BSDTalk 143 is an interview with Deborah Norling, focusing on computer accessibility for the blind on BSD, and old computer equipment. It’s a very different interview from the normal technical overview. A choice quote: “We don’t have a [PDP] 11/70 cause they’re just too darn big”.
wiki.dragonflybsd.org has been updated by yours truly to 1.6.1 of MoinMoin; this should fix some reported errors with 1.6.0.
Peter Avalos has been working on CAM locking using lockmgr; he has a patch set available for anyone who wants in on the action.
Welcome our newest committer: Dave Hayes.  His first project will apparently be importing the BSD Installer.
If you’re willing to mentor a DragonFly project for Google Summer of Code, please speak up now, as the application is going in soon.
Because my name is attached to a variety of DragonFly ‘things’, including this digest, sometimes I get bizarre email.
Francis Gudin is working on IKE/IPSEC support for DragonFly; he has patches for racoon in pkgsrc, plus there’s other patches available out there.
If you need an XSLT2 processor, or like programs written in Eiffel, Colin Adams has a program for you.
If your configure is out of date, Sascha Wildner pointed out the right place to get the most recent config.sub and config.guess.
This is one of those perennial article types: “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits” on IBM’s developerWorks site. It’s not shell-specific, and actually quite useful, though dry. (via rootprompt)
OnLAMP has a article talking about setting up Apache with SSL; it’s been covered elsewhere, but this article manages to not assume you’re using one platform or another, thankfully.
DragonFly user ‘why the lucky stiff’ has put together a book called ‘Nobody Knows Shoes‘. Shoes is a library for creating graphical interfaces on Ruby applications. The book is a lesson on how to use Shoes, mixed in with hand-drawn and collaged art, and available as a free download or a physical, purchasable object.
I am all for more interesting computer books. This one reads as a mix between an O’Reilly Nutshell guide and The Book of the Subgenius, or perhaps a Max Ernst novel.
Alert readers may remember why’s previous book, “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby“.
The NYCBSDCon site now has a call for presentations, plus details for sponsorship.  (via Undeadly)
Hubert Feyrer’s latest post detailing recent changes in NetBSD mentions strcspn(3), strpbrk(3) and strpspn(3) improvements coming from DragonFly. It’s gratifying to see good ideas spread.
It’s finally happened: an amateur entomologist interested in dragonflies (the bugs) is using DragonFly (the operating system). This entertains me in a geeky way.
Dmitri Nikulin wrote a long post on users@ about how he was worried that DragonFly would lose importance given that FreeBSD 7 has improved performance relative to FreeBSD 5/6. Responses include a number of anecdotes on how agreeable the DragonFly community can be, plus my note that DragonFly validation does not require FreeBSD to suck. Matthew Dillon noted his concerns as project leader, and the difficulty of explaining how significant the changes from FreeBSD-4 are in DragonFly.
EuroBSDCon 2008 will be Oct. 18-19th at the University of Strasbourg, France.
NYCBSDCon 2008 will be October 11-12th at Columbia University.
BSDCan 2008 will be May 16-17th, in Ottawa, Canada.
AsiaBSDCon 2008 will be the 27-30th of March, at the Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan
EuroBSDCon’s dates were recently announced, which is what caused this post. Has anyone noticed that not so many years ago, BSD conventions were just informal gatherings held at Linux-centric events? An interesting change.
BSDTalk 142 has an interview with Ken Smith, lead release engineer for FreeBSD. I haven’t listeded to the interview yet, but I daresay it covers the recent 7.0 release.
It’s always entertaining to see where release announcements appear. I like this one from _why, as it’s way better than the usual announcement reprint. Plus, it’s the first art/code blog I’ve ever seen.
Dru Lavigne posted that the latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is available; this issue being about “open data”.