A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Google’s planning a Summer of Code again for 2009, according to the still-running mailing lists from last year’s SoC event. More will be announced at FOSDEM.
DragonFly may or may not be participating; it’s dependent on the application process same as every year. If you’re a student, start thinking about what to do, now.
The DCBSDCon Blog announces the last 3 speakers at DCBSDCon:George Neville-Neil, one of the authors of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Ken Caruso of SchmooCon Labs, and our very own Robert Luciani, talking about DragonFly and threading.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. (via) Dru Lavigne posted a list of the contents, earlier.
The hotel discount for DCBSDCon 2009 expires this Friday, so now is a good time to register. Registrations for the convention itself closes at the end of this month.
Also, Kurt Miller will be talking at DCBSDCon about his work in OpenBSD on Position Independent Executables.
Michael Neumann brought up the idea of using C++ in kernel programming, which has been suggested before. Reactions were generally negative, but there would be some possibilities.
pcc appears to have had some significant updates due to funding; has anyone tried it on DragonFly recently?
The newest @Play column talks about yet another roguelike I’ve never heard of: Incursion. (Too much Zangband on my part.) Apparently it follows 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules quite carefully, which is different than the usual vague Tolkienish/D&Dish look that most roguelikes keep. Check the supplement at the bottom for some literary history.
You get to hear me blather on for 22 minutes about this Digest and how important/easy it is to contribute to BSD projects, in BSDTalk 169.
Vincent Stemen posted a note about his homemade tool, called ‘partition’. It has some interesting features, though it would require some documentation and cleanup to use in DragonFly, where it could serve as a replacement for fdisk. If anyone’s interested in making that happen, contact Vincent.
Two UNIX-centric items for end-of-week reading: “The History of Unix *dump programs” and “Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS“. (via)
The Winter version of the BSDA courseware DVD is now available. Everything on there is available (in parts) for free over the Internet, but paying the USD$40 for the DVD gets you convenience and a way to support bsdcertification.org. (via)
I need to note these faster; they’re piling up: the DCBSDCon blog has announced two more speakers for the convention: Richard Bejtlich (of Tao of Security), who will talking about network security monitoring with FreeBSD, and Marco Peereboom, of OpenBSD, who will be talking about epitome.
The most recent item on the DCBSDCon blog announces Kristaps Džonsons as a speaker; he will talk about his process isolation work on mult.
P.S. Who else thinks that it would be good to have man pages look as pretty as the web page for mult?
This recent Coding Horror column by Jeff Atwood expands on a Joel Spolsky discussion, where it’s pointed out good programmers program cause they love it, not because of the pay or anything else. I’d take that discussion a step farther and use open source programming as an example; people do it because they want to; because they don’t want to stop thinking about solving problems even when they aren’t at work.
There’s a parallel here that I’ll make between programming and ‘normal’ art; artists and designers do the same thing when they get home too.
If you didn’t make it to the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, there’s a number of ways it’s getting streamed via video and audio. (via)
The DCBSDCon blog has another speaker announced: Ted Unangst, who will be talking about SMP and OpenBSD.
BSDTalk has apparently hit 3 years! An excellent milestone. Oh, and the latest version is an 17-minute interview with Michael Lauth, the iXsystems CEO.
iXsystems is working on a “BSD Laptop“, which is an interesting idea; it was hinted at during one of Will Backman’s live podcasts from NYCBSDCon, I think it was. My first reaction to the idea is to think “Oh, you can just buy any laptop for that”. My second reaction is to look at the 3 laptops in the room with me that can’t quite boot any BSD flavor, and change my mind.
The patch for carp(4) that Sepherosa Ziehau posted a while back has been reworked, please (re)test, if you use carp(4).
The GameSetWatch column Pixel Journeys, by the same fellow who writes the @Play columns I often link to, has a writeup about dnd, an early role-playing game (but kind of a roguelike!) I’ve never heard of on a computer system I’ve never heard of. Just reading about gives me that wierd feeling like the first time I encountered VMS.