Did you know that AT&T maintains a regex library and test suite? I did not, but now DragonFly has both, in part for better multibyte character support.
(corrected to note that the regex library is not from AT&T – thanks, anonymous commenter)
The vi in any BSD is not the original Berkeley vi – instead it’s usually nvi. However, thanks to John Marino, DragonFly has the up-to-date, multibyte-supporting nvi2. (I know I’ve made reference to the nv/nvi difference before.)
There’s some meaty reading this week, so get settled in and start clicking.
- Haunted Machines An Origin Story. I love this sort of intersection of ideas. (via)
- Our Friends, the Bots. (via previous)
- Futures of Text. Why wasn’t this ever done at the command line, too? (via previous)
- Cybernetic Serendipity.
- The Verge’s Web Sucks. A followup to “The Mobile Web Sucks” that I linked to previously.
- How Does Level Generation Work In Brogue? The animated gifs work very well here.
- Surfing the Internet from My TRS-80 Model 100. (via)
- The Itanium processor, parts 2, 3, 3b, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Here’s part 1 if you missed it last week. Windows-centric, but probably still interesting for the hardware.
- Ever wonder why they used “that key”? (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Pronunciation guide for UNIX. (via)
- Forgotten Quests from the golden age of adventure games.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales. It’s a comics series where different comics artists start a story, then hands the story off to a different writer and artist for each issue after that. I’ve been getting individual issues as they make them, and I want more people to subscribe, so they can get enough cash to print the last few issues. (Independent comics is a hard business.) Order the complete series, for yourself or as a unique present for a smaller person.
Be ready for the latent craziness in some of the links for this Lazy Reading episode.
- Unix Meets Prime Numbers.
- The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up.
- Google INTERCAL Style Guide. (via)
- Before Spelunky and FTL, There Was Only ASCII. “Procedural Death Labyrinths” sounds fun. (via)
- How Pinterest simplified, compartmentalised and scattered the web.
- “actually a hat“.
- GMO biology transformed by “Inventor of Email”. There’s a reason that last part is in quotes.
- What’s Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It: Interview With Internet Pioneer John Day. A 6-month interview. (via)
- Running TSS/8 on the DEC PiDP-8/i and SIMH. It’s not just a software simulation; it’s a Raspberry Pi inside a PDP-8 shell. The front panel actually works. (thanks, Remy van Elst!)
Your off-topic movie link of the week: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. (via an internet cult.) Originally titled Invention For Destruction and released by a Czech director, then subtitled to English. Looks like a strange mix of steampunk content and Monty Python-style animation. That may seem only mildly interesting until you notice it was filmed in 1958.
This is Thoughtful Consideration week.
- The Anti-Mac Interface. The future of interfaces is in some ways the opposite of good interface design circa 1986. (via)
- What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers? The resemblance to a classical MUD is not a surprise when you think about it. (via)
- The Harmful Consequences of Postel’s Maxim. I see this more as the 2.0 problem, which I don’t yet have a good link to describe. (via)
- My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Four
- CCCamp 2015 preordering is open. (via)
- Calvin and Markov. Markov chains are simple but fun. (via)
- On Port 80. Platforms that run on user content, but aren’t controlled by users, go downhill over time. It’s a repeating pattern. (via and via)
- A floppy drive with a survival mechanism. (via)
- keepachangelog.com. (via)
- The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive. (via)
- Post-memes. (via)
- The 2015 Postel Network Operator’s Scholarship is open, with entertaining selection criteria.
- Warcraft 3 in a browser. (via)
- The ARMiga Project. (via)
- The minimig-mist, also a recreated Amiga. (via previous link)
- Go garbage collection. It’s humor, not real. (via profmakx on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Your unrelated game link of the week: Compare Javascript frameworks by playing the same game (well, game mechanism) in each: Breakouts. (via)
I don’t know why I’ve been finding so many roguelike links lately, but it’s to our benefit.
- The Open Container Project. No mention of a BSD. I don’t know if that’s necessarily bad.
- Random Numbers in the original Doom. Is that true? That seems a bit crazy. (via)
- The NANOG65 call for presentations is out.
- More falsehoods programmers believe about time. A followup to a previous link.
- @Play 82: The Talks of the International Roguelike Developers Conference US, 2015. Some fascinating links/talks on video there.
- Stick to 64-bit counters.
- LIFE IS TERRIBLE: LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WEB – James Mickens. I don’t think I saw/linked to this one before. Why is a Microsoft researcher one of the funniest nerd people online? (via)
- The first port of UNIX. (PDF, via)
- Vim Colors (via)
- Releasing a Commercial ASCII Roguelike, a Post-Mortem. (via)
- Cold brew tea.
- From TextMate to Vim. (via)
- Shortest network cable evar. I once had a coworker confuse inches (“) and feet (‘) when ordering, so we ended up with a box of 200 6-inch Ethernet cables. (via)
I came up with a whole bunch of links at the last minute despite traveling and being sick. I’m dedicated to your idle reading!
- In defence of curl | sudo bash –. Not really in defense because nobody’s that crazy. (via)
- Leap “smearing”.
- HyperRogue – A non-Euclidean roguelike. (via)
- Hack RUN. A… greenscreenlike?
- 30 years of Amiga. Coming up in about a month. (via)
- “Why Agile, Lean and Six Sigma must die …” (via)
- You probably already saw “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks“, but there’s already a t-shirt. (via)
- Finding the needles.
- If We’ve Won, Why Are We Still Explaining Open Source? (via)
- hhighlighter, syntax coloring for the output of other programs.
- UNIX Recovery Legend. (via) There’s more documents of similar vintage to look at.
- “The Hacker’s Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”. While I hadn’t read this before now, I’ve been doing a similar pattern for some months now, and I’ve lost 30 lbs/13.5 kg.
- The Curta Calculator. A neat bit of machinery that I’ve never seen.
- Retro Thinkpad idea. I would buy this, for the keyboard alone.
Your off-topic link of the week: you have about a week to pay $35 to not die when the Earth is destroyed on July 5th. It’s the 18th time the world has almost ended, so it has to work out one of these times.
I had to do this early, too, so the link count is a bit low this week. Sorry!
- From the abacus to smartphone: The evolution of mobile and portable computers, a book by Evan Koblentz. (via)
- A/UX – The Long View. OS X in 1998. I wish I had been able to try this. (via)
- Monsters and Manuals, another RPG thinkblog.
- The NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament. (via)
- Linux is not gnu/linux. Linking because it’s a bit off the deep end. (via)
- Why I dislike systemd. (via)
- OBYaVLENIYA KOMANDA 135 [Command 135 initiated] Numbers stations are one of those deep-dive things. (via)
- Meet Processing, the Lingua Franca of Creative Coding. (via)
- mdast-man: Compile markdown to man pages (roff) So often, the open source solution to something is not to produce more or better quality output, but to instead rearrange the tools for doing so. (via)
‘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.
I guess the accidental theme this week is Unix.
- The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid. From 1981, which says something. (via)
- Terminal: Beyond Ctrl + A and Ctrl + E. Linked because I needed to know what the nondestructive version of Ctrl-U was. (Ctrl-A)
- Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the problem. I’ve been considering a static generator for this site, for similar reasons. (via)
- How to name things: the hardest problem in programming. A dry topic talked about in a very human way. (via)
- Floppy Drive Organ.
- Cold Weather, Gogol And The Rise Of The Russian Samovar. I don’t need one, but I’ve always thought samovars are interesting.
- Unix Shells: Bash, Fish, Ksh, Tcsh, Zsh. (via)
- When Poll is Better than Interrupt. (PDF, via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution (via)
- Backblaze hard drive stats for 2015Q1. (via)
- Crystals and computer viruses. (via)
- Inadvertent collection.
- Bash history format.
- Vim Tips For Intermediate Users. (via)
- Why isn’t our fax working? (Hint: a power issue.) (via)
- The Problem with the Roguelike Metagame. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: svblm. Found via a link to Infinideer and Forest Ambassador.
Happy Easter! It means chocolate for me.
- Everything is Made up and the Points Don’t Matter. Substitute “open source work” for “design” in this story. (via)
- The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty. Quoted from the article: They would roll their eyes a bit, then hasten to add, as more than one did, “But he’s right about most things.” (via)
- COMPUTERS IN OUR LIVES.
- Where we went wrong, or, The one thing Philip Greenspun got right (in 1997).
- A Round Pie in a Square Box. I admit I read it at first just because it mentioned pie, but it is an interesting history. (via)
- istruecryptauditedyet.com. (via)
- How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT. I shall now be annoying: Should have used pfSense, and it’s not a doubling of speed, it’s a doubling of capacity. Any connection on either link is still limited to the speed of that link. (via)
- Oblique Strategies, the website. The Wikipedia entry on Oblique Strategies will tell you what that is, though I could have sworn I talked about it before. (via)
- How a bad RJ45 termination can ruin a cable. First time I’ve seen a check other than “It lights up the tester; must be fine.” (via)
- Some slick awk built-ins.
- Origins of the tilde.
- My Quantified Email Self Experiment: A failure. (via)
- free-for-dev, a list of ‘as-a-service’ items offered free, for development or whatever. (via)
- /dev/notrandom, an April Fools item I actually liked. (via)
- MISTAKES WERE MADE: COMPUTER HISTORY, DECOMPILED. April 17th in NYC.
- Vintage Computer Festival East, happening same day in New Jersey.
- The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing. At Bard College now.
- (Last 3 links all via SIGCIS, an excellent resource.)
- Creating a BBS in 2015. (via)
- Dueling Unixes and the Unix Wars [pdf]. (via)
- Is BSD UNIX?
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Jason Shiga’s comics. It’s an article about the comics, not the comics themselves, so go to his site next. (via)
Also unrelated: tea is one of the topics I link here, and alert reader Jeff Ramnani pointed out Strand Tea as a good source. I also saw Deep Mills referenced in the UK. Anyone else have a favorite online vendor?
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.
Minimal link text this week. It just happened that way.
- random in the wild
- Best Unix time-savers
- Where apps end and the system begins.
- The password? You changed it, right?
- Live network attack map. (via)
- Playing with my son.
- At the computer farm. (via)
- Typography in sci-fi: Alien. (via)
- Turing Complete User. (via)
- XLennart. XBill + systemd (via IRC)
- OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t. (via)
- FOSSASIA, March 13-15, 2015, Singapore. (new to me)
- Nethack: the best game of all time? I still like Angband more. (via)
- moreutils, additional Unix-style utilities. (via)
- Plan9Front. (indirectly via)
- Wang Calculators. Neat physical wiring and even Nixie tubes! (via)
- Fixing a computer with the right type of string. (via)
- Previous, a NeXT emulator. I like the name. (via)
- From the previous source, lighting a NeXT cube on fire.
- “Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s Operating System” (via)
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)
Snow snow snow!
- DoomRL, a Doom roguelike. From Hasso Tepper, who correctly pointed out I haven’t been linking enough roguelike material lately.
- Unix: Catching up with Unix errors.
- True Stuff: Build Your Own Propeller Car. Not so much about the car as about the building part.
- Making Internet Local. A deep dive into what everyone calls ‘mesh networking’ and what that really means.
- “The alternative Windows Store” I guess sounds better than win64 package manager. Anyway, the idea of a ports collection is becoming universal.
- Command-line Unix-style note taker.
- Sample the Amen Break. Hey, a Squarepusher video gets in there. (via)
- Receiving NOAA Weather Images with SDR. Sounds fun to build, though I know I won’t get to it. (via)
- What is the URL to your technical blog? More things to read there.
- New Found Sounds, early synthesizers. (also via)
- XScreenSaver 5.31. “To make this work I had to add a UTF8 parser to my VT100 implementation”
- 100-year-old mechanical computer. It does Fourier analysis. (via)
- A bread-slicing machine. Looks dangerous and useful. (via)
- Stupid Hackathon. (via)
Unrelated link of the week: Lenny Kravitz – Fly Away (lyrics) Watch to the end. “just like a dragonfly” (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 finished almost this entire thing just on September 1st. I blame school season restarting. Speaking of which, O’Reilly’s running a 50% off ebooks sale.
- VAXen, My Children, Just Don’t Belong In Some Places. (via)
- Taking it to Th’emacs. (via)
- Running old UNIXes on the Raspberry Pi. (via)
- In the Mind of the Fractal King. A reconstructed Benoit Mandelbrot interview. Does each question match the structure of the overall text? (via)
- How I Start: Go. (via)
- How to Secure SSH with Google Authenticator’s Two-Factor Authentication. Can you do this on BSD? I hope so. (via)
- A 4-minute film about IBM culture – mostly before computing as we’d know it, from a longer 2011 film. (via SIGCIS)
- Unix: Better network connection insights with mtr.
- It’s a trap! Employment documents that require you to violate company policy. I had a similar situation once, handling abuse@ email for a Time Warner affiliate. I have some horrifying stories from that…
- The truth about 2 spaces after the end of a sentence. (via)
- Classic Papers in Programming Languages and Logic. Set aside some time for this. (via)
- Building my own home router, part 1. I can figure out the other hardware – I just need a low-cost 24-port gigabit ethernet card so I can build a home switch. Yeah, yeah, I know. (via)
- thx nsa.
- The things that will last on the internet are not owned. (via)
- Why do you think tech books don’t sell like they used to? (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: the final answer on how to say GIF . (video source – watch the outtakes, too.)