Goings-on – Page 44 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/09/112011/09/11

Lazy Reading for 2011/09/11

Happy birthday to my younger daughter, Claire, who is 9 today. That’s a much better anniversary to celebrate today.

A musing about the waveform and how it’s the most iconic representation of music. It’s also a holdover from analog days, if you think about it. (via)
There seems to be a new kinda-improper activity from GoDaddy found every 6 months or so. Find yourself a new registrar, if you haven’t already.
Here’s how you know DragonFly is actually getting somewhere: exploits show up.
Not directly BSD related, but it’s from Colin Percival, writing as “FreeBSD Security Officer”. With the recent Diginotar news, he points out what’s the best secure certificate to forge.
Introduction to Arduino, a comic guide. (via)
“A jpeg is worth 1000kb“, talking about ZORK and other text adventures. Look for the twisty column of familiar phrases, all alike. The Interactive Fiction genre of game is still going surprisingly strong, so many years later.
That article about ZORK links to this excellent, excellent exploration of the original Colossal Cave game, which led to Adventure and so many other games. Oh yeah, the author was building ARPANet at the time, too.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Chainsawsuit.

2011/09/10

Puppet support for DragonFly

Noticed through a saved Google search: DragonFly BSD support as part of Puppet. This was thanks to the work of a ‘jaydg’. Thanks, person whose name I probably should know!

2011/09/10

Future changes for PF and ALTQ

The recent OpenBSD 5.0 pre-release announcement on undeadly notes that ALTQ is being replaced by new priority settings. This should make it to DragonFly at some point, since pf in DragonFly has been catching up to the current version of pf in OpenBSD, thanks to the efforts of Jan Lentfer…

2011/08/30

Lightning Talk for DragonFly, September 9th,

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.

2011/08/29

pkgin 0.5 on the way

The next release of pkgin, the binary package installer for pkgsrc, is imminent. I link to the note about this because the new features list sounds good, including a significant speedup.

2011/08/282011/08/27

Lazy Reading for 2011/08/28

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 posts~~ noise today. (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella. This is the comic that ruined Batman for me. I can’t unthink it.

2011/08/252011/08/25

DESTDIR almost done

There are only 45 packages out of over 10,000 in pkgsrc that do not support being installed by people who aren’t root, or in different locations. Thomas Klausner has that list of 45 packages. It’s very close to zero packages with this problem at this point, so if you want to make a big difference…

2011/08/252011/08/25

PPTP, explained

As part of a larger thread, Chris Turner went into a longer explanation of how PPTP connections work. Do you have PPTP working on DragonFly? Please share details!

2011/08/23

Mixing pkgsrc and alien packages

Anton Panev is working on a Google Summer of Code project for NetBSD, adding support in pkgsrc for RPM/Debian package formats. He posted a status report recently; will this come to DragonFly via pkgsrc? I don’t know!

2011/08/212011/08/20

Lazy Reading for 08/21/2011

Ah, August. The month where everybody goes on vacation. I’ve been gone off and on for the last few weeks, so my link collection has been slower, but I’ve been able to keep up something.

Friday was whyday. (via) I can certainly agree with the sentiment.
Panic panic panic panic panic panic panic
Not BSD or even software, but good to see: a kid, math, and solar power. (via Tomas Bodzar)
More BSD videos, this time from BSDCan2011 and Google Tech Talks.
The future’s gone meta: there are now game modifications which emulate real computer hardware in that virtual world. (via) It’s not turtles all the way down; it’s emulators.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nedroid. “Beartato” is one of the best names ever.

Yeah, unrelated links seem to always be comics. They offer the most reading.

2011/08/202011/08/20

More readable assertions

Assertions, in DragonFly, are places in the code where the programmer lists a condition, and tells the system to panic if the condition doesn’t exist. It’s a good way to guard against weird situations, when something ends up with a strange value. Do you actually use them while programming? Then Adam Hoka’s patch to print file name and line number when the assertion hits will be useful to you.

2011/08/19

Quotas almost sort of working

Francois Tigeot took an old Summer of Code proposal, VFS Quotas, and started running with it. He’s made some progress, as he detailed in a recent post to kernel@ (with code!) , but the nullfs-mount nature of PFSs in Hammer are making it difficult.

2011/08/172011/08/19

DragonFly and IPv6 advertisements

Apparently, if you are running IPv6, and using radvd (Linux)/rtadvd (BSD) to autoconfigure your hosts with IPv6 addresses, you need to tell your DragonFly hosts to accept this.

2011/08/15

vkernel without a disk

Thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez, there’s now an explanation in the vkernel(7) man page on how to netboot virtualized DragonFly kernels.

2011/08/142011/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2011/08/14

This is a shorter version of a Lazy Reading post, but it’s linking to some extensive writing. Yay for having other people make up for my brevity!

Here’s part two of the excellently written story of @. Again, interesting because it mentions ASCII, and its unlamented predecessor BCDIC, among other things. Read part 1 if you missed it.
Stephen Ramsay’s blog – the most recent items are about command line usage. There’s some gems to glean from there, like Jekyll. (via)
Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes. The world needs more tutorials like this, or else this.) (also via)
Obsessive detail over emulation. (via)
Hey, that’s a good idea for passwords.

Your unrelated link of the day: the comics of Lucy Knisley. (follow the ‘Previous’ links for more)

2011/08/112011/08/08

kqueue Summer of Code progress

Samuel Greear posted a progress report on his kqueue Summer of Code project. There’s code available now to try it out. It sounds grand, though I can’t identify what effects it will have for the end user.

2011/08/102011/08/07

pkgsrc: now as git

CVS has traditionally been used to distribute the files in pkgsrc, but there’s been a converted git version for DragonFly for a bit now. It looks like there is now an official version (i.e. for everyone, maybe to replace CVS?) at Github.

2011/08/092011/08/07

August OSBR: open source business

The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource magazine is out, talking about starting open-source based businesses. It also announces a name change, to “Technology Innovation Management Review”. The reason, according to the editor, is that the original purpose of the magazine was to explain how you could make money creating or using open source software. People seem to have figured that out now…

The question now is how do you make your (probably open source using) business grow. I totally believe that now based on the number of businesses that have sprung up based around open source software; it used to be much harder to find a commercial backer for a project that let you see the source code. Now, it’s practically commonplace. (examples added off the top of my head.)

2011/08/082011/08/09

More OpenGrok

We went from feast to famine, and now back to feast. grok.v12.su is back up and running, for your source comparison needs. It complements the one at pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org – plus it still contains source for multiple operating systems.

Note/update: grok.v12.su is having some problems keeping Tomcat running, so your mileage may vary…

2011/08/072011/08/08

Lazy Reading for 2011/08/07

I’m throwing this in as a late update as I catch up on what happened while I was on the road last week.

Venkatesh Srinivas is doing The Right Thing and making sure patches get applied to the original software, not just in pkgsrc. (bitcoin, in this case.) Thanks!
Hey, more reviews (they agree with mine) for Practical Packet Analysis, from other No Starch authors.
RetroBSD: a tiny version of BSD, based on 2.11BSD and running on MIPS hardware, is available. That was the one that ran on PDP-11 systems, so the small footprint is no surprise. (According to the site) It uses a tenth of the memory, can run its own C compiler, and can fork. Apparently uClinux can’t do any of those things.

Your unrelated link for the day: Rotate Your Owl. (via)