Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.
For anyone who is a student considering Google Summer of Code this year: this timeframe we’re in right now is listed by Google as time for “students discuss project ideas with mentoring organizations”. This is the perfect time to find out what the people in an organization are like, and get early feedback on your project ideas.
Chances are, if you’re submitting a proposal for an idea from an org’s project list, you’re one of a number of students all trying for the same thing. The best way to get accepted instead of any other applicant is to be the person they already know.
I hope you like reading; there’s some very meaty links this week. Go get a cup of tea and settle in. You drink tea, don’t you? You ought to.
- Reading about KDE’s repository near-meltdown makes me think we need more checks for DragonFly. We have the advantage of Hammer, of course, which would help in the same way that the linked article names ZFS as a ‘fix’. (via multiple places)
- We know that Apple will reject apps it disagrees with. Google also will do so. Has there ever been a program rejected from pkgsrc or (FreeBSD/OpenBSD) ports on content grounds? Not that I know of – anyone remember differently? I’d argue that’s a favorable point for the BSD packaging systems, though it may just be that no application has tested those boundaries yet.
- Portscanning all IPv4 addresses on the planet. Possibly the largest distributed effort ever? The detail in the maps and returned services is especially interesting. (via)
- Scale Fail, a Youtube video of a 2011 talk about screwing up your services. Mostly about the humor, but the underlying points are valid. (via #dragonflybsd IRC)
- There’s still improvement possible to fsck, apparently based on this. That’s UFS2 fsck.
- What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? A very thorough explanation of verbs, marks, and registers. Holy cow, I wish I had known about ‘: … v’ before. It’s long, but worth it. (via)
- Matthew Garret’s description of Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot with UEFI, (via a coworker who went to Libreplanet 2013). I’m still not sure what DragonFly will need to do about this.
- I missed mentioning this earlier: 20 years of NetBSD. We’re coming up on 10 soon.
- Dragonfly drones. Unrelated except for name.
- That guy who starts to froth madly every time BSD is mentioned on Phoronix is still there (see comments).
- Mainframe computer supercut. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter asked people for their lists of webcomics that could go in a ‘Hall of Fame’. The resulting list is a lot of really, really good material. Go use up a few hours reading.
OpenGrok is a source browser that I have not used extensively, but many people say is a great tool. The same people say it’s difficult to run. Zafer Aydogan just posted that DragonFly’s source is available now from his perfectly-functional OpenGrok installation.
(I’ll put it in the links sidebar here, too.)
It’s still snowing in my area, which is unusual. And great!
- An IBM Selectric being gutted, in stop motion.
- Apple is Losing the War – Of Words. I’m not interested in it for Apple, but rather the casual reference to the huge quantity of astroturfing going on, all the time, from major tech companies.
- Following up on my earlier tweetspam post: World’s Best Spam. Remember, recommendations from others is the most effective persuasion method to get people to buy, so there’s a big economic incentive to create positive recommendations. (via)
- Related: The Economics of Spam. (via)
- se, a modernized, screen-oriented ed. (via)
- Where the symbols “+” and “-” came from. (via)
- A Partial History of Headphones.
- Geometric shapes in Latex. I’m sure someone will find this useful. (via)
- “The Kung Fu Killing Machine DragonFly” See the second cover. I have this actual series in paper form; it’s great. (via)
- That Afrodisiac comic from the previous link is available from the publisher; there’s a PDF preview.
- Continuing – the best blaxplotation homage ever is Black Dynamite.
- I never promised I’d stay on topic here.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: French cartoonist Boulet knocks it out of the park again.
I managed to come up with a lot of links this week, somehow, despite the start of the class I’m teaching in addition to normal work. And Summer of Code’s coming up! And we’re due for a release relatively soon! I may appear somewhat… stretched over the next few weeks.
- Hey, other people are noticing that odd linkspam email I’ve been getting. (via)
- The followup: Don’t share that infographic spam. I’m pretty sure I’m the ‘one reader’ mentioned by the author, since I mailed him about the previous story.
- I always enjoy stories about troubleshooting strange performance problems.
- We need something like this Red Book idea for pkgsrc/DPorts.
- Ode to the Semicolon. I love semicolons; I use them more than an em dash. (via)
- The Maker Map. You may find this useful for building resources. I’m gaining one near me soon. (via)
- The Book-writing Machine. Possibly the first book written with a word processor. (via)
- Vim Git Gutter. A brilliant idea: show the git diff as you work in Vim. (via)
- Add everything to Vim! Add nothing to Vim! (via a long twisty path of links)
- An HTML5 roguelike, THE ROYAL WEDDING; nicely done. (via)
- Hey, the Digest is on Google Plus, or at least the RSS feed is.
- Smallest analog computer ever made. This is what computers should look like. (via)
- List of inventors killed by their own inventions. No good reason to link this other than it’s a longer list than I thought it would be. (via)
- This PHP/MySQL assessment made me laugh. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: I’m the Computer Man. I always thought the mid-1990s were sort of a Internet/computer teenager phase. Everything had potential but everything was also awkward. (via I forget, sorry!)
I am all over the place with links this week – some of them pretty far off the path. There’s a lot, too, so enjoy!
- Puctuation obscurantism, punctuation humor; I like it all. (via)
- Exporting your git repository. Found while looking for something else.
- I want CTRL-D at a terminal to make something like this to happen.
- Visual Representation of Regular Expression Character Classes. I like visual ways of classifying complex data.
- Speaking of which: Anatomy of Data. Not sure how I found it.
- Digital Files and 3D Printing – In the Renaissance? The title sounds a bit linkbaity, but the story of the 14th century map designed to be recreated with a graphing tool is pretty neat.
- Postgres: The Bits You Haven’t Found. Advanced/odd Postgres usage. (via)
- Breaking your arrow keys is the latest idea in improving Vim usage.
- PC-BSD is moving to a ‘rolling release’ format, and also using the new pkg tools that are also in DPorts. Historic details on this new setup are available.
- Fred, taking off.
- Ten hours with the most inscrutable game of all time. I like the idea of Dwarf Fortress more than I actually like playing it. I’m somewhat afraid of it. It looks like this sounds.
- That last comparison wasn’t necessarily fair, but it was fun.
- If I’m going to talk about music like that, I should link Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.
- The Wizard of Pinball. I just want my own standup pinball or arcade cabinet game. Yes, yes, I know, MAME cabinet.
- Appropriately this week, “Ball Saved”, page 1 and page 2 of a 2-page comic about pinball.
- UnReal World, an Iron-Age roguelike. Apparently pretty brutal, and two decades in development. Runs on several platforms, but not BSD. (via)
- You Are Boring. Some of the ‘boring’ items made me laugh. (via)
- The first review of Michael W. Lucas’s Absolute OpenBSD, Second Edition is available.
Your unrelated link of the week: I’ve already been offbeat enough in this Lazy Reading; I don’t have anything else.
Constantine A. Murenin has put together a new man page resource for all the BSDS: mdoc.su. The options for shortened URLs are entertainingly diverse.
This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.
- An oldie but goodie. ENHANCE. This will make anyone who has done photo/video editing twitch. Check the author’s Tumblr for more supercuts. (indirectly via)
- Many people complain about regular expressions (and more recently), but they are an insanely powerful tool if you know them well. If you do, figure out this crossword. (PDF) (via)
- Followup on the first two links in that last item: xkcd drives a lot of traffic!
- If you are on Windows, you probably use PuTTY for ssh. It saves everything in the registry, which can occasionally mean losing all your configuration. There’s manual ways to save it, but there’s also PuTTYtray. (I’ve used portaPuTTY in the past, but it seems to be missing/no longer updated.)
- Actually, holy crap there’s a lot of variations/addons for PuTTY.
- That makes sense given how many terminal emulators there are, really.
- Why piping something off the Internet right to a shell isn’t a good idea. (via)
- Remember when the computer section in bookstores had books that involved programming? (unfair, I know.)
- “Don’t Be A Stranger“, musing on how there isn’t enough meeting strangers through the Internet any more. Here’s the odd thought I had while reading that article: I couldn’t pick most of the other DragonFly developers out of a lineup, but I’ve been working and talking with some of them for a decade.
- You could build Photoshop version 1 yourself – just substitute the original Mac libraries.
- Related: Photoshop is a city for everyone.
- Some of the oldest color film footage. Not the oldest,but possibly some of the earliest commercial film. Of course, the first thing filmed are young, attractive women. This is a re-occurring theme.
- Hey, a comprehensive year-end BSD roundup.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server. Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it. (via)
Wait, this is better! That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry. At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever. Even better than Elemental!
Michael W. Lucas has put together a script for pulling a user’s authorized_keys file for SSH out of LDAP. It’s a very good idea, though he hints pretty clearly that he could use feedback/feedback – there’s already some in the comments.
Updates: from discussion in IRC about this sort of distributed authentication (maybe ‘authentication distribution’ is a better phrase): Tools like puppet or FreeIPA may also be useful. From seeing other conversations about this, it looks like there’s a lot of solutions to pick from, of varying difficulty, and none canonical. That’s both good and bad.
Pierre Abbat noticed that when using pkg_rolling-replace, his Python packages would fail to be built/replaced. This is because pkgsrc puts the version number into the name of the package, and he was moving from Python 2.6 to 2.7. OBATA Akio and Greg Troxel had suggestions/explanations.
If you have git installed, and you are trying to upgrade it, you may have problems. The scmgit-docs package dependency requires some DocBook files that aren’t always accessible. If you do run into this problem, there’s 3 separate options:
- You can just install scmgit-base and ignore scmgit-docs. The program ‘git’ still runs.
- You can download the prebuilt DocBook files separately.
- You can rebuild some XML-related dependent files and then rebuild without issue.
Based on this bug report on the recently updated m4, you may need to perform some extra steps to update m4 as part of a normal upgrade:
# cd /usr/src/usr.bin/m4 # make # make install clean
If you are a brave soul and have an IPv6-only DragonFly installation, there’s now a git mirror of DragonFly that is available on IPv6.
I could have sworn I noted it before, but as Venkatesh Srinivas points out, there’s a port of cpdup to Linux. Also, if you’re using cpdup to copy material out of a Hammer volume’s history, use the -VV switch.
Michael W. Lucas announced his next book will be about DNSSec, which is good. It’s also self-published, which I like to see. I don’t know if it necessarily makes him more money, but I like to see more exploration of this new way of publishing.
If you look at his announcement, there’s a link to something else: vendor-free SSL certificates. These are possible? That’s one of those things I didn’t even realize I wanted; having to deal with a certification authority is annoying.
This discussion of cryptographic hardware for FreeBSD may include hardware that would work for DragonFly too. Can someone verify?
Shopping! This is the big holiday shopping weekend in the US, and I usually put together something here.
- Buy an SSD for someone who doesn’t have one – including you if that’s the case. There’s better and worse SSDs out there, but you’ll get a speed benefit no matter what, and other bonuses are possible.
- The Tea Bag Buddy, which also comes in a color-changing version. Because tea.
- My perennial Science! suggestions: ThinkGeek, American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear, The Bone Room, and Skulls Unlimited.
- The Best of BSD 2011 and Last Year in BSD Security, from the BSD Magazine publisher.
- For more BSD, there’s always the orgs themselves. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD – no DragonFly, though there ought to be. Also, ISC.
- For lists of gifts, there’s the Verge Gift Guide, which has some interesting offshoots.
- Another long list: The Comics Reporter’s Shopping List.
If you have suggestions, please comment!
Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD. Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on. For example:
smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006" smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. " smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "
This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.
The 3.2 release seems to have gone well. Who has tried the new USB support? I’m curious to see how it’s going.
- :syntax Off, about working without syntax highlighting. (via)
- The previous link led me to this .vimrc with by-line explanations. I never get tired of looking at these things, though I also never implement anything out of them.
- 102 FreeBSD Tips. It’s really the contents of the FreeBSD fortune file. Almost all these tips apply to DragonFly, too, and often the other BSDs.
- A tcpdump primer. Always a good tool to know. It’s not as easy to use as Wireshark, but it’s certainly possible to end up with access to tcpdump and not Wireshark, right when you really need to see what’s happening on the network. (via)
- An HTML5-based terminal in your browser. Displays images, runs vim, etc. All that technological growth since 1972 has come full circle to replicate an 80×25 screen again. (I kid; it’s pretty neat.)
- A 6-week cryptography course, free of charge.
- Nothing to do with this operating system, but: Robot DragonFly, an Indiegogo project. (via)
- When you’re young and getting paid to work on open source, you can be surprisingly naive. (via several people)
- I agree with this sentiment about Linuxisms coming from an OpenBSD developer. (via Tomaz Bodzar)
- Someone want to work on ssh-ldap-helper for BSD? It sounds like a very good idea.
- A bunch of free computer books. Ignore the Linux ones; there’s free books for Ruby/Python/Perl there. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: This roundup of ultrarealist human sculpture. You’ve probably seen Ron Mueck‘s art before, at least.