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)