Lazy Reading for 2024/02/25

You get to see a rabbit hole I went down just by following the links in order.

Lazy Reading for 2020/01/19

No theme, just lots of links.

Lazy Reading for 2018/09/16

Unofficial history theme this week – but not UNIX-specific, for once.

Your unrelated baking video of the week: Round Cake Production with Unifiller Depositors and Decorating Equipment.  I’m not recommending this as a food; it’s just somewhat hypnotic to watch the robot production of something you usually imagine as lovingly handcrafted.

Lazy Reading for 2018/09/02

Unofficial accidental “time” theme this week.  Also charts!

Some package statistics

The article I linked yesterday about Ravenports got me wondering about what package are most popular.  avalon.dragonflybsd.org is the default binary package archive for pkg, and it has httpd logs back to 2013, so I collated some information.

I read out a list of packages, and weighed them according to how recently they were downloaded.  I also mushed together all the py/ruby/p5/php numbered packages, and excluded lib*.

After all that… there’s a lot of noise.  One install of any desktop environment pulls in hundreds of packages automatically, so it’s hard to tell what’s installed by a human and what’s installed by dependency.  That being said, here’s some highlights.  This is me applying an arbitrary value and then arbitrarily snipping out a list… but it’s fun to see if nothing else.

18596 python27
13564 xorg-server
13499 perl5
13391 xterm
12098 xorg
8512 cups
8453 bash
8389 ffmpeg
8367 spidermonkey170
7884 python
7432 firefox
6997 sudo
6896 bind-tools
6702 openldap-client
5651 nano
5529 xfce4-conf
5052 xfce
4663 ruby
4447 vim
3133 tmux
2578 chromium
2248 zsh
2175 samba44
2132 python36
2007 mate-desktop
1765 mysql56-client
1699 fluxbox
1690 vim-lite
1517 CoinMP
1407 openjdk8
1395 samba46
1384 lumina
1367 kde
1355 mpg123
1353 spidermonkey24
1340 vlc
1338 thunderbird
1329 wpa_supplicant
1252 firebird25-client
1164 gimp
1103 zip
1083 youtube_dl
1044 php
941 freerdp
931 mercurial
927 lynx
866 evolution
848 gnome3
845 openjdk
842 openbox
842 epiphany
799 nmap
798 go
796 mutt
796 gnuchess
743 apache24
726 rxvt-unicode
722 irssi
652 firefox-esr
652 htop
649 rust
619 smartmontools
575 fvwm
529 windowmaker
477 openvpn
472 synth
451 fish
406 npm
403 inkscape
402 enlightenment
367 firefox-i18n
351 dwm
347 neovim
341 R
339 emacs25
320 emacs
320 unbound
312 tor
310 lua
300 cinnamon
300 wireshark
282 netcat
272 pidgin
258 postfix
258 joe
252 GraphicsMagick
251 dillo
249 icewm
242 mosh
236 rtorrent
225 weechat
219 audacious
218 smtube
216 calibre
190 xmms
187 pdksh
184 redis
184 openssh-portable
183 tk85
173 rdesktop
172 nedit
164 terminator
161 fetchmail
160 KeePassX
156 dnsmasq

New mechanism: kcollect

There’s a new facility in DragonFly: kcollect(8).  It holds automatically-collected kernel data for about the last day, and can output to gnuplot.  Note the automatic collection part; your system will always be able to tell you about weirdness – assuming that weirdness extends to one of the features kcollect tracks.  Here’s some of the commits.

In Other BSDs for 2017/07/22

It’s accidental how-to week!

AsiaBSDCon 2017 and DragonFly networking

Sepherosa Ziehau went to AsiaBSDCon 2017 and gave a talk on his work with DragonFly’s networking.  He’s published a report of his trip, which comes with a link to his paper, his presentation, and pictures of who he met.

Note that the PDF and the Powerpoint slides links are different; one is the paper, one is the talk.  The Powerpoint slides contain the benchmarks linked here in comments, previously.

Network performance comparison

In what can be described as perfect timing, Sepherosa Ziehau has produced a document comparing FreeBSD, several different Linux kernels, and DragonFly, for networking.  He’s presenting it in the afternoon track of Day 3 for AsiaBSDCon 2017, starting later this week.

He’s published a snippet as a PDF (via), which includes some graphs.    The one place Linux outperforms DragonFly seems to be linked to the Linux version of the network card driver being able to access more hardware – so DragonFly should be comparable or better there too, once the powers-of-2 problem is solved.  (This already came up in comments to a post last week.)

Those graphs are available standalone, too, which means it’s easier to see the fantastic performance for latency – see the thin blue line – that seems exclusive to DragonFly.   That, if anything, is the real takeaway; that DragonFly’s model has benefits not just to plain speed but to the system’s responsiveness under load.  “My CPU is maxed out cause I’m doing a lot of work but I hardly notice” is a common comment over the past few years – and now we can see that for network performance, too.

Lazy Reading for 2016/03/13

I had too many links for this as early as Tuesday.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Rotoscoped Horse.  Taken from the old Muybridge photos.  (via)

Lazy Reading for 2016/01/31

I am proud of finding some of these links this week; they are not the usual “here’s what everyone else linked to” that you see.

Your unrelated graph link of the week: Visualizing HipHop trends from 1989 – 2015.  (via)

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/14

I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.

Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941.  This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)