In the last few days I have read several blogs, even technical blogs which should know better, treating Google's Instant Search like it's something otherworldly. Without actually analyzing how it's done, I think it's simply one of these things whose time has come. In other worlds, here's how I'd do it:
Howdy,
I know long time not wrote but gives a lot reason for that, i will
post a bit later whats happend 
. My Friend Beat from the Gecko
Team call for help, he ported IcedTea Java plugin to FreeBSD,
he dont have much experience in the Java world and needs your
help. Please read here his Annoucment. Happy Testing.
Late last year, the developer of FreeNAS, a FreeBSD based NAS system, decided to move onto CoreNAS, a Debian based NAS system. Developers at iXsystems didn't want to see FreeNAS go by the wayside and have been hard at work on the next FreeNAS version which incorporates a new core design that will allow for modularity.
I'm just idly taking a look at GNATS...
While the popular sentiment is "I'm too old for this shit", GNATS is one of those things that just want me say "I'm too young for this shit."
I’ve replaced CTR encryption mode with XTS. Salsa20 stream cipher was also removed. CTR mode was inappropriate design for a filesystem, and allowed encrypted data to be easily manipulated by attacker and could even reveal plantext in cases when previous encrypted data snapshots where available to attacker, i.e. filesystem level snapshots. There should be no visible performance degradation because of switching to XTS.
CTR mode compatibility is not available to prevent further misuse, thus upgrade by hand would be necessary.
Besides I’ve also commited real support for sparse files and file extending, it should make filesystem faster in generic use cases. New version also contains fix for a race in rename operation.
I would like to ask people interested in getting such functionality in FreeBSD to give pefs a try, any feedback is welcome.
Installation instructions may be found in my message to freebsd-current maillist.
The FreeBSD Foundation will be represented at the *BSD booth during Ohio Linuxfest this upcoming Saturday in Columbus, Ohio. This conference is free, but you need to register by midnight this Wednesday.
The *BSD booth will be available from 8:30 to 19:30 and we'll have Foundation pamphlets and swag available and can accept cash donations. As always, donations will be recorded on the Foundation website.
The *BSD booth will be available from 8:30 to 19:30 and we'll have Foundation pamphlets and swag available and can accept cash donations. As always, donations will be recorded on the Foundation website.
Jesse Smith of DistroWatch recently collected questions from readers for me to answer regarding PC-BSD. The questions and answers are in this week's edition of Distrowatch. Topics include BSD vs GPL licensing, differences between BSD and Linux, package management, ZFS, and boot loaders.
The latest version of the BSD Certification Study DVD is now available. Besides being a handy study reference, the DVD is a useful tool as it contains the latest versions of the 4 BSDs plus their documentation. From the announcement:
In one project I have a choice of modifying a behaviour of a class either by abstracting a base class with virtual methods and creating two descendant classes implementing those methods differently or by adding a flag and an "if" statement in the class and implementing the different behaviour based on the flag. Which one would you choose? Which one do you thing would be faster?
My presentation "PC-BSD: An Easy to Use BSD Desktop" for next week's OLF is available on slideshare. If you're in the Columbus, OH area, drop by the BSD booth to pick up a free DVD of PC-BSD 8.1 and chat about all things BSD. Also, consider supporting BSD Certification by taking the BSDA exam at this event.
If I've been quiet lately it's because I was burning the midnight oil participating in the final technical and grammatical review for the BSD Professional Certification Requirements document. The document was published late Tuesday night and is a thing of beauty. From the announcement:
The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to remind users that November 30
is also the end of support for the Ports Collection for both FreeBSD 6.4
RELEASE and the FreeBSD 6.x STABLE branch. Â Neither the infrastructure nor
individual ports are guaranteed to work on these FreeBSD versions after
that date. Â A CVS tag will be created for users who cannot upgrade for some
reason, at which time these users are advised to stop tracking the latest
ports CVS repository and use the RELEASE_6_EOL tag instead.
While many people still use RELENG_6, it is at the end of it’s development
cycle. The Ports Management team has set the following policies with regard
to EOL/EOS of this branch and we kindly ask developers to implement these:
- We will keep building 6.4 packages as long as we have the resources.
6.x package builds will however be deprioritised, meaning they will not
be rebuilt as frequently.
- We will continue to support the 6.x infrastructure until RELENG_6
EOL (11/30/2010) by building the INDEX on RELENG_6 for use by ‘make
fetchindex’, and making sure that the ports collection infrastructure
(bsd.port.mk, etc) continues to function on RELENG_6, subject to the
reduced testing that this branch will receive. Â This means that problems
may be noticed only after the fact and may require community support to
develop and test fixes.
- We do not require committers/maintainers to support 6.x, but ports
will need to be marked BROKEN/IGNORE if they do not build/run.
- Port maintainers are strongly encouraged to accept patches from the
community that allow their ports to build and run on 6.x. Â However,
since running on 6.x is no longer a requirement, maintainers may use
their discretion in cases where a proposed patch would be disruptive
to other supported FreeBSD branches, or would unreasonably impede
ongoing maintenance of the port.
- We will continue to accept patches for ports collection infrastructure
(bsd.port.mk, etc)
- We encourage all users and developers to migrate to the FreeBSD 7.x or
8.x branch, both of which is a stable and mature platform, and are now
the ‘reference’ branches for the ports collection.
Please also see the secteam@ announcement,
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2010-September/001344.html
A Security Officer bulletin has been issued recently to announce the end-of-line for FreeBSD 6.x - which is an opportunity to discuss how FreeBSD release cycle generally works (for those not familiar with it).
A Security Officer bulletin has been issued recently to announce the end-of-line for FreeBSD 6.x - which is an opportunity to discuss how FreeBSD release cycle generally works (for those not familiar with it).
A while ago a wind turbine was installed not far away from my place. It is far enough to not disturb us, and it is near enough to notice that it turns a lot (IIRC I have seen it only once not turning).
This triggered a question. How much energy would such a device (smaller of course) produce at my place?
The answer depends upon several factors. The wind speed, the wind direction and the wind-speed-to-power-output curve of the device. If you do not take a device which rotates around the horizontal axis but the vertical axis, the wind direction can be taken out of the question (probably not completely, but to answer my question this simplification should be ok). The output-power curve depends upon the device, and I hope it is easy to get it from the vendors. The remaining open question it the wind speed at my place. Is there enough wind with enough speed?
To answer this question I bought a weather station with an anemometer (wind speed sensor). I searched a little bit until I decided to buy a specific one (actually I bought three of them, some coworkers got interested too but they found only much more expensive ones, so soon there will be three more weather stations in use in Belgium, France and Germany). The main point is, I can connect it to an USB port of a PC and there is some software for Linux to read out the data. It also comes with some other outdoor-sensors (temperature, rain, wind direction, humidity, …) and an indoor-control-unit with some internal sensors (temperature, humidity). The user interface is mainly the touchscreen of the control-unit. There is also some Windows software, which is needed to program the interval in which the measurements are taken and saved in the control-unit.
It seems the weather station is produced by Fine Offset Electronics Co.,Ltd and sold within different brands in different locations. The Linux software can read all of them, as the vendor and product IDs are not changed.
Porting the software was easy, it uses libusb and I just had to correct a little problem for the non-portable functions which are used (I asked about them on usb@ and the response was that they just got implemented upon my request and will be committed to HEAD soon). I made a little patch for the software to only use them when available (if you have not loaded the USB HID driver, you do not need to care about them) and committed it to the Ports Collection as astro/fowsr.
Now I just need to attach the outside sensors at the place where I would put the vertical axis wind turbine, install some toolkit which takes a series of measurements and displays them as a nice graph (while keeping all data values) and write some glue code to feed the output of fowsr to it. After a year I can then calculate how much power a given wind turbine would have produced during the year and calculate the return of investment for it.
The Linux software also references several weather sites, for some of them you can get even an iGoogle widget so that you can view the data from wherever you want (as long as you have a suitable internet connection). I think this is also something I will have a look at later.
Note to users in Europe, the device also comes with a DCF77 receiver. As the time is distributed in UTC+1 (or +2, depending on the daylight saving time), you should adjust the timezone setting accordingly to this, not to plain UTC (so for me the timezone should be ‘0’ for the same timezone).
I've seen a HP "LeftHand" / StorageWorkd P4000 SAN device recently and got quite good impressions off of it. One thing that occured to me is - why didn't anyone try this before? Certainly both Linux (to lesser extent) and FreeBSD (to a somewhat greater) contain the pieces for it, and have contained for some years now. In fact, several people did such setups privately or internally for their companies but there was apparently never a concentrated effort to sell it.
