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.

So much that I’m doing bullet points:

• Peter Avalos brought in nsswitch and replaced portmap with rpcbind.
• Aggelos Economopoulos brought in his NETMP branch, where he is removing the BGL from socket code.
• Sepherosa Ziehau added support (from FreeBSD) for Attansic network chips.
• Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert brought in the remainder of Jordan Gordeev’s AMD64 work.
• Simon and other DragonFly developers are at 25C3 this week - say hi!

The ISC DHCP package in pkgsrc is changing as it moves from 4.0 to 4.1; the package names will be different, as will the rc flags.  Keep an eye out for this if you use it for your internal network.  (This may affect our install CD, 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)

Michael Neumann reported success booting DragonFly on his Eee PC 1000H, though the wireless/wired network drivers don’t work yet.

• 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.

I did not realize this until someone else did, but: ScummVM, which should work on DragonFly via pkgsrc, supports a large quantity of non-Lucasarts games like 7th Guest.

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

Holiday distraction: Some not-completely-accurate educational literature about computers.  (via)

Pkgsrc is frozen right now for the 2008Q4 release, and should last to the end of the month.  I’m working on having a build of it on pkgbox, though it looks like there’s some issues that slipped into the release.

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.

In addition to committing the new scheduler improvements mentioned earlier this week, Matthew Dillon has made some changes to how DragonFly handles low memory situations, so the system will be able to recover much more quickly.  He’s also asking for testers of his new vm.burst_fault sysctl.

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.