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.

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.

DragonFly has been unable to work on VirtualBox for quite some time due to a timer problem.  However, the VirtualBox developers have come up with a patch that fixes it.  It’s not in the VirtualBox 2.1.2 release, though I assume it’ll be in the next one after that.

Matching the UNIX history quiz from a few posts ago, George Rosamond sent along a note about this NYCBUG talk from Issac Levy on “The Real UNIX Tradition”, which is conveniently available in audio form.

Assuming your DNS has caught up, www.dragonflybsd.org has been updated using ikiwiki to merge the wiki and the regular site.

Everything that was in the wiki is now present in the Documentation area, and can be edited in the same way.  Enjoy!  Please tell me if you encounter problems, especially as this is my fault.

Now this is a convention idea I can get behind: DCBSDCon will have a Frack Room, with Quake-series games and bzflag running.  Or, you could work with others to collaborate and debug, but let’s be serious here.

Also!  There’s two weeks left to register, and three weeks to the event.

There’s an oldest file meme, first seen here, where you find the oldest files in your home directory and figure out where they came from.  The page I linked to uses a Linux-specific search, but some other pages have a scripted way to do it that should work on DragonFly.

I also found a link to a Unix History quiz from the same location, with some answers.  It’s a tough quiz.

Something I’ve been holding onto for a while and only got around to looking at tonight: A Git introduction at a Google TechTalk, via YouTube.

Anecdote: I saw Randal Schwartz, the speaker, at a Perl conference back in… 2000?  He was a decent speaker, and I went up after his talk to tell him how I was (successfully) using two programming practices he specifically deprecated during his talk.  Not that it was any better an idea because of that…

Want to look at old computer museums?  There’s a number of them to choose from.  (via)  While you’re at it: Apple ][ in a browser, now via Java (via).

In the ridiculously rare event that my old-school credentials are ever challenged, I will just point to my store-bought 5.25" floppy of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple ][, complete with typewritten label.

• SysV init must die (via) Someone mentioned runit in IRC the other day, I think...
• V7 Unix for x86 (also via)  Put on the bellbottoms.
• This blog has been running various sed and awk one-liner demonstrations, among other things; very useful tricks to remember.  Go through the history; there’s fun and useful stuff.

OnlineDirect has a new DragonFly mirror up in Bulgaria; it’s hosting the official ISOs at this point.

• This Coding Horror article talks about garbage collection and happens to mention an entertaining common BSD function in shutdown.c: die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog()
• The DCBSDCon Blog has some notes on the facilities – there will be wireless, and Jason Dixon will be giving his “BSD Is Dying” talk, too.
• An hour of Marshall Kirk McKusick’s FreeBSD kernel class (based on his book) is available now on Youtube.  (via)  Plus, more videos on other open source topics at the FOSSLC.  (via)
• This new column on GameSetWatch, The Amateur, titled “Why You Should Pay for Free“, gets into free software (like BSD) from a giveaway gaming point of view (not like BSD).  It’s an interesting take.
• ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack is a new Rock, Paper, Shotgun article about playing a tiled roguelike, and quite enjoyable to read.  Check the comments for some interesting links.

For those of you thinking of installing DragonFly on a EeePC 901, Christopher Rawnsley tried, with some booting problems.  Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has an easy fix, however.

For those going to DCBSDCon but not yet having rooms to sleep in, a cheaper Days Inn has been found a few metro stops away from the convention.

(Hotel costs kept me from making it to NYCBSDCon, for instance.)

Some extra reading: Hasso Tepper posted a link to an article talking about non-uniform memory access (NUMA).  Any article that can have diagrams labeled ‘hypercubes’ must be worthwhile.

Google’s planning a Summer of Code again for 2009, according to the still-running mailing lists from last year’s SoC event.  More will be announced at FOSDEM.

DragonFly may or may not be participating; it’s dependent on the application process same as every year.  If you’re a student, start thinking about what to do, now.

The DCBSDCon Blog announces the last 3 speakers at DCBSDCon:George Neville-Neil, one of the authors of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Ken Caruso of SchmooCon Labs, and our very own Robert Luciani, talking about DragonFly and threading.

The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out.  (via)  Dru Lavigne posted a list of the contents, earlier.

The hotel discount for DCBSDCon 2009 expires this Friday, so now is a good time to register.  Registrations for the convention itself closes at the end of this month.

Also, Kurt Miller will be talking at DCBSDCon about his work in OpenBSD on Position Independent Executables.

Michael Neumann brought up the idea of using C++ in kernel programming, which has been suggested before.  Reactions were generally negative, but there would be some possibilities.

pcc appears to have had some significant updates due to funding; has anyone tried it on DragonFly recently?

The newest @Play column talks about yet another roguelike I’ve never heard of: Incursion.  (Too much Zangband on my part.)  Apparently it follows 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules quite carefully, which is different than the usual vague Tolkienish/D&Dish look that most roguelikes keep.  Check the supplement at the bottom for some literary history.

You get to hear me blather on for 22 minutes about this Digest and how important/easy it is to contribute to BSD projects, in BSDTalk 169.

Vincent Stemen posted a note about his homemade tool, called ‘partition’.  It has some interesting features, though it would require some documentation and cleanup to use in DragonFly, where it could serve as a replacement for fdisk.  If anyone’s interested in making that happen, contact Vincent.

Two UNIX-centric items for end-of-week reading: “The History of Unix *dump programs” and “Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS“.  (via)

The Winter version of the BSDA courseware DVD is now available.  Everything on there is available (in parts) for free over the Internet, but paying the USD$40 for the DVD gets you convenience and a way to support bsdcertification.org.  (via)

I need to note these faster; they’re piling up: the DCBSDCon blog has announced two more speakers for the convention: Richard Bejtlich (of Tao of Security), who will talking about network security monitoring with FreeBSD, and Marco Peereboom, of OpenBSD, who will be talking about epitome.