Practical Packet Analysis: a review

Background: You may remember some time ago, I posted a review of Michael Lucas’s Network Flow Analysis.  He’s written several BSD books and so I figured it was worth reading further, knowing that this network-specific book would be BSD-friendly.  Also, he made it easier by sending me a copy.

No Starch Press, the company that published all the books linked in the previous paragraph, asked if I’d read/review another book from them. This would be Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd edition.  (Review continues after the break…)

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Summer of Code Doc Camp

One of the perpetual questions about Summer of Code is “Why can’t there be documentation projects?”, since most open source projects need docs as badly as code.  There’s various reasons that I’m too lazy to research and type out, I’m sure, but Google is sponsoring a “Doc Camp“, in October.  You don’t have to be in Summer of Code; you just have to be willing to spend the 17th through the 25th writing documentation.  Google pays for room and board, and you can apply for transportation cost coverage.  A classy idea, all around.  Someone participate and report back!

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/03

I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.

You probably heard of this already, but hey, look!  DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.

Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front.  This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.

While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself.  It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up.  Yeah, that worked out just dandy.  There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).

The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places)  Here’s my story.  It was, and still is, “Fupjack”.  Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack.  Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot!  Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway.  He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.

Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!”  I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one.  People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…

A change for committers, a change for pkgsrc

Two completely separate and unrelated changes:

First, Alex Hornung has added a check to look for certain lines in a commit message, and add a MFC reminder note to the commit message if they are found.  MFC, if you haven’t heard it, means ‘merge from current’, or moving a change from dragonfly-current to the last release version.

Second, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc coming up, there’s some old packages that will get dropped.  Speak up if you need them to stick around.

 

Donation credit where it’s due

Jeremy Chadwick donated an SSD to DragonFly developer ‘josepht’.  Thanks, Jeremy!

Normally I’d take this moment to point out the other donations that could be useful for DragonFly developers…  but there doesn’t seem to be any pending requests.  Anyone working on a hardware driver that needs something physical to test against?  Here’s the moment to note that.

Lazy Reading for 2011/06/19

A light week.  School’s nearly out in the States, so I expect the Internets to be quieter.

  • Another open-source compiler suite.  Maybe parts of it were open before?  I don’t know; all I have to go on is a press release.  Remember when there was GCC or nothing?
  • Read this; it will show you just how amazingly intricate the Telehack project is.  If that doesn’t convince you, read this.
  • Incomplete man pages are no fun.  Not this bad, but close.
  • Do you use PuTTY as a SSH client on Windows?  This PuTTY shortcut creator may be really handy.  It also saves your settings in a sane location, instead of buried somewhere in the registry as PuTTY does.
  • The origin of Pong.  (via)  It debunks some of the legends.