Lazy Reading for 2011/10/09

Getting close to 2.12 release…

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/02

Yep, fall hits and it’s easier to find links.

Your unrelated link of the week: Scientific Illustration.  Not a comic, but still visually interesting.

Lazy Reading for 2011/09/04

It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America.  About time, too!  I don’t like the heat.  Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday.  I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/24

Lazy reading is easy when it’s been this hot out.  In fact, I may melt before this article gets published.

  • Ecdysis – a NAT64 gateway program.  I link to it for two reasons.  1: You will probably need to NAT 6-to-4 sooner or later, and 2: it uses PF and so is BSD-compatible. (via)
  • Don’t not copy that floppy! (also via)  My original Apple ][ disk for Castle Wolfenstein is probably no longer functional.  Not that I have equipment to play it on…
  • World timezones, as a visible map.  (via)   I mention time zone updates here on occasion, and this is a immediate guide to what a strange patchwork of zones it is.  You can’t even see some of the really tiny/crazy ones.
  • A crappy way to start your day.  Nobody ever enjoys that call from work…

And now, a link that has nothing to do with this.

Practical Packet Analysis: a review

Background: You may remember some time ago, I posted a review of Michael Lucas’s Network Flow Analysis.  He’s written several BSD books and so I figured it was worth reading further, knowing that this network-specific book would be BSD-friendly.  Also, he made it easier by sending me a copy.

No Starch Press, the company that published all the books linked in the previous paragraph, asked if I’d read/review another book from them. This would be Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd edition.  (Review continues after the break…)

Continue reading “Practical Packet Analysis: a review”

Lazy Reading

You can probably infer the new (to me) blog I found this week from some of the links…

  • Adding IPv6 to a FreeBSD Mail/Web Server – from Michael Lucas, repeat BSD author.  I link to this because we’re all going to have to do something similar in the next year or so, I bet..
  • A visual guide to TMUX, part 1 and part 2.  tmux has usually been introduced to me as “It’s BSD-licensed and not screen”, which is good, but not compelling on its own.  The first of the articles linked here goes over the comparative differences in some detail.  (via)
  • Speaking of screen-ish things, do you leave an irssi session running in screen so that you can rejoin IRC conversations at any time?  I sure do.  Sometimes I even reconnect through ConnectBot on my Android phone.  There’s now a Connectbot variation for irssi, just for people who do such a thing.  Don’t forget: #dragonflybsd on EFNet.
  • Also still on the topic: forgetting to use screen and then being stuck with a long-running process is lousy.  There’s ways to deal with it, though.  (via, from a blogroll link)
  • Hey, it’s neat to see a new business built on BSD – OpenBSD, in this case: Tunnelr.  (via)
  • We’re still doing great in terms of pkgsrc packages building successfully on DragonFly.
  • An hour+ recording of the recent NYCBUG meeting about BSD networking is online.  (Link is to a MP3 – via)
  • How not to comment code.
  • AT&T -> BSD -> AT&T.
Lazy Reading: cheatsheet, disks, pkgsrc, more

Normally I hold this for Sunday, but I’ve got a good batch of links already.  Something here for everyone, this week.

  • A git cheatsheet, and another git cheatsheet.  I may have linked to the latter one before, as it looks vaguely familiar.  Anyway, bookmark.  (Thanks, luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • What should you do about bad blocks on a disk?  Get a new disk.
  • If you ever wanted to port software, there’s a pkgsrc developer’s guide (thanks Francois Tigeot) that shows you how.
  • It’s NOT LINUX, for the billionth time.  It’s BSD UNIX (certified, even) under there!
  • Children of the Cron“.  An entertaining pun.  (via)
  • Nothing to do with BSD, or even computers, really: Gary Gorton, interviewed about the recent financial crisis, at a Fed bank website (!?).  Interesting because I like economic matters, and because it’s the first web page where I’ve ever seen pop-up links added usefully, as a sort of footnote that you don’t have to scroll.  (via)
  • Michael Lucas recently had a machine broken into.  Since everything on the machine is suspect, he’s using Netflow data to figure out when it happened, and how, which is not surprising given his most recent book.  He has two posts describing how he backtracks his way to the probable source.
Lazy Reading: Lots and lots of it

Somehow I ended up with a zillion links for this week’s Lazy Reading.  I hope you’ve got some spare time for this…  Let’s get right into it:

  • Michael Lucas, BSD book author (see links on site), has started Twittering.   He’s also found the Wikileaks/NetBSD association that I didn’t know about, as Julian Assange even shows up in the NetBSD fortunes file.  Also, while linking to his blog, I’ll point at his post on “Write what you don’t know“.  Think of that article next time you feel you don’t know enough to contribute to something – especially open source.
  • There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“.   You can follow the whole thread on the listing page.  I am all for the idea.  Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days.  Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites.  This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.
  • Hey, a roguelike zombie apocalypse game!  Aw, it’s Windows-only.
  • Mikel King has an editorial that sums up the many places BSD serves as an underpinning to products – a good checklist, if you don’t know of them.  He’s also written an instructional article on passwordless/SSH setup.
  • Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things.  This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.
  • Did you know there are even BSD Certification classes in Iran?  I really need to do that… though probably not at that location.
  • Yacc is not dead.  (via)  I link to this because I had a moment of nerd excitement realizing that blog’s title is intended to look like a bang path.
  • Database design ideas.  There’s been a good series of posts there lately, good for anyone wanting to move beyond the basic CRUD details.
A super-simple install

I was reading this Perl Advent Calendar (that would be good for DragonFly, come to think of it) post about ack, and came across a interesting line:

curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3'

fetch’ would work just as well on a BSD system. The interesting thing is that it’s a one-liner for installing software that doesn’t make any assumptions about having an existing framework like pkgsrc or aptitude or anything like that – it just grabs the code and plops it in place.  It wouldn’t work for more complex software, but the simplicity is intriguing, to match the Unix-like single, chainable program idea.

For those who haven’t seen it, ‘ack‘ is a grep replacement that automatically takes care of common activities around searching – skipping files that would cause duplicate matches, binary files, etc., handles a larger range of regular expressions, and runs startlingly fast.