Category: UNIXish

‘Historic information week’ is this week’s accidental theme.

• Why traceroute uses UDP and not ICMP.
• W. Richard Stevens, a list of works.  The previous traceroute link came from there, and there’s a lot more gems in those links.
• I agree with this description of web apps.
• grepcidr2, for finding networks within a given CIDR range.
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications, a book.  The Sendmail chapter may be interesting, given that Sendmail is wrapped up in the history of Unix and the Internet.  Also, it notes that ‘syslog’ exists as a sendmail side project that kept going. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• What is Code?  From Paul Ford.  Long, but excellent.  (via several places)
• Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible.  (via)
• The Manuscripts of E.W. Dijkstra.  This is just one of the excellent links hidden in the previous story.
• It’s the Future.  The web page creation process has become complicated.(via)
• Yes, A video game contributed to Unix Development.  (via)
• Finding Your Groups.
• Unix is not an acceptable Unix.  The “one thing well” part of Unix tools is frequently misunderstood, perhaps on purpose.  This is one of those.  (via)
• Age, Pleasing Apple, and Trying To Climb Out of the Hole.  Getting old, running your own business, and programming, is all together a daunting prospect.
• The Apple Collector.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Fully Computerized.

Pre-assembled over the week, since I have an odd weekend schedule this week.  On the plus side, there’s lots to click here.

• How to Be a Good Open Source Community Member.  (via)
• Reliable Cron across the Planet.  (via)
• How to irritate people away from your website, example 1 and example 2.  I hate being repeatedly asked to sign up for a newsletter I’m already on.  Also, this.
• “If you build your business on top of someone else’s system, eventually they’re going to notice.“
• Explorable Explanations.  I’ve seen at least one of them before and it really stuck with me.  (via)
• “Gee, this is a lot of microfiche material.  Better build my own high-volume scanner!”  (via)
• Also at that last link: DECbox, BlinkenBone, and other projects.
• How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web.  The author says “It’s very slow”, but so was everything back then.  (via)
• The HP-01, found indirectly through the last link.  Think of that when next reading about wearables.
• The Days They Changed The Gauge.  Heck of an outage window.  (via)
• What’s the oldest/weirdest thing you’ve found on your network?  An ancient Catalyst switch, running inside an enclosure 1400 ft underground, crammed between a wooden structure and a rock wall.  I have a picture of the space.
• Slack is quietly, unintentionally killing IRC.  Not scientifically studied, and anything dependent on a single company and not a standard can have longevity problems.  (via I lost track, sorry)
• sslh, two services on one port, for when most everything gets blocked.  (via NANOG)
• UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use — 1982, Bell Laboratories.  (via)
• The Shut-In Economy, or how to dedicate your life to a workplace.  Also, how to ignore the temping nature of all these new jobs.  (via)
• O’Reilly’s running a Top 25 sale.
• Andrew W.K. is the Kibo (see site) of Instagram: his name + nosebleed is all it takes.  (via)

Unrelated link of the week: Tea.  Contains strong language.

Happy (almost) St. Patrick’s Day!  An excuse in the U.S. to wear green things and drink beer.

• VimGolf. (via Rolinh on #dragonflybsd)
• Operating system research – 16 years perspective.  (via)
• A bad day for your network infrastructure.
• Unix best practices.
• 8 Unix networking commands and what they tell you.
• Open computing progress.  (via)
• Extracting content without the hassle.
• gvim-to-xcolors.
• A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge.  I remember Visicalc.  (via)
• Google Code is shutting down.  There’s DragonFly Summer of Code stuff in there.
• Oxford is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace’s birth.  (via)
• What’s your great-great-great-grandmother’s maiden name?

All over the spectrum this week.

• The Story of the Intel 4004.  (via)
• Why Perl Didn’t Win.  Some methods that could be useful for the BSDs here.  (via)
• uBlock, a less-resource-intensive version of AdBlock.  (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Emacs user at work.  (via alexh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Librem 15, “A Free/Libre Software Laptop”.  Blobless.  (via Mike)
• How to cheat at the future.  Something I need to address for this very Digest.  (via)
• What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?  (via)
• Your entire PC in a mouse.  (via)
• So I bought a mechanical keyboard.
• Emacs is my new window manager.  (via)
• m-x start-them-early.
• Slackbot bot.  (via)
• List of Good Free Programming and Data Resources.  (via)
• Open Hardware Random Number Generator.  (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• The Hemingwrite.  Looks like a TRS-80.  (via)
• The Emularity.

Your unrelated link of the week: Skymall, 2007.

I’m going with links to some old-school crazy-hard projects this week.  No simple hacks, these.

• Mysteries of the unix kind.
• Nerdy trivia about Unix time_t. (via)
• PDP-11/04 – Restoration.  (via)  Very nice pictures.
• Plan 9.  Plan 9.  Plan 9.  Plan 9.  (all via)
• Linux on Obsolete Displays Project Page.  (via)
• USB Power Issues.  That is definitely a hardware problem.
• Know Your UNIX System Administrator – A Field Guide.  (via)
• Fitness machines for big data.
• It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source.
• Historic Computer Images.  Hosted by the U.S. military.
• EDSAC, the (only?) computer from the 1940s, is being rebuilt.  No keyboard, no monitor.
• God’s Lonely Programmer.  (via)
• Some light reading on lock-free programming.
• A Rare Peek into the Massive Scale of AWS.  Their capitalization, not mine.  (via)
• Metastable failure state.  (also via)
• Stumbleupon’s Big Data Architecture Using Open Source Software.  (via)
• Remote work: an engineering leader’s perspective.  These articles never seem to note how open source developers fit this mold.   (via)

For some reason, more historical links this week than usual.

• Thinking Forth.  It sounds to be – though I haven’t read it yet – one of those books that transcends the target language.  (via)
• Fuzix, a “new” OS.  (They should just try something else small, like RetroBSD.)  (via)
• The Best Small Computer in the World – 1968.  (pdf, via)
• Vim after 11 years.  (via)
• Terms of Service.  I have other comics from the artist.  (via)
• Recalculating Odds of RAID5 URE Failure.
• A brief history of spam and email crypto, from a former GMail worker.
• Kerberos Papers and Documentation  (via)
• Amazon Echo, which continues the long trend of companies reinventing existing open source projects and making them creepier.
• Or making lovable things annoying.  Seriously, phone alerts and “where are you?” alerts from a teddy bear?  I hate it when people pepper me with that.  (via)
• Noisy dead satellites.  (via)
• Old UNIX releases/source
• Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network.  I just barely remember seeing this hardware in the wild, so to speak.  It was awful.  (via)
• The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing  (via)  Lose some time on this one.
• Forth in the USSR.  (PDF, via)

Unrelated link of the week: Cartozia Tales.  It’s a print comic in a limited series.  Many stories, many artists.  I’ve been getting the issues and it’s a lot of fun.  Here’s an interview with the person coordinating the whole thing.

I have an excellent mix of links this week, I think.  I like to have multiple links on multiple topics.

• Xenix 1.0, stuck on the 286.  The second operating system licensed from Microsoft by IBM, and it was a type of Unix.  (via)
• 50 Years of Moog.  (via)
• Uselessd.  (via)
• The End of Linux.  (via)
• Revitalizing the Perl Power Tools.  AKA the Unix Revitalization Project.  It’s possible to contribute; this is something I’d like to see modernized.  (via)
• Culture Stories: Introduction and Milk.  I like the “I gave stuff away and eventually everyone did” part of the story.  (via)
• mdp, a Markdown-based presentation maker.  I like the concept and the animated gif used to demonstrate it.
• Remarkable, a Markdown editor with a WYSIWYD (what you see is what you did) component.  Does it run on BSD?  Dunno.  Markdown is one of those deceptively good ideas that’s becoming accepted in part because it’s unowned.
• Edit: A Relaxing Mix of Vi and Acme.  This is going to be the exact blend someone wanted and didn’t know it.  (via)
• From Vim to Emacs+Evil chaotic migration guide.  It’d be better as “Chaotic Evil”.  You know what I’m alluding to, nerd.  (via)
• Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car.  Is building Faraday cages for your own things going to be a lucrative business 5 years from now?  (via)
• Forth Salon.  (via)
• The Craft of Text Editing.  (via)
• Programming Sucks.  (seen many places but this time via)
• Current Status: (via)

I bring the audio and the visual today.

• The History of Mana.  (via)
• Where “Von Neumann architecture” comes from.  (via)
• Futuristic User Interface 16.  (video)
• Floppy table.  The storage space is clever.
• As I’ve said before, every software project grows until it has its own package manager for installing other software.  This time, it’s Rust.  (via)
• Also, sooner or later someone says, “Hey, I could build an operating system in $myfavoritelanguage!”  It’s like building a house because you’ve got a favorite hammer rather than a need to live somewhere.  (via)
• Best of Vim Tips.  (via)  Some interesting tips in the source link comments, too.
• vimawesome.com.  Pretty!  (via)
• The Internet of Newsletters.  A reaction (and a good one) to social media.  (via)
• Charlie Stross’s keynote YAPC speech.
• “I no longer see the matrix anymore, all I see is dwarf, sad dwarf, crazy dwarf“
• Awww, it’s cute.
• Raising Lazarus – The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars.  And a counter-argument.  (both via)
• Modern tech in 1977 Atari style.  (via)  Did I link this before?  I feel like I did, but maybe that’s because of the subject matter.
• Sorta related: Betamaxx.  (via)
• “Undefined behavior can result in time travel“.
• Lisp implementation in sed.  (via)
• Unix: having fun with diff.
• Visualizing Algorithms.  Presented with explanation and methodology, as it should be, as opposed to a random gallery of pseudo-mathy crap.  (via)

You unrelated comics link of the week: The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turing, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Purvis.  I have other work by both authors – they are excellent – and Alan Turning should be a name already familiar to you.

Again, a backlog from last week means this week is fat.

• Non-classical processor behavior: How doing something can be faster than not doing it.  Confusing but interesting.
• Rudd Canaday’s blog.  One of the people behind UNIX, though not as well known.  His stories have some very interesting glimpses into early computing.  (via)
• Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine.  Lisp machines get talked about as if they were the last remnants of a superior, extinct precursor race.  Maybe they are?  I’ve never touched one.  (via)
• Mapping the decentralization movement.  I can get behind this idea.  (via)
• KnightOS, an operating system for z80 calculators.  (via)
• The SSD Endurance Experiment.  (via)
• The first Photoshopped image.  (via)
• Does your capacitive load purr?
• The very worst subject lines.
• Facebook has built its own switch – and it looks a lot like a server.  Not a surprise to anyone familiar with the Open Compute idea, but the source article for the link has some useful references to equipment that you can actually get, unlike the Facebook doodad.
• UNIX: $42,000.  (this and other links via this thread.)  (update: that link was to a FTP server at Bell Labs, which appears to be down…  darnit.)
• The end of Freshmeat, and a surprise link to the origins.  (via)
• Aggregate hardware and software use patterns from The Setup.  A sort of crowdsourced ‘effective tools’ report.  Not necessarily perfect – Aeron chairs are popular, for instance, but I’d pick something else..  In an odd coincidence, a former teacher/coworker of mine is #3 on The Setup right now.  (via)
• Happy World Productivity Day.
• A three-sided die, which I didn’t think was possible.
• 8088 Domination, part 1 and part 2.  Full-motion video on a 4.77 Mhz 8088 chip from 1981.
• The Early History of Smalltalk.  It’s a long read, but a good one.  (via)

Your unrelated links of the week: My side hobby I never mention here is baking.  I looked up a word I didn’t know, found out about an ice cream type I’ve never seen, started reading about odd things to do with eggs and pressure cookers, and now I’m confused by the possibilities.  No narrative point here; I just need to get in the kitchen.

I’ve been short on this week (worked 19 hour day Tues/Wed, ug), so the list is short.

• All Is Lost, the results of feeding the worst possible player stats into the NBA Y2K game.  I don’t watch basketball or play sports games, but the forced scrambling of the game is entertaining.  The author did a similar thing to Madden NFL.  The animated GIFs are the best.  (via)
• UNIX Uniforms.  (via)
• UNIX: Root Cause Analysis.  Always makes you sound fancy to say that.
• jwz says: stop centralizing things.
• The Burroughs B6500 Status Report.  That’s some oooooold computing there.  (via)
• textql: SQL queries on CSV/TSV, which is something I’ve silently wished for before.  (via)
• Not sure what this is or the source, but it’s neat looking.

Your unrelated link of the week: Another Cyriak music video, this time for Bonobo.  (via)

I have possibly two weeks worth of Lazy Reading built up here, so sit down and get with the clicking:

• The Internet with a Human Face.  Maciej Ceglowski’s recent talk.  This is the you-should-read-it link of the week.  (via)
• I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome.  Bunnie Huang finds the best place in the world to smash your cell phone.
• The Art of UNIX Programming.  Prompted by this.
• Alert Design.  The design of network monitor warnings, not designing alertly.  (via)
• UNIX History Repository.  On GitHub.  So much is on GitHub these days…  (via)
• A Trip Down UNIX Memory Lane.  A lot of UNIX links this week; I don’t know why.
• “Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketech platishforms?” Funny but sorta realistic.
• Presenting Data and Information, taught by Edward Tufte.  Might be both interesting and local to some reader.  (via)
• Python 3 is killing Python.  This sort of thing has happened before, called “Perl 6”.  (via)
• The Design of SQLite 4.  The more I use SQLite, the more I like it.  (via)
• Relics of Technology.  How many of these things have you actually used?  (via)
• tetris-bsd: the most basic version of tetris I’ve ever seen.  (via saved Google search)
• That previous link led me to taipan, which is a game I loved on my Apple ][.  Wait, I can still play it now?
• Apple phone and tablet models from the 80s.  I remember shaping and painting models out of that sort of foam, years ago, before CAD ate it all.
• Notepad: more dangerous than you thought.
• Not necessarily the wrong way to look at tech blogs.
• 2000 or so Unicode characters.  What common fonts actually implement everything in Unicode?  Cause that would be a heck of a lot of designs.  (via a Kickstarter newsletter)
• Beyond the stack.  This way of setting up systems has taken over computing firms that are producing software for the Internet… but I don’t think people realize that isn’t all companies.
• The current Humble Book Bundle includes some Top Shelf comics publications, including semi-fictional-early-hacking-history Wizzywig which I’ve mentioned before, and the colossal not-related-to-computers work From Hell.  Hopefully will still be up when you read this…
• If I can run an arbitrary program, I can do arbitrary things.
• Sun stories.  Remember, it used to be BSD, back when Sun did was growing.  One thing everyone seems to agree on: the workstations were great.  (via)
• What’s going on with TrueCrypt.  Since DragonFly has a truecrypt-compatible implementation, I’d certainly like to see it continue.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: The End of Garfield. I don’t know if this is the original source for the image.