a sample page if you are curious.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/02/17

This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.

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!

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Lazy Reading for 2013/02/03

No theme evolved this week, but that’s OK.

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.

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A book in beta

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.

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A quick commercial anecdote for pfSense

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.