Lazy Reading for 08/21/2011

Ah, August.  The month where everybody goes on vacation.  I’ve been gone off and on for the last few weeks, so my link collection has been slower, but I’ve been able to keep up something.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nedroid.  “Beartato” is one of the best names ever.

Yeah, unrelated links seem to always be comics.  They offer the most reading.

More readable assertions

Assertions, in DragonFly, are places in the code where the programmer lists a condition, and tells the system to panic if the condition doesn’t exist.  It’s a good way to guard against weird situations, when something ends up with a strange value.  Do you actually use them while programming?  Then Adam Hoka’s patch to print file name and line number when the assertion hits will be useful to you.

x86_64: Rebuild!

If you’re running 64-bit DragonFly, and you’re on version 2.11, you will want to rebuild with the latest sources.  Peter Avalos found a bug with file descriptor passing, and Venkatesh Srinivas fixed it.  It will require a quickworld/kernel build – maybe a full buildworld and kernel?  I’m not sure.   Some pkgsrc packages might need recompilation, too if they also passed file descriptors around.

Lazy Reading for 2011/08/14

This is a shorter version of a Lazy Reading post, but it’s linking to some extensive writing.  Yay for having other people make up for my brevity!

Your unrelated link of the day: the comics of Lucy Knisley.  (follow the ‘Previous’ links for more)

August OSBR: open source business

The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource magazine is out, talking about starting open-source based businesses.  It also announces a name change, to “Technology Innovation Management Review”. The reason, according to the editor, is that the original purpose of the magazine was to explain how you could make money creating or using open source software.  People seem to have figured that out now…

The question now is how do you make your (probably open source using) business grow.   I totally believe that now based on the number of businesses that have sprung up based around open source software; it used to be much harder to find a commercial backer for a project that let you see the source code.  Now, it’s practically commonplace.  (examples added off the top of my head.)