I missed this for the “In Other BSDs” section yesterday, so I’m adding it today. It’s time dependent. BSDCan 2014 is happening May 14-17 at the University of Ottawa, with those first two days being tutorials. If you want to get a paper in, you have to do it today.
The Internet overfloweth with good links, lately. Nothing this week that requires a lot of reading, but plenty of things to click. Enjoy!
- The “Basket of Remotes” problem. An area where standards are never applied.
- Dice portraits. I like the images. (via)
- Who made that dial tone? (via a mailing list)
- Simple Git workflow is simple. (via)
- Bunnie Huang talks about his open laptop project, Novena. (mentioned here before.) They sound really neat, but I can imagine you need to be ready for a certain amount of manual work.
- Speaking of machines, Michael W. Lucas got a beefy new desktop system from iXsystems, which is is not a product they advertise… but it makes sense if you want to run a BSD.
- How I built a Raspberry Pi Tablet. Here’s how the author did it. It wasn’t cheap or easy. (via)
- A History of Programming Games, 1961-1989. Not games programming, but games where you program robots as part of the game. I remember being horribly confused by Robotwar on the Apple ][. (via)
- A LISP interpreter, written in Bash. Is there one written in Javascript yet? There must be. (via)
- You use SSH keys, don’t you? If not, read this primer.
- On compiling 34 year old C code. Getting Unix V7 ed/sed working. As the article points out, “ed is already using a legacy interface in 1979.” (via)
- Most pedantic bug ever. (via somewhere on Twitter, of all places)
- Also on Twitter: I am devloper.
- Facebook is launching a newsfeed reader. I agree with the person who originally posted this link – it’ll probably be a one-way street where Facebook scarfs up content from the rest of the web via RSS, but everything on Facebook will stay locked away.
- I am looking forward to replacing my Windows desktop with a non-Windows tablet – it’s getting closer.
- Remember: if it’s not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it’s not really yours.
- The curse of the leading zero.
- The Hidden Backdoors to the City of Cron. (re)Infection via cron. (via)
- The Internet is better referred to as “the Stacks”. It’s 5 companies, and everything revolves around what they do. That end-of-2012 article is talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft… though Microsoft seems to be on the way out. Anyway, startups plan for buyout these days, which should tell you that it’s easier to take cash from one of a few large companies than try to compete with them, however indirectly.
Your unrelated link of the week: Fail Forward, a collection of writing about pen and paper RPGs. (via)
I’ve got a buildup of convention dates to mention, so I’ll do it now: John Marino, one of the folks behind dports, is talking about Ada and BSD at FOSDEM, in Brussels, February 1-2. George Neville-Neil is talking about BSD to NYLUG in of course New York City, on I think February 13th. Ike Levy will be talking to the Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyokai Group, on February 17th, about pfSense. And of course, NYCBSDCon is happening February 8th, and I think I’ll be there.
I didn’t even need to find source links this week.
- Do you have a VAX laying around? Cool! Now, can you give/lend it to OpenBSD?
- Along those lines, anyone have a Cray they don’t need? I don’t care if it works. It has to be full-size, though. (via)
- I found out that the RetroBSD site now lists hardware that runs RetroBSD. Here’s a video of something doing just that. There’s more of it on little teeny boards. Someone build this into a watch.
- The DiscoverBSD roundup for 2014/01/14. DiscoverBSD also has a new writer, Nur Agus.
- Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example. Part 1. There’s a nice VFS explanation in there, too. (via)
- Some OpenBSD videos from ruBSD.
- Here’s a good explanation of OpenBSD’s new signify tool.
- FreeBSD 10.0 is tagged.
- PC-BSD 10 is also almost ready.
- Unscrewed, a story linked in last week’s BSDNow presentation, in case you missed it.
- Using Ansible to fix the recently-discovered NTP amplification attack – on BSD.
- I assume he’s flying.
With everyone buying tablets lately, the low end of computers is getting pretty low-cost indeed. Creating single-purpose computers is possible, and I was thinking of doing that to create a Go-testing system. (Though probably not necessary for me.) It got me to thinking, though…
How low-cost a system could run DragonFly? The master-slave and low system requirements of Hammer lead to some interesting possibilities. There’s no Arduino equivalent for DragonFly because there’s no DragonFly on ARM, despite all my wishing. DragonFly has been run on Soekris systems before, and might work on a PCEngines ALIX board. Ebay, my basement, or Craigslist are options too, but not as fun. Who has suggestions?
The 20th episode of BSDNow is up. The interview is with Neel Natu and Peter Grehan, about Bhyve, and there’s of course more, including a bhyve tutorial. There’s other material, including the new-to-me Spiderinabox.
If you want to test out the latest (20131218) update to ACPICA, Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch for you. This will be good for anyone who wants to use less electricity. (updated to reflect this doesn’t enable deeper C-states as I thought it did.)
ACPI has been updated in DragonFly by Sepherosa Ziehau, to potentially support the very low-power sleep states available with Haswell CPUs.
Note: Sepherosa clarified that the lower power states are not available – yet.
There are no binary packages built for dports, on DragonFly 3.7, for 32-bit machines, at this time. Pierre Abbat found this out. You can build from source, of course, or just use 3.6 packages. Don’t forget -DBATCH to avoid getting asked for build options when building from source.
The OpenBSD Project (Foundation?) needs to pay a large electrical bill for their hosting location. I had mentioned this in a weekend BSD report just before the end of 2013, but the problem is still there and deserves a special mention. It’s possible to contribute directly, or to the I-assume-nonprofit-so-tax-deductible-for-many-people OpenBSD Foundation. You can set up a low but reoccurring Paypal payment for the Foundation, which would be probably unnoticeable for you but very helpful for the organization.
Even if you aren’t booting OpenBSD on anything, you’re using a technology that came out of that project – OpenSSH, pf, your dhcpclient, etc; or using 3rd-party software that received fixes from OpenBSD work. Putting dollars towards this software development is one of the more effective things you can do with your money to help open source.
Markus Pfeiffer has added more of his work on USB4BSD to DragonFly, and a reminder: if you want to try it out, there’s just a few options to set.
I didn’t post this before, and should have: Matthew Dillon posted a summary of all the trackpad improvements he added, and how to make use of the various features.
Warren Postma found that hal and dbus caused a crash in VMWare for DragonFly. The answer is to use moused, not dbus.
Also, if you want to keep a custom or just older package from dports on your system, as karu.pruun did, ‘pkg lock’ is the answer.
There’s a lot this week, so let’s get started:
Git Reference. Not that there isn’t a lot of other documentation out there, but much of what you find is people asking specific questions rather than explanations of procedure. (via)
Movie Code. At least most of these are using legit code, even if it’s often the wrong application. It’s been worse. (See ‘state of the art video’ item) (via)
Unix: 14 things to do or stop doing in 2014. These tips are actually useful and contain no buzzwords.
TrewGrip, another item in my quest for interesting keyboards I don’t use.
4043 bytes to recreate a mid-80s IBM PC. There are less bytes of data in the program than there were transistors in the CPU that it emulates. It can run MS Flight Simulator. It was for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, which should surprise you not at all. (via)
The World’s Most Pimped-Out ZX81. I don’t think it can run Doom, though.
The Unix Shell’s Humble If. For once, an article that doesn’t just pretend bash is the only shell that exists. (via)
Unix Shell RPG Tutorial. It’s exactly what that combination of words means. (via)
Scientists tell their favorite jokes.
Best programmer jokes, found here where there’s more.
I find these animations slightly hypnotizing. (via)
Technology used to suck even when it was cutting-edge, and we’ll still feel that way in the future. (via)
How did we end up with a centralized Internet?
Software in 2014. The summary is: server side is great, client is not. (via)
Able to be turn on, and that is it. Sci-fi movies ignore where technology comes from.
True Nuke Puke Story. My mine coworkers once did something similar to a copier repairman; got him so worried about going underground that he had a panic attack when he had to step on the hoist. We had to get a new repairman.
Your unrelated link of the week: BIG ENDING FACES! (via)
Running late putting this together… Back to bullets!
- The weekly PC-BSD digest for January 3rd.
- DiscoverBSD’s weekly roundup.
- PC-BSD’s weekly digest.
- Jailing FreeBSD 4 on FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD 4 has been a very long-lived release, so to speak.
- OpenBSD has a new auto-install feature that needs to be tested.
- Julio Merino has plans for his test suite on FreeBSD, and will be giving a tutorial on it at AsiaBSDCon 2014.
- OpenBSD has a new ‘signify’ program for cryptographically signing and verifying files.
- Ingo Schwarze has been implementing various optimizations for mandoc in OpenBSD. gprof helps.
- FreeBSD has updated netmap.
- python-3.2 is probably going to be removed from pkgsrc; it’s redundant to all the other versions.
- FreeBSD’s gcc version is being made more compatible to clang by incorporating some Apple changes.
BSDNow episode 19 is up, titled “The Installfest“. They install DragonFly along with other BSDs, and I haven’t even looked at it yet.
Markus Pfieffer has committed Larisa Grigore’s Google Summer of Code work, “SysV IPC in userspace”. It’s been a bit since the event finished, but it’s in DragonFly now.