Lazy Reading – Page 34 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2012/06/032012/06/02

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/03

So many links this week I’m already working on next week’s entry. Enjoy!

git aliae so that you never lose work (part 2). (via) Aliae is the plural of alias?
The Setup; people’s work environments. I’ve linked to it before, when nabbing links from Trivium, but I never realized how many people there were to look at. People like Chet Faliszek, Gabe Newell, ‘bunnie’ Huang, _why the lucky stiff, Lee Hardcastle, Joel Johnson, MC Frontalot, Derek Yu, Eric Meyer, Anil Dash, Jordan Mechner, Andy Hertzfeld, and Ryan North. There’s a lot more. If any of those names are unfamiliar, you should go look them up and be pleasantly surprised.
How to use DragonFly to troll Amiga users. Funny/sad, like most trolling.
One does not simply run Unicorn in DragonFlyBSD. Not sure what Unicorn is, but I feel bad that it crashed.
Become a Vim Master By Learning these 30+ Key Bindings. Well, it’s vim, not vi, but oh well. It’s the standard list of commands that normally makes up articles like this, but I still look, in the hopes that I’ll permanently absorb another movement pattern and get that much faster.
Which hashing algorithm is best for uniqueness and speed? (via) The colorized hash maps are a pretty interlude in a technical discussion.
Speaking of Vim, here’s the M command, implemented for a web page. (via) The only better thing would be a vertical split screen view.
End of a Fishing Expedition. Makes a good point about the recently-lost-by-Oracle lawsuit about copyrighting APIs: if that was possible, most Unixish operating systems, including BSD, would suddenly have legal problems. Also, the judge in the case apparently knows how to program, and actually established a point of law instead of shrugging and saying “These kids and their newfangled Internets confuse me.”
CPU wars. (via) A trump cards game based on CPUs. Super-nerdy!
Oops.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Make Good Art. (via) The comic version of Neil Gaiman’s recent commencement speech, cause comics are more fun than video.

2012/05/272012/05/25

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/27

Let’s get right down to it:

Hey, Nmap 6 is out. It’s one of those always-useful tools, similar to wireshark.
Biculturalism, a fair assessment. (via) The generalizations are a little extreme (1 Unix-based author who Got Religion, vs. a diffused Windows developer stereotype) but still has value.
A Git Horror Story. (via) Not a true story, but useful for describing how git commits can be GPG-signed.
A recent Google Doodle, a playable Moog synthesizer, done for Bob Moog’s birthday. The Moog Music site has instructions. I happened to notice they’re using FreeBSD as the server – cool! Maybe it’s just the hosting org? Anyway, I link to it because Bob Moog’s cousin was for a while my father’s employer.
“Google is transitive, whereas Facebook is reflexive.” (via) This sums up the practical difference between Google and Facebook rather well.
I did not know this existed: OpenBSD Network Shell. (via) Interface like a Cisco-ish router, internals are OpenBSD.
There’s been recent news articles about how programmers over 35 tend to not get hired. Here’s one of the reasons: younger programmers discount the value of their own time. Anything where all the benefits (cheaper labor, more products) accrue to the company, and all the costs go to the employee (time lost, extra work) is not a good idea in the long run.
“Now I’ve met the other DragonFly BSD user, too.” That’s two more than I expected for any given project, really.
Undeadly.org has an extensive interview/article about OpenSMTPd. It’s OpenBSD’s implementation of a SMTP daemon, which is something I haven’t heard much about before. Compare with DragonFly’s much-smaller-in-scope dma.
Van Jacobsen Saved the Internet. Or just fixed a timing bug. Depends on whether you listen to Wired or to him. The interesting part is that he had to build the tools to troubleshoot the problem.
Here’s something I don’t think anyone’s noticed yet: Microsoft is responsible for half of Google’s DMCA notices last month. My employer recently was audited by Microsoft (technically by Accenture contractors for Microsoft) for license compliance. My Dell sales representative, when I asked him for a list of what Microsoft-licensed OEM devices we had bought, said many of his customers were asking for the same thing. He joked that Microsoft was trying to improve its profitability numbers for the quarter. Given that they are trying to push to Windows 8, that might just be true, and they are trying to enforce their way to it, not sell their way to it.

Your unrelated link of the week: MAD GOD, the film.

2012/05/202012/05/18

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/20

There’s been so much activity this week in DragonFly that I’m having a hard time keeping up. There’s always time for Lazy Reading, though.

The March of Progress. (via)
My Third Attempt at Vim. Follow the link to pathogen, if you haven’t heard of it.
From the same article, Destroy All Software screencasts. They look interesting, though I’ve found the web has eradicated my ability to watch videos over a minute in length, unless they contain squeaking guinea pigs or running bunnies.
How Pixar Almost Lost Toy Story 2 to a Bad Backup. (via) You can nitpick details (rm * isn’t recursive) but it’s funny in a nearly catastrophic disaster kind of way. Also, now is a good time to check your backups.
Here’s a video trailer for that WIZZYWIG comic I mentioned in a previous Lazy Reading.
This post about ROFLCon 3 makes a good point: Much of what we expect to do on the Internet, from installing your own operating system to captioning pictures of kittens, requires a computer. Increased phone and tablet use kills that, cause it’s not convenient. As the article notes by way of Chris Poole, things like Facebook are friend-based, not interest-based. Think about that for a bit. It’s important to me because that’s exactly what this site is – interest-based, rather than a social app.
The truth about system bottlenecks.

Your unrelated link of the week: Captain Forever. A game. Mentioned most recently on Verge, but read Rock, Paper, Shotgun for context.

2012/05/132012/05/12

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/13

I’m starting to pack these full enough that I might have to go biweekly.

“My 10 Unix command-line mistakes“. (via) You will have done at least a few of these – see comments on that article for even more. I know I’ve shut down the interface I’m connected on a few times…
BSD vs. Linux. (via) Maybe you know the details, maybe you don’t.
Git now has subtree support. You can now stuff git repositories into other git repositories, but they remain ‘normal’ repos that can be split back off later. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying. Also, the git website has gone through a redesign.
A BSD daemon patch, $3. (via) No Puffy or Fred ones that I’ve seen.
Here’s a puppet fix for DragonFly.
The Grammar of Vim. (via)
Rob Pike vs. Richard Stallman. (via the same place) Not enough drama, guys, come on!
Anatomy of a Scam. I link to it because my employer just received one of the bogus invoices mentioned in the article.
Computing Fossils. (via) If you follow one link from that article, make it this one about a punchcard IBM from 1948, still in use.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wizzywig. A self-contained comic about the early days of phone phreaking and hacking, written and drawn by Ed Piskor. The first two chapters are available as a PDF. Read and if you like it, order the whole thing. Also: Steve and Steve. If you know your history, you’ll get the cartoon.

Ed Piskor is currently cartooning the origin of hip-hop at BoingBoing; it’s a good read.

2012/05/062012/05/04

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/06

Drowning in links this week. Is that so bad? No.

I pity people that had to make illustrations about abstract concepts like the Internet, especially in the 1990s.
Slashdot jumps the shark. I’m not really knocking what they are adding – I could use it for work – but Slashdot has gone corporate, in the bland sense of the word. There’s no clear voice behind what they talk about. Even if you don’t like what they are posting, there’s no longer a specific author to disagree with. Younger folks may shrug and say “So what?”, but Slashdot used to be nearly the only decent source for nerdity online.
A sensible discussion of open source and how it relates to obsolescence and access.
Jan Schaumann’s NYCBUG presentation in mp3 form: “The Useless Use of *“
Winning entries in the 2011 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (via)
Hyperrogue III (Zeno Rogue). (via) It’s a roguelike, with vi-based directional controls and a non-Euclidian hyperbolic plane world, or at least that’s what the description says. It might compile on DragonFly.
“Why don’t more developers contribute to open source?“
Spam-merican Apparel (via) Spambots and T-shirts; that combination seems to be a natural growth of the internet.
XFCE 4.8 is on the way in pkgsrc. I know this will please some people.
The smallest (ELF) Hello World possible. (via profmakx onEFNet #dragonflybsd)
A SSD roundup. I have one in my work laptop right now and it makes a huge difference.
DuckDuckHack. (via) Quick, someone make a plugin for pkgsrc packages.

Your unrelated links of the week: Turntablism. I was talking about assembled music last week, and this is a whole area to itself. Watch Kid Koala turn a few seconds of trumpet playing into an entire blues progression.

2012/04/292012/04/27

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/29

I go a bit beyond presenting links and comment on them too, this week. Not too much! Enjoy.

Best ad for a front-end designer ever. (via) It will make sense if you used the Web in 1995.
A while back I linked to a article about Valve’s development process. Now, here’s the Handbook. (PDF, via) As I said before, they’ve arguably taken the best parts of open source development work and used then to create a workspace. These best parts are not the ones usually talk about when they say, “open source company”, though. There’s a Harvard Business School paper that talks about the carrot or stick approach to motivation, and I think Valve nailed it. Read the PDF, cause it’s more fun than this.
Animated Engines. (via) Animations that show how different engine types work. I find them oddly soothing. Also, I finally know more about a Wankel Rotary Engine outside of its existence as a punchline in a Monty Python sketch.
The best reaction to space mining. (via)
LOL memory, to the moon.
A BSD-specific fork of ekg2. Never used it; just saw the BSD part of the name.
“Imagine that you’re crazy enough to think about building a search engine.” (via)
“Before you write a patch, write an email“.
If you’re going to fund open source work, you should fund the boring stuff for maximum effectiveness.
Volatile Software (via) You may or may not agree with the strategy, but I can agree with the sentiment. For better or worse, BSD is generally a more sane/stable platform.
Twitter CLI. (via) Ruby-based, and seems like an actual good idea, not just a hack to see if it can be done.
“FreeBSD Device Drivers” for a pre-release 40% off. Some of the contents may apply to DragonFly. Or perhaps you enjoy device driver documentation?
Go Right (via), for anyone who played a game console more than 10 years ago.
VIM Adventures. (via) Surprisingly fun.

Your unrelated link of the week. Youtube Poop. As far as I can tell, ‘Youtube Poop’ are glitched videos made from Youtube content but with segments repeated, frames modified, or new sentences constructed from reassembling the frames. Sometimes noisy, sometimes rude. Also, an art form that can only exist now, and never really before. Reminds me of the old Fensler Films, or that odd series out of Japan. I find the idea of assembling new rhythms and music out of non-musical items fascinating, but I would, wouldn’t I?

(Turn your volume down before trying some of those links.)

2012/04/222012/04/21

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/22

Enjoy!

I like the sentiments here about Instagram. (via) I can see why it was popular, but not how it represented anything but a cosmetic tool, dependent on other services.
Waxy.org turns 10. I relink (reblog? I don’t know) material from the links page on waxy.org, because Andy Baio has a keen eye. That article has links to various high points over the last 10 years, so it’s worth setting aside some of your time and looking at previous features. Come to think of it, he started that only a year before I started this Digest.
Supercomputers installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. All the way back to UNIVAC. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) This picture is one of the more realistic I’ve ever seen about rack installation.
RFC6540: IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes. (via) YES.
The Story of BSD and Open-Source Linux, unfortunately incorrect, starting with the headline.
40 years on: Why Unix standards still matter. A brief note about the Single Unix Specification. There’s some implication that Unix was involved in the moon landings; was that the case? I didn’t think so, since at least a chunk of the moon landings predate Unix existing. (i.e. before the Epoch.)
A photo followup on the one PHP article from last week. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
From the same site as the PHP article, tmux is sweet as heck. It’s nice to see the positive points of tmux defined outside of licensing. Also, it serves as a good tmux configuration checklist.

Your unrelated link of the week: One Thing Well. The BSD tag might be the most useful.

2012/04/152012/04/14

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/15

It’s a good week when I can start collecting new Lazy Reading material right after posting the previous week’s summary.

There’s a ‘flickr doomsday clock‘. The concept is entertaining, even though the result it warns about is pretty bad. (via) There’s a sort of assumption that external sites hosting huge amounts of our personal data will never go away, or that there’s always an easy way to deal with it if they do.
Dragonfly – the knife.
Jack Tramiel died this past week. He’s responsible for Commodore, and the Amiga, and later owned Atari. There’s a DragonFly connection; Matthew Dillon was known for his DICE Amiga C compiler, among other things.
Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers on the Internet. (pdf, from sephe on EFNet #dragonflybsd) Hopefully I’m summing this up correctly: too many devices buffer network data when there’s congestion (and even when there isn’t congestion) instead of saying “It’s congested” through the normal TCP mechanisms, with the end result of much higher latency for everything. bufferbloat.net talks about it more, and Matthew Dillon found a good paper about it.
“PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat.” (via) I’m just enjoying the metaphors in the third paragraph.
And that led me to this: PHP: A fractal of bad design. The list of problems is larger than I thought. As in, it went from comedy to tragedy in the same document.
Peter Hansteen talks about port knocking. (via) As a side effect, the article provides a good checklist of how to make your system more secure. “No root login” is already implemented on DragonFly.
Computers Brochures, 50s-70s. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There’s a whole bunch of desktop wallpapers in a zip file down at the end. The scans are a bit noisy, but fun to see. I like the layout of the PDP issues.
Whatever happened to UNIX? We’re soaking in it.
I mentioned RetroBSD on PIC32 last week, and now here’s a picture.
Valve’s internal structure sounds astonishingly like an open source project. Everyone has access to the code, project direction is determined by interest, and it’s up to you to coordinate with others.
Google as a 1980s BBS. (via, via) It totally works.

Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley’s Cabinet Followups. There’s about a bazillion links there to follow about weird history.

2012/04/082012/04/07

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/08

The links are all over the map this week, which is fine. Enjoy!

This makes me laugh every time. (via)
Etsy has an astonishingly good internal development practice. And open source code? (via)
For contrast, Facebook’s release engineering process. (via I lost it, sorry) Not as interesting but I can’t tell why.
Mosh, a program designed for the persistence of screen but differently. (via) Dunno if it builds on DragonFly, but it looks neat.
I’m getting more paranoid as I get older. Things like this Javascript ad injection on hotel wi-fi may be a reason. (via)
“I just ran emacs. LOL!“
0x10c, a sci-fi game set in the future with spaceships running a 16-bit CPU. That you can program.
I wish I could write here with the same mix of loathing and excitement found in this comics review. Warning: mildly… gonzo?
The journey from user to contributor, a NYCBUG talk in mp3 form. (via)
I’ve mentioned RetroBSD before, but here’s an example of it being installed on a Duinomite board. 2.11 BSD on a super-cheap, super-small Arduino-style board! (via) I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want one. It even has keyboard and VGA ports.
At some point, this CPU database will be handy. (via)
A new, slow form of brute force ssh attack. (via) What I find interesting here is not so much the new attack itself, but Peter Hansteen’s careful gathering and analysis of data around it.

Your unrelated link of the week: memepool. It’s seen some activity lately. It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.

2012/04/012012/03/31

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/01

This would be the right time for an April Fools joke… but no. It’s so common it’s hard to come up with something that won’t make people roll their eyes.

Here’s an Ultimate SSH Hacks article that isn’t actually that ultimate, or hacky. However, I found it via this Slashdot article that had a comment with this nifty trick for having a single-file Unix-portable ssh link.
Design Disease. (via) I can sympathize. If you can’t tell what he’s objecting to in the pictures, consider yourself lucky. There’s probably a similar symptom that makes people collect old computer equipment, which I daresay a few readers are vulnerable to.
Legit, Git workflow for humans. Slightly more sensical syntax for git, as far as I can tell. (via)
Michael Lucas is dedicated to writing. Really dedicated.
Also, Michael Lucas and The Value of Tech Books. He’s very right about man pages; they’re great and also not great.
How DNS Changer was taken down and victims redirected. (via) I link to it because Paul Vixie, the author, also wrote the cron program you’re running right now. Really, look at the end of the man page.
Look at what’s happened to DuckDuckGo’s traffic stats! (via) I’ve linked to the search engine before, and I know there’s at least a few readers who like it.
“Let’s kill all proprietary drivers for good” (PDF, via several places) It makes me happy that it talks about drivers and acknowledges the existence of BSD. Driver unification would be great, though it really needs someone solidly behind it as with any project.
“The problem is compounded by the way Linux has grown over the years into an ungainly edifice, built upon thousands of individual packages of computer code that have been stapled together.”

Your unrelated link of the day: a Space Shuttle launch from the point of view of the booster rocket. (via) Remember when humanity had reusable spaceships?

2012/03/252012/03/24

Lazy Reading for 2012/03/25

This is the week of in-depth items to look at. I hope you have some time set aside… Also, I’m doing something a little different; since Lazy Reading articles are built up over the week, I’m scheduling it for early Sunday (EST) so that you can read it in your bathrobe, drinking an astonishingly large amount of tea. Or at least that’s what I’ll be doing.

Apparently there’s a Russian version of BSD Magazine, with a special Russian-only article. Anyone who can read it willing to tell me what it’s about?
Did you know BSD also stands for something bike-related?
70 Roguelikes! The 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, just completed, has 70 games out as a result. This will keep you busy, and there’s a very good writeup on several of the games to help you pick from the options.
20 Years of Adobe Photoshop. (via) I link it because almost everyone, sooner or later, has used it or has used a program with a very similar tool layout. Though I suppose you could argue it all comes from MacPaint, designed by Susan Kare, who happens to have also originated Clarus the dogcow. Moof!
Man, Apple used to really have a sense of humor, too. Maybe they still do. Companies still do funny things (caution, autoplay video), but it seems to be done with the company’s marketing image in mind these days. Also, get your ball out of my yard you darn kids etc.
Michael Lucas is teaching a SSH class at BSDCan 2012.
Lucas also has also disclosed numbers on his recent self-publishing venture. I love seeing numbers like this because self-publishing discussion usually brings a whole lot of biases to the table, and people come down on one side or another because of what they want it to be, not because of what it is. (Like discussions of the music industry, piracy, and software.) This is just the plain numbers. Also, Absolute OpenBSD, second edition, is definitely his next book.
Still on ssh, This Undeadly article talks about using OpenBSD, make, and ssh to speed up research.
20 iconic tech sounds bound for extinction. (via) Something in there will make you feel nostalgic. I like the 8mm film noise.
Speaking of noise, here’s Famous Sounds, mostly electronically generated or sampled. (via) I guarantee some of these will be instantly familiar even though you won’t have heard the original song.

Your unrelated link of the week: Traitor. (via) It’s a Flash space shootemup game. But dragonflies show up in one part! (to shoot.)

2012/03/182012/03/18

Lazy Reading for 2012/03/18

I’m making sure I post this Lazy Reading on the right day. A nice full week’s worth of stuff.

Bandwidth used when loading different web pages. (via) The largest one is also the most surprising.
Do you have an IBM x3550? Turn ACPI off.
The recent TCL presentation at NYCBUG is available in audio form.
Did you want to know a lot of detail on how to do journaled soft updates in UFS? You want detail, you got it. (via, via) (Is that a repeat link? I don’t think so…)
This is totally useful if you’re using ssh from a Windows machine.
SSH is used as a noun and a verb, I just realized. No link, it’s just me noticing verbification.
BSDCan 2012 registration is open. (via Michael Lucas’s Twitter feed) Conventions are awesome. You should go.
Michael Lucas talks about book promotion with his recent book. There’s a graph, so it’s automatically great.
Speaking of books, Modern Perl: The Book is free to download in PDF form.
A story about _why. (via) I’m not so interested in his identity, but in what he did to get people to program.
My git habits. (Not mine; that’s just the title.) Speaking of learning, I’ve always thought the next steps past learning the basics of anything is to then see how experienced people approach it, idiomatically.
Why Juniper Gives Back to the FreeBSD Community. I link to this because I like what they are doing, and also because in a perfect world I would rather have a BSD-ish interface on my networking equipment than fiddle with IOS. Oh well.
Bunnie Huang always builds neat stuff. This time it’s a Geiger counter. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Neo Scavenger. (via) It’s a game, in Flash, and in beta. If you like postapocalyptic survival, it may be for you.

2012/03/112012/03/12

Lazy Reading for 2012/03/11

This is the week where I remember to actually write introductory text. I also didn’t think I was going to have anything good this week, but The Internet came through for me at the last minute. Thanks, Internet! It’s also the week where I mis-schedule this post for Friday, temporarily.

You may not need to Build Command Line Tools in Style, but I like the way the slides in this presentation … slide.
This is another version of the “my computer should be free” argument. (via) The argument has been made before, though this version is slightly less antic.
It’s always neat to see notes from someone trying DragonFly for the first time. Desktop and video editing… that’s going to be a hard road, though.
Unix == ZZ Top. (via)
Where vi came from. The original terminal had arrows on the HJKL keys.
An in-depth explanation of HTTPS Everywhere.
Dungeon creation using a dungeon! Next: recursive dragons, I just know it. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!

2012/03/042012/03/03

Lazy Reading for 2012/03/04

Whee!

“Entropy is a programming langauge where data decays as the program runs. ” (via) It was used to write Drunk Eliza, a form of the famous Eliza program that uses Rogerian-therapy-style interaction. That led me to find Esolang, the esoteric programming languages wiki. You will be amused/horrified, perhaps simultaneously, by some of the languages described there. (Did I link to Esolang before? I recall something like that but can’t find it…)
Here’s someone asking for an implementation of DragonFly’s swapcache, for Postgres. The response, quite correctly, is “No.” I can’t imagine how painful it would be to support a database-specific disk caching system across multiple platforms, on top of whatever each platform did on its own. (Thanks, Jan Lentfer)
Surrealist humor mixed with typographical humor.
SSH Mastery is now available on Amazon, in hardcopy form.
Cat vs. Router.
Armenia has abolished summer time. It’s just a time zone update, but I like the phrase.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Friends With Boys. The whole comic is available online starting with the first page here and going on for about 200 more. The full comic is only going to be online for a few days – hopefully enough for people to see it – and then you have to buy it. (There will still be a preview.) It’s a good story.

2012/02/192012/02/21

Lazy Reading for 2012/02/19

Apparently this is a good week for Lazy Reading links, cause I have lots! If you have any specific suggestions of where to find more links, I’d welcome them. I’m sure there’s more people to follow that come up with tidbits like these…

Coding Tricks of Game Developers. A mix of genuine techniques and deadline near-misses. (via)
Insane Calculations In Bash. Ostensibly, it describes all the work required to convert number series to “sparks” (inline UTF-8-based graphs) using bash. What it really shows is how far down the paths of madness shell programming can take you.
From the same person, It Came From The Hold Space, a description of how crappy things could be pre-1990 or so when, say, sed was the most capable tool you had. Read the presentation description first. Bonus: the presentation explains a non-acronym source for the name “grep”.
Hey, I’ve seen that logo before. (via Koston on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Mounting files from the web. (via luxh, same place)
Here’s a Google Summer of Code success story that made me feel good just for having participated.
“If a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have an option which enables it to be easily played by a moderately inebriated person who isn’t good at math, it is a failure.“
Hey, Window Maker finally got updated. (via) It was always my favorite window manager.
Michael Lucas published his sales numbers so far for SSH Mastery. (reviewed by me here, totally worth buying) The interesting takeaway for me was that despite the reach of Amazon, Smashwords was more profitable – and I like the variety of Smashwords’ DRM-free formats more.
I’m linking to this mention of open source operating system cost estimates mostly cause I like the phrase “Debian for the most part is a package repository.“
Hey, that’s cute. (Make sure your terminal is wider than 80 columns to see it.)

Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak. An animator in the UK; I like the rhythmic repetition in his (occasionally disturbing) animations.

As I mentioned last week, DragonFly developer Venkatesh Srinivas is collecting pledges for his crazy-long bike ride, raising funds for cancer patient support. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mother died from cancer in a long, agonizing process some years ago. The support system funded by these pledges would have helped us tremendously. Please donate a few dollars to ease someone else’s burden.

2012/02/122012/02/12

Lazy Reading for 2012/02/12

Hey, it’s snowing here! Finally.

I remember when fractal zooming would bring a desktop computer to its knees. Now, you can do it in a web browser. (via) This exists as a standalone application (x11/XaoS) too.
I see content from here get splogged, from time to time, and I think that’s what’s happening here. Someone throws “BSD” into a content generator, with ads slapped on top of it? Honestly, I’m not sure what it is. (via)
Hammer 2 work is starting, as noted earlier this week. Let’s see some details on a similar filesystem project, btrfs. (via)
You should quit Facebook because privacy etc. you’ve heard it from me before. The arguments are getting more thorough, though.
Here’s an article from independent game developer Jeff Vogel about serving a niche with your independent work. I like his writing, plus if you squint your eyes and sorta look at that article’s point sideways, you could construe it as relevant for BSD.
For fun, spot the two things I mention/link to here frequently, in this somewhat hypey article about Tumblr. (via)
An Economist article about shifting from computer to computer. I read that and realized the one computer constant for me isn’t my desktop – it’s “~”.
If you ever played games on the Amiga, you may want to watch this movie. It’s clips from a lot of Amiga games. By a lot, I mean an hour and a half of footage total. There were some really advanced games for the time there. (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Shut Up About Cats. The rest of that site’s good too.

Also! On a related link, Venkatesh Srinivas, one of the DragonFly developers, is participating in a bike ride to raise cash for the Ulman Cancer Fund. If you’d like to pledge some money, he’ll feel better as he cycles a ridiculous 4,000 miles across the US.

2012/02/052012/02/04

Lazy Reading for 2012/02/05

It’s like early spring here in the northeast US. Which would be fine if it was actually spring. I miss snow.

An explanation of the classic UNIX hierarchy. (via thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd) I’m behind any explanation that uses the phrase “accretion disk” to describe an organization.
Hipster BSD. If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s based on this.
Would you like to have DNSSEC upgrading explained to you?
Hooray for Unicode! (via)
What Commons Do We Wish For? I was, briefly, technically, an AOL employee after the Time Warner merger in 2000. I didn’t like the notion of working for a walled garden then, and I think that’s why Facebook and other companies irk me now. Anyway, read that article for a good explanation of why that feeling is important.

Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf 2.0. A small comics publisher that has put much of their comics online to read. Their stuff on paper is worth buying too, as I have been doing for a while now.

2012/01/292012/01/27

Lazy reading for 2012/01/29

This is the week of the funny, apparently.

I’ve linked to this site before, but not this specific feature: History of UNIX manpages. Part of the formatting that makes up man pages dates back to 1964! ‘roff’ comes from RUNOFF, the original markup! This is the perfect mix of history, nerditry, and language for me.
Hubert Feyrer says there should be BSD Certification training material. I agree.
That’s the spiffiest TWM I’ve ever seen, and it’s on DragonFly. Found at the same place: Bash.
Hey, Michael Lucas is planning for his next book!
Developer error HTTP status codes. (via) What’s the geekiest joke I can still find funny?
I like it when computers look like serious computers. (via luxh on #dragonflybsd)

Your totally unrelated video link of the week: The Necronomicon. Pitch perfect.

2012/01/222012/01/22

Lazy Reading for 2012/01/22

I even have some comedy in here this week.

Here’s some interesting ideas on improving the standard terminal window. (via)
Hey, a Windows Phone application that aggregates BSD news! Including this one, I think. No way to test it because Windows Phones are rarer than hen’s teeth.
This article about Bruce Perens has some good quotes in it – especially the Mark Shuttleworth one. (via)
I think these computers all predate the integrated circuit. (via)
How Google Code Search Worked. (via)
The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing. (via) I don’t think the numbers used are accurate, but the trend is correct: a lot more people are computing through devices that are “walled gardens”, where they can’t install what they want.
The App Store Guide – Take Two. It boils down to: Curated information on what programs to run is very useful. Someone could do this with pkgsrc or ports, easily. pkgsrc.se is sorta there, but not really with any sort of authorial voice.
Variable typing can be surprisingly funny. (via) The final punchline is great but may not make sense unless you’ve seen where it comes from.
Network jokes are the bestest jokes. (via)

Your unrelated comics link for the week: Tom Neely‘s Doppelganger. Page 11 is my favoritest.

Another unrelated thing: David Shao, are you out there? Can you get on IRC (EFNet #dragonflybsd) and help some people out with GEM/KMS questions? Nobody’s been able to find you.

2012/01/152012/01/15

Lazy Reading for 2012/01/15

Getting back into the rhythm, here…

Jeff Vogel, who is a funny and smart guy, wrote this article, essentially about crowdsourcing. It’s another way of saying “bikeshed“. Plus: D&D!
Michael Lucas, sometimes BSD author, has a new fiction collection out. He’s working on a SSH book too.
Hey, AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, BSDCan in May. I don’t know about EuroBSDCon or NYCBSDCon, though. Plan ahead!
Did you know there’s a bsd.org? Very old-school: here’s a list of commands, get going.
GNU Tar doesn’t have a man page. (via) Weird. I didn’t verify that, but I’m not sure how to.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: there’s a Freddy, and a dragonfly, but it’s not DragonFly BSD. It’s still fun though.