Ferruccio Zamuner is doing a lightning talk about DragonFly at the sixth annual Italian Perl Workshop, September 9th in Turin, Italy. I mentioned this back in May, but now there’s a concrete date, and it’s about a week and a half away.
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 postsnoise today. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella. This is the comic that ruined Batman for me. I can’t unthink it.
EuroBSDcon 2011, which is happening in Maarssen, The Netherlands 2011/10/6 to 2011/10/9, is now open for registration. This is the 10th anniversary!
BSDday Argentina 2011 is happening the 4th and 5th of November, in Buenos Aires City, Argentina. The Call for Papers is out, if you’d like to contribute.
About a month from now (August 10-14), the CCC Camp is being held outside Berlin. Bring a tent and (I assume) something capable of getting a wireless connection. It only happens every 4 years, so jump on it now. There will be at least one DragonFly-using person there – Matthias Schmidt is going.
Audio recordings of the events at BSDCan 2011 are now available, in mp3 form. If the file names aren’t descriptive enough, you can go through the speaker list and match up. (found indirectly via Facebook)
BSDDay Argentina is starting to look for speakers. The official site doesn’t list 2011 dates yet, but it’ll be in November, in Buenos Aires. (via Damian Vicino) Alex Hornung gave a DragonFly presentation there last year…
A nice big pile of links this week. Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.
- An interview with Dennis Richie about inventing Unix. (via) I like that he sounds just absolutely tickled that there’s a version of ‘his’ operating system on his phone.
- A nice article describing Project Euler, for those who want to program; or program more. (via several places)
- Michael Lucas points out something that isn’t new but still needs reinforcement: avoid SSH1.
- Anecdotal evidence that SSD drives fail a lot. On the other hand, the bulk builds I’ve done of pkgsrc have worked the crap out of several SSDs and I haven’t killed a single one.
- Weird things in IPv6 routing. (indirectly via this, via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd IRC)
- Aw, Google’s BSD-specific search page is gone. Not that it was really needed at this point; I hadn’t seen a difference in the search results for some time. There’s more pressing issues.
- The FreeBSD Foundation has a trip report from Sergio Ligregni and from Thomas Abthorpe, from sponsored trips to BSDCan 2011. I’d encourage everyone to make it to a BSD convention – it’s energizing to see others working on BSD, in person.
- I don’t think you really need a guide for this. (via)
- Emacs user at work.
- Totally unrelated: best dubstep video ever.
Fresh from BSDCan 2011, an interview with Ingo Schwartze and Kristaps Dzonsons, mostly about mdocml. (Which is already present in DragonFly.)
EuroBSDCon 2011, which is being held at Maarssen, The Netherlands, is October 6th through 9th of this year. If you want to get a paper in, the deadline is in a week – May 30th. Get a move on if you want to present!
Ferruccio Zamuner will be doing a talk about DragonFly at the Italian Perl Workshop in Turin, in September. It’s a free event. He’s working on slides, and is looking for feedback on them (I assume once he has them.)
The 10th EuroBSDCon is happening in Maarssen, The Netherlands, October 6th through the 9th. The call for proposals is up until the end of the month.
The newest BSDTalk has a roughly 15-minute talk with Dan Langille about the upcoming 2011 BSDCan and PGCon events.
This shouldn’t be a surprise considering recent events: AsiaBSDCon 2011 has had some event cancellations; specifically the tutorials and meetings. The paper presentations starting on the 19th, and the banquet, are still on, however. (via)
Dan Langille has announced the BSDCan 2011 schedule/list of events in several places. There’s some fun stuff in there, like discussion of Sendmail from the guy who (originally) wrote it. There’s a talk about Roff (it’s that old?)from Kristaps Dzonsons, whose mdocml also happens to just have been committed by Sascha Wilder to DragonFly’s contrib.
NYCBSDCon 2010 was crazy fun. I hope I can make it to BSDCan…
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010 is online, in video form. I got to see this as it happened, and it was a excellent talk. Mr. Lucas is able to put some reasonable arguments together as to the why of things, since he’s been published multiple times, plus his sense of humor keeps it moving.
Hey, wait – there’s more from the conference on BSD TV! How did I miss this? Hopefully even more will show up; the facility was perfect for recording.
February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.
Stuff!
- I find this erasure of the separation between remote code repository and local code editor very interesting. It may upset more traditional people.
- If you haven’t been watching the BSD Events Twitter stream, Dru Lavigne’s written a nice summary of the next few months, including BSD Exam dates/locations.
- The XFCE 4.8 release announcement hinted at some problems with BSD. It’s apparently because udev, a Linux-only product, is the only consistent way to access various items, so XFCE’s power and volume controls use it. There’s no udev on BSD, so we get left out. I’d normally end this with a call for a compatibility layer, but udev is the latest in a series of jumps from framework to framework in Linux, so I don’t know if it would actually do any good. (Thanks, sjg on #dragonflybsd for the link)
- The Economist has an article on open-source that does a hype-free job of describing the state of open source today. It points out two trends that I don’t think are covered enough: the large amount of open-source work funded by companies, and the hidden costs of training and integration. One downside of the “software is free, training costs money” model for open source is that it creates an economic incentive for byzantine configurations and difficult setups. That idea could use some exploration, but I don’t think many people want to, precisely because it’s negative. The article doesn’t go that far, but they should.
Apparently the surplus money from the recent NYCBSDCon is going to each of the BSD projects. Great news! Now, what to do with it…
Apparently there’s a lot of DragonFly people going to the 27th Chaos Communication Congress. Of course, I don’t know if there’s any tickets left at this point.