Lazy Reading – Page 29 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/05/112014/05/10

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/11

I’ve linked to Wizzywig (free complete book PDF at that link before, as a sort of early semi-fictional history of personal computing. I met the author at TCAF this weekend; his Brain Rot comics about the start of hip-hop are enjoyable too. There’s about a zillion more books I wanted to buy at TCAF, too…

Arabic programming language artwork. “At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text.” (via)
How babies are like Unix.
Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator. (via)
How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch. From the man himself. (via)
The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop. Diving into language use and data analysis. (via)
The Quest for Randomness. (via)
Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. An AD&D module and map, illustrated and turned into a complete narrative. (via)
Recreational Mathematics Magazine. Someone will find this deeply satisfying. (via)
Practical Alternatives to systemd?
The operating system: should there be one? (PDF) Smalltalk, lurking. (via)
Found via that previous link: The Interlisp Programming Environment. (PDF) Notice it says ‘environment’, not ‘language’. Lisp implementations seem to be considered both the operating system and the programming language.
Again found via: Go is more UNIX than UNIX.

Your unrelated link of the week: Memorex. As a friend from years ago said, “Eiiiiiiiiighteeeeeees”. (via)

2014/05/052014/05/03

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/04

Busy week, but lots to read.

My brush with Oulipo. Thinking far harder about language patterns than I thought possible.
The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was. Follow the links, and feel disappointment.
BASIC turns 50. I like BASIC – specifically AppleBASIC – in a way only nostalgia can cause. (via)
More secure than telnetmallows. (via)
The Great Works of Software. “…works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.” An accurate description. UNIX is #4. (via)
GitHub monoculture. Git is decentralized, GitHub is not. (via)
Novena’s hackable bezel. A spiffy way to hold a keyboard.
“Here’s my favorite operating systems war story, what’s yours?” Some excellent, old-school war stories in the originating link.

Your unrelated link of the week: Doc Brown on My Proper Tea. Language warning.

2014/04/272014/04/25

Lazy Reading for 2014/04/27

Settle back, there’s a lot to read.

CERN Terminal font. I mentally expect the characters to be printed in green or amber, just from the shape. (via)
Systems Programming at Twitter. (via)
Richard Garriot’s D&D #1; his first game written in BASIC, long before Ultima. There’s a contest involved, but that’s not the important part. (via)
Unix: Counting chickens or anything else.
Matul Remit, a Dwarf Fortress story. Yeah, I know, third Dwarf Fortress item in three weeks. This one is about the story itself, not the gameplay. (via)
The Pac-Man Dossier, Obsessive notes and details about Pac-Man. (also via)
“…nothing worse for the future of home lighting than having to remember whether the lights in the bedroom were made by Sylvania or Philips before I can turn them off.” The Internet of (proprietary) Things.
The Modern Perl book, 2014 edition, is out and is a free download.
Your favorite 2-piece keyboard.
The Novena laptop, has a crowdfunding campaign. It even has stretch goals, now. It sounds fun, but you have to be seriously interested in hardware twiddling. There’s a contest for a new logo, too.
Worst common denominator programming. You can guess the source.
Technology Monoculture as threat. It’s about OpenSSL, but I’d argue that Linux represents another monoculture problem.
go in go. (via)
A discovered quirk is just [a] few steps away from becoming a feature.
Microsoft Word is not a terminal emulator. :wq
Using Vim as a writing environment. (via)
boycottsystemd.org. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Agatha Heterodyne & The Sleeping City. It’s a kickstarter for the 13th volume of a long-running story – which is also free to read online. As I have mentioned before, the artist Phil Foglio drew the original BSD daemons.

2014/04/202014/04/19

Lazy Reading for 2014/04/20

This is another week where I find neat stuff at the start of the week, start the post, and by the time the post date rolls around, those links have been seen everywhere. Yes, I’m complaining I don’t get “First Post!” the way I want.

UNIX: More ways to spin the top command.
Leslie Lamport’s Thinking for Programmers talk. It’s the opposite of a TED talk; not glamorous, not made accessible, and not there to make you feel good about yourself – but quite useful. (via)
A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross. This fascinates me in the same way Markov-chain generated text can be interesting. (via)
How ‘DevOps’ is Killing the Developer. Not necessarily an accurate description of how DevOps works, but accurate for describing problems with poorly implemented DevOps. ‘Reaction-to-new-strategy-that-gets-implemented-poorly’ is not new – see Agile. (via)
Here’s a conversational intro to Dwarf Fortress. Unlike every other article, it emphasizes how quickly you can get into the game. This is probably the better way to talk about it.
A Secure C and C++ reference recommendation.
@ around Europe. I can’t confirm this, but I’m sure many readers can. (via)
According to this story about XENIX, Microsoft almost went with it as a successor to DOS. That certainly would have made things different. (via)
UNIX ACTUAL. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Heads or Tails. Chris Ware’s comics are all about using the comic as a way of expressing the movement of time, in so many ways. (via)

2014/04/132014/04/11

Lazy Reading for 2014/04/13

I am all over the map this week.

UNIX Tutorial for Beginners. Also, UNIX Shell Scripting Tutorial. (via)
Staticapps.org, a explanation of single-page web applications. The idea is good but the site itself is really just an ad for a service that does … single-page web application hosting. Comments on the original link source may be more useful.
The Lazy Newb Pack for Dwarf Fortress. A good idea, but there’s actually a more recent Starter Pack. (via)
I link to Cyriak videos from time to time; here’s a documentary about him and his work. (via scrubgenius)
Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF’s. (via)
Star Trek 1971 Text Game. Hey, I remember at least one of the variations of this! (via)
Untrusted, a roguelike-in-appearance game where you use Javascript to get through puzzles. Warning: music. (via)
Now even Microsoft Windows has a package manager. (via)
Branching in code instead of in version control. I suspect this is one of those ideas that sounds good but turns out to eventually require reinventing the original setup, like NoSQL. (also via)
“This is NOT real Git documentation!” Frighteningly real. (via)
Heartbleed should bleed x.509 to death. (also via)
Dudley Buck’s Forgotten Cryotron Computer. (via)

Your unrelated animated image of the week: a seal with hiccups.

2014/04/062014/04/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/04/06

This is the first Lazy Reading in a while that I hadn’t already started before the previous week’s Lazy Reading was displayed.

Eventually, Javascript will eat everything. (via)
Wrong and Right Reasons to be Upset about Oculus. Gets at something that’s been bothering me: too many new companies have acquisition as an exit strategy. Over time, that becomes the only strategy. (via many places)
How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40%. I can confirm this works, via the small sample of the class I taught recently. (via I lost track, sorry)
Toward a better programming. Makes some good points about programming, though it unfortunately ends not with solutions but with a ‘buy my stuff’ push. (via)
Michael W. Lucas reviews “Applied Network Security Monitoring”, the book.
7 Habits of Highly Successful UNIX Admins.
thread patterns, about surviving mailing list overload. You will recognize exactly what’s being described if you’ve read any mailing list for more than a year of your life. (via #dragonflybsd)
How pinball and boardwalk amusements gave rise to video games.
RPN calculation, a description and history.
I don’t know if this conspiracy theory with Red Hat, systemd, and the military-industrial complex is even realistic, but it’s kinda fun to see, in a “look at that mess over there in that other operating system” kind of way. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the day: The Very Hungry Rust Monster.

2014/03/302015/11/04

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/30

I suddenly can’t remember if I pad my dates with zeros.

Certain people will love this: After Dark in CSS. Flying toasters! (via)
MicroMUSE, a story about Gopher and MUDs and nostalgia. Do any of the things I’ve built in MUDs still exist? I don’t know, but I kind of hope so. (also via)
Crafting link underlines on Medium. I find it interesting for the obsession over ‘doing it right’. (via)
Stupid UNIX tricks. Follow the email thread.
UNIX: More networking basics for the beginner.
Accidentally Turing-complete. This resembles the start of a number of science fiction stories. (via)
Why Facebook will never innovate. My title. (via)
Developers should know how to run their own server. Again, my title. (also via)
Hack ‘N’ Slash, where you are supposed to hack the game.
The Art of Atari. Art that describes a certain time and technology all at once. I’m sure I’ve linked to something like this before.
Explain Git with D3. Animations to show what happens in Git operations. (via)
The current Humble Bundle weekly sale is all ~~open source~~ games created with open source tools. I don’t know how many of them can run on a BSD, but it’s still nice to see them. Humble Bundles can be quite the deal, too.
The Ultimate Frontend Build Tool: make. I see articles like this every so often that can be summed up as “hey, make is reliable and hard to beat – on the specific tasks it is suited for.” (via)
AD&D cover art on Pinterest. (via) One of the artists involved in that just died. (via)
DNSSEC-verified SSL Certificates, the Standard Way. Michael W. Lucas explains something I wish was more common: a way to use SSL without paying money to a CA.

Your unrelated link of the week: The creepiest animatronic work I’ve seen yet. (via Orbital Operations)

2014/03/232014/03/22

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/23

Aaaaaaaaa link overflow!

The Story I’ll Tell at the Web’s 25th Birthday Party.
When Will the Next Dot.com Bubble Burst? The comment from Gary Helms is correct.
The truth about content management systems. It’s one of those basic mistakes that everyone gets to learn in some form. (via I lost track, sorry)
The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s do better. I agree with the sentiment that smaller communities are necessary, and that Facebook is an unsustainable place for them. I’m seeing more specific communities retreating from social media to mailing lists – and it’s better. (via)
UNIX: Network Basics for the Beginner.
Boulet takes on tech support. We’ve all gotten that call from an older family member.
The Turino XL, a computer with over 45 x 10¹⁷ bytes available.
Worse. Bundling and the negative effects that come with it. (via)
Hooray! More James Mickens! (PDF) It’s listed as his last column. Booooo. Anyway, he starts talking about web browsers, and perhaps accidentally gives the best description of Javascript ever. (also via)
This World of Ours, a James Mickens logout column from December 2013 that I missed.
Actually, if you look at his Microsoft Research page, he has links to his past articles at the bottom, plus a link to his 2011 presentation about why web browsers are horrible.
Why I Use Vim. Describes a “climbing up, sliding down” learning curve, which puts me in mind of one of my favorite diagrams. (via)
How to boost your Vim productivity. Some interesting tips in this, plus bits on tmux. (via)
Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep. Sort of a basic economics lesson. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Space Replay. A very good use of an Arduino board. (via)

2014/03/162014/03/15

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/16

A lot of this was done early; last week had a lot of interesting stuff turn up. Maybe because we’re coming out of a extreme winter in the northern hemisphere, and people are feeling a bit more energetic?

How to Eat Your Entropy and Have it Too — Optimal Recovery Strategies for Compromised RNGs. One of the authors, Yevgeniy Dodis, is I think speaking at an upcoming NYCBUG meeting.
This may not surprise you, but the GNU version of ‘true’ can sometimes return false.
I still have a weakness for 80s vector graphics.
Matching one of the links from last week, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game online. (via)
The History of Information. Mesmerizing, like reading Wikipedia in serial order. (via)
Drifting into Fragility, a look at complex system failure analysis at WETA. Notable for the offhand comment that they’re rendering on 49,000 cores. That’s… over 9,000! (Old joke but still fun.) (via)
pleaserun, an attempt to abstract away the systemd vs. everything else argument. Also, a perfectly descriptive name. (also via)
Unix: Pranks that sysadmins play.
Token ring: still used. Eh, could be worse; could be frame relay.
The Mid-Career Crisis of the Perl Programmer. The leading tl;dr segments are dead on, but the essay itself rolls out into a conversation about skills for older programmers and what choices you make. (via)
Maury, Innovation, and Change. Open data and common APIs – in 1850. (via)
How to save read-only files in Vim. A step better than the usual advice.
UNIX Magic. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Conet Project, recordings of numbers stations, at the Internet Archive. (via the Orbital Operations newsletter)

Bonus timewaster: 2048. (via multiple places)

2014/03/092014/03/12

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/09

This week blew up with links fast.

An 8-bit integer overflow turns Mahatma Gandhi into “255 points of pure nuclear rage“. That’s one of the more entertaining sentences I’ve ever typed here.
“DevOps” is one of the new buzzwords lately. The most shallow approaches seem to equate it with automated deployment, but it really seems to be about project management within IT. It’s probably of most use within larger companies that have enough staff to build up department-internal silos. I don’t know if it’s a new strategy or a way to deal with the rigidity of larger corporate IT groups. (via)
mosh: the answer to ssh annoyances. (via)
Why I use Emacs. I like “retrogrouch.” (via)
The Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks. You know your system/program has really made it when it starts it own plugin/theme/library/mod/extension/app store collection. (via)
Only 90s Web Developers Remember This. “DHTML was the Twitter Bootstrap of the time.” (via)
What is a web framework? A temperate description. (via)
Reflections on Eric Raymond’s “Myth of the Fall”. Makes a good point: open source is the best when it’s for architectural, interoperational reasons.
Bitrot and atomic COWs. Will make you worried about your already-RAIDed data. (via #dragonflybsd)
Thoughts on style, the TLS, and errors. I agree with the note about ‘affirmative ~~conformation~~ confirmation’.
Technology has changed. Tech items from a decade ago. Everything was silvery and round back then. (via)
A little farther back in time, Thomas Dolby Explains How Synthesis Works To Kids & Ghosts. 1989, and yes, he plays that song. (via a mailing list for yetis)
Related to nothing: it’s odd to see your great-grandfather mentioned in a random place on the web.
The 2014 7-Day Roguelike Challenge has started. (via)
Ow my eyes.

Your unrelated video of the week: This trailer for Crawl. This is a roguelike multiplayer cross-platform game, though I don’t know if it would work on BSD. The important thing: the voiceover narration is fantastic.

2014/03/022014/03/02

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/02

A public service announcement: Check your backup power systems when the weather is bad. It has been so cold that the always-running heater blocks cooked away the coolant in my workplace’s backup generator in between the weekly inspections, and when the power died a few days ago, the generator failed to start. This led to the paradoxical sensor warning: “High coolant temperature” when the outside temperature was below freezing.

Scott Hanselman wrote “Microsoft killed my Pappy“, where he attributes dislike to Microsoft to being old anger from antitrust suits, etc. Those were more the outcome of frustration over Microsoft quality, as I recall. Microsoft is doing some things right nowadays – generally using open source techniques and sorta working with standards – but then again, so are all the other large tech silos.
Those who do not know jails are doomed to reinvent them. That’s my description of these container/docker/etc ideas floating around Linux. Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying. (via)
speaking.io, about public speaking. Posted mostly for my own future edification. (via)
UNIX: Making better use of the find command.
More history on stpcpy(3) than you ever knew.
Unix: How to get along with your coworkers.
James Iry’s History of Programming Languages. Some the jokes aren’t exactly new, but it made me laugh. (via #dragonflybsd)
The End of Facebook. I know I should have the Digest on Facebook, but I’m not sure how much of an audience I’d be able to reach without paying to play. (via)
I Still Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem. I find the lack of adherence to standards – or even agreement on common formats – very frustrating. (via)
Twitch Plays Pokemon, the explanation.
A brief history of one-line fixes. Written in honor of Apple’s recent blunder. The conclusion is good, too.

Your unrelated link of the week: Muppets, NYC, and tea. I know it’s an ad, but it fits my interests perfectly.

2014/02/232014/02/20

Lazy Reading for 2014/02/23

Pardon me as I wander through a lot of topics.

Where to keep your pubic hair. I worry about this (syntax, not hair storage) when I’m writing titles here. (via)
Top 100 most searched for out-of-print books in 2013. This is a UK site, so it’s UK-specific, I assume. I am thinking of it because I saw copies of the entertainingly illustrated “UNIX System Administrator’s Handbook” at NYCBSDCon. I have copies of the 3rd edition; the 4th edition in print now is the “UNIX and Linux…” version, and I don’t know if the illustrations survived. (via)
Also found while looking at the previous links: UNIX Systems Advanced Administration and Management Handbook. No idea of the contents, since it’s nearly 20 years old, but the cover hints that it might be interesting more for the style of how it was assembled and what it covers, rather than the technical aspects. I am entertained by ‘first edition’ AD&D manuals the same way.
It’s about time. DDOS attacks and NTP. A summary of the recent trend.
Ten Things We Forgot to Monitor. The authors very kindly include the scripts they use to monitor these things now. (via)
Less Commonly Used UNIX Commands. From a variety of places, so only a subset of this list is available on any given system. (via)
The Death of Xenix. That was Microsoft UNIX, for those who don’t remember. (via)
Unix: Using pushd and popd for faster navigation. One of those habits I’ve never been able to establish.
Introducing BPasswd2. By Alex Hornung, one of the DragonFly developers. I’ve been meaning to post this for some time.
Typeset In The Future, examining typefaces all through a sci-fi movie, down to the buttons. (via)
World War G. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Top Shelf is now selling their excellent comics without DRM, so they can be stored/read however you like.

2014/02/162014/02/15

Lazy Reading for 2014/02/16

Trivia fact that I told someone about at NYCBSDCon: the habit of using (via) to correctly attribute links comes from a still-online-but-not-functioning site called The Nonist. The fellow putting it together had the most wonderful ability to find esoteric, interesting items to read about. I can’t match his talent for images. The Wayback Machine has a copy of the Nonist site so you can see it in its original glory.

To the (text-only) links!

English minus the non-Germanic words. (via)
‘Tainted Love’, played via floppy drive.
Unix: When to look for a new job.
The Dreamliner’s latest in-flight emergency. I’m not that interested in the article, but I like the quote from the place where I found it linked: “The Internet of Rebooting Things”.
Android is becoming unforkable. (via) The article doesn’t mention Cyanogen or Replicant when it’s talking about ‘alternative’ strategies for Android development; I’m curious what to make of them.
Broken by design: systemd. (via)
A followup: Why systemd is winning. (via) ‘winning because nobody else showed up to the game’. Not a direct quote, but a summary.
Bunnie Huang’s Name That Ware February 2014 is a mystery to me, but it’s oddly pretty.
3D versions of D&D Monster Manual creatures from Patrick Farley. (via)
A Vim tutorial and primer. (via)
ICMP types in IPv6.
An objective points-based system for keyboards. “KLACKY keyboards feel great but they will get you knifed in the back by the people who work near you.”
Hello boss… Something happened…
All IBM training videos should be this awesome.

Your unrelated link of the week: If I met you at NYCBSDCon last week, did I seem like a mature adult? I’m not. Here’s Deer Fart.wmv.

2014/02/092014/02/09

Lazy Reading for 2014/02/09

A low week this week, but I have been on the road… I will hopefully have a large NYCBSDCon report up later today, to make up for a skimpy Lazy Reading.

Bit rot, circa 1998. Enjoy looking at the old technology options and prices. (via)

The Industrial Internet of Things. Most of what’s out there that should be wired isn’t, and it’s because the companies making the equipment like to pretend the Internet never happened. Also, modbus is horrifying.

Bluetooth Low Energy: what do we do with you? I’m surprised more people aren’t excited about BLE; it has a lot of potential.

Your unrelated link of the week: a new Cyriak film! Starts cute, ends horrifying, but that’s no surprise.

2014/02/022014/02/02

Lazy Reading for 2014/02/02

Lots of randomness this week. That’s great!

Facial animation, then and now, and now. (via)
accessmaincomputerfile.net. Some of these are real, or at least made with ‘real’ parts. (via)
Writing more maintainable shell scripts. (again, Bash-specific.)
Nancy Householder Hauge’s stories about working HR for Sun Microsystems relatively early in the life of the company: parts one, two, three, four, five, six. (via)
The Descent to C. C programming for people not used to C. Written by the fellow responsible for PuTTY. (via)
Access Windows through SSH. It’s confusing.
It’s not a bug, it’s a… (found via)
The Magic of Strace. (via)
SSD Reliability. Not really a statistics-based study.
The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art. It goes far deeper than you’d expect.
Related: ‘ascii art’ tagged on Tumblr. (via)
Amiga nostalgia, via the Apple app store.
Why I like Java. This is perhaps the best description of the language I’ve seen.

Your unrelated link of the week: it’s two links, for the two very rare German episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

2014/01/262014/01/26

Lazy Reading for 2014/01/26

Finally, a relatively quiet week.

Writing more efficient shell scripts.

The Occultation of Relations and Logic: Exposing the Hidden Meaning from within Shadows and Unix Command Lines. Piped shell commands seen as a set of relations. This is the most analysis I’ve ever seen of a command line. (via) Also related.

Perl Secret Operators. (via)

As a followup on last week’s Curse of the Leading Zero link, Thomas Klausner points out Python 3.0 explicitly stopped reading leading zeros as the prefix for octals.

The current Humble Weekly Sale (through the 31st) is all roguelikes. Dunno how many of them run on non-Windows. though.

Mastering Vim in Vim. Lots more ‘learning Vim’ suggestions where I found this link.

Not possible to have happen; I don’t believe it. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: 50 years of tape. Cassette audio tapes, that is. (via)

2014/01/192014/01/19

Lazy Reading for 2014/01/19

The Internet overfloweth with good links, lately. Nothing this week that requires a lot of reading, but plenty of things to click. Enjoy!

The “Basket of Remotes” problem. An area where standards are never applied.
Dice portraits. I like the images. (via)
Who made that dial tone? (via a mailing list)
Simple Git workflow is simple. (via)
Bunnie Huang talks about his open laptop project, Novena. (mentioned here before.) They sound really neat, but I can imagine you need to be ready for a certain amount of manual work.
Speaking of machines, Michael W. Lucas got a beefy new desktop system from iXsystems, which is is not a product they advertise… but it makes sense if you want to run a BSD.
How I built a Raspberry Pi Tablet. Here’s how the author did it. It wasn’t cheap or easy. (via)
A History of Programming Games, 1961-1989. Not games programming, but games where you program robots as part of the game. I remember being horribly confused by Robotwar on the Apple ][. (via)
A LISP interpreter, written in Bash. Is there one written in Javascript yet? There must be. (via)
You use SSH keys, don’t you? If not, read this primer.
On compiling 34 year old C code. Getting Unix V7 ed/sed working. As the article points out, “ed is already using a legacy interface in 1979.” (via)
Most pedantic bug ever. (via somewhere on Twitter, of all places)
Also on Twitter: I am devloper.
Facebook is launching a newsfeed reader. I agree with the person who originally posted this link – it’ll probably be a one-way street where Facebook scarfs up content from the rest of the web via RSS, but everything on Facebook will stay locked away.
I am looking forward to replacing my Windows desktop with a non-Windows tablet – it’s getting closer.
Remember: if it’s not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it’s not really yours.
The curse of the leading zero.
The Hidden Backdoors to the City of Cron. (re)Infection via cron. (via)
The Internet is better referred to as “the Stacks”. It’s 5 companies, and everything revolves around what they do. That end-of-2012 article is talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft… though Microsoft seems to be on the way out. Anyway, startups plan for buyout these days, which should tell you that it’s easier to take cash from one of a few large companies than try to compete with them, however indirectly.

Your unrelated link of the week: Fail Forward, a collection of writing about pen and paper RPGs. (via)

2014/01/122014/01/11

Lazy Reading for 2014/01/12

There’s a lot this week, so let’s get started:

Git Reference. Not that there isn’t a lot of other documentation out there, but much of what you find is people asking specific questions rather than explanations of procedure. (via)

Movie Code. At least most of these are using legit code, even if it’s often the wrong application. It’s been worse. (See ‘state of the art video’ item) (via)

Unix: 14 things to do or stop doing in 2014. These tips are actually useful and contain no buzzwords.

TrewGrip, another item in my quest for interesting keyboards I don’t use.

4043 bytes to recreate a mid-80s IBM PC. There are less bytes of data in the program than there were transistors in the CPU that it emulates. It can run MS Flight Simulator. It was for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, which should surprise you not at all. (via)

The World’s Most Pimped-Out ZX81. I don’t think it can run Doom, though.

The Unix Shell’s Humble If. For once, an article that doesn’t just pretend bash is the only shell that exists. (via)

Unix Shell RPG Tutorial. It’s exactly what that combination of words means. (via)

Scientists tell their favorite jokes.

Best programmer jokes, found here where there’s more.

I find these animations slightly hypnotizing. (via)

Technology used to suck even when it was cutting-edge, and we’ll still feel that way in the future. (via)

How did we end up with a centralized Internet?

Software in 2014. The summary is: server side is great, client is not. (via)

Able to be turn on, and that is it. Sci-fi movies ignore where technology comes from.

True Nuke Puke Story. My mine coworkers once did something similar to a copier repairman; got him so worried about going underground that he had a panic attack when he had to step on the hoist. We had to get a new repairman.

Your unrelated link of the week: BIG ENDING FACES! (via)

2014/01/052014/01/04

Lazy Reading for 2014/01/05

The holiday break for most people at the end of the year translated to a lot more material showing up now. We all benefit!

The Year Megaplatforms Ruled The Internet. Online companies aren’t ‘disruptive’ any more; they are the establishment. That didn’t take long. Is it a cycle? I hope so. (via)

Intel XDK. Should be cross-platform enough to work on DragonFly, I bet. (via)

On Hacking MicroSD Cards. Bunnie Huang from 30C3, so it’s in-depth. “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” The microcontroller on the cards is exploitable. (via)

Speaking of 30c3, the recordings are up. (via same place)

Bignum Bakeoff contest recap, from 2001. 512B to return the largest number possible. (via)

Owlbears, Rust Monsters, and Bulettes, oh my! The origin of some of the AD&D Monster Manual monsters. (via)

The Postmodernity of Big Data. I don’t know about the text, but I like the punchcard images.

You are going to be using IPv6, whether you are ready or not. (via, with good discussion)

End Paper Maps. This is ephemera that shan’t survive the Internet, I suppose – but I always did enjoy it. (via)

Understanding the Galaga No-Fire Cheat. I would have loved to do this as a child, but surviving 15 minutes in a coin-op video was nearly impossible, barring (for me) one strange exception. (via)

Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking. (also via)

Remember, The Cloud means that even if companies last, their services may not – even if there’s no other service to replace it. (via)

Eventually, will every program have its own internal upgrading and management code? It seems like it.

New Year’s Resolutions for Sysadmins. Some of these resolutions look forward, some look backward.

Mommy, why is there a server in the house?

2013/12/292013/12/27

Lazy Reading for 2013/12/29

Last of the year! You’ll want to take some reading/watching time this week.

Can you be arrested for what’s on your computer? Yes, of course.

Making SSH connections easier. If you don’t know it, you should.

Ansible vs. Salt and Creating a new Ansible node. BSD-focused.

Vim in the hands of a Real Maniac. Damian Conway, the speaker, is a man of complicated skill, and a good speaker. It gets pretty crazy by the end. (via)

The Saddest Moment, James Mickens talking about Byzantine fault tolerance. (via)

The via link on that last one led me to Dadhacker, with some excellent entries like this Eject button at Apple or Fuctuation.

Digital restoration and typesetter forensics. Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, and Joe Condon reverse-engineering hardware because the vendor won’t reveal how it works – in the 1970s. The letter to the vendor is hilarious. The story of how it was recovered, also linked there, is a good read, too. (also via)

Over-Extended Metaphor for the Day. Could quibble, won’t. I like the Emo Phillips followup joke quoted here, where I found it.

Oldcomputers.net. There’s some neat old things there – and they’re selling/buying! (via)

Console Living Room; more old game systems resurrected via JSMESS. First reaction was that it was neat, second reaction: these old games were horrible, compared to what we have now. (via multiple places)

exabgp, human-readable BGP messages. (also also via)

The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition. I had a student who excelled at this, involuntarily. (via)

We’ve run out of closed-source things to re-implement as open source, and now we’re reinventing the open-source wheel.

How open source changed Google – and how Google changed open source. Their open source group is essentially about license compliance, not evangelism. That is the way it should be. The last paragraph about Summer of Code is spot-on. (via)

Readers of a certain age will recognize the global vector map theme. (Here’s more.) It makes me think of the old Apple ][ game, NORAD. (incidentally, I was way better at it than the player in that video.)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: not a comic, but a magazine that includes comics: Mineshaft. I’ve heard about it many times, and I keep meaning to get a subscription.