The most recent item on the DCBSDCon blog announces Kristaps Džonsons as a speaker; he will talk about his process isolation work on mult.

P.S. Who else thinks that it would be good to have man pages look as pretty as the web page for mult?

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.

This cartoon from XKCD is very entertaining.

It looks like Jost Tobias Springenberg is planning to revamp DragonFly’s fdisk, which will be much appreciated.

Peter Avalos has a patch that moves DragonFly from using portmap to rpcbind.  (Ha ha!  HP-UX man page!)   He”d like to get some extra testing before he commits it, next week, so speak up if you use portmap.

Sepeherosa Ziehau has a patch for carp(4) users; it apparently removes some unneeded complexity.

The FreeBSD Foundation has 66% of the money they need to raise for the year; chip in, if you can.  It gets you a tax break (at least in the U.S.) and they do good work.

Hiroki Sato has posted a reminder: the deadline for AsiaBSDCon 2009 paper submission is December 20th.

So, if you’re holiday shopping, here’s some last minute suggestions. Everyone knows the usual target, but there’s more esoteric choices. However, start dropping some science if you want to get something different.  Also, the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD options.

InsideSoCal‘s Click column has a nice review up of DragonFly; I remember reading this before and somehow not thinking to publish it.  In my defense, I’ve been running a serious news backlog, from all these Git events.  Anyway, I was reminded by the DistroWatch newsletter, which has an image of that very pretty LiveDVD desktop.

There’s a BSD Conferences channel on YouTube, which is a very good idea.  As others have noted, there’s a deficit of non-FreeBSD videos – please help, if you have some audiovisual material to upload.

XHomer, a Linux (and possibly BSD; it’s untried) emulator of the DEC Pro 350 computer, is not that exciting unless you happened to own one way back when. However, look at the last of the screenshots, using the phrase “trans-cranial shock therapy“. Keep that in mind next time you’re thinking of taking a screenshot of an X desktop with the typical IRC client, music player, web browser, and widget display: be surprising. (via)

Jason Dixon’s doing a good job of publicity, so you’ve probably already seen this, but: BSDTalk 167 is Jason Dixon talking about DCBSDCon, happening this February.

The newest @Play column describes the general types of items found in roguelike games, and also covers the winners of the recent NetHack tournament.  It’s a more enjoyable read than how I’m making it sound,

Some miscellaneous links I’ve been saving:

• Undeadly has some recent notes on the status of pcc; does this run on DragonFly yet?
• Occasional DragonFly user _why has released Shoes 2.0, an entertaining Ruby-based GUI toolkit.  Or maybe it’s a vehicle for him to tell stories.  Or both.
• The preview of the December issue of the Open Source Business Resource has, among other things, an article from Leslie “Google Summer of Code 2008″ Hawthorn, which DragonFly particpated in. Oh wait – it’s up as HTML or PDF.
• Asciio, a GUI program to draw charts in ascii that you can then cut and paste anywhere.  Nothing earthshaking other than a very good idea.

If you feel like updating netgraph in DragonFly to match what’s in FreeBSD 7 (a task that has been partially accomplished), Alexander Motin will be able to answer questions to help out, as he’s already supporting it in FreeBSD.)

The DCBSDCon site, for the BSD convention in Washington, DC, Feb 5th-6th, now has a separate blog.  The very first post lets slip the name of their first speaker and the fact that they will have 2 separate BSDA exams at the convention.

Michael Neumann created a patch that can get VirtualBox to run DragonFly, kinda sorta.  The underlying issue in Virtualbox is not fixed by this, however..

Stumbled on via Google Alerts: Freebench, a new benchmarking program that has already been tested on DragonFly.  (Scroll down to “Freebenchin’”.)

I added BSDanywhere to the blogroll – it’s another livecd BSD ‘distribution’, this time with OpenBSD as the base.  Also, Jibbed, which is the same arrangement using NetBSD.

Jason Dixon posted that today is the last day to submit papers for the DCBSDCon.  So you’re either done, really close to done, or not getting anything in this year, at this point.