Damian Vicino has posted about plans for an expanded second “BSDDay-AR” (a BSD event in Argentina) this year.  If you want to show and give a talk, let him know.  It’s always good to hear about a BSD event expanding.

I gots a Summer of Code org application to write up, so you get a linkdump:

An mp3 of “PFSense II, Rocking The Datacenter” at NYCBUG, via Dru Lavigne.  Also, her “BSD for Linux Users” at the SCALE website.

A 5-part series about Scripting Vim, written by a terribly smart guy?  Interesting!  (Yeah, I did link to a part of it before…)

Have you ever wondered if building more than one pkgsrc package at a time can be a problem?  Others have too, and apparently there’s a fix.   If you don’t want to have to get to a command line to find the answer, it’s:

PKGSRC_LOCKTYPE?= none
The type of locking that will be done if competing processes
attempt to do work on one package directory simultaneously.

Possible values:
* none: No locking takes place at all.
* once: When the lock has already been aquired by another
process, the current process is terminated.
* sleep: When the lock has already been acquired by another
process, the current process will sleep for PKGSRC_SLEEPSECS
seconds and then try again.

You should also set OBJHOSTNAME when you are using the same
copy of pkgsrc on different hosts, maybe via NFS. This is because the locking process writes its process ID into the lockfile, and process IDs on different hosts are unrelated.

See also: LOCALBASE_LOCKTYPE, WRKDIR_LOCKTYPE.

BSDTV has been launched, with 3 videos to start.  Will there be DragonFly content?  I hope so.  (found via this and this)

A new, free issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the theme of “BSD as a Desktop“.  The next issue is “Hosting BSD”, and if that sounds interesting, Dru Lavigne is a contact for writing an article on that theme.

The iPad is BSD-based, which is neat.  I like the notion of covering more BSD devices and products here on the Digest.

But: do you like even the vague concept of open source?  The iPad is expressly designed to limit your choices, especially with media consumption and the programs you run.  It’s sort of like owning a TV circa 1975 – you get what large media groups and the network (Apple) want you to see. I don’t want to come across as someone who’s complaining because it’s different – I’m complaining because it’s not different.

There’s other people arguing the same idea, with even more reasons.  This is one of the most specific.  Plus, there’s the natural progression…

It’s that Opera thing again.  “Sigh“.

It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!

• PkgsrcCon 2010 is May 28th to 30th, in Basel.  The date’s been declared, but not much else – yet.
• Chunks of KDE in pkgsrc are now updating to the KDE4 versions by default.  This only affects pkgsrc-current users, not pkgsrc-2009Q4.
• An interesting story about computer manufactuing and MicroSD problems.
• In Praise of Online Obscurity – this article makes me think of communities like DragonFly and the other BSDs.  In essence, growth causes smaller independent groups to form out of a larger membership, because a social group can only be maintained to a certain size.   Perhaps this is why FreeBSD’s evolved a core group, or other groups form, like Wikipedia ‘editors’.  (via)  I’m catering to my own interests in group dynamics here.
• Jan Lentfer’s brought in his hostapd and wpa_supplicant work, mentioned previously.

Guy Harris found a problem with non-blocking reads from a BPF device that’s common to DragonFly, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.  It’s fixed in DragonFly.

Brought to you by iXsystems: a BSD-themed cartoon.  We haven’t had one since the one that ran on bsdnews.com… 5 years ago?  (via)  Updates each Friday.

I can’t keep up with all the things to post.  I desperately want to clear my inbox, so here’s a week’s worth of posts all smushed together.  Enjoy!

• Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work is almost ready to go.
• Francois Tigeot is looking to find supported RAID hardware for DragonFly; the LSI1068e isn’t useable.  Freddie Cash listed a number of different and fully supported cards, and Francois listed some other potential choices.
• While talking about hardware, Steve O’Hara-Smith reported excellent results with a particular Atom 330-based board and DragonFly.
• Stathis Kamperis has added to ‘hammer snapls’ output; an example is in his submit@message.
• The 2.6 release of DragonFly, scheduled for March, will have version 4 of HAMMER.  2.4 has version 2.  Upgrading from version 2 to 4 can happen in place, live, and only needs to happen once per volume, not per PFS.  That’s about as easy as it gets.  More details are available.
• The default sshd config has been updated; this shouldn’t affect your normal operations unless you’re using one of the mentioned options.
• Oliver Fromme linked to more discussion of SSD durability.
• Also, Matthew Dillon posted more notes and benchmark numbers for his swapcache work.  There’s been some side benefits too.  A man page for swapcache is now available.
• Aggelos Economopoulos’s libevtr has been added, for event tracing.  He’s posted some additional notes on this work-in-progress.
• We now have /var/log/daemon, too.
• Notes on prepping for Google Summer of Code 2010 from the GSOC Discussion list; I don’t know if that link is readable for nonsubscribers.
• The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD is out at the end of this short month.  Dru writes good books.
• Did you know FreeCiv (a Civilization clone, of sorts) is playable in a web browser?  Goodbye free time!  Details are available at my favoritest game site.

Phew.

That was fast – there’s another BSDTalk already!  BSDTalk 186 has Jeff Roberson, FreeBSD committer.  He’s talking about schedulers and softupdates for a good half hour.

The first online-only free version of BSD Magazine is out!  It’s good, but there’s no DragonFly, darnit.  Anyway, it’s worth reading if for no other reason than it’s in pleasant, colorful PDF format.

James Nixon, iXsystems employee and PC-BSD developer, is interviewed for 16 minutes on BSDTalk 185.

I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:

• Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
• Red Hat did it: opensource.com.  Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
• Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
• Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget)  Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal.  (via)
• The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
• Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache.  Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
• More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
• The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.

The economy, at least in the U.S., seems to be improving.  With that in mind, I’ve seen some traffic on the freebsd-jobs mailing list lately.  BSD-specific jobs are harder to come by, so take a look if you’re ‘in the market’.

The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the topic being “success factors”.   Many of the articles focus on participation, and it’s an interesting read.  February’s theme is “Startups”, with articles due by Jan. 20th if you’re contributing one.

It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I’ve built up over the past few days.

• Hubert Feyrer posted notes on how to mount fixed disks in KDE.  This probably works on NetBSD, but I bet it would work on DragonFly too…
• pcc is now able to build an OpenBSD i386 kernel.  Will it work for other BSDs?  I hope so, eventually.
• The FreeBSD Foundation is in the last hours of donation for 2009 – give if you get a chance.  Did you know they get Bad Code Offsets, like carbon offsets?  I did not know such a thing exists, though it makes sense.
• Brian Kernighan talking about Elements of Programming Style, in video.  (via)  Kernighan’s book, “The Practice of Programming“, with Rob Pike, is an excellent read.

BSDTalk was recently linked here interviewing Randal Schwartz.  Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte, who create a podcast called “FLOSS 101 Weekly”, now have an interview with Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler about pfSense.  (via)  It’s a nice bit of symmetry, and Scott was an early contributor to DragonFly – specifically, the installer.

BSDTalk (4 years old!) has 24 minutes of talk with Randal Schwartz, talking about a whole pile of different subjects. I met Randal before – he’s a decent guy.