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Lazy Reading for 2011/09/04

It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America.  About time, too!  I don’t like the heat.  Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday.  I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/08/28

This week has taught me one thing for sure: Always make sure your backup generator is working.  And over-plan battery capacity.  That’s actually two things, but what the heck.  I’m tired, for reasons that can probably be inferred!  I’m not the only one suffering these problems, it seems.

  • There is a certain subset of readers here that will find this fascinating: a video of a game postmortem.  Specifically, Elite.  (via)  Needs Flash.
  • This is as good an article as any I’ve seen describing where the tablet computer market is going, at The Economist.
  • Remember RetroBSD, mentioned here previously?  Here’s some discussion of it.
  • EuroBSDCon’s 2011 conference is open for registration, but the early bird discount only lasts until the end of August, so jump on it soon if you’re thinking of going.  It’s the 10th anniversary of the event!
  • PHP 5.3 is coming to pkgsrc as default, soon?  The PHP 5.2 -> 5.3 transition seems to mess up a lot of code because of some changes in the way things are handled, or at least that’s my experience, so watch out.
  • Make sure you aren’t running mod_deflate on your Apache 2.x server.
  • Kristaps Dzonsons, the fellow behind mdocml (which is in DragonFly now and mentioned here before) is working on a mdoc manual.  It’s an actual book, with examples.  It’s titled “Practical UNIX Manuals: mdoc”, which sounds like part of a series, though I don’t know if there’s anything else.  I’d sure like it if there was.  (via Undeadly.)  Look very closely at the mdoc web page and you will see the markup, too.  Neat!
  • Breakout treated as a musical instrument, in 1983.  That’s too glib a summary of this explanation of an old book studying the game Breakout and playing it.  Really, read the article, and remember that the book described would just be lost in a sea of blog posts noise today.  (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella.  This is the comic that ruined Batman for me.  I can’t unthink it.

 

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Lazy Reading for 08/21/2011

Ah, August.  The month where everybody goes on vacation.  I’ve been gone off and on for the last few weeks, so my link collection has been slower, but I’ve been able to keep up something.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nedroid.  “Beartato” is one of the best names ever.

Yeah, unrelated links seem to always be comics.  They offer the most reading.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/08/07

I’m throwing this in as a late update as I catch up on what happened while I was on the road last week.

  • Venkatesh Srinivas is doing The Right Thing and making sure patches get applied to the original software, not just in pkgsrc.  (bitcoin, in this case.)  Thanks!
  • Hey, more reviews (they agree with mine) for Practical Packet Analysis, from other No Starch authors.
  • RetroBSD: a tiny version of BSD, based on 2.11BSD and running on MIPS hardware, is available.  That was the one that ran on PDP-11 systems, so the small footprint is no surprise.  (According to the site) It uses a tenth of the memory, can run its own C compiler, and can fork.  Apparently uClinux can’t do any of those things.

Your unrelated link for the day: Rotate Your Owl. (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2011/07/24

Lazy reading is easy when it’s been this hot out.  In fact, I may melt before this article gets published.

  • Ecdysis – a NAT64 gateway program.  I link to it for two reasons.  1: You will probably need to NAT 6-to-4 sooner or later, and 2: it uses PF and so is BSD-compatible. (via)
  • Don’t not copy that floppy! (also via)  My original Apple ][ disk for Castle Wolfenstein is probably no longer functional.  Not that I have equipment to play it on…
  • World timezones, as a visible map.  (via)   I mention time zone updates here on occasion, and this is a immediate guide to what a strange patchwork of zones it is.  You can’t even see some of the really tiny/crazy ones.
  • A crappy way to start your day.  Nobody ever enjoys that call from work…

And now, a link that has nothing to do with this.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/07/17

Man, it’s like the whole Internet decided to take a nap lately.  Warm weather in the northern hemisphere does that.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/06/26

Somehow, I ended up with the most concise link listing I’ve ever done, even though I have a pretty good batch here.  Go figure.

 

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Lazy reading for 2011/06/12

A nice big pile of links this week.  Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/06/05

Short but good this week.

  • I always enjoy seeing other people’s window configs, even if I don’t use them.
  • The CCBY license is very similar to the BSD license – and there’s some big institutions using it.  That is good news for everyone.
  • I linked to telehack before, but I didn’t realize how huge it was.  There’s 25,000 virtual hosts in there, recreated from history, complete with realistic user lists.  You can ‘hack’ into hosts, or run games and BASIC files.  (hammurabi!)  It even recreates early USENET.  Read the description of what to do – it gets really interesting about halfway down.   It’s an Internet Simulation, if ever there was one.  (via)
  • Remember I posted earlier this week about my results with deduplication?  I had about a 7% gain of the disk.  As time has gone on and the Hammer reblocker was able to work overnight, I’m now up to a gain of 10%.  Neat!
  • Also: I got Minecraft working (as a server) on DragonFly.  See the comments on my original it’s-almost-working post.
  • RAS Syndrome: Recursive Acronym Syndrome Syndrome.  For anyone who has typed “GNU”.  (via)