Dan Langille runs BSDCan and PGCon. He also went to EuroBSDCon and described how he put together these conferences. The PDF containing his presentation slides makes a good checklist of what you might need for your own event, even if it’s not on the scale of his conventions.
Every year, the Chaos Communication Congress tends to gather at least a few DragonFly-using people, and this year is no different. The event is being held in a much larger arena this year, in Hamburg, Germany, so there’s a good chance a DragonFly ‘assembly‘ could be held. Speak up on the users@ mailing list, or EFNet #dragonflybsd, if you’re going too. It’s happening on the last few days of this year, December 27th through 31st.
AsiaBSDCon 2013 will be at the Tokyo University of Science, March 14-17. The call for papers is already out.
Remember how I pointed at BSDEvent’s collection of slides from 3 different BSD conventions? Well, now’s it is a lot more conventions. As in multiple years of convention slides.
BSD Events linked to the presentations for FOSDEM 2012, BSD-Day Europe 2012, and BSDCan 2012. There’s a lot of reading there for you – and even some video.
NYCBUG, the NY BSD user’s group, has an RSS feed for their speaker events, found via Dru Lavigne’s always useful BSD Events twitter. The next event at the start of October is a talk about SMPng in FreeBSD. Given that it was the project that in part led to the creation of DragonFly, I’d like to hear about it. (and even better, have someone more qualified than I compare and contrast that approach with what’s in DragonFly.)
LOPSA East is happening next May in New Jersey. I haven’t seen mention of this on any BSD list, but there’s definitely Unixy things happening there. The call for papers is out.
Adrian Chadd has apparently been smushing FreeBSD onto MIPS systems for some time, and he’s going to talk about it tomorrow night at the NYCBUG meeting. I’m noting it because I’ve always found it interesting how much can be stripped out of a kernel and userland and still have a functional system.
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.)
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.”)
BSDCan 2012 spawned a lot of interviews. We all benefit from that. For example, another BSDTalk interview, talking with Kris Moore of iXSystems about what’s in the next version of PC-BSD.
The presentations from BSDCan 2012 are up in video form. I was going to link to this in a Lazy Reading post, but there’s a lot of video there. (via) Of interest: Intro to DNSSEC and FreeBSD’s new package manager. Check the list, cause there’s a lot more.
The links are all over the map this week, which is fine. Enjoy!
- This makes me laugh every time. (via)
- Etsy has an astonishingly good internal development practice. And open source code? (via)
- For contrast, Facebook’s release engineering process. (via I lost it, sorry) Not as interesting but I can’t tell why.
- Mosh, a program designed for the persistence of screen but differently. (via) Dunno if it builds on DragonFly, but it looks neat.
- I’m getting more paranoid as I get older. Things like this Javascript ad injection on hotel wi-fi may be a reason. (via)
- “I just ran emacs. LOL!“
- 0x10c, a sci-fi game set in the future with spaceships running a 16-bit CPU. That you can program.
- I wish I could write here with the same mix of loathing and excitement found in this comics review. Warning: mildly… gonzo?
- The journey from user to contributor, a NYCBUG talk in mp3 form. (via)
- I’ve mentioned RetroBSD before, but here’s an example of it being installed on a Duinomite board. 2.11 BSD on a super-cheap, super-small Arduino-style board! (via) I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want one. It even has keyboard and VGA ports.
- At some point, this CPU database will be handy. (via)
- A new, slow form of brute force ssh attack. (via) What I find interesting here is not so much the new attack itself, but Peter Hansteen’s careful gathering and analysis of data around it.
Your unrelated link of the week: memepool. It’s seen some activity lately. It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.
I’m making sure I post this Lazy Reading on the right day. A nice full week’s worth of stuff.
- Bandwidth used when loading different web pages. (via) The largest one is also the most surprising.
- Do you have an IBM x3550? Turn ACPI off.
- The recent TCL presentation at NYCBUG is available in audio form.
- Did you want to know a lot of detail on how to do journaled soft updates in UFS? You want detail, you got it. (via, via) (Is that a repeat link? I don’t think so…)
- This is totally useful if you’re using ssh from a Windows machine.
- SSH is used as a noun and a verb, I just realized. No link, it’s just me noticing verbification.
- BSDCan 2012 registration is open. (via Michael Lucas’s Twitter feed) Conventions are awesome. You should go.
- Michael Lucas talks about book promotion with his recent book. There’s a graph, so it’s automatically great.
- Speaking of books, Modern Perl: The Book is free to download in PDF form.
- A story about _why. (via) I’m not so interested in his identity, but in what he did to get people to program.
- My git habits. (Not mine; that’s just the title.) Speaking of learning, I’ve always thought the next steps past learning the basics of anything is to then see how experienced people approach it, idiomatically.
- Why Juniper Gives Back to the FreeBSD Community. I link to this because I like what they are doing, and also because in a perfect world I would rather have a BSD-ish interface on my networking equipment than fiddle with IOS. Oh well.
- Bunnie Huang always builds neat stuff. This time it’s a Geiger counter. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Neo Scavenger. (via) It’s a game, in Flash, and in beta. If you like postapocalyptic survival, it may be for you.
I’ve seen notices in the past 24 hours for 2 different BSD events: BSD-Day, at UAS Technikum Wien in Vienna, Austria on May 5, 2012, and EuroBSDcon 2012, in Warsaw, Poland, October 18-21. The Call For Proposals is out for EuroBSDcon, for submission by May 20th.
Take a look at the schedule if you’ve been thinking about going… (seen via multiple places) This is as good a time as any to point out, once again, the very valuable BSD Events Twitter feed.
Here’s several things to look at:
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube. I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk. Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.
Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.
There’s a single day between BSDCan and PGCon, May 13th. That day will be the 2012 Joint Documentation Summit. People from BSD projects and Postgres will get together to discuss documentation tools, projects, and so on. If you are going to either convention, I’d recommend visiting this too. This sort of cross-project pollination leads to good things.
The deadline for submitting papers for BSDCan has been extended, since the convention’s site suffered some downtime this past weekend. Submit proposals by tomorrow, the 31st, now.
Getting back into the rhythm, here…
- Jeff Vogel, who is a funny and smart guy, wrote this article, essentially about crowdsourcing. It’s another way of saying “bikeshed“. Plus: D&D!
- Michael Lucas, sometimes BSD author, has a new fiction collection out. He’s working on a SSH book too.
- Hey, AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, BSDCan in May. I don’t know about EuroBSDCon or NYCBSDCon, though. Plan ahead!
- Did you know there’s a bsd.org? Very old-school: here’s a list of commands, get going.
- GNU Tar doesn’t have a man page. (via) Weird. I didn’t verify that, but I’m not sure how to.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: there’s a Freddy, and a dragonfly, but it’s not DragonFly BSD. It’s still fun though.