my BSD Planet

Not only have Kindle sales increased by a factor of three year over year, the digital copy sales have overtaken the combined sales of hardcover and paperback book sales. Is the ebook tipping point upon us?

Pete Meyers has been kicking the tires on two reading systems — Logos Bible Software and Glo Bible — both of which are filled with reader-friendly ebook features.

Isis' CEO opens the doors to its NFC effort, while a stealth project at Apple's retail stores makes some wonder if it will leap ahead of other NFC players. Also, mobile banking is on a tear, especially where it's the first option for the unbanked.

Perl extension for exceptions that don\'t hurt

Those evangelizing the revolutionary qualities of "the next big thing" (whatever it may be) would do well to revisit past "big things." Truth is, computing goes in cycles.

Add more instructions for Guru Mediation

Moderator writes "Could Gnome drop support for non-Linux operating systems? That was a recent proposal on the Gnome mailing list, although there were significant objections in response. Quoting: 'It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels...the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Right to Access the Internet -- a survey of different countries' rights to access to access the Internet. Peace Through Statistics -- three ex-Yugoslavian statisticians nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. In war-torn and impoverished countries, statistics provides a welcome arena in which science runs independent of ethnicity and religion. With so few resources, many countries are graduating few, if...

By removing the "hoops, headaches, and hangovers" of traditional online book buying, CompletelyNovel co-founders Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks hope their company new company, ValoBox, will streamline ebook consumption.

What do those flashing lights on an Arduino board mean? This brief overview explains. Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:Asterisk: How to use FollowMe to call a series of phone numbersHow to handle threads in Android, and what you need to watch forHow to get started learning Flex 4Tips for working at home Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

add links

Add more infos about guru mediation

Perl extension to avoid XSS with JavaScript value interpolation

Perl extension for Mozilla CA cert bundle in PEM format

Perl extension to generate signed OAuth requests

Correct mistake

"JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Sixth Edition" for only $19.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDJS6 to get your savings....

PAM module for two-step authentication from Google

John Marino has made it possible to use ‘gold‘, the new linker in binutils 2.21, on DragonFly.  His explanatory post outlines the benefits (much faster C++ compiling), and caveats (does not work yet for building world/kernel).

Samuel Greear has a totally untested update to the NVIDIA video driver available.  It may not work, but it’s not like that’ll be any different than the current state of the driver.

Add lldb link.

Minor sorting. Add link to PathDB (recently ported) and Solaris' MDB

Certain high risk industries — aviation, space travel,healthcare — use resilience engineering to investigate failures. Etsy vice president John Allspaw says the same concepts have a place in web engineering.

"The Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone" application has been nominated for a TV British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. Henry Volans, head of Faber Digital, discusses the app and why he thinks it's being honored with the nomination.

Add link suggested by a Dtrace expert.

The Future of the Library (Seth Godin) -- We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime. Passionate railing against a straw man. The library profession...

This week Apple's iOS developer community got a patent wake up call, the recently discarded Mono project found a new home, and a favorite scripting language got a new version.

A utility to create Samba password hashes

"Learning iPhone Programming" for only $11.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDFNE to get your savings....

"Node: Up and Running" for only $13.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDM95 to get your savings....

I have them, for DragonFly 2.11/i386 and DragonFly 2.11/x86_64 (see pkgsrc-bulk), on pkgsrc-2011Q1.  I think I even uploaded them correctly this time.

Practical Extraction and Report Language

A new issue of the free BSD Magazine is available: Embedded BSD – FreeBSD and ALIX (pdf). From the table of contents: Introduction to the Z Shell In this modern age of computing, we are offered many choices with regard to how … Continue reading →

A new app created by Tim Meaney, partner at Arc90, and Christopher Fahey, founding partner at Behavior Design, taps into and harnesses conference distraction. Here's how it works.

Android is fully capable of running multiple threads at the same time, but you need to know how applications use threads in order to design your application properly. Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:Set up a 4G mobile hotspot as a home Internet replacementHow Arduino's servo library controls positioningTwo ways to create a user Interface for AndroidAsterisk: How to use FollowMe to call a series of phone numbers Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Because we now have so much data at our disposal, any dataset with a decent amount of information can be matched against identifiable public records. To keep datasets available, we must acknowledge that foolproof anonymization is an illusion.

Sorting Out 9/11 (New Yorker) -- the thorniest problem for the 9/11 memorial was the ordering of the names. Computer science to the rescue! Tagger -- Python library for extracting tags (statistically significant words or phrases) from a piece of text. Free Science, One Paper at a Time (Wired) -- Jonathan Eisen's attempt to collect and distribute his father's...

On May 25, attend the next Strata Online Conference and learn how big data services tear down barriers to entry and which businesses are most vulnerable to attacks by data-literate startups. Register to attend this free online event.

Update bug

Add undefined symbol bug

"Programming HTML5 Applications" for only $13.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDM96 to get your savings....

Henning Brauer (henning@) has just sent an e-mail to misc@ announcing the publication of his presentation from BSDCan 2011. Weighing in at 82 pages, he gives a detailed overview of what happened to our favourite firewall in the last 10 years. I can still remember running IPF so a big thank you to all the developers involved in PF over the years is more than warranted.

Henning also reminds everybody that EuroBSDCon 2011 will be held in October in The Netherlands, with several OpenBSD developers presenting there. If you are in the area, make sure you stop by.

Add a link to the Dwarf standards.

Add link to MDB. Remove llquantize link, it looks like there is a volunteer for that already.

Ferruccio Zamuner will be doing a talk about DragonFly at the Italian Perl Workshop in Turin, in September.  It’s a free event.  He’s working on slides, and is looking for feedback on them (I assume once he has them.)

Adam Hoka, a student in Google Summer of Code for DragonFly, has created a wiki page for his device mapper mirroring project.  Not a lot there, but I’m happy to see the reference.

add requested link to GNATS

Google I/O 2011 was marked by the Android Accessory Development Kit, the Chromebook vision and lots of robots. Mike Loukides examines the big I/O developments and their possible repercussions.

Great news in 2011: The jobs are coming back, and fast. Are you ready? In this blog, Trish Gray gives an IT career outlook for the rest of this year.

In this presentation, O'Reilly CIO Jonathan Reichental discusses a range of future technology trends and what it will mean for work and the workforce.

People from across the Ruby on Rails community are coming together in Baltimore this week for RailsConf 2011. Learn more about the event, check out the schedule, and watch this space for conference updates.

Percona's goal is to bring MySQL expertise out of the Silicon Valley and build community around MySQL in many locations.

 

It's time to stop lamenting the death of marginalia at the hands of digital publishing and actually do something about it. Openmargin, a startup in the Netherlands, has done just that.

Entering the Minority Report Era -- a survey of technology inspired by or reminiscent of Minority Report, which came out ten years ago. (via Hacker News) Sally -- a tool for embedding strings in matrices, as used in machine learning. (via Matt Biddulph) GNU SIP Witch Released -- can be used to deploy private secure calling networks, whether stand-alone...

Leaders from across the Ruby on Rails world are coming together this week at RailsConf in Baltimore, Maryland. Learn more about the event, and watch this space for updates from the conference and a livestream of the keynote presentations beginning Tuesday at 9am EDT.

Update libvirt status

Renames mp3 files using freedb or local CDDB

Add link to Bryan Cantrill's DTrace blog regarding llquantize

Description title

link APACHE_PORT to bsd.apache.mk

This week: lots more reading!

• Michael Lucas describes an extra layer of protection for when you can’t force public key usage on every SSH user.
• Cool, but obscure Unix tools (via)  The screenshots are all from a Mac… How many of the 24 tools listed are in pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip?   Almost all of them.  (tpp sounds entertaining.)
• NYCBUG, in addition to having a really fun convention, has been regularly posting audio of the presentations they host.  The most recent is “William Baxter’s NYCBUG presentation on The Unix Method of Development Management”.   See the BSD Events tweet for the download.
• What Ubuntu means.  (via)
• Here’s a nice explanation of Intel’s new Tri-Gate design and with it, an incidental explanation of the processor market.
• This ycombinator post about Hammer2 work has an in-depth comment from Venkatesh Srinivas about DragonFly’s network setup, memory allocator, and token use.  (Ignore the trolling in other comments.)
• Michael Lucas’s next No Starch Press book is Absolute OpenBSD, second edition.
• Pictures and video are starting to show up from the just-passed BSDCan 2011. (via this and also thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• My first experience of The Internet was very similar to this.  It should be bizarrely unfamiliar to anyone under 20 or so.  (via)  Get this: I typed ‘exit’ instead of just closing the browser window when I was done messing with it, because some habits cannot be broken.

An output system for Snort or Suricata that parses unified2 files

Gecko Layout Engine for Wine (HTML support)

Update UFS possible improvements (consulted with kirk@)

Fix sysenter perforce link

Remove who from IPv6 userland cleanup, it's fixed in 9-current using utx.

typo, s/od/of/

more of the same

markup

If you’ve used ‘free’ on Linux to find available memory, Steve O’Hara-Smith has described the way to do the same thing on DragonFly.

It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on getting multiprocessor kernels able to boot on single-processor systems.  This makes life a bit easier, since there’s only one kernel needed for any given processor.  I don’t know if it’s in a finished state yet.

Add backdated news for GHC update.

Simplify page, add "project news"

The Haskell Platform

The command-line interface for Cabal and Hackage

Don't highlight libf2c version since it will not be updated.

Intel drivers are BSD licensed

Initial IPv6 information.

Image processing tools

Pete Meyers suggests ways to improve ebook note-taking tools, publishers can actually get consumer data from Apple, and the American Booksellers Association wants its member stores to have Espresso Book Machines.

In the latest Search Notes: A look at the curious campaign against Google's Social Circle, the Chromebook is an I/O highlight, and Google Goggles hints at a new kind of search.

Matthew Dillon did some tests building both with an Intel i7 2600K and AMD PhenomIIx6 1090T CPU, and posted the results.  He follows up with a note that the lower electricity cost of the Intel i7 makes it price-comparable with the AMD chip within a year and a half.

For anyone who missed/couldn’t join Summer of Code, there’s still lists of potentially interesting projects, as Alex Hornung points out.

The field of visualization is sometimes narrowly perceived as data interpreted through imagery. Ben Fry, principal at Fathom, says visualizations actually share the same sort of nuance we see in writing — different styles, different intents, and different outcomes.

Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers.

Subscribe to Make Magazine today.

We ran a developer contest to see what folks could do with O'Reilly's new "writable" API. Today we're announcing the winners.

Argh, schedule typo.

Update and sort the references section

Add power info

Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data (PDF) -- excellent article from Notices of the American Mathematical Society about the flaws in "value-added modelling", the latest fad whereby data about students' results in different classes are analysed to identify the effect of each teacher. People recognize that tests are an imperfect measure of educational success, but when sophisticated mathematics is...

Add my card on Adrian's request.

"Canvas Pocket Reference" for only $5.49. You save 50%. Use discount code DDCNV to get your savings....

Why would Microsoft pay so much for a company that doesn't have vastly superior technology or great financials? Here's five reasons.

New research from the Pew Internet and Life Project sheds light on how online users are gathering and sharing health data. Here's a look at three important trends revealed in the survey.

In the latest Strata Week: An AVOS acquisition hints at what's to come, a ranking tool reveals data's intimidation factor, and a look at how scientific papers might evolve.

A GTK+-based quake-like terminal emulator

Python utilities for console mail clients (eg. mutt)

Nagios Plugin to monitor your mail environment

Initial Create

I mentioned it before, but Matthew Dillon’s updated his Hammer document, and posted about it.  Read on, especially if you like extremely complex plans.

Edit: first link fixed, plus there’s a followup.

I finished two builds of pkgsrc-2011Q1 on DragonFly; the reports are available.  The only real breakage is security/heimdal.   There’s a patch for that, though.

10.x dumdidudidum

Silly ideas from the 10.x sessions

Clarify VFS namecache proposal and add link

Clarify the C-FFS suggestion and fix broken links

Oracle casts another piece of Sun from their portfolio, Apple and Google defend themselves from big-brother accusations made by, um, Big Brother, and it turns out you probably have a pretty sweet job, after all.

A recent survey questions whether the teen market has any interest in check-ins. Also, Facebook gets access to Skype through its investor Microsoft, and some thoughts on taking Facebook Credits and Apple's payment system beyond their walled gardens.

Fix mismatch in MDFS entry

Google\'s open source JavaScript engine

Add reference our HFS Wiki

9.0 open items, yadda yadda yadda

Add the documents for my EuroBSDCon 2008 talk.

Ebook note-taking needs attention. The upside is that the ereader company that builds the best tools could also create a competitive advantage.

Acunu CEO Tim Moreton talks about how his company has redesigned the data stack from the ground up, and what the resulting speed boost might mean for big data developers.

Correct the last FreeBSD version number that was known to work with HFS

Provide a description and some historic information

This excerpt from Learning Android helps you understand how activities and the Activity Manager are used in Android programming. Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:Apache: Redirect to language path by browser language settingsSome use cases for SimpleDB with Amazon EC2Can you copyright an XML schema?Are there any full-featured open source alternatives to Adobe Flash Builder? Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Telsta Scores Patent Win over Amazon (ZDNet) -- The delegate of the Commissioner of Patents, Ed Knock, found this week that Amazon's 1-click buy facility "lacks novelty [and] an inventive step", making Amazon's claim unpatentable. The Final Answer for What To Do To Prevent Piracy (Jeff Vogel) -- His advice is to do the minimum to encourage people to...

Add some extra ideas for the Dtrace project.

Reference my latest attempts to get rid of some GPL'd headers

Attach slides

"DNS and BIND on IPv6" for only $8.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDDV6 to get your savings....

Rope is a python refactoring library

Thanks to Matthias Rampke, Chromium builds on DragonFly.  He’s posted with notes and even a screenshot, and has a working i386 binary.

I didn’t think of this, but I needed it: if you have an older Hammer system that now can perform deduplication because you upgraded to DragonFly 2.10, make sure to add it to the configuration for that file system, or else it won’t run.

spell fix

netcat have been updated to 4.9.

Note less and netcat updates.

Add GNU grep to GPLv3 software

Attach slides

+1

Both the bright lights of success and the mire of gridlock were held up for examination this week at the conference Health Information Technology Improving Healthcare and the Economy. A report on meaningful use, data exchange, jobs in health IT, and more.

I've been a writer in my heart since I was old enough to hold a pencil and a professional writer for nearly 20 years (writing as William Stanek and Robert Stanek). Over the years many would-be writers have asked...

P2P VoIP software, development version

add flz talk

Added Attendees

"R in a Nutshell" for only $17.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDRN5 to get your savings....

Provide a simple Login controller which can be reused

Provide a description for HFS+ port

ru@ has recently updated awk

libf2c and libobjc are no longer in head

There’s been some discussion on buying a SSD and how to match it with a hard disk, and/or swapcache.  Follow the thread for more details.

Andy Oram interviews Dr. Deborah Peel of the Patient Privacy Rights Coalition about the conference "Getting IT Right: Protecting Patient Privacy Rights in a Wired World."

Ignite takes place at Google I/O on Tue. May 10 at 5 PM PDT in Room 11 at Moscone West. If you can't be there, you can watch live on the I/O Live site.

+1

"Linux in a Nutshell, Sixth Edition" for only $17.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDLNX to get your savings....

The Android Native Development Kit, or NDK, is an add-on to SDK that helps you integrate native code within your Android application. Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:Are there any full-featured open source alternatives to Adobe Flash Builder?How to "fix" the copy address feature in Mac OS X's mail clientSome use cases for SimpleDB with Amazon EC2How to crawl followers on Twitter to approximate potential influence Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

This October, O'Reilly is launching Android Open, the first "big tent" Android-only conference. Our goal is to give all the Android players a place to become a community.

ODB to iPhone Converter -- hardware to connect to your car's onboard computer and display it on an iPhone app. (via Imran Ali) Multitasking Brains (Wired) -- interesting pair of studies: old brains have trouble recovering from distractions; hardcore multitaskers have trouble focusing. (via Stormy Peters) Social Privacy -- Danah Boyd draft paper on teens' attitudes to online privacy....

The software industry is now full of "best practices," and many of them make sense when considered in isolation. But when you lump them all on the backs of developers, you end up with dispirited bureaucrats/bean counters.

Add db

That's the conclusion of OpenBSD founder and project leader Theo de Raadt, who reviewed code following a claim earlier this month that the FBI had planted a secret backdoor in the OpenBSD IPsec stack.

Add David's e-mail address

Add Mike Karels

Add David O'Brien from Juniper

Add Kris Moore to Capsicum attendee list; unfortunately, I won't be making it after all

Added Attendee

Add wxa

Enumeratees for the incremental conversion of builders to bytestrings

Thanks to John Marino, the one dependency needing libgnuregex is gone, as is the software itself.  I didn’t even know libgnuregex was there.

If you have a really old DragonFly system, meaning you’ve been upgrading it since version… 1.8 (I think?), you may have libpthread linked to libc_r instead of libxu.  This means that if you have a system that old, you will now need to set THREAD_LIB or just recompile your pkgsrc programs on your next upgrade to something after DragonFly 2.10.   I don’t think this is going to apply to a lot of people.

(I hope I got the lib details right…)

Add another Guru Medidation error

P2P VoIP software

P2P VoIP software

Legacy version P2P VoIP software

BrightScope has unlocked government data on financial advisors and made the information publicly available. Now, anyone can research a potential money manager.

Add description for VT-x error

Set AIO bug to not reproducible (tested by alexander eichner)

Add link to SOC2011IlyaPutsikau

While formal boundaries and professional criteria for "data science" remain undefined, here's why we should keep using the term.

UDID DeAnonymization -- a developer exposed an API that connected UDID to other information such as Facebook ID. The API has been closed, but it remains true that your iPhone has a primary key and darn near every app developer has a database linking your UDID to other details about you. Apple requires this to not be public, but...

"Windows PowerShell Cookbook, Second Edition" for only $21.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDW2K to get your savings....

A standalone program to browse and edit data

A Java/UML Object-Oriented Design Tool

Python wrapper for chinese/cconv

PHP wrapper for chinese/cconv

Perl wrapper for chinese/cconv

Perl module of Amazon Simple Email Services

Read-Eval-Print-Loop for debugging your Catalyst application

Read-Eval-Print-Loop on die and/or warn

Add short talk by plosher

Added what I am interested in discussing.

Profile your Catalyst application with Devel::NYTProf

Inject components into your Catalyst application

Debug memory leaks in Catalyst applications

User role-based authorization action class

Binding to the libsvg-cairo library

GUI functions as used in the book "The Haskell School of Expression"

Binding to the Cairo library

Documentation for transformers

An efficient packed Unicode text type

Scrap Your Boilerplate

Software Transactional Memory

Parallel programming library

Documentation for mtl

Monad transformer library

Support for manipulating Haskell source code

Tools to build the Gtk2Hs suite of User Interface Libraries

Binding to the GLIB library for Gtk2Hs

Binding to the glade library

Binding to the GIO

Binding to the GNOME configuration database system

Reliable, high-performance processing with left-fold enumerators

Command line argument processing

Efficient buffered output

Unit testing framework for Haskell

Haskell library for reading/writing/manipulating tar archives

Binding to the VTE library

Binding to the Pango text rendering engine

Binding to the GtkSourceView library

Binding to the GTK+ OpenGL Extension

Binding to the Gtk+ graphical user interface library

Correct room. Add link.

+3

Let’s see, what do I have now…

• Did you know we just released DragonFly 2.1?  Neither did I.
• The AppleCrate II (][?), a set of parallel Apple //e systems.  It makes me so happy.  I love to see how simple uncomplex the old Apple systems were, almost at the level of programmable logic controllers today.  I was struck by the fact that the Apple //e requires less than 5 volts, which means it could run off a USB port.  (via lots of places)
• Removing the internet’s relics: a call to kill FTP now that it’s 40 years old.  There’s no easy alternative, though…
• 20 years of Adobe Photoshop.  (via)  Obviously that’s not found on any BSD platform, but almost every raster-based image editor out there tries to emulate Photoshop in some way, on every platform.  It casts a long shadow.  Plus, I remember the Photoshop 2.0 loading screen, so now I feel old.
• Is tech blogging becoming worse? i.e not really tech any more?  I’ve mumbled about this before, since this site is arguably a tech blog.  Sites tend to diversify and lose focus to grow their audience.  You can see the same pattern in the magazine market, back when there was a magazine market.  You don’t have to worry about the Digest – I’m targeting BSD users, so I’m totally not growing my audience!  (Joking, joking.  Readership is staying even to slightly up, over the last while.)

On a separate note that has nothing to do with DragonFly: if you live outside the United States and have a postcard handy, can you send it to “St. John Neumann School, 31 Empire Blvd.,  Rochester, NY 14609 USA”?  My daughters’ school is collecting international postcards this month as part of their geography lesson.  It doesn’t have to have anything specific, other than be interesting to 8-year-olds.

 

Linux compatibility layer - V4L2 ioctl handler

Red Hat's usual modus operandi is the precise inverse of most companies based on open source. This drives what I heard at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, solid progress along the lines laid out by Red Hat and JBoss in previous years.

ipfilter has now been removed from DragonFly, by Sascha Wildner.  We now have “only” ipfw2 and pf for software firewalls.

John Marino has updated the GNU Debugger (GDB) from version 7.0 to version 7.2.  The lengthy commit message describes how surprisingly complex the upgrade proved to be.

Search, watch and download from Google Image and YouTube

Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer

DNS relay for ad blocking

Following one beta and five release candidates (RC’s), FreeNAS 8.0-RELEASE has been made availabe earlier this week by iXsystems, the corporate sponser behind the FreeNAS Project. The last stable release was FreeNAS 0.7.2 (Sabanda), released mid-October 2010. FreeNAS is a … Continue reading →

Update guru meditation details

Add link to bugreport

Update Guru Meditation bug and add another one

Updates

Add BenL

zoneinfo, libdialog

"Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR" for only $15.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDAAR to get your savings....

Supplementary distributions and RNG for R

And here’s one last writeup/introduction for Google Summer of Code projects on DragonFly: kevent part 2.  (Apparently school exams prevented this from being written sooner.)

The 10th EuroBSDCon is happening in Maarssen, The Netherlands, October 6th through the 9th.  The call for proposals is up until the end of the month.

Sass is an extension of CSS3

Raspberry Pi -- the creator of the game Elite has made an inline computer the size of a thumb drive--it plugs into an HDMI cable on one end and USB on the other. 700MHz CPU, OpenGL, 1080p-capable, running Ubuntu. Pricetag: $25. The mission is to supply them to schools. A Budget for Babel (Tim Carmody) -- What would you...

Next week, Sherwood Neiss will testify in favor of a small offerings exemption for investments, which could spark a revolution in grassroots entrepreneurship.

Subscribe to Make Magazine today.

Couldn't get a hold of KirkMcKusick (3 tries) so I'm just adding myself. Hope thats not a problem.

In advance of the upcoming Maker Faire Bay Area, here's a look at two vastly different robotics projects: one aims to change the world while the other wants to roll around (and inspire some healthy creativity).

In the latest Search Notes: Bing is going all out to claim more market share, Google News' personalization features could create an echo chamber, and Osama Bin Laden's death creates a search frenzy.

The final installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, looks at what Sage Bionetworks and its friends need to do.

In the latest Publishing News: A study found digital text might disrupt cognitive mapping, digital browsing solutions are discussed in Pete Meyers' latest "Breaking the Page" installment, and Amazon launches its fourth imprint.

Matthew Dillon’s been thinking about Hammer, and how to implement clustering well enough to work as a sort of RAID replacement.  He’s written up a document describing his plans.  Some highlights:

• writable history snapshots
• quotas and accounting
• live rebuilds of data from mirrors
• and the same history, mirroring, and snapshots as before.

It’s going to be a while before this “Hammer 2″ becomes a finished product, though, so don’t count on it for the next release.

The May issue of BSD Magazine is out.  The cover says “Embedded FreeBSD” as a continuation of last month’s theme, but there’s really a wide mix in there.  Of course, there’s a DragonFly news section from me, talking about 2.10.  I’ll point at the zsh article that opens the magazine, since every zsh user I’ve met talks about zsh rapturously.  Also, the iXSystems ad on page 2 has a rather fun illustration…

Aspell Kannada dictionary

Add Rene Ladan

The fourth installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, focuses in on the rights of patients and how they want researchers to treat their data.

A new interactive feature posted at WhiteHouse.gov uses open data to visualize excess federal property. The full dataset is also available for download in a structured format.

Will big data kill the stock exchange? That question was recently explored by Andy Kessler. Plus: How recent security breaches could shape the black market and a look at how "island biogeography" predicted Osama Bin Laden's location.

Wondering if Amazon is a competitor to publishers? Take a look at the company's growing number of imprints and publishing projects.

A report says developers are holding back on Android, put off by fragmentation in the platform and a disappointing uptake in Android tablets. Also, Facebook Credits gets attention and we take a look at PayPal's latest purchase.

Add Rene Ladan to the working group. While here, add the building and room now that it is known, too.

Add Attendees

Add another bug

Add another bug

Perl interface to OpenDKIM C library

For one day only, you can SAVE 50% on all O'Reilly videos. Use discount code DDF2V in the shopping cart. Videos from oreilly.com are DRM-free. You get free lifetime access, multiple file formats, free updates....

"This company was created to provide interesting work for interesting people. We follow our dreams, our curiosity, and our sense of what's important." --Tim O'Reilly, Founder and President O'Reilly Job Opportunities: Creative Director Sales Manager Online Marketing Specialist Contract Manager Operations Director, Conferences See more job opportunities.

Why We Chose MongoDB for Guardian.co.uk (SlideShare) -- they're using MongoDB's flexible schema, as schema upgrades were pain in their previous system (Oracle). I think of these as the database equivalent of dynamic typing in languages like Perl and Ruby. (via Paul Rowe) Solving Problems with Visual Analytics -- This book is the result of a community effort of...

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, says subtle interactions — like a buzzing phone — could lead to better augmented reality experiences than those provided through cameras and screens.

In this excerpt from Programming Amazon EC2, we look at problems that SimpleDB can help resolve. Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:How to "Fix" the "Copy Address" feature in Mac OS X's Mail clientDocBook Tutorial: DocBook to PDF with Xcode and XMLLINTHow to gather geographic location dataTop 10 Tips for the iPad 2 Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Initial version of the homepage

Added link to the TESLA gsoc project

A random password generator

Add MateuszKocielski for GSoC.

Tim Bisson has inital TRIM support working for UFS.  His lengthy posting talks about how it’s done, and shows how much it speeds things up.  He’s looking for testers, so please try it if you have a SSD.  (The usual warnings apply about testing code that specifically deletes things.)

For those not familiar with TRIM in SSD context, here’s the least annoying page with an explanation that I could find in a few seconds of Googling.

A POE component base class which implements the Observer pattern

A PHP script to browse, create folders, upload files etc

Unzip with iconv patches

The May 2011 issue of the Open Source Business Resource is “Technology Entrepreneurship“.  You’ll want to read this because it’s all people who are their own boss, using software they can modify themselves.  Seductively nerdy/utopian!  They’re continuing the topic for next month’s issue, so if that describes you and you like writing, here’s your chance.

Chess engine (e.g. xboard) for shatranj, courier chess, ...

Another cancellation.

Below some links, resources and updates for future and past (Free)BSD conferences: 1. BSDCan 2011 will be held this month (11-13 May). Links: Registration – Schedule - Main Page 2. The EuroBSDCon 2011 website has gone live. This year it will be the … Continue reading →

First cut at a schedule for the devsummit talk track.

FreeBSD on Amazon EC2 Colin Percifal announced back in December 2010 that he had managed to make FreeBSD run on Amazon EC2. There were some quirks and some work-rounds needed, but it worked. FreeBSD ran only on the ‘small t1.micro’ instance, … Continue reading →

Unable to attend.

Recently, Attachmate gave their US-based Mono developers the pink slip, there was much ado about mobile, and Chrome puts Java on the back burner.

The third installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, explores the barriers that keep private companies and researchers from sharing their work.

The use of strict print design elements in digital content locks readers into systems that aren't user friendly. A little rethinking can go a long way toward solving that problem.

Students and professors have anxiously anticipated the replacement of analog textbooks with digital options. As it turns out, however, current technology might actually hinder learning.

Maqetta -- open source (modified BSD) WYSIWYG HTML5 user interface editor from the Dojo project. (via Hacker News) Hacker News Analysis -- interesting to see relationship between number of posts, median score, and quality over time. Most interesting, though, was the relative popularity of different companies. (via Hacker News) Real Time All The Time (Emily Bell) -- Every news...

The U.S. government's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace addresses key issues around identity, privacy and security. Implementation, however, will require significant effort and innovation from the private sector.

Sorting through thousands of news stories and categorizing information based on mood and tone creates useful data points for financial systems.

"Gamestorming" for only $11.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDGMT to get your savings....

Tentative last minute attendee is not able to come.

A cancellation.

Add notes about buildings and rooms and list ISC as a sponsor.

That's the conclusion of OpenBSD founder and project leader Theo de Raadt, who reviewed code following a claim earlier this month that the FBI had planted a secret backdoor in the OpenBSD IPsec stack.

add a page with some clusteradm topics to discuss at BSDCan

Change the first section to be "current" interesting links - move tinderbox down some as I don't think that many people need that

John Marino’s gone on a tear and updated GCC to version 4.4.6, diffutils from 2.87 to 3.0, and texinfo from 4.8 to 4.13.  Each commit message that I linked to has plenty of notes on what’s different, so they’re worth following.  This is the first update for texinfo in 6 years, so the quantity of updates is not surprising.

Kedar Soparkar applied for Google Summer of Code with DragonFly, but didn’t make the cut with the very few slots we have.  So, he’s going to work on his i386 ABI implementation anyway.   More student work is always wonderful news.

A library implementing Secure RTP

Robot Operating System - documentation utilities

Robot Operating System - geometric and math libraries

Robot Operating System - common messages

Robot Operating System - communication-related utilities

Robot Operating System - GUI related tools

Many thanks to everybody who recently took a minute voting in the “FreeBSD Installer preference” poll and the “FreeBSD version usage” poll. Below the numbers, percentages and the charts. 1. What kind of FreeBSD Installer do you like? 2. What version of … Continue reading →

Adjust the schedule. No outside speaker for this year.

Add room assignments for working groups.

Push Button Installer Manager

dotCloud command-line interface client

Major security breaches sometimes lead to an onslaught of phish emails. Here's a handful of simple ways to spot suspect correspondence and avoid traps.

Formatting; add vlc to streamdev examples

Add note about adding vdr to the webcamd group

boot2 is ok now

"Using SQLite" for only $15.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDSQT to get your savings....

SentiWordNet -- WordNet with hints as to sentiment of particular terms, for use in sentiment analysis. (via Matt Biddulph) Word Frequency Lists and Dictionaries -- also for text analysis. This site contains what we believe is the most accurate frequency data of English. It contains word frequency lists of the top 60,000 words (lemmas) in English, collocates lists (looking...

Coordinate pairs are regular and orderly, but they are entirely ambiguous when used to represent more conceptual places like states, cities, stores and neighborhoods.

As with a single instance of MongoDB, most administration on a cluster can be done through the Mongo shell. Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:How to gather geographic location dataCan you copyright XML schemas?How to fix a frozen Droid XDocBook video: Setting up Xcode 4 and SVN Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

The second installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, looks at the reasons collaborative research is critical to finding new treatments.

A framework for developing PHP web applications

A JavaScript graphical toolkit for data visualization

Simplified-Traditional Chinese conversion tool

little updates

Add my root-on-zfs-4k-sectors guide.

Simple extension to Hashie::Mash for rubyified keys

The command line client for Cloud Foundry

Ruby 1.9.1 compatible Zip library.

Library for handling money and different currencies

Manage ISO 3166 country names and codes

Support for creating state machines for attributes on any Ruby class

Simple, feature rich ascii table generation library

iXsystems has announced the availability of FreeNAS 8-RELEASE. Along with the new .0 release, the FreeNAS website received a make-over. Some of FreeNAS 8′s main features are: 1. FreeNAS 8.0-RELEASE supports NFS, CIFS, AFP, FTP and TFTP as filesharing mechanisms.  It … Continue reading →

The opening installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, explains the elements of modern research and how collaboration facilitates progress.

Water companies need data analysis tools to find and repair costly leaks. Enter Israeli startup TaKaDu, which offers water infrastructure monitoring as a service.

Tile splitter for mkgmap

SSH connection multiplexing library for Ruby

Chatoor Kalki posted about his desire to learn about this whole UNIX/BSD/DragonFly thing, and there were several followups that may be useful to anyone interested in some reading.

Then use the new LINT64 config added by Sascha Wildner.  LINT kernels have every option turned on, so it’s pretty easy to have problems due to conflicts or untested parts and so on.  You probably won’t get a kernel out of it, but now there’s a comprehensive list of your 64-bit kernel options for when you’re building a kernel that works.

 

Perl module that implements the Google Provisioning API

Chinese Internet Cafes (Bryce Roberts) -- a good quick read. My note: people valued the same things in Internet cafes that they value in public libraries, and the uses are very similar. They pose a similar threat to the already-successful, which is why public libraries are threatened in many Western countries. SIFT -- the Scale Invariant Feature Transform library,...

Most of us are familiar with the libel lawsuits aimed at magazine and newspaper publishers, but how do libel laws apply to Twitter, Facebook, and blogs? David Ardia, fellow at the Berkman Center and the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, breaks it down.

"Writing Game Center Apps in iOS" for only $6.49. You save 50%. Use discount code DDWRT to get your savings....

More talks.

A preprocessor to generate LaTeX code from literate Haskell sources

Perl module to Manage .css and .js assets

Perl module for combining local path manipulation and URI manipulation

Fast and featureful UNIX-style path parsing and manipulation

Perl module which implements an ordered hash-like object

An anonymous reader writes "The release of OpenBSD 4.9 has been announced. New highlights included since 4.8: enabled NTFS by default (read-only), the vmt(4) driver by default for VMWare tools, SMP kernels can now boot on machines with up to 64 cores, support for AES-NI instructions found in recent Intel processors, improvements in suspend and resume, OpenSSH 5.8, MySQL 5.1.54, LibreOffice 3.3.0.4, and bug fixes." Also in BSD news, an anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.10 has been released! The latest release brings data deduplication (online and at garbage-collection time) to the HAMMER file system. Capping off years of work, the MP lock is no longer the main point of contention in multiprocessor systems. It also brings a new version of the pf packet filter, support for 63 CPUs and 512 GB of RAM and switches the system compiler to gcc 4.4."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There hasn’t been much to nab for Lazy Reading, lately.  Oh well.  The last few weeks were good so it has to even out sometime.

• Did you know GBC stands for Great Ball Contraption, a Lego device designed to move little plastic balls?  Here’s 20 of them chained together.  (via b3ta)
• The original University POSTGRES.   (thanks, Jan)  This is a source for PostgreSQL, as far as I can tell, which makes it in some ways contemporary to BSD’s origins.  I am not surprised.  PostgreSQL seems to be the thinking person’s alternative to MySQL like BSD is the thinking person’s alternative to Linux.
• Do you have a pf.conf?  The people behind fwbuilder can use it for examples, so they can support pf in their config builder.  (via)

Video Disk Recorder - wirbelscan plugin

Video Disk Recorder - Reelchannelscan plugin

Add notes about reelchannelscan and wirlbelscan plugins that I just ported

Add note for installing FreeBSD guests

Below some links to some FreeBSD resourses that you guys may be interested in, and other BSD related items I’ve come across. FreeBSD Chromium 10, Google’s blazingly fast internet browser, is now available in the FreeBSD Ports directory (www/chromium). New FreeBSD Installer test … Continue reading →

Concurrent FreeBSD port builder

A method that speeds methods up at the cost of memory

Rui-Xiang Guo is looking for testers for wip/chromium.  That’s the zippy Google browser.  He especially wants DragonFly users – this would be useful, especially since I think Firefox 4 does not build on DragonFly right now.

Two more of the DragonFly and Google Summer of Code projects: Irina Presa’s checkpointing vkernels, where you can save a running virtual kernel and start it again later, and Nick Prokharau’s port of PUFFS.

(Anyone know the HTML character code for ‘s’ with an inverted grave mark so I can spell Irina’s name correctly?)

Can't afford to buy a laptop? You might be Google's next target audience. New rumors suggest the Internet giant may be plotting to rent laptops, complete with hardware updates and repair as needed.

In the latest Publishing News: US News & World Report replaced national advertising with data-driven revenue streams, iPad magazine publishers are missing the boat, and publishing startups will soon have a new way to get attention.

A recent study notes many successes in Massachusetts, but highlights the threat of rising costs.

some task updates. flz took care of putting qmanager under svn control, and moving the other scripts from cvs to svn.

A DVD slideshow maker

"bash Cookbook" for only $19.99. You save 50%. Use discount code DDBZH to get your savings....

Subscribe to Make Magazine today.

Kathy Sierra Nails Gamification -- I rarely link to things on O'Reilly sites, and have never before linked to something on Radar, but the comments here from Kathy Sierra are fantastic. She nails what makes me queasy about shallow gamification behaviours: replacing innate rewards with artificial ones papers over shitty products/experiences instead of fixing them, and don't get people...

+2

Complete security camera solution, fully web based with image analysis

Note workaround for aio problem

That's the conclusion of OpenBSD founder and project leader Theo de Raadt, who reviewed code following a claim earlier this month that the FBI had planted a secret backdoor in the OpenBSD IPsec stack.

fix mdf's name

Yay acronyms! Brills Peng was accepted for the Summer of Code project “Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy” – and now there’s a nice writeup describing what’s planned. Also, Stéphanie Ouillon did the same thing for the virtio drivers project.  Adam Hoka also joined in with a summary for his LVM mirror project.  Please keep this up, students.

If you are a European resident, Federico Biancuzzi has the DRAGONFLYBSD.IT domain name available to donate. He doesn’t want to let it go and have it taken by a domain squatter. Talk to him at sale@securitydaemon.com if you want to hold on to it for some unspecified time.

Nagios plugin which scans log files for specific patterns

OSS plugin for ALSA (Linux Fedora 10)

As some of you may know, fwbuilder.org is a cross-platform, graphical firewall management utility that supports iptables, ASA, PIX, FWSM, Cisco router access lists, pf, ipfw, ipfilter, and HP ProCurve ACL firewalls. Vadim Kurland and Mike Horn, the lead fwbuilder developers, … Continue reading →

Add USB task to bugs list

Add skreuzer