There’s a minute and a half of video up of NYCBSDCon 2010, showing off the nice facilities, food, and some of the talks. (via) You can see me shifting around in my seat at 1:28.
The December theme for the Open Source Business Resource is “Humanitarian Open Source”. It sounds somewhat ethereal, but the articles actually concentrate on achieving concrete targets. Plus, more microfinance!
I did this last year and the year before, so why not make a habit of it? I get no commissions; these are mostly places I’ve shopped or plan to shop. It’s based on “This would be SO COOL to have”, and nothing else.
General:
Nerditry: Newegg, ThinkGeek, Leatherman Wave, ISC.org (see 9-layer OSI model shirt).
Science: American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear.
Creepy: Bone Room, Skulls Unlimited, or Skullduggery.
BSDs:
There are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD stores, where money goes back to the project.
Bookwise, Jeremy C. Reed publishes a number of BSD–related books. Buy his stuff through Amazon. There’s also No Starch Press, which has a number of BSD publications. (and LEGO, too?) And of course O’Reilly, for a bunch of things.
Nice things to do:
The FreeBSD Foundation is having an end-of-year appeal for funds, so you can donate in someone’s name. The NetBSD Foundation probably accepts donations, though I don’t have a specific page to link to for that.
Donations to the Itojun Service Award fund are also a good thing.
Everything else I could think of:
- MAKE Magazine subscriptions
- SparkFun Electronics (I want one of their Port-O-Rotary phones),
- Topatoco shirts and books
- Klein bottles
- RLT.com (check out the many subsites linked there)
Further suggestions welcome, especially for European shoppers. I’ve been slowly growing this list year-to-year, and I can always use more interesting and unique places.
Update: George Rosamond pointed at DealExtreme.com. There are some crazy cheap prices there.
Also, and I can’t believe I didn’t link to this before: Brando. If you’re looking for something with a USB port, Brando has it. Even if it’s a jeweled scorpion necklace… USB drive.
DragonFly versions >=2.6 and ipfw don’t seem to get along for doing network address translations. I’ve posted about this before, but I’m linking again because this time I have the explicit config lines written out.
I should probably create a pf category…
Alex Hornung has added the basic work for dmirror, a software RAID-1 implementation into the tree, along with a concept description from Matthew Dillon. It’s not ready for use yet; ready for development, though.
Siju George noticed that his mouse would stop working in X, perhaps every hour. Restarting X would fix it, but he didn’t have a clear cause. Antonio Huete Jimenez suggested turning the sysctl ‘debug.psm.loglevel’ to 9 to at least see what messages cropped up, and that seemed to fix it. I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution, but it’s worth mentioning in case this odd bug bites someone else.
Please welcome our newest committer: Ilya Dryomov. He’s already responsible for deduplication code for Hammer, so now he can work directly.
Tomas Bodzar found robotpkg, a pkgsrc-based collection of robotics-related software. Because of its pkgsrc origins, it should in theory work with DragonFly, or most anything.
A general roundup of things, this week.
- The 1978 Bell System Technical Journal, describing this new Unix thing. (via)
- The book Modern Perl is out, written by chromatic. I link to it for two reasons: the first is that while the book is available for purchase, it’s also available as a free download, with the only condition that you must tell others about it. The second reason – and the reason I’d mention this book anyway – is that chromatic writes on his site and for O’Reilly, and his articles are succinct and enjoyable. The Web is a deluge of text, so any author that can hold your attention, with all the other sources to read, is worth following.
- More NYCBSDCon 2010 stuff, from the comments on my previous post: Will Backman has partial audio recordings, and Jason Dixon’s adventure is online. (thanks, Will and Lawrence)
- This summary of the (BSD-ish) Tarsnap service made me smile.
- Top 5 Best Practices for an Open Source Development Community. (via) I especially agree with items 2 and 3.
- Oddly compelling. (via everywhere)
Peter Avalos is working on having OpenSSL use assembly code. On i386, he reports initial rough results of blowfish working 15% faster, and DES doubling in speed. (seen via IRC.)
Another point release for DragonFly 2.8 is planned, with a bunch of small updates, some of which have been covered here recently.
Jan Lentfer, who apparently has a high tolerance for pain, has now brought the kernel part of pf up to the equivalent of the OpenBSD 4.4 version, available for testing. It’s not yet committed. pfctl’s updated too.
Francois Tigeot was able to get wip/jdk15 to build on DragonFly, from pkgsrc-wip. Unfortunately, the package has been removed, but he’s looking to put it back.
Marius Nünnerich posted a call for papers for FOSDEM 2011. Submissions need to be in by December 20th; the Brussels conference itself is happening in February.
(Has anyone been to this? What was it like?)
If you have any last-minute suggestions for Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly, pass them along now – it starts Monday! Post them here, or in #dragonflybsd on EFNet IRC, or on the kernel@ mailing list. We have 34 already, but you can never have too many.
My NYCBSDCon 2010 summary, or How I Spent My New York City vacation:
Well, almost – I’m still in an airport. I didn’t get to liveblog because of some Atheros chipset issues that are now conveniently solved, but I’ll have a lengthy post by tomorrow detailing the NYCBSDCon convention. The short version: lots of fun, you all should do it.
It has multiple authors at this point starting with Chris Turner and moving to Siju George, but: the Flash setup is in the quickstart document. As I recall, someone put together a changed library for it that fixes a audio/video sync issue. Oh wait, I did find that before.
Dovecot, a rather popular IMAP/POP3 mail server, has had version 2 arrive in pkgsrc. There’s an upgrade guide on pkgsrc-users@ if you’re thinking of upgrading.
Alex Hornung is having trouble getting his power consumption as low as it could be on his DragonFly laptop. A side effect of this problem is that when he posts about it, he also manages to enumerate all the various ways you can reduce power consumption and heat usage on a laptop. (Follow the thread for more.)