Was it really this painful to program a PDP-11? I can only imagine every other alternative was worse. (via)
@Play has a new column up, this one about “Spelunky”, a tile-based underground exploration game. This game’s new and has been getting some buzz; it’s a sidescroller game that has aspects of roguelike play.
Also, this column is the 50th @Play column and, at the bottom of the page, has a nice list of past articles by topic.
One last build of pkgsrc 2008Q4 is complete on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; 2008Q4 packages for 2.2 will be available at time of release.
The epoch time is going to reach 1234567890 near Valentine’s Day, as noticed by Hubert Feyrer. The extreme nerdiness of that moment makes it that much more entertaining.
Thanks to Matthias Schmidt donating some machine time, I have pkgsrc 2008Q4 packages built for a recent DragonFly 2.1 system but labeled 2.2 already built. They’re uploaded to pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org and should be available on a mirror by the time of the 2.2 release.
As Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert notes, DragonFly is now in a ‘Feature Freeze’ for two weeks. Please work on bug fixes in the intervening timeframe, and push them to the ‘master’ branch. Changes for the release will be pushed to the 2.2 release branch. Matthew Dillon has more details.
This has been all over the Intarwebs at this point, but: there’s a good rumor that the next Sidekick phone will be running NetBSD on the inside. Danger, the company that makes the Sidekick, was bought by Microsoft, which makes this a BSD-based phone produced by Microsoft. I never thought I’d type that sequence of words together.
The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on “Commercialization”.
A post from Matthew Dillon notes that development will go into a ‘mini-freeze’ for two weeks while the 2.2 release is put together, along with news of a DVD release for 2.2 that includes many prebuilt packages, and some Hammer details.
Dru Lavigne has an article up at Wazi talking about open source alternatives, on a product by product basis. I’m looking forward to part 2, where she will look at Visio alternatives. (via)
The Wazi site has some other interesting comparisons, too, on databases and licenses.
There’s new busdma fixes (see man pages) by Sepherosa Ziehau available in his git repo; these will show up after the 2.2 release.
There’s a Xapian-powered search function on www.dragonflybsd.org now; it should be easier now to figure out where I shuffled everything.
You’ve got about 24 hours left to register for DCBSDCon 2009, which starts in 6 days. You should go, and pick up a DragonFly LiveDVD, among other things.
Reading this Textfiles article about keeping data in “the Internet cloud” and then this one about Google made me think: if the Internet went away, what data would you lose?
There is, as of this writing, 245 bugs listed in the DragonFly bug tracker. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert and other have been doing an excellent job of fixing/cleaning items listed there, but it can always use more input.
If you’ve posted something to bugs@, it’s in the bug tracker. Please, especially if it was fixed, make sure the ticket is closed.
University videos on How to Program a PDP-11. Watch and feel relieved at how far technology’s come in terms of convenience.
Recently noticed: OpenSSH 5.1, which was imported into DragonFly some time ago, reversed the preferred order for host keys from DSA to RSA, which will give you a changed host key warning when logging into a newly updated DragonFly host. If that bugs you, there’s an easy fix.
The most recent DCBSDCon blog post mentions that there will be FreeBSD and OpenBSD goodies for sale at the conference, plus DragonFly media. That’s me; I’m burning a pile of DVDs with a LiveDVD image of DragonFly 2.1, which should be freely available at the convention.
There’s RSS (and Atom) feeds available from the DragonFly website now – these feeds cover changes to the site, including the former wiki-only content.
Python 2.1 is being retired from pkgsrc. In the relatively unlikely chance that this affects you, speak up on one of the pkgsrc mailing lists.