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Lazy Reading for 2013/04/21

I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades.  Time to move to 64-bit!  Anyway, lots of links this week.  These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…

  • For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
  • Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies.  I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future.  (via several places)
  • Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies.  It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing.  (via)
  • Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend.  This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well.  My favorite was always the BeOS set.
  • On benchmarks.  It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke.  (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”.    The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly.  See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
  • Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone.  Exactly two years before I was born!   At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy.  There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz.  It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future.  I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone.  More Spacewar links here.
  • Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP.  “Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.”  (via)
  • Ancient computers in use today.  I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before,  but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new.  Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware.  (via)
  • Yahoo Chat!  A Eulogy.  The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message.  (via)
  • The $12 Gongkai Phone.  Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license.  (via)
  • The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance.  Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
  • A Complete History of Breakout.  It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK.  It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles.  (via)
  • Ack 2.0 is out.  It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
  • Space Claw, Flickr via BBS.  You’ll need telnet.   (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out.  If you liked those links, you know what to do next.

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mfi(4) users and foreign configs

If you have a mfi(4) device – in other words, a LSI MegaRAID SAS driver – you can now see/import/clear/etc. foreign configurations, thanks to this commit from Sascha Wildner, tested by Francois Tigeot, and originally from FreeBSD.

For the confused, ‘foreign’ means any disk hooked to a RAID controller that isn’t part of a configuration the RAID device already knows about.  A replacement disk, or more worryingly, a good disk gone bad/unrecognizable.  (I’ve had both.)

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Another sh(1) update

Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD.  I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point.  Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old.   The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.

Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use?  I don’t know the answer.

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Patch cross-pollination

I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently DragonFly’s version of patch(1) comes from OpenBSD and NetBSD.  FreeBSD’s old version of patch is being replaced by this and modified to match the old one’s behaviors.  It would be worthwhile to bring these changes back, if possible, just to reduce the differences in a utility that’s already been around the world, so to speak.

As an aside, I always thought patch was one of Larry Wall’s unsung successes, and I’m entertained by any program that has “Hmm…” as one of its official outputs.

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Some other BSDs

For once, I got to read the commit logs for other BSDs…

The OpenBSD ‘Papers’ page has some videos listed to match the OpenBSD-related presentations from EuroBSDCon 2012.

Not only does NetBSD support the BeagleBoard, but Michael Lorenz is committing from it.

FreeBSD has brought in a new version of bmake and jemalloc.  I’ve seen a number of other commits recently attributed to ‘NetApp’, which is good to see.  Also, preliminary USB support for boot loaders.

PC-BSD is looking to use pkgng, the same binary package manager used in John Marino’s DPorts.  It’s proving quite popular.

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Lazy reading for 2012/12/30

The last of the year.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Marlo Meekins’ Tumblr.   Her lettering is refreshingly expressive.  That may sounds strange to single out, but so many people place words as an set block of text rather than as part of a graphic layout.

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SMBIOS access now possible

Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD.  Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on.  For example:

smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006"
smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. "
smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "

This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.

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Clang-Day today for FreeBSD

Today is the day that FreeBSD moves to using clang by default.  This is not necessarily a surprise, but I like the finality of calling it “Clang-Day”.   I think Clang will probably be the next compiler brought into DragonFly’s base system, instead of the next release of gcc.  Don’t make any bets on my statement, though, cause I certainly won’t be the one doing it.  (It’s hard.)

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From make to bmake

John Marino is working on a very good idea: bringing bmake into DragonFly as a replacement for the current ‘make’.  bmake is going through more active development and apparently also in use/will be used? on FreeBSD, so syncing up with the same make flavor as FreeBSD and NetBSD will help everyone.  It’ll also remove the problem where you ‘make’ everything in DragonFly, except pkgsrc packages which you ‘bmake’.  It’s not changed over yet.

(What does OpenBSD use for make?)

 

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Major USB update arrives

Sascha Wildner has committed Markus Pfeiffer’s port of USB4BSD to DragonFly.   USB network, input , audio, and storage devices (including xhci/USB3 items) may work, though there’s no guarantee for each driver.  This is added but not on by default, so see the first link for instructions on how to rebuild your kernel to use it.  This will be in (but not default) the DragonFly 3.2 release.

(This is shaping up to be a much bigger release than I anticipated!)

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NYCBUG, RSS, and SMPng

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.)

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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.