BSD – Page 78 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2012/09/172012/09/16

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.

2012/09/06

BSD Magazine for Sept. 2012

The September issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as usual. Visit the site to find out the table of contents.

2012/09/052012/09/05

BSDTalk 219: David Gwynne and OpenBSD

David Gwynne talks for 31 minutes about OpenBSD on BSDTalk 219. Also, Will Backman, the host of BSDTalk is heading to Tbilisi, Georgia next month. Say ‘hi’ if you’re a Georgian.

2012/09/04

Some more books to read

This recent question asked on-list about creating your own file system meandered into good reference books. This so far was “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System“, “Modern Operating Systems“, and the paper “Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX“. Looking for links on those things led me to this Unix filesystem history paper from IBM, which is fun reading.

I’m saying that unironically! It really is an interesting document to read, for historical and general knowledge. I am a nerd.

2012/09/03

BSDMag, collected

BSD Magazine has a “Best of 2011” issue out for purchase; it has updated versions of various articles published over the last year in BSD Magazine. The price is not clear on the website.

2012/08/192012/08/18

Lazy Reading for 2012/08/19

I think I’ve made it through my backlog of things to post. For no apparent reason, I ended up with a whole bunch of ‘this vs. that’ links this week.

BSD vs. Linux. The target article is way old, but it’s interesting to see the comments.
Arch vs. Slackware, a friendly comparison. Mentions BSD in passing, and Arch is the most BSD-ish Linux distribution I hear mentioned. The package count for both Arch and Slackware is much smaller than I expected, relative to pkgsrc. (via previous link.)
Internet arguments about similar products, crystallized: WikiVs. All the arguments you’ve ever seen, plus more.
Emacs for Android. Requires “a rather big display”. (via)
It’s somewhat off-topic for this site, but I’ll mention it: I read Ubuntu Made Easy from No Starch Press (who publishes a number of BSD books) recently and reviewed it on Amazon.
The original drawing for the HP-35 calculator. The creation story is neat, but if you look closely at that drawing, you can see the little bumps in the red lines where the artist used a radius template to draw the curves with his marker. I learned to render that way, and it’s a visual flavor you don’t see often, given the ubiquity of computer rendering. (via)
Maaaaybe it’s time to slowly sidle away from MySQL? Lemme bring out my favorite quote. (via many places)
The problem and the fragmentation of content and communication. Maybe it’s just me that finds this interesting because of what I do here.
Ken Thompson’s debugging method, as told by Rob Pike. Sounds a lot like the Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm.

Your unrelated link of the week: Taipan! I played this on the Apple ][ and loved it. The buy-low-sell-high game is an old genre that hasn’t been used in newer games in the same fashion as roguelikes or sidescrollers. The only recent equivalents I can think of are Drug Wars and maaaaybe Eve Online.

2012/08/12

BSD Magazine for August

I spent the last week on an island in Lake Huron in Canada, so I missed that the latest issue of BSD Magazine is out. I’ll catch up when I can. Anything interesting happen while I was gone?

2012/08/052012/08/04

Lazy Reading for 2012/08/05

I seem to include a vi/vim tip every week. It’s not on purpose, or at least it wasn’t until now.

vimwiki – maintain a wiki within Vim. Not as extreme an idea as you’d think. (via)
Oh yeah, something about git too. How about “10 Things I Hate About Git“? (same via)
Revisiting the 2002 Radio Shack Catalog. Drop your phone/tablet and look at this. It’s only 10 years old. (via)
The ELF Tool Chain project. This is a good idea. I found out about it by reading this description of the build system they are working on. (via)
I’m sure anyone reading this is familiar with BSD – license, history, and so on. But are you familiar with the BSD battles with GRizzEAT?
The apparently accidental origin of dotfiles, from Rob Pike. I wish his Google+ page had an RSS feed. (via)
Speaking of Google things, did you know there’s a Google Store? Where you can buy such things as a light-up dog leash with the Google logo? And a Go Gopher Tote. Actually, the tote is kinda neat.
Is the Go Gopher a Renee French illustration like Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny? Apparently yes. It’s from a WFMU t-shirt, and Renee French has a number of comics you can buy. Her Marbles in my Underpants book is one of the more disturbing things I’ve ever read.
If you aren’t familiar with WFMU, you really should be. It’s my second-favorite radio station after my local college station, WBER.
When I wander off track, I run.

Your unrelated link of the week: a thorough investigation of the history of the ‘long s’ character, via. If that’s too cerebral for you, try this video of a man making turkeys gobble, which made me laugh and laugh.

2012/08/02

EuroBSDCon 2012 registration open

If you’re going to be near Warsaw, Poland, in late October, you can visit EuroBSDCon. Registration is open now.

(The logo makes me think of a certain meme.)

2012/07/312012/07/31

BSDTalk 218: Michael W. Lucas, also ports/pkgsrc opinions

I’m back home and getting back into things, so here’s thing one: Michael W. Lucas was interviewed at BSDCan 2012 for 16 minutes about his recent and upcoming books.

Lucas also recently talked about a problem with port installation on FreeBSD. What he says there I think applies to pkgsrc as well.

(I haven’t even read my email yet, gee whiz.)

2012/07/152012/07/14

Lazy Reading for 2012/07/15

It’s a short week this week, but that’s OK. The last few weeks have been a deluge of links.

Coming Home to Vim. More tips than you can get through in one reading, I think. (via)
This is a time saver: Vim completion. (via same place)
You might be a Unix geek. (again)
Hey, this is a good idea: OpenBSD commits on Twitter.
I miss cassettes.
“BSD is a Microsoft plot” is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while.
I like this Kickstarter for a USB LED indicator, and not just because it includes the man page reference in the project name. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Crane Recursion. (via)

2012/07/10

Near NYC? See tmux

NYCBUG has a presentation tomorrow night titled “Bring a Box, Rock Your tmux(1)“, with Matthew Story. If you’re near the area, it’s worth seeing.

(posted for the benefit of the people who keep telling me “stop using screen and switch to tmux.”)

2012/07/06

July BSD Magazine out

July’s BSD Magazine has, among other things, an article from Michael W. Lucas along with a 30% off coupon for his Absolute FreeBSD book. There’s also an interview of Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo. Apparently DuckDuckGo uses FreeBSD? That’s good news.

2012/07/02

Hardware reports given out

New company Gainframe is offering up OpenBSD dmesg/pcidump/usbdevs output for every system they build. I was originally going to link to this in a Lazy Reading entry, but then I realized it’s also a new company specializing in BSD-compatible hardware. Read the interview; I met Michael Dexter at the last NYCBSDCon and he is a decent guy.

We need more of this sort of specifically targeted work. Sites that rely on crowd-sourced contribution are good, but it’s not necessarily comprehensive, and you need a very large crowd for it to work.

2012/07/012012/06/29

Lazy Reading for 2012/07/01

It’s summer, and I’m too warm. I’m whiny but still making with the links:

“The return of the FreeBSD desktop“, where Dag-Erling Smørgrav describes getting a BSD desktop working again due to a new ports system on FreeBSD. It’s still too messy a process to get to a GUI, I think, and to support that I’ll point at this post of a KDE developer giving up. (via) One of the issues is the rapid flux of the underlying systems X has to run on – something touched on before.
Here’s someone looking for a ‘Linux like BSD‘. Most of the answers are “then use BSD”, though the poster is hampered by the new Intel video chipset.
These “Ringbow” joystick controllers are described as being for games, but I think they could work as controllers like the Thinkpad nub. (via) It’s a Kickstarter project, so might be worth your money.
With some minor changes, this command could find you all the BSD-licensed items in pkgsrc, I think.
Phoronix thinks FreeBSD and Ivy Bridge don’t work together. I could have sworn I’ve already heard of Ivy Bridge systems running BSDs… Take it with a grain of salt.
Several readers will find the intext: Google search phrase incredibly useful. (via) Also, typing ‘*’ in Google Maps actually does what you’d expect.
Less is exponentially more, Rob Pike talking about Go. (via) The note about the Bell Labs numbering scheme explains a lot about UNIX’s terseness.
Visual Git Reference. (via) Showing a physical position to correlate with time is really helpful here.
A review of FreeBSD Device Drivers, the new No Starch book. Much of it should apply to DragonFly, I should think.
I suppose this Dwarf Fortress book was inevitable.

Your unrelated link of the day: The Kleptones are great, and this collection of the music that influenced Paul Simon’s Graceland is a wonderful find. A happier album I’ve never heard. I feel nostalgic for the days when you had to actually search for music.

2012/06/30

BSDTalk 217 – Turning the tables

Will Backman, the usual interview in BSDTalk episodes, gets interviewed himself by Paul Schenkeveld, for 14 minutes.

2012/06/18

Riak on BSD

Riak, an open source distributed database product, is running on FreeBSD at least. It’s probably able to run on other BSD flavors given that it sounds like the developers were actively working in that direction; someone want to get it into pkgsrc?

2012/06/172012/06/16

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/17

I have such a surplus of links these days that I started this Lazy Reading two weeks ago.

Setting Up spamd(8) With Secondary MXes In Play In Four Easy Steps. Reprinted from bsdly.
A Brief History of Videogames. (via) A 3 minute movie.
Networking by Example with the Packet Construction Set. An mp3 of the NYCBUG presentation from George Neville-Neil. I wish I was just a little closer to NYC so I could attend these… but then I’d be in Syracuse or Albany, and that’s not as cool as Rochester.
I knew Interix existed, but I had never looked at it. Apparently there’s community-created bundles of software to go with it. I think pkgsrc works with it too.
SSD prices appear to be crashing. Now may be a good time to buy. Having a SSD is possibly the bestest part of my work laptop.
Buffers, Windows, and Tabs in Vim. A good explanation for terms unfortunately used somewhat differently in Vim that you’d expect. (via)
Magenta, Darwin/BSD (so sorta FreeBSDish?) on top of Linux. Quoted from page: “This is a very weird project.” As time goes on, what you would think of as BSD goes through new mutations and growths. (also via)
Some selected BSD desktops. XFCE seems to be the most popular; that may not be a surprise in an environment where you are compiling or installing yourself. Various Linux distributions coming with a set desktop hide the pain of compiling all of GNOME/KDE from the user. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of debate.
I never heard the term troll-hugging before, but this description of how a caustic software community will become a smaller software community makes sense. (via)
This emulated VMSCluster setup cost probably close to $150. It would have cost a quarter million or more when I was in college. (via)
It’s a Learning Perl book, from Wrox. But the whole thing appears to be available online at O’Reilly’s site for free? I’m not sure what that is.
Zork 1 played via Twitter.
The Interrupted Unix FAQ. (via) Funny, but probably also a good thing to memorize.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Elfquest, every issue ever. The dialogue is cheesy but the original art is fun, in a way that grabbed me when I read it at 10 years of age.

2012/06/142012/06/14

Do you blog? Write? Post? Tell me!

If you’re involved in application development or BSD development in any way, and you write about it somewhere on a personal blog or page or publication, please let me know. (justin@shiningsilence.com)

My goal is to point out as much interesting development as possible, and I find that getting notes right from the people that make them is the best way. Trade publications and magazines will skip over that stuff and go to the press releases, but that doesn’t work for BSD. I’ve found better, more interesting writing watching Peter Hansteen’s blog or Trivium. If you have someplace you write about technology, and especially BSD-related development, please point me at your RSS feed.

2012/06/13

Another BSD in town

Seen multiple places, but Tomas Bodzar was the first to tell me: there’s a new BSD in town, called Bitrig. It’s forked from OpenBSD. The first release is planned for the end of the month, and it appears to have a more aggressive intended development plan than OpenBSD.