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Lazy Reading for 12/11/11

Last week was low on links, but this week is great!  I hope you have some time set aside.

  • This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11.  I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before.  (via)
  • Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
  • Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet )
  • nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently.  Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
  • This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point.  Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run.  (via)
  • Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
  • “Don’t Be a Free User” (via)  The last paragraph is the best.
  • An expanded grep and diff.  ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds.  Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult.  (via)
  • A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright.  This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference.  It doesn’t.
  • So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like.  You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI.   (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
  • I like this indicator light setup.  (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)  There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too.  I wish there still were computers like these.
  • While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station?  Here’s some pictures.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?

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Two pkgsrc work directory tips

Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience.  If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf :

  1. You can clean up any leftover package building files by deleting the files in that directory and leave your pkgsrc files untouched.
  2. You can have a read-only /usr/pkgsrc, which means it can be shared over NFS (or SMB?) between multiple machines, DragonFly or otherwise.
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Lazy Reading for 2011/11/27

Happy (post) Turkey Day for the U.S. readers!  A light link week this week.

  • Facebook is bad for the Internet.  ‘Gaslighting’ is a new term to me.  As that article points out, I can’t even put my posts to the Digest onto Facebook in any sort of automated way.  Facebook suggests that of course I’d love to retype them all by hand.  That’s not realistic.    Facebook doesn’t want any sort of useful external link to be visible to their customers.  Customers isn’t actually the right word; the customers are the advertisers.  What would be a better word for the users?  Crop?
  • “the internet is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.”  It’s a very long essay that points out people are confusing brand identity with personal identity.  (via)
  • You know what would be good?  More conversations about games on BSD, cause it could use some attention.  Oh hey there you go.
  • A Dragonfly lamp (via Julian Gehtdichgarnichtsan)

Your unrelated link of the week: Animals Talking In All Caps.  It is what it says it is.

 

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What to do with /usr/obj

When building world and kernel on DragonFly, /usr/obj is where the work files get placed.  This can eat a bit of space, but it can be safely deleted.  If you keep the files around, subsequent rebuilds can be done faster with a quickwork/quickkernel, but this may not matter to you.

(This was answered on the mailing lists by Max Herrgaard, but I don’t have a link to his reply – sorry!)

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Huge speed improvements, plus graphs

The two things that make my day!   The work on DragonFly-current has led to some significant speed improvements.  So good, that Samuel Greear’s post on OSNews.org links to graphed results from him and from Francois Tigeot (multi-page PDF) showing the results from pgbench.

The results show a jump in multi-core/processor numbers that vastly exceeds DragonFly 2.10’s performance, and is comparable to FreeBSD 9/10.  Here’s some of what did it.

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DESTDIR: 31 left

Almost all the packages in pkgsrc support non-root installation now…  except these last 31.  I recall something about their removal by the next quarterly release if they still don’t work, or maybe just after.  Jump in if one of these packages is useful to you.

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Pull pkgsrc from git again

Some cleanup in the CVS -> git process wasn’t happening, so if you have been using pkgsrc 2011Q3 from git (i.e. via make in /usr), re-pull to make sure you have everything.

(The post noting this seems to have been eaten by the mailarchive…  that’ll be replaced.)

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COMPAT_43 and COMPAT_DF12 gone

Well, they’re still available, but you don’t want them in your config any more because they can slow you down.  This will only affect you if you are running binary files from DragonFly 1.2 or earlier, or…  I guess a 4.3 BSD binary?  From 1986?  I’m sure there’s some other reason for it to be there.