Francois Tigeot put together some examples of the improvements from DragonFly 3.2 to DragonFly 3.4. The improvement in tmpfs performance is pretty dramatic.
For those of us still on IPv4 networks, the BSD-specific OpenGrok site bxr.su should now be available in general, not just on IPv6.
The April 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is all about FreeNAS. I mean, every article is FreeNAS related. If you’re curious about the product, this is the place to start. (The magazine is also now available in ePub format in addition to PDF.)
Does FreeNAS count as another BSD flavor, rather than an appliance? I’m not sure.
Now’s the time to put in your application for Summer of Code projects, if you’re a student. The application period runs until May 3rd. There’s already been some proposals on the mailing lists; now they can be put in officially.
I’ll point out the last link is from a returning GSoC student, and has a lot of detail; use that as an example if you’re thinking about your own application.
I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades. Time to move to 64-bit! Anyway, lots of links this week. These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…
- For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
- Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies. I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future. (via several places)
- Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies. It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing. (via)
- Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend. This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well. My favorite was always the BeOS set.
- On benchmarks. It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”. The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly. See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
- Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone. Exactly two years before I was born! At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy. There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz. It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future. I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone. More Spacewar links here.
- Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP. “Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.” (via)
- Ancient computers in use today. I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before, but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new. Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware. (via)
- Yahoo Chat! A Eulogy. The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message. (via)
- The $12 Gongkai Phone. Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license. (via)
- The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance. Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
- A Complete History of Breakout. It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK. It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles. (via)
- Ack 2.0 is out. It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
- Space Claw, Flickr via BBS. You’ll need telnet. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out. If you liked those links, you know what to do next.
If you administer one of the DragonFly mirrors, there’s a new /dports directory that can be mirrored. See that second link for details.
Ivan Uemlianin expressed a desire to read about the boot process, and how BSD works in general. I made a short list of suggestions.
Peter N. M. Hansteen has a long writeup about using and creating ports on OpenBSD, which is apparently a reprint of an article he wrote for BSD Magazine back in 2008. I don’t remember if I read it, so it’s new to me, in any case. Port and package creation across the BSDs is juuuust close enough that reading about one version will leave you with a good guess about the others.
BSDCan 2013, which is happening in a few weeks, is going to have a “Documentation Lounge“, which is essentially a docs sprint, but with a much more relaxed-sounding name. Anyway, it’s a good thing to contribute to.
John Marino published a ‘cheatsheet‘ (also, typo fix)for DragonFly 3.5 users who want to try dports, using DragonFly 3.4 packages.
John Marino has a concise explanation of why dports mostly uses gcc 4.4 still to compile, even if you’re building DragonFly itself with the default 4.7. It’s a reason to not use NO_GCC44 – yet.
Eric Radman sent along a plug for a utility he is working on called entr(1). The desciption is “Run arbitrary commands when files change.” The site for it has several nifty examples – run make when *.c files change, or convert Markdown files to HTML as soon as they are modified. The really nice thing about it is that it’s perfectly BSD-friendly, and uses kqueue, but will also work on Linux. This beats the “This runs on the one flavor of Linux I use, in one particular shell!” approach I’ve seen from some other developers. See the reddit discussion of it for comparisons to inotify. No, it’s not in pkgsrc/ports yet.
Update: And thanks to Thomas Klausner, it’s in pkgsrc as sysutils/entr, and in ports as sysutils/entr thanks to Eitan Adler. You have no reason not to try it now.
This is interesting: Verisign is sponsoring a new BSD convention (PDF link) in October, in Dulles, Virginia, USA. Apparently the use of BSD systems at the company is increasing, and they want to host something for it. The pkgNG presentation may be very interesting for DragonFly users. See the announcement. A new convention to support increased BSD uptake is really a nice surprise.
NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge is this weekend, 4/20/2013. Fancy as it sounds, it’s really a single-day hackathon around open software and hardware, with the problems to fix coming from NASA and therefore probably very unique. It’s happening in a bunch of places around the world, but there’s one right here in my town.
Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.
We are very close to the next release. As always, it comes down to building third-party software. Lots of material here to read, until then.
- E-TeX: Guidelines for Future TeX Extensions – revisited. It’s interesting to look at a software project that has had 20 years to run, with a very specific problem domain, and see that there’s always something more that could be done. (via)
- You SHOULD CONSIDER RFC6919. (via)
- The largest computer ever built. Why are there no SAGE emulators? (also via)
- The newlisp.org logo is a dragonfly, similar to ours. I don’t know why. Oh, wait: I bet it’s parentheses for the wings, which makes sense for Lisp. (thanks, Charles Rapenne)
- UNIX V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU coreutils implementations of echo.c. Not necessarily a fair comparison, but interesting; there’s some useful links in the comments, such as this similar exercise for cat.c. (via)
- Top 10 reasons I Like Postgres Over SQL Server. SQL Server is not that bad a product, but I do wish Postgres was run more often.
- Our Regressive Web. A story on how we’re losing the tools that let us focus on content on the web. The author doesn’t say, but should, that this is partially because we’re using platforms owned by other companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of talking on our own. (email, blogs) (via)
- The earliest known version of D&D, the “Dalluhn Manuscript“, is on display at a museum right around the corner from me. (via)
- Workflow in Tmux. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: A bunch of monster models, all taken at a convention called Monsterpalooza. A bit grody, but still some very good construction work. (via)
Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:
- We have the ability to use pkgsrc or dports (building from source in either case) now
- Several people have committed the remaining last-minute fixes
- I’m not going to have pkgsrc binaries built for the release.
- dports binaries – John Marino and Francois Tigeot are uploading now.
I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.
DPorts is based off of FreeBSD’s ports, but it’s possible to add software packages to it that don’t exist in FreeBSD’s ports system and have them build as any other packages. This is briefly detailed in this GitHub bug report, along with a number of the ports that already exist that way.
Matthew Dillon wrote a note about SSDs, HDDs, and swapcache that may be useful for anyone building a system soon. Conversations about SSDs, swapcache, and so on have happened before.