If you have a particular favorite thing in DragonFly, Damian Vincino would like to know about it.
There’s a new version of pkg out – 1.3. (via) That’s an announcement on the FreeBSD-ports-announce list. Since DragonFly also uses pkg, that means it’s available for DragonFly too. John Marino reported on IRC that he’s testing a bulk build now, using it on DragonFly.
NYCBUG is holding a OpenBSD Ports ‘class’ on August 6th (day after tomorrow). You can make a port of something you need, or work on something existing, hackathon style. See the announcement for details – you need to warn someone you are coming for building access.
There’s a lot to read this week… I’m not sure how that happened.
- Schwa, two decades later. I had this, then.
- Famous Women of Computer Science. At least some of the names should be familiar to you. (via)
- Anil Dash on the shifting meaning of “public”. An outgrowth of the jerktech problem.(via)
- The History of Autocorrect. (via a newsletter)
- -2000 lines of code. An early Macintosh story. (via)
- Bill Atkinson’s name in the previous link made me think of Burger Bill (Rebecca, now) Heineman, which led to this: Mentions of Wolf3D for the Apple ][gs. It’s findable, even.
- And that Sheppyware link reminds me of Sweet16, a really nice ][gs emulator for the Mac. Excuse me as I wander down the halls of memory…
- Cool-old-term. Requires qt5 and I don’t know if it works on BSD… but it’s neat looking. (via)
- Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim. There’s some more good resources in the source for this link.
- At the same site: SSH Hacks.
- hicat, cat with syntax highlighting. (via)
- I’ve mentioned ISO 3103 before, or at least I thought I did, but there are apparently 25 more tea-related standards.
- That led me to find George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Douglas Adams all had Opinions on Tea. I must have linked to one of them before, but I can’t find it. Douglas Adams is correct, though: most people in the U.S. have never had a decent cup of tea. (via)
- Origins of common UI symbols. (via)
- Movie Film, at Death’s Door, Gets a Reprieve. This interests me because it’s in the town where I live, but there’s something else. The vast, vast quantities of film out there was filmed in the last 100 years or so. Most of that film is still readable, though the older nitrate films are fragile. If all that video was digital, how would we access it? I don’t have a single digital storage item in my house older than 10 years, except maybe a Zip disk or two, and there’s no way I can read them. (via)
- How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors. I expected the article to quote itself in the middle or something similar; Internet jokes are warping my expectations. (via)
- Software, it’s a thing. Talking about how software exists when it is used, not just as a saved file but rather as a multitude of activities – and how that relates to preserving that history. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Mmmm… diagrams. That describes me. The subject and artist, Scott McCloud, has a book called Understanding Comics that is an excellent discussion of perception and communication. His exploration of visual “closure” is good for anyone who has to think about interfaces.
I was thinking this was going to be a short week, but nope.
- Using pkgsrc for HPC. Follow the thread for discussion of pkgsrc as a self-contained tool system, including the compiler.
- Debugging Firefox on pkgsrc.
- CDE is in pkgsrc-wip.
- tmux in NetBSD got updated.
- pcc in NetBSD got an update, too.
- NetBSD can work on a Kobo Touch?
- FreeBSD’s 40G XL710 driver reached version 1.0.
- FreeBSD has “pkgfs, a file system implementation for reading files out of a compressed tarball, aka package.” From Juniper.
- FreeBSD has Chromebook2 support.
- The FreeBSD Foundation semiannual newsletter is out.
- The FreeBSD quarterly report is out.
- a survey of FreeBSD ZFS snapshot automation tools
- Keeping pf.conf in sync. Many different suggestions.
- OpenBSD’s homegrown httpd is gaining fastcgi.
- Ted Unangst has summarized links to all the g2k14 hackathon reports.
- PC-BSD has something called syscache, which I’m seeing commits for but I haven’t found what it is exactly – a caching system for package info, I think?
- DIscoverBSD for 2014/07/28.
- BSDSec, a BSD-specific security site. (via)
- List of VPSs that support BSD. (via)
As you can probably guess somewhat from the title, BSDNow 048 has an interview about LibreSSL, with Brent Cook. There’s also the normal news roundup, and other recent events.
A frequent question people ask when trying Hammer is “How can I do software RAID to cover a disk failure?” Hammer provides for streaming one volume to another, so you can duplicate drives, but there isn’t an automatic failover mechanism as there is with a RAID setup. The first answer is usually “get hardware RAID“; my preferred solution. The remaining software solutions are vinum, ccd, and lvm for DragonFly.
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and it contains several articles about pkg, for use on FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and DragonFly. The article on DragonFly and pkg was written by Siju George.
Rust has been ported to DragonFly by Michael Neumann. His blog has implementation details, and you can pull from his repo to get a buildable version. This may be useful, as he notes, for anyone wanting to build Rust on other BSDs.
I missed this last week because I was on the road: BSDNow 047 is up, titled DES Challenge IV, has some followup on recent topics like pf in FreeBSD and the recent OpenBSD hackathon, plus an interview of Dag-Erling Smørgrav.
It’s all multimedia day here, as BSDTalk 243 is also out with 16 minutes of conversation with Ingo Schwarze about mandoc. Mandoc is the man replacement in OpenBSD and built-but-not-yet-used in DragonFly. ‘man replacement’ is probably an oversimplification.
I was low on time but I still brought the links!
- This is why software sucks. Many people get tech news by skimming headlines, and don’t read details – so prominently writing an opinionated title is more effective sometimes than, say, reasoned argument.
- “selective disclosure” is a better term. (same author)
- The EFF’s Open Wireless Router project. Can they get a 48-port one built?
- UNIX: knowing your memory commands.
- The Open Source Identity Crisis. I agree with the article – some people still think open source developers are the coders, and then there’s everyone else… which is emphatically not the case any more. (via)
- Used/refurbished server sellers. This is going to be useful to someone.
- Programming with Punched Cards. (PDF, via)
- Escher: Choiceless programming. Weird. (via)
- Apparently I’ll link to anything about Dwarf Fortress; it’s a culturally distinct thing – so much so that it’s being used as an art exhibit. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Summer cakes. The second recipe is from Nicola Humble. I just read her surprisingly interesting history of the cookbook in the UK, hence the link. Plus, I’m hungry.
Part of this was done while traveling, but still a decent week for links.
- A BSD-licensed timeout(1).
- DiscoverBSD roundup for 2014/07/21.
- NetBSD has a start of a radeon driver.
- FreeBSD has a Phabricator site, which is getting linked in some commits.
- The OpenBSD cvsweb was down but appears to be back now.
- Lua in NetBSD went from version 5.1 to 5.3.
- Yay cross-pollination, sorta?
- “*BSD on the desktop for an intermediate Linux user?“
- NetBSD got a slight binary loading speedup.
- OpenBSD + OSX/iOS and IPsec/l2tp setup, the thread and the followup.
- Trying to establish the longest trust chain possible for an OpenBSD install.
- OpenBSD’s new httpd is now installed by default. Lynx is no longer. (partially via)
- ldapd/OpenBSD users may need this thread when upgrading.
- DIAGNOSTIC does not slow down NetBSD.
- Bitrig is nearing 1.0, according to an email on their tech@bitrig.org list. But I can’t find a way to link to the summary of what they have done. There’s the Bitrig roadmap, I guess?
- An early draft (“prerelease”) of Michael Lucas’s next book, “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials“, is available.
- Undeadly has a lot of articles written by recent OpenBSD Hackathon participants. Instead of linking to specific ones, I’ll just point you at the site. (undeadly.org can’t tag or search to a summary page.)
- BSD, the movie. (via).
Thanks to Zachary Crownover, rcreload is available in DragonFly. (It’s always good to see a new contributor name.)
Nuno Antunes brought in a significant number of fixes for libradius. He’s been doing other work recently on netgraph7 support, so I’m linking to this as a ‘signpost’ commit.
If you were looking for something to do, finishing Francois Tigeot’s sound update would help a lot of people. He’s currently tied up with i915 support work. The patches need device cloning to work with devfs, and midi removal.
As mentioned before, the mrsas(4) driver works best for ‘Thunderbolt’ RAID controllers. Now, the switch has happened.
Tethering now works via the urndis(4) device, from a patch contributed by Sascha Wildner/tested by Yellow Rabbit.
(Updated for correct attribution)
I spent this week watching an older Cisco ASA slowly lose its ability to see parts of the Internet. How did I fix it? pfSense.
- Unix: How passwords can improve your life.
- Curated list of curated lists of awesome lists. I suppose this was inevitable. (via)
- Hooray for USB. Really, it’s so successful we don’t even think about it any more.
- A Game as Literary Tutorial. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons on writing. I’d describe it as a common nerd experience for people above 35 or so, similar to “your first computer”. (via)
- Computer virus catalog. Surprisingly pretty. (via)
- Why Outlook gets CTRL+F wrong.
- Open (source) for business. Why aren’t open source software interfaces more polished? (via)
- Cosmic rays: more likely a problem than you think. (via)
- Inside bit.ly’s Distributed Systems. (via)
- Huh, bzr appears to be dead, or as dead as any open source project can ever be. (via)
- Making sure software stays insecure. I had to remove a preinstalled antivirus program from a Windows laptop yesterday… It did nothing, but you’d think I was lighting the motherboard on fire from the warnings it put on screen. (via)
- The SIGCIS 2014 Workshop (on historical computing), happening in November in Michigan, has a call for papers out.
- Time Management with Tom Limoncelli. He wrote the definitive book on the subject. (via) There’s plenty more videos at his site; I suggest setting aside some time to watch it. (ha!)
Your unrelated link of the week: Avery Monsen’s Vines. Vines are an excellent way to make a very short comedy sketch. Infinite Waffles and Break the Silence are my favorites so far. (via)
More than the usual source commit messages this week.
- LibreSSL got another point release. And complaints. (via)
- NetBSD 7’s branch date is planned.
- FreeBSD 9.3 is released. EoL for 9.2 has been extended, too.
- Cloning a FreeBSD/ZFS Machine with ‘zfs send’.
- An OpenBSD hackathon means a lot of articles.
- Troubleshooting Large, Stalling git/ssh Transfers.
- pkg == systemd == government conspiracy. Surely, the writer can’t be real.
- Installing and Using TarSnap. A BSD-friendly service.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/07/14 roundup.
- OpenBSD has OpenSSH and put together LibreSSL. OpenSSL bought… libressh.org? Use whois libressh.org to see. (no link; use your own whois lookup.) (via)
- NetBSD has updated to dhcp 4.3.0.
- OpenBSD has imported ucpp. (hope that’s the right ucpp; there’s lots out there)
- One of those times it’s OK to store passwords in cleartext.
- PC-BSD is now using Samba 4.1 by default.
- OpenBSD has a new httpd(8). Bonus long-in-the-tooth joke, too.
- Yay, SSL library cross-pollination.
- Cross-cross-cross pollination, here. (someone do it in DragonFly, too)
- ssh (on OpenBSD) now supports Unix domain socket forwarding.
- EruoBSDCon 2014 is happening in Sofia, Bulgaria, in September. The FreeBSD Foundation is funding travelers.
- A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-to.