DragonFly BSD Digest

This recent Coding Horror column by Jeff Atwood expands on a Joel Spolsky discussion, where it’s pointed out good programmers program cause they love it, not because of the pay or anything else.  I’d take that discussion a step farther and use open source programming as an example; people do it because they want to; because they don’t want to stop thinking about solving problems even when they aren’t at work.

There’s a parallel here that I’ll make between programming and ‘normal’ art; artists and designers do the same thing when they get home too.

If you didn’t make it to the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, there’s a number of ways it’s getting streamed via video and audio.  (via)

• Dru Lavigne mentioned that there are 2 different groups for BSD Certfication on LinkedIn, for those who use it.  (Don’t forget, there’s a LinkedIn DragonFly BSD group, too.)
• The DCBSDCon Blog has announced annother speaker: Brooks Davis.

The DCBSDCon blog has another speaker announced: Ted Unangst, who will be talking about SMP and OpenBSD.

BSDTalk has apparently hit 3 years!  An excellent milestone.  Oh, and the latest version is an 17-minute interview with Michael Lauth, the iXsystems CEO.

iXsystems is working on a “BSD Laptop“, which is an interesting idea; it was hinted at during one of Will Backman’s live podcasts from NYCBSDCon, I think it was.  My first reaction to the idea is to think “Oh, you can just buy any laptop for that”.  My second reaction is to look at the 3 laptops in the room with me that can’t quite boot any BSD flavor, and change my mind.

The patch for carp(4) that Sepherosa Ziehau posted a while back has been reworked, please (re)test, if you use carp(4).

The GameSetWatch column Pixel Journeys, by the same fellow who writes the @Play columns I often link to, has a writeup about dnd, an early role-playing game (but kind of a roguelike!) I’ve never heard of on a computer system I’ve never heard of.   Just reading about gives me that wierd feeling like the first time I encountered VMS.

Hasso Tepper added OpenPAM as a vendor branch in DragonFly’s git repository, and wrote up some notes, including the tip for .git/config:

[core]
	whitespace = -trailing-space, -space-before-tab

Which I've already needed.

Papers for USENIX 2009 are due January 9th, which isn’t very far off, what with the holiday season. So get cracking!

Jason Dixon announced that DCBSDCon registration is open now.  Also, they’ve announced Kirk McKusick, Henning Brauer, and Chris Buechler as speakers, with more people announced every Monday and Thursday until the Big Event. (That’s a lot of people…)

Does this XKCD comic ring true for anyone else?  In my case, it was my last 2 years of undergraduate school, not 11th grade, but still.  Blame open source software and its ability to provide a framework for contribution.

Related: The End of Credentials (via)

Are you going to the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, at the end of this year?  Let other DragonFly people know, as they’ll be there too.

Hasso Tepper noticed that the scheduler performance on his DragonFly desktop was poor.  Interactivity went way down whenever he had multiple intensive processes running, like building software while browsing the web.

Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to have greatly improved responsiveness; there’s even more explanation available.