DragonFly BSD Digest

I started this Lazy Reading early, since I had so many links it overflowed into the next week.  Merry almost Christmas!

• Here’s an in-depth review of Guilded Youth, an interactive fiction game that hearkens back to the old days of BBS usage.  (Do I need an interactive fiction tag to complement the roguelike one?)
• Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk.  I really think part of DragonFly’s success, despite being such a small, esoteric project, has come from being generally tolerant.
• Vmail, a Vim interface to Gmail.  This seems pretty slick.  Looking further, the author has a number of other Vi/Vim-related projects, like a Vim wiki, Vim newsreader, Vim iTunes controls, and more.  Also something really clever: the equivalent of ‘tail -f twitter.com‘  (via)
• How I got four errors into a one-line program.  All via git.
• Go for C programmers.  (via)
• Mars Code.  I like the statistic that the lines-per-hour of code was <10; it points out that not all metrics apply, all the time.  (also via)
• I never thought I’d actually see e17 come out.
• XKCD has a good summary of the recent Instagram licensing mess, and perhaps a good summary of social media in general.  I’m always surprised when I see a business using Facebook or something similar as their primary customer contact method.
• Why is grep always fast?  Here’s a very technical explanation of why.  There’s more.
• Bunnie Huang is building a laptop.  All the extra headers and analog bits remind me of the dearly departed BeBox.  (Bunnie mentioned previously here)  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: I work at a salt mine.  One of the highlights of my job is when I’m in the mine and need to get somewhere quickly; I use a 4-wheeler to drive.  (I’m licensed to operate it.)  There’s no stop signs, no stoplights, and generally a whole lot of straight roads with no obstacles or traffic.    It can be a fun drive.  However, it’s not as cool as driving on the moon.  (via)

I hope you like links, and lots of history.  It’s been a bumper crop this week.

• The Radio Shack catalog from 1983.  Including such gems as 156,672 characters of storage per $600 disk.  For perspective, that’s about $4 per kilobyte.  A randomly-picked SSD is about 0.000001 cent per kilobyte.  Previously linked here: Radio Shack 2002.  (via)
• Hey, O’Reilly has a comprehensive list of all their open-licensed book titles, for download.  Found from a link to Unix Text Editing.  I bet much of that book still applies, despite being from 1987.  (indirectly via)
• The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World.
• Shady Characters Miscellany #20: On Typewriters.  The ancestor of the TTY.   It’s still just barely possible to buy a new typewriter.  I worked for a printer cartridge remanufacturer for a few years; the highest-profit items were typewriter ribbons, because nobody else made them.
• The UNIX philosophy and a fear of pixels.  I think the author’s conflating philosophy and style.  (via)
• Bell Labs CSR Selected Technical Reports.  (via)  Warning: they’re all in Postscript.  Includes Brian Kernighan’s “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language“, and I’m linking there to a non-Postscript version to make your life a little easier.
• If the idea of non-standard hexadecimal breaks your brain a little bit, go a little bit farther and read The Story of Mel.  I had to read the solution twice to get it.
• Nostalgia for the more open web of 10 years ago.  It’s true, and also makes me feel sad.  (via)
• Google60, Google via punchcard and printer.  It’s more stylistic than literal, but still fun.  (via)
• If you’re near San Francisco, a hackerspace there called Noisebridge wants more open source people – including BSD users – showing up.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Said the Gramophone and The New Shelton Wet/Dry.  The first one’s a music blog, and the second’s more general.  Both have a somewhat random feel with the images used – completely random in the New Shelton’s case.  It’s interesting that there’s such a flood of text and images on the Internet that you can reassemble content out of all of it.  You can’t push over a bookshelf and call it a library, but you can build a whole new narrative from random assembly of Internet data.

This is a mini-theme Lazy Reading, where I find small groups of related things.

• Exploratory data analysis with Unix tools.  The command line is a far better place to mangle data than you’d expect.  Well, maybe not your expectations, given that you’re reading this site.
• “The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive”  Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in 1982.  I found that after reading “Open Source Guilt & Passion“, which is a quite accurate description of working on open source, or perhaps any volunteer work.   (via).
• While talking about people of that generation: Here’s Rob Pike’s Go slideshow (linked previously) in a single-page text format.  (via)
• And we can get even older with this article about the Computer History Museum in California.  There’s a lot of pictures of hardware ‘firsts’, like a light tracking, self driving robot from the 1940s, or the first mass-produced transistor radio.   Look for the hardware that shows where ‘core dumps’ came from. (via)
• Found on the previous link: Rebuilding the IBM 1401.  I like looking at the old “fill-up-a-room” computers, since they look like supercomputers.  I wouldn’t want to actually possess a mainframe; they aren’t powerful, eat electricity, and so on.  Well…  I can think of one that would be OK.
• The Enduring Object.  I find it oddly reassuring when hardware doesn’t change because it works so well.  It’s sort of like an inherited tool from an older relative; something worn from use but distinctly better than buying new.
• The 2012 Good Gift Games Guide.  There’s some really neat board games in there.
• Along the same lines, Designing Board Games with Perl.
• The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection.  An in-depth dive with Wireshark and an explanation of RSA.  My cup of nerditry runneth over! (via)
• It wouldn’t be a Lazy Reading post without some Git thingie.  This time, it’s  ”Git: Twelve Curated Tips And Workflows From The Trenches“.  (via)
• The DuckDuckGo command line.  (via)
• Exploring Emacs.  Posted mostly in the interests of equal time to vi-ish stuff.  (via)
• “What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor“.  A Jason Scott article about emulating old monitors in software, with videos showing the difference.  I’ve seen the hardware difference he’s talking about.  I’m distressed just knowing my children probably don’t recognize analog static.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things.  Also known as ‘old weird crap’, but that’s OK – still interesting.