There’s been a few changes to reduce memory usage; this may not affect you unless you have an extremely busy machine, but it won’t hurt.
This is a mini-theme Lazy Reading, where I find small groups of related things.
- Exploratory data analysis with Unix tools. The command line is a far better place to mangle data than you’d expect. Well, maybe not your expectations, given that you’re reading this site.
- “The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive” Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in 1982. I found that after reading “Open Source Guilt & Passion“, which is a quite accurate description of working on open source, or perhaps any volunteer work. (via).
- While talking about people of that generation: Here’s Rob Pike’s Go slideshow (linked previously) in a single-page text format. (via)
- And we can get even older with this article about the Computer History Museum in California. There’s a lot of pictures of hardware ‘firsts’, like a light tracking, self driving robot from the 1940s, or the first mass-produced transistor radio. Look for the hardware that shows where ‘core dumps’ came from. (via)
- Found on the previous link: Rebuilding the IBM 1401. I like looking at the old “fill-up-a-room” computers, since they look like supercomputers. I wouldn’t want to actually possess a mainframe; they aren’t powerful, eat electricity, and so on. Well… I can think of one that would be OK.
- The Enduring Object. I find it oddly reassuring when hardware doesn’t change because it works so well. It’s sort of like an inherited tool from an older relative; something worn from use but distinctly better than buying new.
- The 2012 Good Gift Games Guide. There’s some really neat board games in there.
- Along the same lines, Designing Board Games with Perl.
- The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection. An in-depth dive with Wireshark and an explanation of RSA. My cup of nerditry runneth over! (via)
- It wouldn’t be a Lazy Reading post without some Git thingie. This time, it’s “Git: Twelve Curated Tips And Workflows From The Trenches“. (via)
- The DuckDuckGo command line. (via)
- Exploring Emacs. Posted mostly in the interests of equal time to vi-ish stuff. (via)
- “What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor“. A Jason Scott article about emulating old monitors in software, with videos showing the difference. I’ve seen the hardware difference he’s talking about. I’m distressed just knowing my children probably don’t recognize analog static. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. Also known as ‘old weird crap’, but that’s OK – still interesting.
I knew about files like /etc/services, for common IP port usages, and /usr/share/zoneinfo, for time zones, but I didn’t know that DragonFly (along with other systems) keeps a list of agreed names for various human languages defined by ISO639 in /share/misc/iso639, and it’s maintained at least in part by the Library of Congress. At least I didn’t know until Sascha Wildner updated it.
Updated: Birthstones and flowers. Don’t know why.
Michael W. Lucas has a coupon code for his new edition of Absolute OpenBSD, so jump on it now. I haven’t read his first edition, but his other books are certainly good.
It’s the end of the year, so it’s time for the FreeBSD Foundation’s end of year campaign.
If you’ve ever wondered how building all of pkgsrc would go with GCC 4.7.2, which is in DragonFly but not the default compiler, John Marino can show you just that. He has a list of the results from a bulk build of all packages on DragonFly with GCC 4.7.2.
It’s been a quiet week, but that’s OK. I have sick kids, sick coworkers, and a certification test this Monday…
- Playing at the World is apparently a good book. The author has a blog where he dives into old RPG minutiae. You will either find that not very interesting or super interesting. No halfway point.
- Teleglitch, a roguelike top-down shooter with pixel graphics. I was happy at the word “roguelike”, of course. (via _hasso_ on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A review of Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition.
- “I’m writing my own OS“. I think Dominic Giampolo said once that everyone in computer science goes through a phase where making your own operating system can’t be too hard and why not try it etc etc. (via)
- This picture makes me happy.
- An entire book of studies based around a single line of C64 BASIC code. It’s available as a free download.
- Teach Your Children Groff. It’s sort of the opposite of the do-without-needing-to-understand practice that most people assume Steve Jobs wanted. (via)
- Your Objects, The Unix Way. (via)
- Getting your computer work done in 1973. Given the hardware, I don’t think this is Unix, but it’s still neat to see it work. Punch cards! (via)
- Here’s how arcade cabinets were first planned out. I like seeing the old-school marker rendering.
- This notebook seems like a bad idea. (via)
- This secure bootloader, on the other hand, could be useful. (via)
- A hypnotic data visualization. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A Star Wars roguelike on GitHub. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: GET LAMP. I thought I had linked to it before, but I’m probably thinking of It Is Pitch Dark. It’s a documentary by Jason Scott of textfiles fame about text adventures.
Michael W. Lucas announced his next book will be about DNSSec, which is good. It’s also self-published, which I like to see. I don’t know if it necessarily makes him more money, but I like to see more exploration of this new way of publishing.
If you look at his announcement, there’s a link to something else: vendor-free SSL certificates. These are possible? That’s one of those things I didn’t even realize I wanted; having to deal with a certification authority is annoying.
BSDTalk 220 is up. It’s a conversation with Eric Oyen, OpenBSD user. It’s about 20 minutes and I don’t know the subject past “OpenBSD” cause I haven’t listened to it – yet.
NYCBUG is joining up with a whole bunch of other software user groups (Linux, Lisp, Puppet, etc.) for a holiday party on December 11th. This may not do you much good unless you live within a few hour’s travel, but I like seeing that sort of cross-group get-togethers, with no sponsor other than the desire to talk and drink.
This discussion of cryptographic hardware for FreeBSD may include hardware that would work for DragonFly too. Can someone verify?
Do you use ndis(4) for a network card that would otherwise not work? Are you running DragonFly 3.3? Are you willing to run USB4BSD and see if it works? If you do, tell Sascha Wildner if his changes worked.
It’s ‘old week’!
- Your team should work like an open source project. It’s not as complete a possibility as I think this person paints it, but there’s principles outlined in that article that could apply to any office. (via)
- An IBM PC Model 5150 – in Javascript. (via)
- World’s oldest d20. If you told me it was, say, a few decades old, I’d have believed it. (via)
- World’s oldest digital computer turned back on. From 1951. I like the name “Harwell Dekatron”.(via)
- Speaking of old, Windows 95 Tips, Ticks, and Tweaks. (via multiple places)
- A horrible computing idea from the 1960s. (via)
- Old computer art updated to work in Processing. You know what Processing is, right? If not, you may be in for a treat. (via)
- xmonad layouts for netbooks. I’ve thought that a tiling window manager is a good solution when low on screen real estate, but I never got this detailed. (via)
- Remember the complaints about Linuxisms last week? ITWire followed up on this with Marc Espie of OpenBSD. He makes the good point that computers are complex systems, and when you stop thinking about compatibility, everything – including Linux – gets crappier. (via)
- Vi-style shortcuts appear everywhere, including on Tumblr. (slightly related: I have a Tumblr with images from the mine where I work.)
Your unrelated link of the week: Disused Rochester Subway. I used to work about half a mile from one end of this structure, and have been in several of the locations pictured. (via)
Shopping! This is the big holiday shopping weekend in the US, and I usually put together something here.
- Buy an SSD for someone who doesn’t have one – including you if that’s the case. There’s better and worse SSDs out there, but you’ll get a speed benefit no matter what, and other bonuses are possible.
- The Tea Bag Buddy, which also comes in a color-changing version. Because tea.
- My perennial Science! suggestions: ThinkGeek, American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear, The Bone Room, and Skulls Unlimited.
- The Best of BSD 2011 and Last Year in BSD Security, from the BSD Magazine publisher.
- For more BSD, there’s always the orgs themselves. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD – no DragonFly, though there ought to be. Also, ISC.
- For lists of gifts, there’s the Verge Gift Guide, which has some interesting offshoots.
- Another long list: The Comics Reporter’s Shopping List.
If you have suggestions, please comment!
Dan Langille runs BSDCan and PGCon. He also went to EuroBSDCon and described how he put together these conferences. The PDF containing his presentation slides makes a good checklist of what you might need for your own event, even if it’s not on the scale of his conventions.
If you are one of the few people still wanting to read an OS/2 HPFS drive, support for it in DragonFly has been updated by Antonio Huete Jimenez. It’s read-only, but writing didn’t work well, and I’d be surprised if there’s any hpfs disks that aren’t archival, out there.
Also, Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the pktgen program to generate even more packets, even at relatively low CPU clock speeds.
Sascha Wildner recently brought in support from FreeBSD for HighPoint’s RocketRAID 4520 and 4522 SAS/SATA RAID cards. It’s in the hptiop(4) driver.
The initial download of pkgsrc via Git on DragonFly is a little bit faster now, with the ‘make pkgsrc-create-shallow’ option recently added by John Marino. Note that there’s a similar option for src. It skips downloading file history.