Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A war of names
  https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-the-best-candidate-for-being-the-only-tested-legally-open-unix/

  A review of the legality surrounding the UNIX name and which part of which UNIX system is open sourced, to which degree and what manner. This is probably the first article with as many German words as this one that I read, it's fun.

• Shared lib how to
  https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf

  This is the research paper I was talking about last week (103) in "ELF symbol resolution". As with anything written by Drepper, it's heavy content and emphasizes on things to do so that code is optimized by the compiler and when running. Be sure to read last week entry because you'll need it to understand this one.

• Terminal block mode
  ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/shuford/terminal/block_mode_news.txt

  I got reminded of this last week during our conversation on the forums about future interfaces. Maybe we'll got back to terminals that update per block depending on form filling, just like what we have today with web APIs.

• Foundations and groups
  https://www.linuxfoundation.org/the-linux-foundation/2018/11/the-linux-foundation-and-risc-v-foundation-announce-joint-collaboration-to-enable-a-new-era-of-open-architecture/

  A new hardware mixing with software alliance has formed. Focused on RTOS that may be better supported on Linux in the future.

• What's in a userland
  https://tilde.town/~elly/userland.txt

  A straight forward intro to the thinking that goes into building a user-space on Unix, from init to useful processes and putting it together.

• Contain and protect
  https://www.netmeister.org/blog/restricting-processes.html

  A deep dive into all the techniques used on Unix to containerize, restrict, protect processes.

• Scripting
  https://blog.dalanmiller.com/2018/12/02/easily-removing-all-your-files-from-flickr/

  I had no idea flickr was still a service. This post is another instance of replacing a paid service with another one and use a script to help you do that.

• Makefile best practices
  https://danyspin97.org/blog/makefiles-best-practices/

  Another article about make best practices, see "Make" in issue 66 and "Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles" of issue 38. This one covers basic things such as variable assignment for specific parts of the Makefile, pkg-config to find libs, and more.

• vi and vim
  https://vimways.org/2018/
  https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-koans/
  https://vfoley.xyz/vi/
  https://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/2018/

  With the third article from our friend tejr this ought to be an interesting advent calendar, a month of vi and vim tips. Lots of fun articles so far! Adding along the way the beautiful vim koans of tejr and another opinion piece about vi. There's also a qemu advent calendar now, checkt it out too.

• Architectures and portability
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-11-15-c-portability.html

  A reminder of "Computers without binaries"in 79 and all the C related articles.

• Linux on MacBook
  https://int3ractive.com/2018/09/make-the-best-of-MacBook-touchpad-on-Ubuntu.html

  And this one deals with the touchpad. One idea I could take from this post is to disable the touchpad while typing. Those are all pretty hard to configure and don't come out of the box, maybe in the future distributions can focus on making this easier.

• NFS debug story
  https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/14/how-we-spent-two-weeks-hunting-an-nfs-bug/

  As with other investigative stories in this newsletter we're so captivated by the story and the action, those are the movies of our world.

• Another newsletter
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/valuable-news-2018-12-01/

  As you might have noticed we've linked vermaden's blog more than once in this newsletter, there's great content in there. On it the author also pushes more or less weekly/bi-weekly news/updates similar to this newsletter. You should check it out. I've contacted vermaden to see if it would be interesting to add a column in the newsletter with his/her content also. This is what we'll try out from now on. As you will notice there's a new section inserted here with links that will be as new for you as they'll be for me. Vermaden Valuable news is usually composed of Unix news&updates, some hardware related news, and a life&other section similar to the "Random" section. Let's hope you enjoy the Unix love. This week we have a lot of links about BSD desktops, lots of new releases, ext4 fs on FreeBSD, bringing back old Unix to life (you can even download the image), and much more. We also brought back Xero's ricing tips section.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• In Other BSDs for 2018/12/01.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/01/22135.html

• History of Dell UNIX.
  https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/
  http://gunkies.org/wiki/Dell_UNIX
  https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2012/03/20/dell-unix-lives-again/

• What makes BeOS and Haiku unique.
  https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-beos-and-haiku-unique/

• DragonFly 5.4.0 Released.
  https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/

• OpenBSD Desktop.
  https://cryogenix.net/openbsd_desktop.html

• Buying Commodore Amiga 30 Years Later.
  https://www.vintagewave.net/blog/2018/11/30/buying-a-commodore-amiga-30-years-later
  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c01a45cf93fd4d1606252b1/5c01b1b04ae2373a235bbc4c/5c01b1b14fa51ac227153f1b/1543614905733/amiga-a1200-keyboard-logo-close-up.jpg
  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c01a45cf93fd4d1606252b1/5c01b1b04ae2373a235bbc4c/5c01b1b1898583f03afd882b/1543614906359/amiga-a1200-1084s-monitor-tank-mouse-joystick-.jpg

• GhostBSD 18.10 Review by Distrowatch.
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20181203#ghostbsd

• Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD.
  https://dressupgeekout.blogspot.com/2018/12/using-gogcom-installers-for-linux-on.html

• HardenedBSD 1100056.10 Available.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-05/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-11-stable-v110005610

• FreeNAS 11.2 Available.
  https://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-11-2-has-arrived/
  https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-release/

• Running AIX 1.3 Inside VirtualBox.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/running-aix-1-3-inside-virtual-box-5-2-16/

• Running macOS Mojave 10.14 on VirtualBox.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/running-macos-mojave-10-14-on-virtualbox-5-2-18-on-linux-x86_64/

• Running AIX 7.2 TL3SP1 on x86_64 via qemu-system-ppc64.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/running-aix-7-2-tl3sp1-on-x86_64-via-qemu-system-ppc64/

• Reverse Shell on AIX 7.2.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/reverse-shell-on-aix-7-2/

• Get Smart with SmartOS.
  http://www.admin-magazine.com/Articles/SmartOS-Cool-Cloud-Platform-Rises-from-the-Ashes-of-Solaris

• OpenBSD on Dell Inspiron 1090 Duo.
  https://grosu.nl/systems/inspiron-duo.html

• NetBSD Desktop Part 3 - Simple Stateful Firewall with NPF.
  https://unitedbsd.com/t/netbsd-desktop-pt-3-simple-stateful-firewall-with-npf/286

• NetBSD Desktop Part 4 - X Display Manager (XDM).
  https://unitedbsd.com/t/netbsd-desktop-pt-4-the-x-display-manager-xdm/292

• FreeBSD 12 got full support for writing ext4 filesystems.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341505

• GhostBSD tested on real hardware ThinkPad T410.
  https://panoramacircle.com/2018/09/23/ghostbsd-tested-on-real-hardware-t410-better-than-trueos/

• MeetBSD California 2018 Talks Available.
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb87fdKUIo8Q41aoPE6vssP-uF4dxk86b

• FreeBSD News and Links Roundup - Edition 2018-48.
  https://www.freebsdbytes.com/2018/12/freebsd-news-and-links-roundup-edition-2018-48/

Hardware

• Raspberry PCI.
  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2720009

• Seagate Reveals World Biggest HDD At 16 TB.
  https://nexthive.com/seagate-biggest-hdd-16-tb/

Life & Other

• Parents Guide to Protecting Kids Privacy.
  https://techlife.asurion.com/feature/parents-guide-to-protecting-kids-privacy/

• Designing cities to counter loneliness? Let’s explore possibilities.
  https://theconversation.com/designing-cities-to-counter-loneliness-lets-explore-the-possibilities-104853

• The Making Of: Dust (Counter-Strike de_dust map).
  https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust/

• The Making Of: Dust 2 (Counter-Strike de_dust2 map).
  https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2/

• Everything you need to know about pointers in C.
  https://boredzo.org/pointers/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

zathura is a vi{m,} like pdf and comicbook viewer.

besides having vi like bindings and a minimal ui, zathura is extremely "riceable" and has a awesome feature called "recolor". when set to true, you can define custom colors for bg and fg of textual documents, but it also sets images to greyscale and tints them in matching inverted hues. :set recolor is a toggle command, so if your set it to run by default in your ~/.config/zathura/zathurarc file, manually calling it from the ui will disable the feature.

here's my config for reference: https://github.com/xero/dotfiles/blob/master/zathura/.config/zathura/zathurarc

cite:

• man 5 zathurarc
• https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/documentation/
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/zathura

____  ___
\   \/  /___________  ____
.\     // __ \_  __ \/ _  \
./     \  ___/ | | \( <_>  )
/___/\  \___  >__|---\____/
|     \_/   \/        |
| xero harrison       |
| xero.nu@gmail.com   |
| http://0w.nz        |
| http://xero.nu      |
| http://fontvir.us   |
`---------------------'

rocx rocks at skteches

Random

• Am I smart enough
  http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/your-iq-matters-less-than-you-think
  https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/napoleons-englich-lessons/
  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/
  https://lemire.me/blog/2018/12/06/asking-the-right-question-is-more-important-than-getting-the-right-answer/

  The first link I've stolen from vermaden's "valuable news" and went on a spree of related ideas. We live in a society/world that loves to find clear causes to things, see "Development and learning" in 93, especially when it comes to finding out if we're doomed/fated/determined for a path. We want to find heroes and villains, distinctions and no ambiguities. In those 4 articles this is the topic that comes across.

• Regulatory capture
  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp

  Yet again a topic that follows a train of thoughts from earlier issues, see "The Shirky principle" in 72 and the thought section of issue of issue 99.

• Web engines
  https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/

  I'll just leave this here, you can have the conversation you want about it.

Thoughts

Issue 104, yet another 52 weeks have gone by.
After passing the 100 issues mark we've finally made it to two years of Unix newsletters.

Thanks to everyone who contributed and to all the readers.

It's fantastic, spread the word around!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Capsicum wrapper
  https://github.com/myfreeweb/capsicumizer

  I love it when tools like this come out. While we could be satisfied with the default, usually not so user friendly, proof of concept the original developers have come up with, it's awesome when the community builds upon the starting block to create what they need from them.

• ELF symbol resolution
  https://0x00sec.org/t/linux-internals-dynamic-linking-wizardry/1082
  https://0x00sec.org/t/linux-internals-the-art-of-symbol-resolution/1488

  We've talked a lot about memory allocation, garbage collection, how to write your own malloc ("In memory layout and Go" in issue 96, "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42, "Pointers, pointers, and pointers" in 25), linking parameters ("LD.SO" in issue 54), the heap (see "Heap, malloc, glibc" in issue 85), the ELF format ("In-memory-only ELF execution" in issue 69, "Tiny ELF" in issue 47, "The world most prominent virus has erased all the source code" in issue 52, "Diving into and ELF" in issue 44, and more) and whatnot in this newsletter, this is a continuation of the thought process. I've got an extensive PDF for next week also, let's hope I can finish it to put it in the next issue.

• How to for a Rust kernel
  https://dominuscarnufex.github.io/cours/rs-kernel/en.html

  A complementary on "For all those people trying to rewrite a kernel" of issue 96. This is a tutorial on both kernel system calls and rust programming at the same time.

• Data structures in the Linux VFS
  https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/lk/lk-8.html

  More and more on the VFS internals, continuation of "VFS, proc and root filesystems" in 58, and "VFS in more details" of 62, and certainly the podcast about "Data storage on Unix".

• Fuzzing (continue)
  https://irssi.org/2017/05/12/fuzzing-irssi/

  This one is quite old compared to the other links I've shared about fuzzing in the newsletter before but I waited on it to be a full fledge popular topic. The article itself is a smooth introduction to fuzzing.

• Big Opinions
  https://github.com/JpOnline/Blog/blob/master/language.md
  https://dpc.pw/the-faster-you-unlearn-oop-the-better-for-you-and-your-software
  https://lobste.rs/s/l5hrk1/faster_you_unlearn_oop_better_for_you_your
  https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans

  If you carry with you absolutes on the internet you'll certainly bring about discussions and arguments. "Every system is built from a DSL designed by the programmers to describe that system. The art of programming is, and has always been, the art of language design. Robert Martin". Having a lot of quotes in a piece and is a mark of an opinionated piece.

• Open source and culture
  https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9

  Yet another instance of big opinions, this one I found quite interesting to read and it's written by a nice fellow you probably know. A follow up type of link for a sort of new series of ideas, see "Open internet/source/culture and the future of this all" in 101 and "A year of big acquisitions, big changes in priorities" from week 99.

• Praising truth
  https://cryptosumer.com/2018/11/24/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-can-do-better-than-bitcoin/

  Click-baity title but a pretty decent discussion by RMS on the Taler system and how it compares with cryptocurrencies. This is in contrast with the previous link, OSS vs FOSS.

• More Emacs
  https://ambrevar.xyz/emacs-everywhere/

  We've shared that blog before in "Shells and pipelines" of issue 75. In this one we're being sold the idea of having emacs for everything with only benefits.

• Oregano
  https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/kFdPoJBpcSA

  A fun discussion I haven't heard about before that xero shared this week about the famous Unix wizard poster.

• Extra cringy music
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHNKTlz1lps
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4YRPdRXKFs

  Similar to "Unix Rap" in 7, enjoy this "nerd" music.

Random

• One of those habit building blog
  https://jamesclear.com/reset-the-room
  https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/how-to-balance-full-time-work-with-creative-projects/

  But a good one, not an annoying listicle type. It gets 2M hits a month on the blog and I've just discovered it. The second post is also related to organizing yourself, the usual work-life balance, a quite popular topic on technology news website. It reminded me of the discussion we had on the forums about Scientifically Proven Digital Attention Helpers, things such as knowing the times in the day when you are more focused, finding what works when guiding yourself towards an intent, what keeps you focus or reminds you of what you need to do (environment or not), splitting big tasks into smaller achievable ones to be able to track them, going with the intent rather than a goal, etc.. See also "Time management and management in general" of issue 98. While also ending on a good note about the histrionic busy: see "Over-Productive" in 78, "Production" in 66, and "The busy trap" in 32.

• Akira
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVoEpRIaKg

  There was a time when anime wasn't associated with what it is today, a time of burgeoning. Probably one of the most impressive animated movie I've seen, along with the Studio Ghibli.

• Information war
  https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/the-digital-maginot-line/

  Complementary to "7 items you won't believe are shockingly amazing!" in issue 85 and to all our "state of the internet" kind of articles.

• Custom typeface
  https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/

  Also, yet again, a recurrent talk in this newsletter: fonts. This episode covers custom typeface, why companies do it, should they continue doing it, and if you should you pay attention.

Thoughts

Judgment is but a mirror that reflects the insecurities of the person who’s doing the judging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBC_jyg-go

Some people live in a world where there are haters and lovers, people that get you and others that don't, everyone judging each others, scaling and measuring their behaviors, inspecting if everyone moves in their plastic manner, pantomime, and making sure they never diverge from their cookie-cutter molds otherwise we'd have to re-invent how we perceive them. It's a world where one move means everything, where you can't make mistakes.
The thing is this only exists when we are teenagers full of hormones living the school days life (or if you're a politician). Real life is much more complex, so get over it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unikernels
  http://250bpm.com/blog:138

  Unikernels are getting more popular in the world of containerization. Other discussions about kernel talks in the newsletter such as the classic "Monolithic vs micro" from 37 and "Not really unix but close and soon will be" in 41 come to mind.

• Linux Redhat and kernels
  https://next.redhat.com/2018/11/14/ukl-a-unikernel-based-on-linux/
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/powering-its-future-while-preserving-present-introducing-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8-beta

  While being corporate-ish Redhat is still one of the front face, along with Oracle and others, to Unix-like operating systems. That first link brings hope to the first entry of this newsletter.

• Safe bash
  https://vaneyckt.io/posts/safer_bash_scripts_with_set_euxo_pipefail/

  Another topic that keeps showing up, see "POSIX shell and no bashism" in 93, "A new shell, why?" in 87, "One liners again..." in 79, "Shells and pipelines" in 75, "Using bash not only for small scripts" in 64, "Bash and shells" in 57, "Bash the bash for bash the bash" in 23, and "Expansion & Globs" in 17. That amount of articles on bash and shell tricks in general is an example of how tricky it is to use them safely.

• Gnome history
  https://www.bassi.io/articles/2018/10/25/the-history-of-gnome/
  https://www.bassi.io/category/history/podcast.xml

  I'll subscribe to this and listen to it during the week, I have a huge podcast list. The first episode sounds captivating. This should add some spices to all the recent news such as the drop of KDE in RedHat in favor of Gnome support, the shell extension and themes discussion, the hackathons follow up, and much more.

• Designing a font
  https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/

  Creating a font that looks nice in all situations is hard, and it's even harder when it's a bitmap font. Also, be sure to disable antialiasing, subpixel rendering, and hinting to keep the crispiness of the bitmaps.

• Standards
  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95manual/arrow.html
  http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-048.pdf

  Want to go deeper in the world of terminal codes, well this is your lucky day.

• Celebrating Unix
  https://unix50.org/

  The anniversary was quite a while ago in internet time but we're still sharing and discussing it.

• GCC arguments
  https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-07/msg02150.html

  Should you care about the people that are relying on unintended behaviours to build software using your libraries. What about when you break/fix this behaviour. We've seen that a bit recently in "OpenBSD doas update and virt" of issue 99.

• D'you have a problem?
  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mgxb/the-internet-has-a-huge-cc-problem-and-developers-dont-want-to-deal-with-it

  A title that shouts "CLICK ME" with an article that is more or less fair. In my opinion switching from one language to another is only moving the problem from one space to another space, a whole lot of new security issues will arise. What do you think?

• Gaming on FreeBSD
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/58/

  We've done gaming on Linux ("Missing games?" in 50 and "Free games" in 10) and recently gaming on OpenBSD ("Extra" in issue 90), this time we're doing gaming on FreeBSD.

Random

• Cringiest articles of the year?
  https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/tech-worker-organizing-google-union-walkout
  https://www.jotform.com/blog/how-google-is-slowing-innovation/

  I don't think I've read a more politically loaded articles this year, I'm not sure why but this is not a trend I'm found of and from the discussions on the forums and irc I know a lot agree that this is getting tiresome. Trying to paint a narrative over whatever is happening, especially a narrative that only applies in certain parts of the world. Keep away with your anti or pro capitalism talk from the 60s and let us enjoy the tech instead. Especially when it comes to the second article and the author nagging about Google being a corporate evil because their own product features are not supported in their pdf reader.

• A world post-rest
  https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/11/18/Post-REST

  Lots of thinking about how the world will evolve, speculations.

• It feels slow
  https://www.inkandswitch.com/slow-software.html

  Another revisit of the topic of "the slow feel", this one feels complete. Somehow related to "Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces" in issue 22, "Latency, second round" in 33, and "This is why NES games are awesome" in issue 28.

• Spammy content
  https://howwegettonext.com/how-bots-were-born-from-spam-62f6c621351f

  The history of spammers and spam content.

Thoughts

The mind can be trained just like the body.

Thinking About Thinking

Meditation, learning psychology, taking the time to teach ourselves about cognitive biases, controlling our day to day intents and attention, leading our future changes and directions. All those are things that are possible and we live in the best time to try them. As much as a cliché as this is I still thought of putting this as the thought of the week.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Fixing audio on OpenBSD
  https://jcs.org/2018/11/12/vfio

  It's hard to be on the same level of dedication as this person when it comes to debugging hardware drivers and making them work. Kudos for that.

• Capsicum
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/57/

  We're seeing this blog more in this newsletter and there's a reason for that. A follow up on "Contain and protect" from issue 76. It's the counterpart of pledge and unveil from OpenBSD on FreeBSD.

• Openstack and debugging story
  https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-1/
  https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-2/
  https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-3/

  A new adventure of debugging using sysdig and others, checkout "Let's setup a honeypot" from issue 18. Beware of defaults!

• Preventing sqli
  https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/11/preventing-sql-injections/
  https://github.com/s0md3v/XSStrike

  Diving into the internals of how sql injections are prevented in Postgres. I've also added one of the brand new XSS finding tool.

• TIMEZONEs
  http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_time_zone/
  https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/europe-may-scrap-dst.html
  https://apenwarr.ca/log/20181113

  Timezones are complex, and adding DST to it doesn't make it easier. I wish I could live in my own timezone like that author, maybe my wish would come true using that trick. It's also my first time encountering the utility zic. As a bonus, because we've saved some hours with our custom timezone, we'll get a wonderful discussion about mtime, the modification timestamp set in the inode (see stat(1)). In my opinion only two or three of the issues brought are actually issues to care about, the others are some edge case outside of scope.

• Open internet/source/culture and the future of this all
  http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open/
  http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
  https://the-pastry-box-project.net/ed-finkler/2014-july-6

  Some meditation on topics some might be accustomed to: open source culture, geek groups, developers thoughts of their own future and balance of life. While I can't really get some of the discussion I can still sympathize with it and have seen it displayed in people I know.

• The History of Unix, Rob Pike
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs

  Another Unix history presentation.

• vim for everything?
  http://alangrow.com/blog/turn-vim-into-excel-tips-for-tabular-data-editing
  https://emily.st/2018/11/13/vim-in-the-future/

  That first post could be listed as a case of using the wrong tool for the task, shooting yourself in the foot at the same time. The second post has a discussion on vim usages across ages, a pretty basic one but something you can share with someone not knowledgeable about vim.

• Gnu stow tuto
  https://stevenrbaker.com/tech/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow.html

  A tool revered in our small corner of the internet. Along with Nix we got a good pair.

Random

• How many computers are in your computer
  https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete#how-many-computers-are-in-your-computer

  Gwern's articles are always well researched and usually get updated a lot over time. This section in his "Surprisingly Turing-Complete" one makes you think about how complex system stack up layers over layers with time.

• Being unsaid
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201110/the-silent-treatment-when-people-leave-you-guessing

  How can the absence of a thing be a sign? And yet it is.

Thoughts

If you can't tell me what you'd like to happen it means you don't have a problem yet. It's simply nagging. A problem exist only if there's a difference between what is effectively happening and what you'd like to happen.

Going along with the last link of the random section, a thought that's been playing in my head for some time now is to "Make explicit what is implicit". We often assume wrongly that some things should go unsaid but it's always better to be clear about what we have understood, what we expect, what we would wish would be the best possible outcome, that's the only good way to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings. Also we need to add that this does not only apply to problematic scenarios but to any others, if we like something we should be explicit about what exactly what done right and what exactly we liked, this way everyone progresses.

Have a wonderful week everyone.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Dropping KDE
  https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde/

  Media craze, maybe. I just don't think there need to be such silly reason behind the IBM acquisition, putting KDE in the loop along with conspiracy thinking. Gnome is getting lots of news as of lately also, see "Gnome shell extensions", "Themes and the past" in 87.

• OpenBSD on a laptop (déjà vu)
  https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/

  Same as some of the previous week posts: "OpenBSD on the desktop" in 97, "BSD on desktop and more GUI stuffs" in 80, and "BSD on desktop and laptop" in 72.

• OpenGL over Vulkan
  https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2018/10/31/introducing-zink-opengl-implementation-vulkan/

  An herculean task that simply "needed to be done".

• GUI for Radeon graphic
  https://github.com/BoukeHaarsma23/WattmanGTK
  https://i.imgur.com/m7vXaaU.png

  We don't often see big graphical configuration tools like this on Unix other than proprietary ones. This is kind of refreshing.

• Tiling WMs course
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Api6dFMlxAA

  A well done and thorough presentation about tiling window managers, why use them, and how to use 6 of them. Highly recommended for anyone that has no clue on that topic.

• the elvish shell
  https://elv.sh/
  https://elv.sh/learn/cookbook.html
  https://danyspin97.org/blog/getting-started-with-execline-scripting/

  "A new shell, why?" in 87 depicts why you should keep your hopes down but it's still fun to try out different things. It's very friendly to use, sorts of reminds me of fish. One annoying thing I noticed is that it doesn't respect ctrl-l to clear the screen but goes into history mode instead though it can be overridden. The last link is in the same mindset, a new tool to build pipelines.

• The init systems war
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/770093/cd322e1fedf67bbe/

  We've all had our popcorn ready the last few years, this sort of articles reminds us that it's not all about stupid internet flame wars but that real works needs to be done to back up software projects otherwise they die out.

• VM in a container
  https://github.com/lattera/articles/blob/master/freebsd/2018-10-27_jailed_bhyve/article.md

  Things get tricky when running dangerous code, this is the kind of security thinking we need.

• Magic bytes
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_signatures
  https://blog.netspi.com/magic-bytes-identifying-common-file-formats-at-a-glance/
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30203586/do-linux-capabilities-work-with-binfmt-misc#30203690

  A friend of mine was trying to find the file type of an unknown file, I thought of pointing him in the direction of magic byte/number (file signature). This kinds of remind me of binfmt_misc on Linux, see "Executables & default program" in issue 77.

• Dump a process memory
  https://github.com/Microsoft/ProcDump-for-Linux

  A small and nifty tool to dump a core from a running process. Give it a try.

• Programming tricks and knowledge
  https://teaearlgraycold.me/xor-swap-explained-visually/
  http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/strings.html
  https://www.nayuki.io/page/creating-a-qr-code-step-by-step
  https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf

  From swapping without intermediated variable, to the wonderful complex world of string implementation, to a walk-through on how QR codes are generated (the only thing bugging me here was how the format bits were not explained, so check it here instead, more fun in this link), and finally ending with a paper on generic paradigm.

Random

• Working remotely
  https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-who-work-from-home-are-happier-more-efficient-according-to-this-fascinating-study-theres-only-1-catch.html
  https://www.zerocracy.com/2018/10/01/remote-work.html
  http://sulami.github.io/posts/working-remotely-part-two/

  Some thoughts, opinions, arguments, and researches on working remotely. What do you think of this, maybe it can be your subject of discussion for the week.

• Password killers
  https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-insert-thing-here-is-not-a-password-killer/

  "If your product is so awesome, have you stopped to consider why no one is using it?", I've seen security advocates tell people to write down their passwords on paper, put it in a tamper safe envelope and store this envelope in a place that no one can reach easily.

• This week we have fun in space
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnhflL7-I3I
  https://lab.nationalmedals.org/gravity/
  http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

  Many interesting videos and explorable explanation links to get you started on your space adventures.

• Metadata
  https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2018/whats-hiding-in-your-pdf/

  This is not really news, but I thought of having a space for it here.

Thoughts

It's been a 100 weeks of Unix newsletters, congratulations everyone! 1763 Unix links, 569 random interesting links, all and all more than 2300 links.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A year of big acquisitions, big changes in priorities
  https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world%E2%80%99s-1-hybrid-cloud-provider
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-said-to-near-deal-to-acquire-software-maker-red-hat
  https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/26/microsoft-completes-github-acquisition/
  https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-has-acquired-github-for-7-5b-in-microsoft-stock/

  I sort of avoided putting business-y articles in this newsletter but I guess it's good to discuss the big acquisitions of this year, this clearly shows the direction that the tech world is taking and is putting its bets on.

• Linux hidpi
  https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2018-4k-hidpi-dual-screen-linux

  It's one of the thing I keep hearing about from people using Linux, the reviews are harsh but fair. I guess we should keep our expectations low and be surprised when something better happens.

• Another week of systemd nags
  https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/10/systemd-is-bad-parsing-and-should-feel.html
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1795921

  Hopefully it'll get patched soon, what can I say. I mean, I don't agree at all that we shouldn't use at all whatever is layed out in this article but there's a point.

• Dependencies in services
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/InitDependencyUnclear

  As usual from this blog it's great content, in this post we see some very good thoughts about what sort of dependencies can exist between services.

• /proc again but on another blog
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/10/27/ps/

  Also a blog we've seen before in this newsletter, in this episode we'll discover yet another intricate and edge scenario about running out of memory.

• Cleaning the kernel
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/internationalizing-kernel
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kills-The-VLA

  Internationalizing the kernel sounds like a really bad idea... I'm not sure where and how anyone could think of this. However, removing all variable length arrays, that's something that is fruitful.

• Notes about porting softwares to FreeBSD
  https://github.com/shlomif/what-i-learned-from-porting-to-freebsd

  A must read for anyone that wants to build packages and deploy them on multiple plaftorms.

• OpenBSD doas update and virt
  https://https.www.google.com.tedunangst.com/flak/post/commands-without-magic
  http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html

  The first link reminded me of the binfmt on Linux, check "Executables & default program" in issue 77. It is related to unveil changes. I kind of like the conclusion "A thing which used to work stopped working, the unintended result of what should have been a harmless change. Ordinarily we’d call that a bug. Except this new behavior is actually what I wanted all along. So could the bug be a bug fix?"

• A how to on OpenSSH
  https://github.com/vedetta-com/vedetta/blob/master/src/usr/local/share/doc/vedetta/OpenSSH_Principals.md

  You probably don't need to read this but it's kind of well done and I had no clue you could create a sort of PKI with ssh keys. See also "SSH ascii art" in 74, "You wouldn't believe what this ssh can do" in 72, "OpenSSH escape sequences" in 46, and much more content related to ssh and ssh keys.

• Learning from rsync
  https://blog.plover.com/prog/switch-case-optimization.html

  A case of switch case optimization. One of those nifty tricks that you can show off to your coworkers, and maybe in future days somebody will wonder how the hek it works.

• Ubuntu, DE, and other shells
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zsh/+bug/1800280

  It's fun when someone jumps on IRC with some weird bugs they found related to how desktop environment rely on too many factors.

Random

• Report
  http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html?module=inline
  https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/10/30/global-biodiversity-wwf_a_23575787/

  A desolating report I haven't gone entirely through yet, it's so backed up by so many scientists all around the globe, so thorough. I'll give it a better read this weekend.

• Much more light
  https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-led-lux
  https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-lumens

  With the above you may be stuck inside because of the weather. So if you feel bad during winter days this could be a solution.

• Helper with research papers
  https://fermatslibrary.com/

  A follow up on last week's (issue 98) "Short papers about papers, meta-papers".

Thoughts

"One of the worst things you can do is force people who don't feel pain to take your aspirin." - Dan Meyer

https://www.nctm.org/blog/ifmathistheaspirin/
A reminder of "The Shirky principle" in 72.

I'm sending the newsletter early this week because I'm taking some vacations as a birthay gift to myself, I've worked 3 months in the span of 2 months.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unix in the old days
  https://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP
  https://www.meetup.com/UNIX-historians/?_cookie-check=b5KQMNxX3kQKSUDh

  Far are the days where people lived on different computing islands. The first link reminds us of the days of discovery and the second one is an example on how nowadays connecting everyone through the web is easier.

• Performance statistics
  https://community.arm.com/tools/b/blog/posts/gnu-toolchain-performance-in-2018
  https://community.arm.com/tools/b/blog/posts/update-on-gnu-performance
  https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance

  The first two are closely related to "About memory" in 58, "A summary" in 64, and "CPU optimizations" in 73, lots of discussion about compiler optimizations, specifically targeted at arm cpu. I'm quite a fan of the graphical representation and code example of the improvements, this is radically different than Ulrich's old paper. As for DragonflyBSD, that page was without a doubt popular and has finally been updated with some newer statistics of 2018 using the brand new "Threadripper" everyone has been spamming so much about in all the tech media (You gotta admit it's good PR). See for yourself if the BSD known for using SMP the best stays true to its name on the 64 threads monster CPU.

• OpenBSD management
  https://chown.me/blog/upgrading-openbsd-with-ansible.html
  https://kristaps.bsd.lv/slant/

  When you run a box remotely, be it a VM or any other type of virtual or real machine, you sort of run into the issue of monitoring and managing that system. Here is some content to do this on OpenBSD.

• Arcan
  https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/17/arcan-versus-xorg-approaching-feature-parity/

  The start of a series of post about the difference between Arcan and Xorg, we talked a bit about Arcan before in "GUI" in 77 and "Awk for multimedia" in 44. This articles brings a lot of X related topics such as rendering, fonts, input management, clipboard (see "X11 Clipboard" in 9), etc..

• A floating WM inside a term
  https://gitlab.com/jD91mZM2/termwm

  Tired of tmux, screen, or dvtm, then try this new kid in town. However, after 2h of trying to fix the compilation issues with Cargo I think I will just give up trying it first hand.

• Fuzzing
  https://www.informatics.indiana.edu/xw7/papers/p2139-you.pdf

  We mentioned fuzzing a lot before, see "Now give me some BSD to balance" in 88 amongst others. This time it's about automating the creation of PoC based on CVE.

• Using Xorg for privilege escalation
  https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2018-October/002927.html
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/25/x_org_server_vulnerability/
  https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/50c0cf885a6e91c0ea71fb49fa8f1b7c86fe330e

  An old school type of bug, bad command-line parameter validation and bad usage of setuid. Maybe fuzzing would've helped finding it earlier, what do you think?

• Sandbox and VMs
  https://david942j.blogspot.com/2018/10/note-learning-kvm-implement-your-own.html

  A tedious tutorial on how to learn to use the KVM of Linux programmatically.

• Still keeping up
  https://ops.tips/blog/how-linux-creates-sockets/
  https://ops.tips/blog/how-linux-tcp-introspection/

  This series of articles has been magnificent so far. Even if the author insists that it's about procfs it is about way much more, it touches many interesting topics of the Linux kernel.

• GC
  http://paul.bone.id.au/2018/10/19/gc-falsehoods/

  There's a bit of hype about GC these days, be it java 11 ZGC (see "Solaris 11.4 SRU and Java 11, everything Oracle" in 94), or Go GC (see "In memory layout and Go" in 96 and "For all those people trying to rewrite a kernel" in the same issue), or Mozilla Firefox JS updates on their GC, or Rust gc, or whatever, all are thriving for better memory footprint.

• Not really sure what this is about
  https://github.com/akavel/up

  I can't find a use case for this, wouldn't tee(1) cut it?

• Audio madness
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/21/audio/
  https://lobste.rs/s/2mru6l/hidden_complication_for_linux_desktop

  When an article starts like this one you know what is incoming, yet another long debugging session.

Random

• TLS session resumption and tracking
  https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/advertisers-can-track-users-across-the-internet-via-tls-session-resumption/
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/23/paul_vixie_slaps_doh_as_dns_privacy_feature_becomes_a_standard/

  A nifty trick on how to track users using TLS session resumption and another series of arguments against and for DoH.

• Websites the last few years
  https://2018.bloomca.me/en

  Enjoy a simulation of what today feels like. Remember "As if you were working" a long time ago in issue 31.

• Time management and management in general
  https://huytd.github.io/the-best-todo-list-method.html
  https://blog.hubstaff.com/time-management-tools/
  http://www.safetydifferently.com/why-do-things-go-right/
  https://jasonevanish.com/

  Different types of articles about to-do lists, time management concepts/tools, how to do things right (as generic as that sounds) sort of taking the opposite of survivorship bias, and ending with a blog about management in general.

• They were all the same before this
  https://reword.ca/different-types-of-dashes-and-how-to-use-them-in-your-writing/

  Today we learned something new, but I think I'll stick to calling them all dashes.

• The Fregoli Delusion
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzv1BDdmqzM

  A sad and complex condition that could be joined and linked with similar other conditions.

• Again in the world of typography
  https://betterwebtype.com/rhythm-in-web-typography

  Typography is hard, this keep being said over and over again, and typography on a computer medium is even harder. This article is an expansion of "Vertical white space" in issue 63.

• Short papers about papers, meta-papers
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/441f/ac7c2020e1c8f0d32adffca697bbb8a198a1.pdf
  http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/07/paper-reading.pdf

  How to read a paper and how to write one, two very short and quick papers on those topics.

Thoughts

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." ― C. A. R. Hoare

"At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." ― C.A.R. Hoare

https://www.innoq.com/en/blog/do-we-worship-complexity/, somewhat of a reminder of "Holding it in my head" in issue 94.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• You own terminal from scratch
  https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2017-write-own-terminal

  It's not really a terminal from scratch but this article shows well how you can build upon the VTE lib to create something.

• FreeBSD amd64 syscalls
  https://cryptoden.pw/downloads/Dive_into_syscall_handling_on_freeBSD_AMD64.txt

  An advanced paper (written in the typical style of security researchers aka not-very-readable) about FreeBSD system calls. Sadly, unlike everything else in most of the newsletter even weird esoteric research, I couldn't finish the paper as it was too dense (or maybe it's me).

• What you get from reading code instead of books
  https://nanxiao.me/en/the-byproducts-of-reading-openbsd-netcat-code/

  Just a quick review by the author on what was learned/found from reading the netcat OpenBSD code.

• OpenBSD on the desktop
  https://blog.gsora.xyz/openbsd-on-the-desktop-some-thoughts/

  Also a thought article with points on what the author liked or not about the OpenBSD user experience. Sort of related to all the entries that touch the topic of desktop and UX such as "Themes and the past" in 87, "BSD on desktop and more GUI stuffs" in 80, "BSD on desktop and laptop" in 72.

• Some lwn with Linux inspired by BSDs
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/767630/594421f913c3d00a/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/767258/
  https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/767137/

  The first article is about getting more idle (power wise too) in the idle state by stopping the kernel tick if it seems like a good idea. Second one is about the freedesktop group (fd.o) having a discussion about their past, current, and future and direction. I added after that one a link to the gnome redesigns which they've been working on, see "Hackathon and secure chats" in 76. The last article is about how to be inspired by OpenBSD's unveil which we mentioned multiple times in this newsletter.

• Horrible Unix forms
  https://czep.net/17/legion-of-lobotomized-unices.html
  https://lobste.rs/s/opfkcr/legion_lobotomized_unices
  https://czep.net/17/lfs-on-ec2.html

  Lots of nostalgia in this article, but we've moved on. Is is rosy retrospection or is it not. The author dreads these new days as if they lack social network interaction... I'm not sure about that, more like there's too much of it, or maybe it's another kind of interaction. What's your take on that topic? A reminder of "Will Geocities websites make a comeback?" in 56.

• top, proc, containers, and scratch
  https://ops.tips/blog/a-month-of-proc/
  https://ops.tips/blog/what-is-slash-proc/
  https://ops.tips/blog/how-is-proc-able-to-list-pids/
  https://ops.tips/blog/why-top-inside-container-wrong-memory/
  https://ops.tips/blog/proc-pid-limits-under-the-hood/
  https://ops.tips/blog/using-procfs-to-get-process-stack-trace/

  A great series of in depth articles (it's going to be 30 in total!) on procfs and everything related, and much much more. You should follow up as the articles come out. Also related to "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks" in 59, "VFS, proc and root filesystems" in 58 and "The mighty proc" in 52, maybe that first article in the series is somehow related to the data storage on Unix podcast..

• MacOS hardening
  https://blog.bejarano.io/hardening-macos.html
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/119627/why-are-interactive-shells-on-osx-login-shells-by-default

  Lots of people praise Apple for being full of intent on security and privacy, some agree on that stance, some say it's only marketing. In this blog post there's a list of steps that could easily be taken by any non-technical user to ensure a bit of security. Somewhat related to "The Shirky principle" in 72 and "Differential privacy" 47. The last link is not really connected to the first one but it's an issue that I've encountered this week and found interesting.

• Some security content
  https://tls.ulfheim.net/
  https://www.libssh.org/security/advisories/CVE-2018-10933.txt
  https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/bug-in-libssh-makes-it-amazingly-easy-for-hackers-to-gain-root-access/

  A website to explore and get an explanation about everything in a TLS connection, plus a new vulnerability, this time in the libssh.

• A poster from 1983
  https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/188/420835186_08b2c2ea0e_b.jpg

  Not much to say about this poster, it's pretty cool.

Random

• A miniature world
  https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/photo/572737/

  These were some entries in a photography competition, let's hope you enjoy them.

• Un-Mercator-ing projection
  https://g.redditmedia.com/CsGjFy1rgy77CN_KYN7AFqeik4oYdUONVY6G5bZlZOM.gif?fm=mp4&mp4-fragmented=false&s=12cc46b1580f9e34e11256a4dc94fd1f

  I already knew the Mercator projections were skewed but I've never realized how much and how to map the scales in my mind, this animation clarifies this.

• Game programming hacks
  http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-12-14-great-old-timey-game-programming-hack.html

  Unrolling loops, something you must have heard many times before. A continuation on the series about old video games and video games in general, checkout last week (issue 96) "Sublime in video games", "Web adventures" in 93, "More game design beauty" in 88, "Camera in side-scroller games" in 88 also, and "Retro gaming" in 77.

• Stress
  https://www.prevention.com/life/a20508569/stress-makes-you-stronger/
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3374921/

  A made a research on stress some years ago (see it here and found so many research about the horrible long term effects it has on us that I might have started to be biased about what I read about the topic. This fun article, along with the fascinating research paper, go over to the opposite side, the side where stress is a helper depending on how you use it and perceive it, a part of growth and human life.

Thoughts

"Confusopoly"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly
http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-11-21
http://blog.dilbert.com/2011/12/07/online-confusopoly/

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• In memory layout and Go
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoProgramMemoryUse
  https://arjunsreedharan.org/post/148675821737/memory-allocators-101-write-a-simple-memory

  Going over the memory chunks allocated by Go. You must also check "Heap, malloc, glibc" in issue 85 for an idea of the layout of the heap and how it's similar to Go structure. The second link is an extra because it has been covered multiple times before in a lot of other entries already such as "sbrk and malloc" in 53.

• For all those people trying to rewrite a kernel
  https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/cutler

  Whatever your preferred high level language this paper goes into the details, motivations, practicalities of writing a kernel with it. It has a big emphasis on memory/heap usage, things such as OOM and more.

• CLI from the perspective of the "hype" industry
  https://medium.com/@jdxcode/12-factor-cli-apps-dd3c227a0e46

  Pale, even cringy and opposite, in comparison with "Yet again a Unix CLI discussion" of 77 and all the other Unix philosophy design talks such as the popular "The Art of Unix Programming" by ESR, but it still deserves a small mention.

• Monitoring
  http://tech.marksblogg.com/top-htop-glances.html
  http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for-linux-2018.html

  A great thorough overview of monitoring tools and another big post by Brendan Gregg's about tracing, this one is about the new powerful bpftrace, see also "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" in 53 and "So many tracing tools it makes me dizzy" in 43.

• Writing a daemon
  https://chaoticlab.io/c/c++/unix/2018/10/01/daemonize.html

  A subject that has been discussed in depth in many places, including the nixers podcast: see here or here.

• And the daemon manager
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=systemd-2018-Lennart

  We covered a lot of the topics in this presentation in this newsletter already, some of the other content/features are also interesting: Portable Services, Boot Counting, OCI runtime support in nspawn, System Call Whitelist, DNS over TLS, and much more.

• Speed up tests without code
  https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/how-to-tune-your-database-to-make-tests-faster.html

  A technique to use systemd mount unit to automatically start the database on a tmpfs when running test.

• VMs
  https://dan.langille.org/2018/10/02/running-freebsd-on-osx-using-xhyve-a-port-of-bhyve/
  http://www.netzbasis.de/openbsd/vmd-debian/index.html

  Two guides on running different Unix OS in VMs on different Unix hosts.

• Indirect licensing
  https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/01/Indirect-Licensing.html

  Open source and the joy of the legal world of licensing, the does and donts. In this article the author visits the different way licenses can be distributed.

• Who's Senior
  https://jvns.ca/blog/senior-engineer/

  A small post about the author's own description of what a senior engineer is.

Random

• Websites and interactions
  https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website/
  https://tinysubversions.com/notes/decentralized-social-networks/

  Maybe this could be considered a continuation on the state of the web series, this time we emphasize on lightweight websites (even physically, see also "Ludites or not" in 72 and "Websites ideas" in 60) and a bit of digital identity with the topic of decentralization.

• Stats about the web
  http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

  Those kinds of statistics are always interesting to see, checkout "Map of 802.11" in 78 and "State of..." in issue 65 too.

• Sublime in video games
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzj4h0R_ryQ

  I'm not sure I agree with the description of the sublime that is portrayed here but I do certainly like the idea that it could be applied to some scenes or moments in video games.

• Decision fatigue
  https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244395
  https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/doctors-and-decision-fatigue/
  http://www.slate.com/articles/business/productivity/2014/10/decision_fatigue_ego_depletion_how_to_make_better_decisions.html

  A concept I thought of sharing this week, a sort of obvious one but that needs to be named.

• Overrationalization
  https://fs.blog/2017/04/mental-model-hanlons-razor/

  Another link from the beautiful knowledge project, this time it's about Hanlon's Razor.

Thoughts

"Everyone is complex and made out of different parts. Those parts grow at different rates. Some parts of ourselves could still be teenagers while others mature more fully."

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Yet another OpenBSD installation tuto
  https://bsdboy.ml/posts/installing-hugo-and-hosting-website/

  This seems like the trend of the moment, and a nice one at that, blog posts about setting up any kind of services on OpenBSD machines.

• Terminal madness (continue)
  http://xn--rpa.cc/essays/term
  https://lobste.rs/s/zvawoa/on_terminal_control

  Not much to say about this one other than to refer to "Terminal interface" from 92, "Alternative screen and the quirkiness of terminals" in 86, "Terminal madness once more" in 82, and also that when I started doing ascii arts with colors I was manually typing the color escape codes and it was time-consuming. Maybe refer to the terminals podcast found here https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2108 or https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2017/06/04/terminals.html.

• Layering docker with Nix
  https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images

  It's kind of hard for me to grasp this topic as I've not delve too much into it but I grasp the overall concept and it seems really cool.

• More on device mapping
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGnFhmG8gT0
  https://www.thegeekdiary.com/beginners-guide-to-device-mapper-dm-multipathing/
  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Device-mapper

  The first link is a presentation about the implementation of device removal of a top layer in ZFS. The second in the list is maybe not as low level as the ones from "Device Mapper" in '77' but still very refreshing, for more review on that topic you can check the podcast on data storage on Unix. Thegeekdiary blog may sound clickbaity but I was surprised by the quality of the content, time to add it to your list of places to follow up. The last link is a wiki that goes over dmsetup, the command line tool used to manipulate device mappers the internals of things such as the raid and crypt implementations. There's also a list of other very interesting device mapper implementation I had no clue existed. I'm sure there are some people around that are fan of volume management and fancy device mappers stacks.

• Linux cache bug
  https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-cache-invalidation-bug-in-linux.html

  A dive (deep) into the Linux VMA to find an overflow bug.

• A analysis of a crypto scheme
  https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/09/30/analyzing-a-simple.html

  Maybe a bit related to "Let's play with encoding and formats" in issue 71.

• Auditing
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/security_guide/chap-system_auditing
  https://linux-audit.com/configuring-and-auditing-linux-systems-with-audit-daemon/

  This week I was reminded of this tool, it sort of fit a business/security case we need. For those who wants to learn more about it those two links should get you started.

• The never ending questions about C
  https://words.steveklabnik.com/should-you-learn-c-to-learn-how-the-computer-works

  A decent and fair article on this topic that comes out a lot, see also "Why C and not something else" in 89 and "More C, more C" in 78.

• Paper vs screen
  https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/Journals/Reading.htm

  I've read this research, which is a sort of meta-analysis, about a year ago when doing a brainstorm on scientifically proven digital attention helpers. I thought of sharing it again this week, as this is a recurrent topic of discussion.

• Software development management
  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/?single_page=true

  The urban legend of the programmers who've automated their jobs. Maybe also checkout "Useless jobs" in 74, and "Ludites or not" in 72.

Random

• The WWW is awesome (continue+)
  https://youtu.be/wSn7CJ0cNZ4

  Last weekend I had this discussion with a friend about this series I ran in this newsletter about the WWW awesomeness of niche found in there and why I was doing that. The sort of refreshment in the face of the never ending list of articles and debates about the online click-economy, privacy, and attention span issues that I've discussed so much in the state-of-the-web state-of-the-mind series. This link is from this same friend, it's quite interesting and well researched as are a lot of those sort of educational Youtube videos, maybe not as niche as the other kinds of videos I've inserted in this newsletter but still fun. This is entry is more of a reminder of the topic then being about the content of the video. So, readers, if you stumble upon things on the internet that makes you go "Waw, damn this is good" then hit me up with it and I'll happily share it in the newsletter.

Thoughts

"Whatever your strengths are, they will likely lead straight into your weaknesses."

A quote from the "Twelve Natural Laws of Business", see http://www.zingermanscommunity.com/2012/01/natural-law-10-whatever-your-strengths-are-they-will-likely-lead-straight-into-your-weaknesses/ for more info.
What I have been reminded by this quote is actually the total opposite, when someone is aware of their weakness it will often appear to others as their most polished attribute.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• More OpenBSD networking
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon08-network.pdf
  https://jonwillia.ms/2018/09/23/anycast-dns-openbsd

  A well explained, quick, and approachable paper giving an overview of OpenBSD network stack. This is my highly recommended read for the week. This is followed by a guide to running anycast DNS on OpenBSD in the world of homecooked community-based meshed network.

• Ed, my old friend
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdNoLongerGoodEditor

  Remember "Just ed" in issue 40, yeah so nothing unexpected here, welcome to another Unix rant about text editors, a toned down and fair version.

• spawn() why isn't there something like that
  https://tavianator.com/spawn-of-satan/

  A sweet article going through the Unix way of starting new processes via already running processes and a "meditation" on the upsides and downsides of it.

• dmesg
  https://ops.tips/blog/dmesg-under-the-hood/

  In this post we explore how dmesg and the Linux ring buffer works.

• Testing the GNU coreutils
  http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-testing.html

  The whole logic behind the test suite used for the GNU coreutils, a well designed test suite in my opinion. You can use the tips mentioned in the article for your owns.

• A marriage between package management and https
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon_2018_https.pdf

  The couple fight between pkg management and https, with a bit of a look at the shiny new TLS1.3 and finally giving the coup-de-grace showing how confidentiality here may not matter because it's not there so we should rely on something else. Related to "Nagging about Debian" in 63 and "APT and https" in 60.

• Chrome and crypto
  https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving-chrome/
  https://ha.x0r.be/posts/chrome-is-a-google-service/
  https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-based-your-feedback/
  https://medium.com/@tejaas_solanki/understanding-pgp-by-simulating-it-79248891325f
  http://blog.obligd.com/posts/everyday-crypto.html

  Three links about the Chrome browser recent discussion and the last ones about crypto and security in general. The PGP one is related to "Spirit of the law" in 84, "Let's play with encoding and formats" in 71, "Why we should use plain text emails" in 75, and "Don't use PGP? Why?" in 42.

• Vnc and remote
  https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/qemu-monitor-socket-rce-vnc
  https://benjojo.co.uk

  We kind of had a trend to create home pages similar to our window managers, this person takes it further by running the entire OS and discovering the security issues with it. This is close to "Run everything on the web!" of 19 and "Emulators in JS" of 16.

• Solaris 11.4 SRU and Java 11, everything Oracle
  https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru1
  https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-releases-for-java-11-and-later
  http://jdk.java.net/11/release-notes
  https://blog.joda.org/2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles-java-11-trap.html

  SRU or Source Repository Update, Solaris is still getting cool updates and support so far (see "Solaris is still alive" in 79), and with Oracle position on Java 11 this will all develop ""interestingly"".

• Swap on Linux
  https://opensource.com/article/18/9/swap-space-linux-systems

  "Arrows cycle symbol for failing faster", I have no clue why this image was chosen in the article... This is a bit related to our usual "data storage on Unix" type of article, while just grasping the tip of the iceberg it's still a good tutorial article that explains most of the content related to swapping.

Random

• Another series of posts about hiring and startups
  http://vadimkravcenko.com/growing-your-interns
  https://leonardofed.io/blog/startups-hiring.html

  Some down to earth thoughts about new programmers to the world of work.

• Holding it in my head
  http://paulgraham.com/head.html

  I never could put this into word as well as this article did but this is something that I can't help but try to do as much as possible when working on projects.

• Love of the internet
  https://youtu.be/01iDVrKmi9w

  Get your hamsters ready to run because they'll have to power some houses.

Thoughts

"Different people define relationships in different ways"

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Handling json in the shell
  https://medv.io/json-in-bash/

  We've had a discussion some days ago about scripts to be "quick and efficient" so we'll continue with it. This one is not really about wrappers around anything but helpers to manipulate json on the pipeline. The tools seem useful, if I had to work with json all day I think I'd give them a try.

• Calendar for history
  https://akr.am/blog/posts/today-in-history-brought-to-you-by-unix

  The fortune of the day. Related to another recent forums discussion about keeping software alive and learning from them by reading their source code.

• POSIX shell and no bashism
  https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110228

  A lot of those are normal tips but some are really good ones too, take it as a reminder/refresher on shell scripting habits.

• Good docs
  https://text.causal.agency/001-make.txt

  A great small miscellaneous man page about some tips related to using Make.

• SMTPD for humans https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/events/691.en.html
  https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/attachments/377_smptd_tutorial.pdf
  https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/attachments/378_smtpd_cheatsheet.pdf

  I haven't found the video of this tutorial but there's still some good content in the presentation slides and cheetsheat.

• The boot choices
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/53/
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bhyve&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+11.1-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html
  https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/virtualization-host-bhyve.html

  Another post from the ashogbo blog. It's my first time learning about the bhyve hypervisor, at least under that name and not vmm, and I already like it.

• Just replace it by systemd
  https://mjanja.ch/2015/06/replacing-cron-jobs-with-systemd-timers/

  Cron jobs are not perfect but they aren't complex either. There are many reasons to not use them but use something else instead, would you give systemd a try?

• A simple linker example
  https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/ld/Simple-Example.html#Simple-Example

  Ever wanted to manipulate the linker at a lower level, commanding it on how it should place the section of the executable. Well, I've wanted to, and this small section of this book is a start.

• Alpine RCE
  https://justi.cz/security/2018/09/13/alpine-apk-rce.html

  A quick MITM attack on Alpine package manager.

• UI NextStep
  https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

  "NEXTSPACE is desktop environment that brings NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux." Nothing more to say, enjoy.

• And an extra for the ride
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/09/13/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-v-two-debug-nightmares/

  This has been one of my favorite blog posts series in a while, so I'm still adding it to this newsletter. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am.

Random

• Lavarand
  https://web.archive.org/web/19971210213248/http://lavarand.sgi.com/
  http://www.lavarand.org/what/index.html
  https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty-gritty-technical-details/

  In the last issue ("You certainly remember those" in 93) we talked about their history. Now we bring a subject dear to cryptography fans, sort of related to "A documentary about chaos theory" in 78 too. Shout-out to my coworkers, we should've bought lavalamps instead of a costly hardware security module.

• Puppets
  http://marwencol.com/
  http://marwencol.com/documentary/

  A beautiful story I was fascinated with this week. It's related to the other puppet master of "The WWW is awesome (continue)" in issue 78.

• Development and learning
  https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt
  https://putanumonit.com/2018/09/07/the-scent-of-bad-psychology/

  The first post is a wonderful example of protocol reverse-engineering technique at its finest and the second just about the reproducibility chaos happening in the world of psychology the last few years.

• Web adventures
  http://www.web-adventures.org/

  A bunch of old-school text-based game revived to be playable in a web-browser.

Thoughts

"Chess has shaped how I think. This idea that most chess moves are mistakes, even when made by very good players. Also, you can’t blame other people for your own problems, even though some of your problems may be their fault." - Tyler Cowen

You know the "Baader-Meinhof" effect, well it happened this week to. It seemed like everywhere I went chess made an appearance. From a series I'm watching with my significant other, to a podcast, to my coworker learning some new moves. Though I haven't got to play this week, ironically, but the concept that kept floating in my mind was the one found in this quote.

The newsletter is coming early this week because I'm taking some small vacations, have fun everyone.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Terminal interface
  https://p.janouch.name/article-tui.html

  A work-in-progress article about the magic (mess) of terminals we've been so fond of. See "Terminal madness once more" in 82 and what it refers in its description, also "Alternative screen and the quirkiness of terminals" in 86. We've shared a lot of content related to this.

• Have you said magic
  https://rhelblog.redhat.com/2018/01/12/linux-and-the-enduring-magic-of-unix/

  The usual "what my journey has been" sort of article. This one differs a bit so it's interesting to go through. Beware for those sensible persons that get micro-aggression-post-traumatic-disorder from hearing Linux and Unix in the same sentence.

• We have to compare it with something
  http://blog.nullspace.io/batch.html

  Let me just quote this eloquent way to put things: "Bash: a language that was neither designed, nor evolved. An adequate solution to a problem that has since become orders of magnitude harder. As arcane as it is useful, as dangerous as it is ubiquitous, Bash: the language that asks how much we are willing to give up for convenience’s sake?".

• Talking about fan base
  https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/how-containers-became-a-tech-darling-and-why-docker-became-their-poster-child-bfaf9ac87825

  An interview with the old CTO of Joyent now head of tech at cloud system at Ericsson about containers, how they came to be and why they took off.

• Bad processes
  https://blog.xenproject.org/2018/08/01/killing-processes-that-dont-want-to-be-killed/

  There's a subtle manner to do simple things the right way without getting yourself in trouble. Here we explore killing a process, especially when we want to have it containerized and not contaminate all the system.

• Oldies
  https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/

  If you're into that sort of recollection of the past with all the gritty details then you'll like this, otherwise it'll all sound like some boring corporate story telling without value.

• Multithreading, multiprocess, coroutine, asynchronous, parallel, NUMA & SMP
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/50/

  This article deals with writing code that doesn't lock or spin too much or use mutex everytime we have to read or write something in a multi-anything environment.

• A Linux distro that is BBQ grilled
  https://killx.linuxbbq.org/

  Tired of having it grandma-easy with GUIs and binary installs then this is for you.

• System programming
  http://willcrichton.net/notes/systems-programming/

  Another instance of pedantry related to name giving. A good definition in my opinion is "programming to maintain the system so that other applications can run better", close to the second definition in the first quote of the article.

• New OpenSSL release
  https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2018/09/11/release111/

  This one finally brings the TLS v1.3 support we've been talking about for so long. This is the big feature of the release basically, enjoy and don't forget to keep doing security updates.

Random

• For developers and software startup creators
  https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade

  Yet-another-big-list-of-links, this time it's about resources to build a software startup.

• Decision, thinking, and understanding
  https://fs.blog/mental-models/
  https://fs.blog/2017/08/amateurs-professionals/

  Another big list of content. Take your time to go through this wonderful blog about decision making, a sort of online think tank. Closely related to "Thinking in new ways" from issue 67.

• In continuation
  https://dnote.io/blog/how-i-built-personal-knowledge-base-for-myself/

  Decisions can't be made without a knowledge base, this is why we tackle this in this post.

• You certainly remember those
  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-the-lava-lamp-21201966/
  https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-lava-lamps-1992086

  No idea why I'm adding this but I'm adding it anyway. Fun history behind this weird contraption.

Thoughts

"does the tournament make sense as you keep going?"

Why are we striving for what we are striving for. Does it make sense to focus more on it or to stabilize, spread out, and balance efforts into other things. To keep going on in the tournament we have to put more of ourselves in it and so less into other things. Maybe this is a warped up way of saying "rat race" maybe it's not, it depends on how deliberate we are about our decisions.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Motherboard and BIOS update
  http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2018-September/357883.html

  I'm not a hardware guy so this kind of talk is hard to follow but it's still impressive to see the kind of testing and benchmarks that is happening.

• Lots of OpenBSD
  https://h3artbl33d.nl/blog/nextcloud-on-openbsd
  https://chown.me/blog/2FA-with-ssh-on-OpenBSD.html
  https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/hard-state-soft-state-confusion

  Lots of projects and articles all with OpenBSD in mind as a platform. You can replace your cloud system provider with nextcloud and run it on OpenBSD. Or use 2FA with one of those external physical token authentication device. Or you can wonder about the state of security patching, from hardware to software (not really OpenBSD but very interesting).

• A series on NetBSD pkgsrc
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files1
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files2
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files3

  A series diving into pkgsrc and how it handles configuration files, setting default values, merging, versioning, and more.

• MacOs exploit
  https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x38.html

  Custom URL schemes, what did the standards say about that, check last week "The arch of the web" in issue 90. They're certainly allowed to extend the protocol but should you probably limit yourself to use the ones from the IANA: http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml?

• Process title
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/51/

  If you've ever wondered what was a process title, how it got set, and where you can read it then this article will answer those questions.

• Debugging
  https://codingagainstchaos.com/2018/07/21/testing-the-unthinkable.html
  https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/09/04/python-multiprocessing/
  http://blog.codetastrophe.com/2008/12/writing-cross-platform-elf-binary.html

  Those are some nice blog names "coding against chaos", "code without rules", "codetastrophe", this shows how we perceive our domain of expertise. From testing code, to forking, and ending with building cross platform elf. I would've put every one of those in a separate entry but I couldn't resist mentioning the blog naming. The source for the last post can be found on Google code https://code.google.com/archive/p/codetastrophe/source/default/source, I've also posted it in a gist https://gist.github.com/venam/34b954db3ac78ab0d9d7d67f98423277.

• paperTTY
  https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY

  This week in awesome inventions we have TTY on e-paper/e-ink displays. The coolness can be summarized with this sentence "Running Nethack outside in the noon sun, powered directly by a solar panel, connected to a Bluetooth keyboard". Simulated paper with a simulated TTY on it.

• Xft but for xcb
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2018/09/02/fonts-xcb.html
  https://p.janouch.name/article-xgb.html

  I'm shamelessly plugging one of my own articles. This goes into how to implement a font library, similar to how Xft works, using common building blocks. If you're interested in how the font stack is put together then this is for you. The second article is about thinking on how to build a UI from scratch using X11, it discuses in more depth about the components and libraries that are needed to plug everything together. It's a great resource.

• Showing code
  https://medium.com/@Fabinout/13-tips-to-show-code-on-screen-5d5a417aec88

  We all have our favorite colorscheme, our favorite way of displaying text (see "Choosing the right typography" in issue 74), but when it comes to showing it to different persons, especially during presentations, there should be a standard pleasant way to do it. Kudos to the author of this article for putting some light on this subject.

• Containers management
  https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-docker-and-container-orchestration-systems/

  The author walks us through the edges of using Docker containers, some of the quirks of pulling prepackaged "official" builds, the security implication on keeping packages within containers up to date, and other things to know.

Random

• Once more... About Identity
  https://regularflolloping.com/posts/identity-in-the-wired/

  Let's bring back an old topic that keeps resurfacing in this newsletter: Identity, and specifically digital identity. This short thought piece should get you back on those thoughts, plus you can always dig in the archive to find all that has been shared.

Thoughts

"Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?" - Sam Altman

This week we have a quote related to work culture, more precisely partnering up aka having coworkers or hiring. I've noted that quote when the "How to Start a Startup" course at Standford in Fall 2014 came out and have kept it in my mind since then. How do we know that the team is holding well together. Some of the criteria are in that quote, what others do you want to add? This can be your conversation starter for next week.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Design of Unix prog
  http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf

  The paper that all cat-v lovers salivate for.

• Scripts to be "quick and efficient"
  https://github.com/huyng/bashmarks
  https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

  We see a bunch of those pop up from time to time, script or interfaces with shorthand to make the typing on the shell quicker or easier, do they really help, I'm not sure but they are interesting. Related to "Is there a command that is as ingrained in our muscle memory as cd" in 69

• Making use of USBs
  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_USB
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Multiboot_USB_drive

  A topic that isn't unknown to any of us. I keep thinking about getting a dedicated harddisk that I would use and transport with me whenever I want to.(see Less ties with a machine) I'm also thinking of getting more hard disks and run my personal RAID but that's another story. In fact I'm just thinking of getting more storage devices in general, there's always an utility for those woudln't you agree?

• Glibc, and Linux Kernel Memory
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
  https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Memory.html#Memory
  https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Memory-Concepts.html#Memory-Concepts

  Some memory interesting related documents, one about overcommit/overallocating configuration on Linux (Also see "In userspace OOM manager" in 85) and the other about generically how the libc memory allocation works. You can start with the last link and dig as deep as you want.

• SMTP auth
  https://grymoire.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/metasploitamazon-ses-or-debugging-sendmails-smtp-authentication/
  https://www.headdesk.me/Postfix_virtual_hosting

  Setting up a mail server is a PITA. I know we've all been there, stuck and not knowing how to debug the SMTP TLS login. This fist article walks you through the initial steps, let's not talk about having users stored in the db instead of using Unix auth, and virtual host.

• Hey can I download the internet?
  http://isticktoit.net/?p=1637
  https://serverfault.com/questions/775728/create-a-multi-homed-linux-load-balancer-with-two-internet-connections-and-one-l#776705
  https://www.linux.com/news/monitoring-network-performance-speedometer

  I haven't actually tried that yet but the idea is enticing. As I have access to a home wifi and a 3g connection I'm thinking of getting my hands on a cheap router to achieve that. I'll plug my laptop ethernet to the router and let it connect and forward the home wifi and I'll use my phone in tethering to share 3g as a wifi connection to the laptop. Imagine yourself making "vrrrm" sound as your crappy internet suddenly nitrogen-speed up. What do you think, worth a try or not?

• Why not overhype minor security bugs
  http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/08/24/1
  http://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2018-15473

  The last few years security researchers have done a lot of PR, here are some thoughts why minor bugs shouldn't be overhyped as security catastrophe by taking the example of CVE-2018-15473.

• The arch of the web
  https://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
  https://stephenmann.io/post/whats-in-a-production-web-application/

  The architecture of the whole web and how a node on that web survives.

• Socializination
  https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-mastodon.html
  https://catalin.red/inspected-mastodon-social-website/

  It's been quite some years since I've touched popular social networks. In this article the author walks us through the story he had jumping from one to the other.

• Job interviews
  https://github.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills

  Worried about your next job interviews or looking to polish your "skills" then this repository will contain some gold for you. It's a series of questions and some typical answers to what is usually asked in sysadmin interviews.

• Extra
  https://lobste.rs/s/zcvotg/openbsd_gaming_resource

  Related to "Missing games?" in issue 50 and "Free games" in issue number 10. Now you have a full collection!

Random

• Memories
  http://paulgraham.com/know.html

  Have you ever felt like you wanted to remember something but you couldn't and then entered a state of sorrow and grief about your lost and wasted memories. This short piece may change your mind on that topic.

• More game design beauty
  https://melmagazine.com/an-oral-history-of-goldeneye-007-on-the-n64-129844f1c5ab

  A follow up on "Camera in side-scroller games" of issue 88. This week we dive into a specific game and the story behind its design.

Thoughts

"Commonality is worst habit of mind"

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Dropbox is dropping support
  http://wittchen.io/2018/08/12/poor-mans-dropbox/

  Well, not really true, they're reducing what they want to focus on, namely what type of filesystem they will support. Read on to know how the author builds a mini alternative to Dropbox. In my opinion it would be better to sync the ~/Backup directory instead of deleting and copying everytime, deleting and copying is way too risky.

• Keep the flame alive
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlbQsKpq3Ak&t=0s&list=PL64C1C0401141D607&index=2
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
  http://betaarchive.mrpijey.net/data/list_online/(Abandonware)%20Operating%20Systems.txt

  Learn from the past. The last link is a community where you are only able to download if you share with them some abandonware, I'm adding it in case someone is interested in those kinds of things.

• Allow changing uid in range
  https://github.com/burrows-labs/chuid
  https://blog.famzah.net/tag/cap_setuid/

  As with anything related to setuid things quickly get confusing. We shared "Setuid... again!" in 28, "Bash is secure" in 13, and "Oh so confusing setuid" in 8. Review those content and continue reading those two links.

• Building a DE, what does it take?
  https://pythonfunblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/14/writing-a-desktop-environment-with-python/
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2016-01-05/0/POSTING-en.html

  Window managers and desktop environments, how do they get build, where to start, this is what this article tries to tackle. For more on that topic see: "Window managers" in 64, and "Display servers and graphic operations" in 73.

• Why C and not something else
  https://mortoray.com/2012/06/11/whats-to-love-about-c/
  http://faehnri.ch/how-c-is-not-a-subset-of-cpp/

  Everyone have their ways of justifying why they like what they like and why they do what they do, that's what happens in the first post. It goes over the reasons why C is still relevant. In the second one the author clarifies why c++ is not c & classes.

• Everyday routine
  https://greduan.com/blog/2014-09-10-gutsu.html

  Thoughts on getting used to bleeding edge softwares.

• Text, typewriters, Linux, and art
  https://www.cambus.net/printing-ansi-art/
  https://www.cambus.net/20-years-of-linux-from-typewriters-to-computers/

  The type of pun is similar to the one in the video of "Retro gaming" in issue 77. This one is more simple and sweet though.

• Networking
  https://rhelblog.redhat.com/2015/09/29/pushing-the-limits-of-kernel-networking/
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/08/06/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-iv/
  http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_F-8HijfOA&list=PLeF8ZihVdpFfkICtA2HFsZecdC28_mrQh

  From configuring and understanding bottleneck in the kernel related to networking performance, to a follow up on the anatomy of a Linux DNS lookup series, to a video about current issues with the network stack (using netmap for user-space networking).

• The edge, what?
  https://arcentry.com/blog/what-the-f-is-the-edge/

  In a world of "cloud computing" and hyper-hype over keywords an ad-clicks, here's the new one that you need to attach yourself to: the edge.

• Another ACM issue
  https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3236388

  A topic that is recurrent to this newsletter: Storage. We talk about it in different forms but it keeps coming back.

Random

• Proving a point
  https://pudding.cool/2018/08/pockets/

  You know when you get in an argument and you feel like spending more time than usual to prove your point, end up doing a research about pocket in pants, then realize what you've done.

• Novel way to produce electricity
  https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/

  Hydroelectric dam are not a new thing but this is quite surprising, lifting and letting concrete blocks falls. What do you think, can it compete with category 2 energy storage?

• On Bullshit
  http://www5.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
  http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

  "This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled - whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything". It would be nice to learn to say "I don't know".

• Gambler's fallacy
  https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/career-hot-streaks

  When you're in the mood then everything falls together, you enter the trance mode.

Thoughts

"Trust breeds trust"

Maybe I don't need to say anything and gently leave those here:

• https://hbr.org/2006/09/the-decision-to-trust
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12170295/Relationships-opposites-do-not-attract-scientists-prove.html
• https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62
• https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/streets-bucharest-how-road-behaviour-correlates-trust-government-2015

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Phenomenography
  https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1273675
  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=4A302B0A84B9D881DC5888208EAFBB91?doi=10.1.1.86.5214&rep=rep1&type=pdf

  I'm not sure if this paper is supposed to be freely available, so if you have university or library access to research paper better pass through that medium. However I can't discern any difference between the one I've linked and the one from the acm. This papers deals with approaches on teaching Unix and what can learned from it, "the purpose of teaching Unix" and why it's important to articulate it clearly to students. A very valuable paper indeed.

• Unprivileged fs mount
  https://lwn.net/Articles/755593/

  What's the state of in-user-space file systems, and when it comes to automount as normal user, find out in this small lwn.

• Catharsis with systemd
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SwitchingToTimesyncd
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdTimesyncdFailure
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdDynamicUserDangerous

  One presentation at BSDCan 2018 about "The Tragedy of systemd" and 3 blog posts on a systemd adventure related to NTP, related to "Dynamic user allocation" and mounting in issue 44. That first presentation goes over what init systems and services are about, and daemons, maybe related to the podcast about daemons, find it here https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2017/06/04/daemons.html or here https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2111 maybe too booting on Unix: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1987.

• Now give me some BSD to balance
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_integrate_libfuzzer
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_integrate_libfuzzer1
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_integrate_libfuzzer2
  https://penguindreams.org/blog/openbsd-spampd-and-the-startup-bug/

  Fuzzing in userland being integrated into NetBSD, this will add huge bug fighting capabilities. More about bugs with the last post.

• GOT
  https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/13203/

  More on security. No this isn't an acronym for something else, this is the Global Offset Table. I've been trying this thing on multiple machines and OSs for days now but this doesn't seem reproducible anymore. Still a great way to learn about processes structure.

• TLS X509 Certificates
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/rfc-8446-aka-tls-1-3/
  https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/x509guide.txt

  We've shared a bunch of stuffs related to the PKI in this newsletter before, see "Security and networking" in 77, "CAs are big and powerful -> bad?" in 73, "TLS 1.3" in 68, "TLS v1.3" in 56. This is a follow up on those, and as usual with cloudflare it's a good technical post. The second text file in the list is for the persons who have or are looking for explanations on the x509 format and extensions, as I've been working with those at my day job it's interesting to see all that unfolding and not sound like an alien language anymore.

• Complexity rising in the DNS system
  https://blog.powerdns.com/2018/03/22/the-dns-camel-or-the-rise-in-dns-complexit/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N_PO3s_Z24&feature=youtu.be&t=1h20m4s

  More on RFCs. You can implement stuffs by looking at pcap only or look through the 3000 RFCs of DNS. As things build in complexity the number of people that are knowledgeable about the ins and outs are gradually reduced to peanuts. Somethings needs to be done about legacy and the way the information is passed down. "Standardizers enjoy complexity but do not personally bear the costs of that complexity."

• Building a stupid network for the best
  http://isen.com/stupid.html

  Continuing with the previous post but for the networking infrastructure. That's a topic that keeps emerging: backward compatibility and inheritance over years. Legacy becomes intelligent in a bad way. Closely related to "The world goes round and round" in issue 46.

• "Documented Unix Facilities Over 48 Years"
  https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3196476&dl=ACM&coll=DL
  https://www2.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2018-MSR-Unix-man/html/unix-man.pdf

  Diomidis Spinellis is the same author as the book linked in "Incorrect data initialization" all the way back in issue number 2. As with the first link in this newsletter, try getting access through your library or university first if you can. This is the research paper that the "Navigate the history of Unix tools" in 68 is based on.

• Doing Unix in the world
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180810075449
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLkPeNJYbew
  http://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-source-of-parking-tickets.html

  Two fun cases of Unix usage, one is about running X on very small devices and the other is similar to what we saw last week in "Everyday tools" (issue 87) about parsing humongous files.

Random

• Camera in side-scroller games
  https://gamasutra.com/blogs/ItayKeren/20150511/243083/Scroll_Back_The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Cameras_in_SideScrollers.php

  The type of articles I love to read, a research on all the different ways games implement camera behavior in side-scrollers.

• Philosoraptor
  http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/flickers_of_freedom/2014/02/a-new-theory-of-free-will-and-the-peer-to-peer-simulation-hypothesis.html

  Taking the Chinese room thought experiment a bit further and in a more complicated way. I'm not so convinced of the follow up on the thoughts but the author does a good job at defending it at least.

• Visualization of markov chains
  http://setosa.io/ev/markov-chains/

  Visualization is a great way to learn.

Thoughts

Everything in life has an expiry date, especially for electronics. Some companies even plan ahead this expiry date and indirectly forces you to buy new. But also, most of the things can be repaired, the question is if it's worth the effort to repair it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Getting it on with OpenBSD
  https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2017/07/openbsd-and-modern-laptop.html
  https://nanxiao.me/en/reflection-on-one-year-usage-of-openbsd/
  https://bobstechsite.com/openbsd-on-an-ibook-g4/
  https://www.bsdjobs.com/people/

  Articles about using OpenBSD on a daily basis, installing it, or saving old hardware with it, and all the fun that can derive from that. The last one is all BSD.

• Hey but NetBSD revives more hardwares!
  http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2018/08/06/msg000780.html
  https://www.embeddedarm.com/blog/netbsd-toaster-powered-by-the-ts-7200-arm9-sbc/
  https://wiki.netbsd.org/veriexec/

  A list of cool hardware from a NetBSD conference, plus the famous toaster as a bonus, and a reminder that NetBSD does care too about security too (certainly not as much as OpenBSD though), check its veriexec (see https://lwn.net/Articles/532778/ too, a bit different as it's using signature instead of hash check).

• Quick tips to check memory
  https://linux-audit.com/understanding-memory-information-on-linux-systems/

  We've tackled resource usage and performance monitoring a lot in this newsletter but most of the tools we've put forward are very specific. One that comes to mind is "Memory and optimizations" in issue number 39 and "Desktop Management Interface (DMI)" in 18. Let's bring the tone down a bit and try something easier, while not necessarily 100% accurate, for once.

• A new shell, why?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m-WEZz46U
  https://github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh
  https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible#erasing-text

  The answer is in the first minutes of the presentation, don't worry. The presentation is also a good review of shells in general, great presenter too. The last link is a reference guide to bash and shell tricks.

• Everyday tools
  https://intoli.com/blog/sitemaps-in-bash/
  https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20180805/

  Bash for the web, ready for some real Unix pipelines, this is what you're going to get. Parsing sitemaps using a single line and making SQL query faster by replacing them with Unix pipelines, sort of like that old Awk post "Special tejr" in issue 23.

• I think I understand now
  https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html

  A revisit of the never getting old "where does vim originate" and "oh I've discovered what vi is". We sort of discussed that in the tools, glue, scripts, and automation podcast and there was a lot of insightful comments on that thread too.

• Syscall reference
  https://john-millikin.com/unix-syscalls
  https://syscalls.kernelgrok.com/

  Two good reference when looking for what the lower level system calls are made. That first one also adds a bit of very welcomed explanation. You can also refer to the podcast about that topic, I tried to present it the best I could.

• Web web, more web
  https://blog.ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/08/04/mozillas-new-dns-resolution-is-dangerous/
  https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/8/229771-traceability/fulltext
  https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia

  In continuation with the previous links, if you remember from "Security and networking" in issue 77 Firefox is starting a new project to do DNS over HTTPs (DoH) and Trusted Recursive Resolver, that first article goes into depth why the author thinks it's a bad idea. The second one is also on the topic of anonymity (Maybe also digital identity). The last link is related to a remake of the web, see "You might have heard of gopher, what about Xanadu" in 76, and probably also related to all those "state of the web" links that were shared in the past. In my opinion, the web is already a web outside the browser.. And that also reminds me of are.na in "Connecting Ideas" of issue 15, a wonderful website.

• Gnome shell extensions
  https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/story-of-gnome-shell-extensions/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch

  Why things are what they are, learning about the past brings the past into the present. You start to see everywhere the legacy it has left.

• Themes and the past
  https://samuelhewitt.com/blog/2018-08-05-moving-beyond-themes
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/why-failure-conquer-desktop-was-great-gnulinux

  In continuation with the previous link, this one goes into letting go of the past when it comes to theming... Or not really. This article also discusses Gtk, theming, and if it's right to leave the default core style instead of overriding it. Do we stop customizing the Gnome shell, and stop customizing Gtk themes, does the project go in a similar direction as Mozilla did with Firefox. Seems like a week with pondering over the direction of the project, good that this is being initiated. We end in a corporate note with how it's important (maybe) to pierce the desktop market.

Random

• Subculture
  https://weburbanist.com/2011/09/05/mechanical-animals-36-steampunk-sculptures-robots/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk
  https://www.bigriversteampunkfestival.com/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z97uQjMOq_I

  Remember the weird music genra in "New genres outside of pop" of issue 78, let's dig into other subcultures, this one is in between comic-con fantasy and the burning man culture, but I'll leave that for you to judge. It's very entertaining to watch, for sure, especially the mechanical parts.

• On my quest of the Cretaceous
  http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#66
  http://www.dinosaurfact.net/

  Don't know why they call it Jurassic Park if most of the dinosaurs are from the Cretaceous. Since last week I've been on a dinosaur hunt, back to my childhood encyclopedia, which I'm sure a lot of other kids have been into.

• Haptic belts & language
  https://360.here.com/2015/04/17/wearables-improve-sense-direction/
  https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028185.800-haptic-soldiers-guided-by-buzzing-belt/
  http://www.messagetoeagle.com/kuuk-thaayorre-language-uses-cardinal-direction-to-define-space/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language

  What do haptic belts and language have in common... Remember the extended mind we keep bringing up (I won't link it again, you can search the archive). This is another side of it, embrace the amazing flexibility of learning to defer tasks to our tools and become experts with them.

• Pollution
  https://undark.org/breathtaking/
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-ban.html
  https://phys.org/news/2018-07-trash-piles-china-door-recycling.html
  https://www.epa.gov/recycle

  Making the environment cleaner to live in, pure and pristine, should be on everyone's mind. Sad to think that for the ones who can make a difference this is all a business and when this business isn't viable anymore there's no reason to continue. There certainly are incentives and money is one, there should be a way to make this lucrative too. We can blame whichever body/systems/government we want instead of taking responsibilities but this doesn't change that we need to do something. Start with using less packaging and more reusable high quality containers, buy local it'll need less transportation.

• I thought I wouldn't post about this anymore
  https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-tech-backlash-we-really-need

  Yes, another "state of the web, state of the mind" piece, a good summary. Tools are made to be used; when a knife is used to kill someone, or let's say it better "when someone uses a knife to kill someone", is it the knife that's at fault or the person? Should we have regulations that made knives harmless because of that? Can you enter anywhere with a knife on you? Wouldn't you be looked at funny if you were walking around with hundreds of knives in your pocket selling them to anyone passing by? What about building extremely dangerous knives with advertisements on how lethal they can be? This is an analogy, a bad one but a relatable one. "When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.." Have fun remembering the awkward and uninformed questioning of Zuckerberg, the over-used-by-career-politician-to-gain-votes "What about the CHILDREN" arguments, and the unexpected surprise by the general audience over their unawareness over the choice of their digital tools usage "because they're free". Let's quote from the article "These are the broad outlines of the tech backlash. But against what, exactly, is the backlash? Is it against the ascendency of technology as the driving principle of modern society?"

Thoughts

"One theory says that man is a neoteny and is no longer able to evolve. If this is true, then what an absurd creature mankind has evolved into." - Eiri Masami

On a side note, we've broken the 240+ readers mark, congratulations everyone! I can't help but be happy at the thought that everyone deliberately chose to receive this newsletter, and that it only spread through word of mouth.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A beautiful way to sandbox
  http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180728063716
  https://man.openbsd.org/unveil

  OpenBSD on its path to sandbox application from the ground up. A follow up on the presentation of Bob Beck in "In BSD land" of issue 79.

• Alternative screen and the quirkiness of terminals
  https://kevingoodsell.github.io/2011-05-20/the-trouble-with-terminals.html
  https://www.xfree86.org/4.8.0/ctlseqs.html
  http://shallowsky.com/linux/noaltscreen.html

  Terminals are such weird beasts from the past, so many compatibility features, so many fallbacks, etc.. It never gets tiresome to read about new things you didn't know about in them.

• extra BSD myths
  https://people.freebsd.org/~nik/advocacy/myths.html

  An old but still relevant myth buster kind of article, skip if you're bored of the typical discussions.

• POSIX lock
  https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/c230a7a24?ln=994-1081

  A discussion about the limitations of POSIX lock within the same process and what sqlite uses to counter them.

• Replacing part of the Linux system with a DB
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.05308.pdf
  https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/07/23/replacing-linux-with-a-database-system/

  32K cores supercomputer, that's a lot of cores and maybe some datastructures within the OS aren't flexible enough to handle that, maybe it would be cool to replace some with a DB, a sort of CRUD plus here associative array algebra. The paper is small (8 pages), a good quick read.

• Detecting you've got your target
  https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/
  http://blog.rahme.info/user-agents-weird

  It's a bad idea to pipe untrusted commands directly on your machines to be executed. Those posts discuss this a bit, the first one is an ingenious way to detect that something is executed on the other end.

• TLD are useless?
  https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/the-death-of-a-tld

  Eh, not really but the death of unexpected funny corporately used top level domains is certainly dead.

• Putting freedom zero under microscope
  https://www.sicpers.info/2018/07/is-freedom-zero-such-a-hot-idea/

  While starting on a hyper biased note, this article still poses a good question, and old one, which is again already answered from the GPL perspective in the comments. This is close to "math-washing" in "..State of the mind" of 75.

• Text art
  http://widerscreen.fi/numerot/2017-1-2/beyond-encoding-a-critical-look-at-the-terminology-of-text-graphics/

  This paper should get you started with text art, it deals with all the types from top to bottom, categorizing them.

• Pointy pointers
  https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2018/07/24/pointers-and-bytes.html

  More on the topics of "Pointers" we addressed in so many issues like 81.

Random

• Blender and light
  https://hackaday.com/2018/07/30/light-painting-animations-directly-from-blender/

  A beautiful way to mix a sort of augmented reality using blender.

• Another hiring critic
  https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/07/29/getting-a-job-without-whiteboard-puzzles/

  For those who don't like whiteboards this article should help.

• That's not advertising!
  https://nrempel.com/posts/what-we-have-now-is-not-advertising/
  https://lobste.rs/s/mwlrof/what_we_have_now_is_not_advertising

  An article in which the author redefines the term advertising as anything he sees too much of on a daily basis. I'm not sure what rock he's been under but even billboards and TV commercial meticulously study their target audience. When in doubt rely on "FAKE NEWSSSSS" from issue 81. If you want an internet black hole for "shitty" content I've written a script for that here: https://gist.github.com/venam/97a06e563161693d109b9d31152bab0b. NB: this newsletter itself is a "curated" feed, let me know what you think of that. You should also read up the comments on the blog and lobste.rs as they are insightful.

• Clickbaity title from nautilus, NO...
  http://nautil.us/issue/62/systems/this-man-says-the-mind-has-no-depths
  http://nautil.us/issue/62/systems/there-is-no-such-thing-as-unconscious-thought
  http://nautil.us/blog/many-of-our-beliefs-are-unconscious-a-response-to-nick-chater

  So much of the content about consciousness, unconsciousness, awareness, mind, and brain have confusing and conflicting definitions (if any at all) which only brings up mysticism and fictions on the topic. In those articles we tackle those, the first two deal with the old mostly thrown away but still over-used in media concept of psychoanalysis, but also proposes a flat mind which is not something especially new but certainly a bit reductionist and contrary to the usual discussion. The last one is a reply to the first two, again with a clash of definitions, which in my opinion he doesn't use the same one so is attacking something entirely different... It might contribute to the mysticism or might not, I'll leave it for you to judge and take whatever value from them or get even more confused with this word jumble/war. Related to "The brain" in 78, "The Grand Analogy" in 66.

• Culture clash
  http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180729-why-brazilians-are-always-late
  https://www.npr.org/2018/07/12/628490776/watch-your-mouth
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

  From culture habits to language, how is intermixing them opening our eyes to new concepts.

Thoughts

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications. - Lawrence Krauss

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Xterm features
  https://lukas.zapletalovi.com/2013/07/hidden-gems-of-xterm.html

  As much as we like minimalist terminals it's still nice to get some useful features, maybe you'll like them and it'll make you switch to Xterm or maybe it'll make you look for similar functions in your current terminal emulator.

• What is time
  https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock.html#toc1

  A timely series (not really, it's old) of tips about setting up your clocks properly. I'll soon try out that trick with the adjtime and the RTC drift.

• environ or getenv
  https://linux.die.net/man/7/environ
  http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_4.0.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/baselib---environ.html
  https://linux.die.net/man/3/getenv

  There are many ways to do this, all are mostly equivalent, which one do you prefer?

• sourceforge
  https://sourceforge.net/blog/brief-history-sourceforge-look-to-future/

  Like it or not sourceforge is an oldie that made the path for other similar websites. This post is about a rebrand regarding the recent events that affected the website trustworthiness.

• Distribute keys, distribute code
  https://bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2018/07/git-aliases-shell/
  https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/23/Git-is-already-distributed.html
  https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2018/07/24/on-git-github-and-email/
  https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/03/12/
  https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/signing-commits-without-gpg/

  That first post is very heavy to read, the style the author has chosen is a bit foggy. The content is still fine, it's the way it's communicated that's the issue. Let me know if I wasn't the only one feeling that. The second one is still about git, a direct continuation of "Git and emails" in 82. The last two are about GPG, its usages, and trying to write alternatives. The last two posts are about GPG sort of mixes the implementation with the protocol by saying that the protocol has a "bad user experience and interface". The protocol doesn't say anything about how to implement the user interface, it's a specification document. Apart from that small note, it's a very cool post.

• zpool and backups
  http://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/46/
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2018-06-26-openbsd-easy-backup.html

  ZFS again with a new volume management feature called "checkpoint", it's fun and makes doing risky operations generate less sweat. TODO

• In the cloud
  https://community.online.net/t/freebsd-on-arm64/6678
  https://push.cx/2018/nixos

  Two posts about setting up FreeBSD on ARM64 in the cloud and NixOS respectively. Not personally my cup of tea but for anyone that loves this kind of posts this is gold.

• Heap, malloc, glibc
  https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/painless-intro-to-the-linux-userland-heap/
  https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-used-and-abused-use-after-free/
  https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-the-magicians-cape-1-byte-overflow/
  https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-riding-free-on-the-heap-double-free-attacks/
  https://sensepost.com/blog/2018/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-set-you-free-part-1/

  This is a superb resource on learning about the heap/malloc. It's well explained though a bit hard to follow in some places. I've solved the two challenges in the second and third links (it was fun, PM me if you want them) however the second one about 1 byte overflow doesn't seem to work on newer glibc (seems to work on 2.23 but not on 2.27).

• In userspace OOM manager
  https://code.fb.com/production-engineering/open-sourcing-oomd-a-new-approach-to-handling-ooms/
  https://github.com/facebookincubator/oomd

  An interesting take at managing process over memory usage instead of letting the kernel handle it when it's in a dire situation. For the worried, this one is under GPL(kernel requirements probably) so don't worry. Related to issue 25 "malloc never fails on Linux... or does it?".

• Another one about hiring
  https://www.stilldrinking.org/interviewing-is-broken

  We had that discussion earlier in "But didn't you write an embedded os" of issue 75. It's pretty hard to set up an interview process that correctly assess the potential of a would-be-future-employee, it's easy to do an interview process for someone who you'll hire only to work on a task and then move on, but asking random unrelated questions seems like a waste of time to both parties.

Random

• Garden paths
  http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguous_garden_path.html
  https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/36385656700/my-favourite-garden-path-sentences

  A beautiful way to have fun with words.

• Man-Computer a reboot of the series
  https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

  Let's continue from "The brain" in 78, "Attention span" in 77, "Are we our tools" in 68, and "The extended mind" in 64, and more. This time it's about an old paper (1960) that we're sort of in the process of reaching. The process of cooperation and participation in thinking mentioned in the paper is still lacking a bit but still in the making, see section 5.1 5.4 and you'll know what I mean. You can check the next link for an example of the drawbacks.

• 7 items you won't believe are shockingly amazing!
  http://www.iftf.org/statesponsoredtrolling
  http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/DigIntel/IFTF_State_sponsored_trolling_report.pdf
  http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/ourwork/digintel/IFTF_biology_of_disinformation_062718.pdf
  https://www.ntd.tv/2018/02/21/memetic-warfare-spreading-weaponized-ideas-for-influence-and-control/

  Long paper that you can skim through. That website also has a series of papers all about the topic of Digital Intelligence and disinformation. When in doubt refer to the infographic of "FAKE NEWSSSSS" in 81.

• Hyperinflation
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-23/venezuela-s-inflation-to-reach-1-million-percent-imf-forecasts
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zimbabwe_$100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Zimbabwe
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsqa-YHE36A
  http://ferfal.blogspot.com/2008/10/thoughts-on-urban-survival-2005.html

  A sad thing we all fear. We don't want to be the person of that last post.

Thoughts

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknown. There are things we don't know we don't know. - Donald Rumsfeld

A seemingly humble quote that should certainly be put in its context. Rumsfeld was a politician and this was something he said following 9/11 regarding "weapons of mass destruction" and the lack of evidence for them. There are multiple aspects to this, on one level it reminds us of our relation with our knowledge, on another it gives you a moment to stop and think before assuming or over-rationalizing, and finally it shows that cheesy quotes are often posted on social media without checking their background story (yet another week with cheesy quotes, I know!).

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A file, what's a file?
  https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/everything_is_file.html

  Sometimes exposing a kernel function via a file (VFS api) isn't very practical but only adds complexity to the mix.

• PipesFS
  https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/pipesfs-fast-linux-io-in-the-unix-tradition
  https://www.cs.vu.nl/~herbertb/projects/streamline/index.html

  For those who don't have access to a research database you can PM me for a link or simply search for it online (your responsibility). This is a paper about making pipes faster by using the power of multiple processors and mixing this with an intricate use of the VFS. This puts in question what was discussed in the previous link or actually confirms it. Maybe related to "Parallelism in any Bourne shell" in 17.

• Http in asm
  https://github.com/nemasu/asmttpd

  You could write your web server using the pipesFS or you could do it with asm.

• usr available at boot
  https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/
  https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-May/025003.html
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64116#c3

  A change that was also done on Arch a few years back (~2013), here we see the adaptive decisions that some distributions have to make to support specific programs that rely on this and also to make them more compatible with other systems. This is related to the discussion on file system hierarchy, https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2006. The last link is extra content about the argument for binary logs.

• The annoying driver interaction with ioctl
  https://www.lifewire.com/linux-command-ioctl-4092621
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl

  I don't usually like to link to Wikipedia but this one is unexpectedly explained really well. If you've been confused about this whole ioctl then take a look.

• Machine independent packing/format
  https://github.com/pgniewek/learn_gbitx
  https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man3/fcall.html

  A mini example on how to pack together some values to get machine independent format. Probably related to "On a roll with C" in 61 and "Packing bytes natively what does that mean" in 59.

• BSD confs everywhere everytime
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/report_from_pkgsrccon_2018
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180716193511
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180716202456
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180717074543

  Those hackatons are great, they seem to push forward a lot of good engineering. PkgsrcCon and OpenBSD hackaton. One of our old member gave a talk there, hello yrmt! There's probably too much content to consume in a week, I only could check a few of those. Similarly to "Hackathon and secure chats" in 76, I'm still a huge proponent of those types of posts.

• Pushing ideas
  https://williambharding.com/blog/technology/linux-touchpad-like-a-macbook-goal-worth-pursuing/
  https://zebmccorkle.u.asymptote.club/blog/nanix-an-idea-for-a-modern-small-unix-like-operating-system/

  Just ideas by bloggers, one about how there's a need for a small but usable Unix-like system. This is related to sortix in "POSIX" of issue 65 and fuzix in "Very small Unix" of issue 15. Another about the state of the touchpad on Linux, also related to "The mouse is so fast on your machine" in 75.

• Spirit of the law
  https://medium.com/@mdrahony/are-pgp-key-servers-breaking-the-law-under-the-gdpr-a81ddd709d3e

  Remember the whois thing in "State of the web..." of issue 75, well now it's bringing that stuff back at pgp servers. gpg --search-keys 'nothisrealaddress@someoneelses_emailaddress.notreal'

• More features and customization or less
  http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/07/options.html
  https://lobste.rs/s/hs4gnj/tech_notes_why_not_add_option_for

  No, just the right amount. This articles goes into the kind of thinking you should go through before deciding what to add as an option/configuration to your program.

Random

• Have you showered?
  http://www.homethingspast.com/vintage-antique-showers/

  Because this is the trendy new thing in town, an unusual contraption called a shower. I stole that from HN and thought it was a nice article, similar to "Remote Control" in 82, "A history of the picnic table" in 77 and "A story on privacy" in 65. This is interesting to go back and time and trace the history of today's common ideas and things.

• Social media craze
  https://anildash.com/2018/07/13/unfollowing-everybody/

  It's been a while since I've shared something with the "state of the internet", so here's one about quitting but not quitting entirely. The writer goes through a weird complex and filtering process (sort of related to the obsessive over-rationalization of "Goddess Spreadsheet" in 28). It's like the middle-ground between smoking 10 packs a day and saying 5 cigs a day won't kill you - The underlying reason why you smoke hasn't changed in both cases, you haven't tackled the issue.

• Edge effect
  https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-design-principles/10-edge-effect/

  A phenomena that stay true across domains of life and inter-domains of life. Be sure to check the delightful comments at the bottom of the article.

• Bring it on!
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/well/the-power-of-positive-people.html

  Spend time with your friends this week. This is what I'm going to do and I hope this is going to be super fun for everyone! "In general you want friends with whom you can have a meaningful conversation. You can call them on a bad day and they will care. Your group of friends are better than any drug or anti-aging supplement, and will do more for you than just about anything."

• Glitch art
  https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/15/17564588/datamosh-youtubeartifacts-glitch-art-kraftsow

  All cyberpunk unite! This post goes into a simple technique to create glitchy videos, a new but old trend on youtube. It's nice that this is coming back to life. This seems to be the thing these days: Remake whatever is old cool again. There's certainly a marketing idea behind that to target people based on nostalgia but still, I ain't got anything against that as long as we're deliberately choosing to revive memories.

Thoughts

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives - Annie Dillard

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with - Jim Rohn

We become and attract what we think about most of the time - Jerry Bruckner

Three quotes that are pretty much encompasses the same idea, to do things deliberately because this is what this is, not a future concept of what could be. Hope this can enlighten your week, cheers!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Plumbing
  https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/plumbing
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/09/23/the-duct-tape-programmer/

  The classic question about hiring and actual work. Plumbers and duct-tapers vs craftmanships. Is it about ego in the end, who doesn't want to be hired as a creator?

• Mommy where do greps come from?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk

  So... I've been pronouncing ed the wrong way all my life, does it change anything, I don't think so. Enjoy a mini-talk by Kernighan about the history of grep.

• Renderer redirecter
  https://www.brow.sh/

  Render a browser in the terminal, kind of like libcaca is for video. There's also a browser front-end for a browser https://html.brow.sh/https://nixers.net which turns everything upside down. Related to "Fun in the console" in 61.

• Networking load balancing
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-drop-10-million-packets/
  https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2018-multi-tier-loadbalancer

  Technical details about setting things up so that you drop packets rapidly or balance them.

• Nftables vs iptables
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zr8XqdET1c
  https://www.garron.me/en/linux/iptables-manual.html

  I never really got into iptables so those info are pretty new to me. If you feel the same way this should help, even though the presentation is a bit heavy to listen to, not in the technical sense but in a boring sense, it's still worth a listen.

• Memory management
  https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/memory-in-c-the-stack-the-heap-and-static/
  https://www.iar.com/support/resources/articles/mastering-stack-and-heap-for-system-reliability/
  https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-bonus-printf-might-be-leaking/
  http://ourmachinery.com/post/virtual-memory-tricks/
  https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/management/jconsole.html

  A review of what was seen in "sbrk and malloc" in 53 plus much more interesting related topics on memory management like heap exploitable and virtual mem tricks (this one is close to the handle in "Pointers" of issue 81). The last link is for comparison.

• Init system components
  https://github.com/arsv/sninit/tree/master/doc
  https://github.com/arsv/sninit/blob/master/doc/init.txt
  https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

  So the discussion about init system starts again. This time we'll take it even more seriously and technically. The first series of docs go into the nitty-gritty details of writing a PID1, you can start with the second link. The last link is somewhat like supervisord but split in many sub-programs.

• Portable systemd services
  http://0pointer.net/blog/walkthrough-for-portable-services.html

  It seems we're talking too much about systemd but there's a reason for that: It keeps adding more features to itself. You can choose to ignore it or to read and learn about what's up with it and if you can get ideas (to do or not) for your own projects and research on init/system&service-manager/super-server-daemon.

• ***programmers
  http://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeStarProgrammer

  Pointers frighten many persons and many novice or advance programmers take it as a point of pride to shame newcomers by creating impenetrable code. I'll quote something from the newcomers podcast: "Those condescending persons might sound elitist but it’s a sort of wall of entry which may appear intriguing to new ones. They might want to get behind the wall with the others, it’s tempting to become yourself a condescending guy/gal. It could be in itself a drive to learn but it’s wrong to add fuel to the fire."

Random

• More on identity
  https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/10/smarter-signatures-experiments-in-verifications/

  What are the available work in progress, ideas, and solutions for smart signatures. This is a continuation on digital identity.

• Art critics
  http://www.tylerlhobbs.com/writings/intellectualism-and-generative-art

  Let's resume with the "Organic art" from last week (issue 82). In this one we explore the tricky aspect of who's building all those arts we saw and how their perspective maybe affect their pieces.

• The survival of design
  https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/timeless-classic-ui-design
  https://brutalist-web.design/
  https://lobste.rs/s/lxbdu9/brutalist_web_design

  Creativity with design, ditching templates and heavy pages, dance with the counter-culture of lightweight minimalist functional websites. There's an excellent discussion in the lobste.rs link.

• Too much internet
  https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/opinion/chinas-web-junkies.html
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqctG3NnDa0

  I agree that there's a video game addiction growing with young boys but I don't agree with the conflation that this is an "internet addiction". Video games are something, the internet in its entirety something else.

• NIH
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqQQBSJj5yc

  A phenomena that keeps being brought up in a lot of tech discussion, from scratch or not from scratch.

• El libro de la familia
  http://www.technologicaldisobedience.com/2016/05/16/el-libro-de-la-familia/
  http://cubamaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Con-Nuestros-Propios-Esfuerzos-reduced.pdf

  Two books that were distributed in Cuba during its low time. I'll let you judge what to think of them.

• Safety and checklists
  https://rakhim.org/2018/07/software-shouldnt-fail
  https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/559996276/the-trick-to-surviving-a-high-stakes-high-pressure-job-try-a-checklist

  Test driven development is super popular, RFCs are there too, we got ton of specifications that we have to adhere with, some people are crazy about formal verification, etc.. I guess the software tech field is more solid then he'd like to think. What's your opinion on this topic?

Thoughts

You may delay, but time will not. - Benjamin Franklin (can't find the source?)

Can't throw a cheesy quote without more context:
https://philosiblog.com/2013/02/18/you-may-delay-but-time-will-not/

This article takes it from the side of productivity (see "Over-Productive" in 78, "Production" in 66, and "The busy trap" in 32) however this is not really accurate as many of the most prominent inventors didn't have the mindset we today portray as overly obsessed with managing their time and work. The other side of it is that it's a reflection on paying attention to what matters to you, an appreciation of life.

Have a great week!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Listing processes in OpenBSD
  http://www.kaashif.co.uk/2015/06/18/how-to-get-a-list-of-processes-on-openbsd-in-c/
  http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/sys/sys/sysctl.h#331
  http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/include/kvm.h#55
  http://bxr.su/NetBSD/include/kvm.h#58
  http://bxr.su/DragonFly/lib/libkvm/kvm.h#73
  http://bxr.su/FreeBSD/lib/libkvm/kvm.h#74
  http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/bin/ps/ps.c.diff?r1=1.37&r2=1.38&only_with_tag=MAIN&f=h
  http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/bin/ps/ps.c.diff?r1=1.46&r2=1.47&only_with_tag=MAIN&f=h
  http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/bin/ps/ps.c?rev=1.91&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_with_tag=MAIN

  An example of non-portability on Unix, but that is available on most BSDs (see links 3 to 6). Remember that NetBSD, for example, has had a procfs for a long time but if you inspect the code of ps(1) they switched to the sysctl/kvm interface starting from 1.38 (18 years ago) and deprecated the procfs in 1.47 (links 7 to 9).

• Git and emails
  https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html

  A blogger we already know from an articles in 29 "Rules are made to be broken". In continuation with last week fun with git, this week we're doing git from emails. These days most use interfaces to handle all this but it's good to do it from the command line too.

• Core dumps
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/29/core/

  Another blogger we know from "Debugging issues on unknown boxes" in 69, this one is about using the core dump pattern feature of the Linux kernel and how it can have weird behavior when the pattern waits. Another user has commented that maybe using /proc/sys/kernel/core_pipe_limit as a safety could mitigate the many concurrent crashing processes piped to user-space.

• Another week with posts about C and pointers
  https://stefansf.de/post/pointers-are-more-abstract-than-you-might-expect/

  An article where we turn pointer arithmetic into madness with C specification and compiler practices.

• Study of filesystems evolution
  https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_lu_010-017_final.pdf

  An easy to read study that delves into answering questions like what kind of patches land in filesystems, what kind of bugs or other things do they fix, are they reduced over time, where exactly in the code those bugs appear the most, etc..

• Terminal madness once more
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSnMoClPH2E&feature=player_embedded
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5zA5Xi_ph8

  Terminals are intricate, you learn about them and are surprised by the mess of backward compatibility that lies underneath it. In continuity with "Signals for IPC? NO!" in 81, "Writing a terminal emulator" in 64, "Console codes" in 63, "Doing it in V7" in 58, "Following through with the low level hacks" in 52, "More terminal love" in 49, "What's that key for, why is that key used here?" in 37, "RS-232 and others" in 29, "A zoom into control characters and terminals" in 13, "Understanding the modifier keys in the terminal" in 1. So much content!

• Font shaping
  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1x97pfbB1gbD53Yhz6-_yBUozQMVJ_5yMqqR_D-R7b7I/present#slide=id.p
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/typography/script-development/devanagari

  Just when you thought regex were a bit complex, check what shapers syntax is like for an Indic language used in India and Nepal amongst others like Persian and even Unicode "art", and what is required to parse them properly.

• Compilers and bitcode
  https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/

  Another continuity with past links, this one goes into "Programming language theory", check issue 80. We dive into Fat binaries and what is being worked on to avoid them in the future for Apple devices, it's very messy.

• Color biases
  https://www.fastcodesign.com/90177573/how-blue-became-techs-favorite-color-and-why-it-shouldnt-be

  Remember the "Green on black" discussion, well this is another aspect of light on computers.

• Front-end, over minimalism, and UX
  https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-246
  https://medium.com/@caseorganic/why-do-we-keep-building-cars-with-touchscreens-alt-the-hidden-lives-of-touchscreens-55faf92799bf
  http://www.breck-mckye.com/blog/2018/05/why-is-front-end-development-so-unstable/
  https://medium.com/@jdan/i-peeked-into-my-node-modules-directory-and-you-wont-believe-what-happened-next-b89f63d21558

  Most UI are made with JS these days, and it's hard to follow up, plus it's also hard to design something that has good user interaction.

• MWL, who's that?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1GjP1Q_SG0

  An interview with the super funny and knowledgeable author of "Erotic systemd" we had in 40 and others such as content related to PAM we shared before. "Good software let you sleep", a lesson to take from the above links. Though we're definitely not doing any advertisement for his books, I haven't read any of them yet so..

Random

• Organic art
  https://inconvergent.net/
  http://www.complexification.net/gallery/
  https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/
  http://latham-mutator.com

  Enjoy those intricate pieces I've found laying on a wave while surfing the WWW.

• Remote Control
  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/how-the-remote-control-rewired-the-home/375214/
  http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/06/the_history_of_the_remote_control_why_are_they_so_awful_.html

  Remote control started as anti-ads then brought up the habit of channel surfing and slouching in the couch. Nowadays we're slowly seeing the rise of voice interfaces which are more integrated and less hindering to our dynamic lives, and the same goes for smart watches and phones that can remotely control all the IoT connected devices. It seems we've moved away and are somewhat repulsed by "laziness", we're on an ever growing trend of efficacy and production mania. However, a sentence of the first article caught my attention, it reflects a feeling about the emergent tech and most early adopters, a sort of signaling: "Remotes suggested that their owner was himself high-tech and in demand, so busy and important he could not possibly cross the room to change the CD himself."

• Some philosophy
  http://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/
  http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/twenty-questions/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTm-4O2a9dA

  Big philosophy to justify being addicted to twitter, and some real nice website about ethics.

• Is it dinner or supper?
  https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/dinner-or-supper?page=1
  https://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/

  Language evolves, something close to "Pedantic and semantic" in 66.

Thoughts

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act. - Tara Ploughman

For context: https://www.quotes-clothing.com/less-confident-are-more-serious-act-tara-ploughman/

I've always liked this quote, I have no clue if it's true but from anecdotal evidence I can assert it. Aren't the advices about being "more confident" pullulating the online self-help trend trying to say indirectly that we have to take ourselves and things in general less seriously. Yep, cheesy social media quote that actually has more in it than it looks.

Have a wonderful week!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• HAMMER2
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/06/20/21411.html

  Amazing that these days with automation we can trigger rare unexpected bugs that happen in extreme cases.

• Having fun with Qemu
  https://www.cambus.net/booting-openbsd-kernels-in-efi-mode-with-qemu/

  A mini-guide on setting up EFI for the Qemu environment so that you can run tests locally.

• SED and windows path
  https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2018/06/sed-a-debugging-story

  It's cool to have some Unix tools available on Windows but the issue the author ran into shows how the different ways of thinking about system development can affect simple script execution.

• Signals for IPC? NO!
  https://blog.danielisz.org/2018/06/21/the-power-of-ctrlt/
  https://lobste.rs/s/d6zgrr/power_ctrl_t

  Remember that podcast about signals when we talked about BSD adding SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for user defined signals (maybe we've also mentioned that when discussing terminals)? Well here's an example of how some programs choose to implement their handling for progress report.

• Volatility
  https://barrgroup.com/Embedded-Systems/How-To/C-Volatile-Keyword
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13341870/signals-and-interrupts-a-comparison
  https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/understanding-the-linux/0596005652/ch04s06.html

  From embedded system to more on interrupts and signals, that last article is a bit beyond me but I can still hover the content.

• Pointers
  https://gist.github.com/shafik/848ae25ee209f698763cffee272a58f8
  http://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
  https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/Massacring-C-Pointers/index.html

  Undefined behavior in C and C++ and type punning, aka some sort of casting by memcpy into other types, more on how to create a handle system to not mess up with pointers, and even more about a book about pointers.

• Restart sequences
  https://lwn.net/Articles/650333/
  https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d82991a8688ad128b46db1b42d5d84396487a508/kernel/rseq.c

  Something called "restart sequences" just landed in the Linux kernel, remember Drepper's paper in issue 58, well this tackles the issue of process scheduling and CPU affinity in multiprocessor environment by restarting the sequence of important code. The limit is that it can only be a single operation.

• GUI every week?
  https://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=1915
  https://blog.gtk.org/2018/06/23/a-gtk-3-update/

  Right in the middle of the TTY week and we have to talk about the temptation of sumptuous graphical interfaces. Here we see updates on the work for KDE on FreeBSD and on the GTK team.

• Git history
  https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/07/keeping-git-commit-history-clean/
  https://henrikwarne.com/2018/06/25/6-git-aha-moments/

  It's important to have a good history, maybe leaving some useless commits once in a while doesn't kill but overall you want to be able to narrow down what happened at what time and who did it for which reason. The other one is about git from the point of view of someone that comes from svn.

• Reproducibility and security
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/757118/f2f894279576c348/
  https://isdebianreproducibleyet.com/
  https://oxy-secure.app/
  https://oxy-secure.app/protocol.txt

  Torture your binaries to make them reproducible, make a soup in two widely different environments you've created. All of that sweat polishes them. That Oxy is a new tool the author uses as a replacement to SSH, as with anything new it comes with lots of critics and lots of cheers. Check out the protocol it's an interesting and simple one using asymmetric keys and ephemeral ones to derive a shared symmetric secret.

Random

• A good explanation
  http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/

  Communication is hard and this article is all about that.

• Wedding season is here, buckled your belt
  https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/laura-knowles/disney-delusion-relationships-_b_1235922.html?guccounter=1
  https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/fashion/weddings/chasing-the-fairy-tale-wedding.html

  In continuation with "Fairy tales and sleep", as with that other topic this is a hot one left for your own judgement.

• FAKE NEWSSSSS
  https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174

  The International Federation of Library Associations has setup and convenient infographic to educate and advocate critical thinking.

• Internet and culture
  https://irc.com/
  http://www.openculture.com/

  Bring IRC back, we're already on it! On the openculture one you'll find a lot of intricate topics, sort of similarto "A fascinating blog" in 66.

Thoughts

The S in IoT stands for Security

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Writing services with systemd
  https://blog.akerl.org/2016/05/26/systemd-services-are-easy/
  https://davmac.wordpress.com/2018/06/21/escape-from-system-d-episode-v/

  We've shared a lot of content already about systemd like "systemd gui" in 54, and many more like "Yet another systemd article" in 37. Take those ones as a complements to the others.

• Dreaming about shells
  https://rain-1.github.io/shell-2.html

  Rethink the shell, think powershell. Do you like that? Why?

• BSD on desktop and more GUI stuffs
  https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/16/freebsd-desktop-part-5-key-components-status-bar/
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/freebsd-desktop-part-4-key-components-window-manager/
  https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.13.0.php

  A continuation of the vermaden blog posts (which there are more at the moment but I won't link) plus another update of KDE and stuffs related to UX. The browser integration inside the desktop is an intriguing concept. Someone commented on the vermaden posts that they are too basic and not containing useful information however I disagree on that. I think it's a space that needs to be filled and whenever someone tries to write content for beginners explaining every component of a functioning desktop environment they are met with similar feedbacks. Two other projects that come to mind but that are still lacking are https://github.com/feroldi/ricing and https://github.com/nixers-projects/ricerous.

• Parsing
  https://medium.com/@indy_singh/strings-are-evil-a803d05e5ce3

  "It's all just text", right, like we said last week, however text parsing can be consuming. This guy reduces the consumption from 7GB to 32KB.

• Access to root TTY
  https://j.ludost.net/blog/archives/2018/06/13/ancient_su_-_hostile_vulnerability_in_debian_8_and_9/

  I had no clue of this privilege escalation trick. When you think about it it makes sense but it's a pretty big flaw.

• Crack and debug
  https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/15/confessions-of-a-disk-cracker-the-secrets-of-4am/
  https://blog.asrpo.com/making_a_low_level_debugger

  Reverse engineering software and a new lovely blogger to follow (it's the same person as the cool "Bootstraping issues" entry in 23, so not really new).

• Deduplication on the command line
  http://git.2f30.org/dedup/file/README.html

  No need for that Virtual Data Optimizer layer of "VDO, A new layer to add to the data storage stack" in 71, you can get simple deduplication on the command line. It's harder to manage but it's simpler to setup. Give it a try.

• Booting on Unix
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LinuxBootOverview

  I've tried myself at explaining the booting process on Unix before, as clumsily as I could. Here the author does it in a much more compacted and clean way with a focus on points of failures.

• Programming language theory
  https://mpc.sh/blog/a-gentle-intro-to-plt/

  I started to dabble a bit with bison the past few weeks, checking what's the big deal. I wish I had this document before diving into the documentation.

• DNS lookup part 2
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/06/18/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-ii/

  We left off last week with part 1 so let's continue.

Random

• The scarcity trap
  https://www.npr.org/2018/04/02/598119170/the-scarcity-trap-why-we-keep-digging-when-were-stuck-in-a-hole

  This happens with everyone of us, for each in different situations.

• Many layers of messages
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-choco-pie-dividend-south-korean-firms-are-drooling-at-the-prospect-of-business-in-the-north/2018/06/17/3a6e7cc8-6f8b-11e8-bf86-a2351b5ece99_story.html

  I don't usually share world news however in this one there's a lot to say on many levels and I think I'll leave it to you to have fun discussing it with your peers, there's a lot to discuss.

• A math village
  http://www.middleeasteye.net/in-depth/features/turkey-s-mathematics-village-changing-education-one-equation-at-a-time-1597523620

  The school of Pythagoreanism is back to life and at an intricate location on top of it all.

• '06
  http://jimmyjonesphotography.com/p47158853
  http://jimmyjonesphotography.com/blog/2012/12/my-uncanny-connection-to-the-06-female-wolf-832f

  Discussion about '06 for the 6th month of the year. A wild and proud animal dominating its territory. I incite you to dig more on its subject.

• Some dev stuffs
  https://rclayton.silvrback.com/speaking-intelligently-about-java-vs-node-performance

  Maybe related to those concurrency articles in "Concurrency" in

  73. This time we're exploring Java and nodejs.

Thoughts

"Every choice we make allows us to manipulate the future. Do I ask Adrienne or Suzanne to the spring dance? Do I take my holiday on Corsica or Risa? A person's life, their future, hinges on each of a thousand choices. Living is making choices! Now you ask me to believe that if I make a choice other than the one that appears in your history books, then your past will be irrevocably altered. Well, you know, Professor, perhaps I don't give a damn about your past, because your past is my future. And as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been written yet!" - Captain Picard about time travel

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Your inner daemon
  https://linoxide.com/how-tos/d-bus-ipc-mechanism-linux/
  https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html
  https://dvdhrm.github.io/rethinking-the-dbus-message-bus/

  Dbus is hated so much as a message passing system, is that hate anchored in something? Let's learn the basics of dbus to clear things up and make our minds. There's also a repost of "And its ilk" in 42.

• Making zsh faster
  https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/speeding-up-zsh

  Shell fancy plugins and eye candies can stack up really fast, beware! Here's a story on un-doing this.

• RAIDZ
  https://www.delphix.com/blog/delphix-engineering/zfs-raidz-stripe-width-or-how-i-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-raidz

  We discussed zfs and RAID separately more than once in this newsletter. This specific article is about optimising or for speed/IOPS or for space the raid layout of zfs.

• Language support
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/handling_non_utf_8_hebrew

  "It's all just text", easy said, right, but it's not as simple as that. A reminder of "Plain text" in 57.

• In BSD land
  https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/syspatch-fosdem-2018.pdf
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2018-06-09/june-hardenedbsd-foundation-update
  https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/bsdcan-2018-recap/
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/BeckPledgeUnveilBSDCan2018.pdf
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2018-mininet.pdf

  A presentation on the new and fascinating OpenBSD's solution on keeping their base system up to date and secure, syspatch. Other articles about hardnenedBSD trying to become a not-for-profit org, plus others about recent presentations on cool topics like pledge, minimet (software defined networking), etc..

• One liners again...
  http://www.bashoneliners.com/

  As I've mentioned before, in "One liners" issue 20, I'm not a fan of one liners, but this time it's different, they come with their explanation. Kinda related to "Explain your pipeline" in 16.

• Computers without binaries
  https://medium.com/@bellmar/the-land-before-binary-cc705d5bdd70

  Take whatever you know about computing and throw it out the window, enjoy!

• DNS lookup from the inside
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/06/08/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-i/

  Oh, I love this type of blog posts, insightful, tackling the topic from a top down approach, get ready!

• Solaris is still alive
  https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/solaris-114%3a-10-good-to-know-features%2c-enhancements-or-changes

  Even after the deprecation date being set Solaris still is alive and kicking, getting lots of cool updates.

• C plus pluses
  http://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/06/10/
  https://nanxiao.me/en/why-do-i-recommend-learning-c-plus-plus/

  Last week we had too much C, so let's tear that apart with C++.

Random

• Who the hek is Graham?
  http://www.meetgraham.com.au

  A fantastic and powerful piece of art representing our weaknesses and bringing awareness.

• Fairy tales and sleep
  https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/the-dark-origins-of-fairy-tales.htm
  http://www.midorisnyder.com/essays/sleeping-beauty-dreaming-and-awake-ii.html
  https://www.folio.ca/sleep-is-like-sexwe-arent-getting-enough/
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4c9e/8c5d6e82dbfa2fdaa5583294decba15b0e59.pdf
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueOqYebVhtc

  Hands up for criticism! A series of ideas related to fairy tales and the slumber of women in them. I know a lot of persons regards those ideas with disdain but it never hurts to at least see what's up and if some of it makes sense to you.

• Colors
  https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1202772/Color-Topics-for-Programmers
  http://datagenetics.com/blog/may12018/index.html

  Remember in issue 70 "Beauty is found in the detail2" how we've spent so much time learning the details of the bottom down process of how colors are transferred from a screen to our retina? Well this is the continuation.

Thoughts

Everything is a conspiracy when it doesn't suit us. When it does it's just the state of the world. We live in bubbles, when is the right time to question the state of affair and when is it not?

I've setup a new scavenger hunt on the forums, be sure to check it out: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2206.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• DungeonFS
  https://github.com/ChrisRx/dungeonfs

  A genius use of FUSE to play a game in your file system using basic Unix commands.

• Only one OS
  https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/there-is-only-one-os-and-its-been-obsolete-for-decades/
  http://prog21.dadgum.com/159.html

  A visit into the similarities between the currently popular operating systems which then turns into a critic of Unix designs, and then into new ideas for operating systems.

• More C, more C
  http://floooh.github.io/2018/06/02/one-year-of-c.html
  http://mymicrocontroller.com/2018/04/03/what-happens-before-main-function-is-executed-in-c-and-why-is-it-important/
  https://exez.in/conf-parser
  https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
  http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7979
  https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/05/c-is-too-low-level.html

  C is fun, it's not the best language for everything, but it's definitely entertaining and satisfying to use when appropriate. Check out those fierce arguments thrown around when discussing the validity of usage or its qualifications or the current state. The last articles are related to "A summary" in 64.

• Processes and signals
  https://medium.com/@_neerajpal/openbsd-kernel-internals-creation-of-process-from-user-space-to-kernel-space-31a504389f87
  https://ldpreload.com/blog/signalfd-is-useless

  Two articles about the internals of processes and signaling to them, arguably signalfd isn't that useless.

• Running on small machines
  http://www.jcwolfram.de/projekte/mxe11_en/main.php

  Another article about installing a Unix-like system in weird places this times it's Unix V6 on MXE11, Related to "Reducing/Shrinking the Linux kernel" in 66, also somehow related to "Doing it in V7" in 58.

• Messing up with people
  https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/how-to-mess-with-your-roommate/
  http://johnloeber.com/docs/twitter-likes.html

  Lovely articles about ingenious ways to fight using computers, taking pranks to the next level.

• Abusing sudo?
  http://touhidshaikh.com/blog/?p=790

  This article discusses privilege escalation but in my opinion and the opinion of others those aren't flaws at all in sudo but normal usages where you can spawn shells. From the perspective of a deeply engrained infosec person maybe this is new, who knows.

• Crypto patch
  https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg33291.html

  The point of view of a crypto expert on an algorithm pushed forward by the USA's NSA and that has recently been added in the Linux kernel.

• KSH and PWD
  https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-go/commit/?id=a050431f2660d73e191ab8100d2f0934c8aedbf9

  A lot of utilities rely on specific behaviors, once something is out and used in the wild it's hard to not keep backward compatibility.

• Networking included
  http://eradman.com/posts/networking-included.html

  How to debug networking issues and inspect things on BSD and most Linux distro, somehow related to "So many tracing tools it makes me dizzy" in 43.

• Make your own Gtk theme
  https://gtkthemingguide.now.sh/

  A guide on how to customize gtk themes.

Random

• Over-Productive
  https://arbtt.nomeata.de/#what
  https://habitica.com/

  We don't need managers anymore, we entered and era where we consider ourselves production machines that constantly need to output more, achievement is not a question it's a must. Those are arguable topics, take them with a grain of salt, food for thought.

• Math visualization
  https://www.joshwcomeau.com/posts/dynamic-bezier-curves

  When you let the readers interact or see illustrations of what you are describing it helps tremendously to understand. This is also related to "Awesome GAMES for kids!" in 23.

• Map of 802.11
  https://wigle.net/

  Where in the world are the most Wifi hubs located?

• Smallest animation
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0
  http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html

  A bit of a stunt/showcase by IBM, moving atoms to create the smallest animation. And a counterpart in the demoscene world.

• A documentary about chaos theory
  https://ihavenotv.com/the-secret-life-of-chaos

  Order from chaos, and chaos from order... Does that remind you of documenting your code?

• Rube Goldberg
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

  Known for his unusually complex contraption of chain reactions machines. Miniature metaphors for a world we live in.

• The brain
  https://nancysbraintalks.mit.edu/course/9-11-the-human-brain
  https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/05/24/611609366/whats-going-on-in-your-childs-brain-when-you-read-them-a-story
  http://time.com/3836428/reading-to-children-brain/

  The brain itself is a chaotic system. Here I present an MIT open course lectures about the brain, and two articles mentioning a study done in 2015 and another done in 2018 about the effect of reading to children.

• New genres outside of pop
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrOTHl6Tldc
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v43jn9VJzLQ
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Dh5QoXv2c
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRg_8NNPTD8
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZEKlp-H6FE

  A lot of the pop/radio music these days all sound the same, remember "Connecting Ideas" the millenial whoop and others, well it's not really true there's a lot of ingenuity and creativeness, new genres, etc.. Check the three I've linked, you don't have to like them but just to appreciate the innovation as they are deeply connected to our generation, somewhat related to "Doom - behind the music" in 39. The last three are just for fun as youtube started recommending some weird videos similar.

• The WWW is awesome (continue)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCNZy2bNRi8
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUUtK9FFIt4

  This week let's check out this guy who's passionate about puppets. The craft and details that goes into making those is impressive.

Thoughts

"From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone - If nothing was caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish." - Nietzsche

An idea similar to the thoughts in issue 74: Push your ideas out there in the wild, without spoon feeding people, without following the clickbait trend, all you have to do is prepare the content in the most appropriately consumable way for anyone that ever encounters it.

PS: I've beaten last week record by making this newsletter longer than the last one. If you really enjoy it be sure to share it with your friends that might be interested.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Hashes
  https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1225252/A-New-Hash-Function-ZobHash
  https://pthree.org/2018/05/23/do-not-use-sha256crypt-sha512crypt-theyre-dangerous/

  Making a good, secure, fast (or slow), hashing function is not easy, everyone is going to try to find flaws in it, break it. Side channel attacks aren't obvious. Be sure to check the comments on the second article, some of the original creator of well known hashes added their insights.

• Yet again a Unix CLI discussion
  https://monkey.org/~marius/unix-tools-hints.html
  http://julio.meroh.net/2013/09/cli-design-series-wrap-up.html

  Read up on some points the author brings up about making good unix tools.

• In soviet Russia
  http://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/219983/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rot

  Sometimes bugs are caused by unexpected events, we tend to forget computers are physical things, especially in an era of "clouds".

• On writing technical articles
  https://chrisshort.net/writing-technical-articles/
  https://lobste.rs/s/eiydww/writing_technical_articles

  Regardless of the quality of the article itself, this should start up a discussion: We need more people writing technical, understandable, articles about their crafts.

• GUI
  https://pointieststick.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/this-week-in-usability-productivity-part-20/
  http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=10656
  https://eklitzke.org/lobotomizing-gnome
  https://arcan-fe.com/2018/05/31/revisiting-the-arcan-project/

  Maintaining and building desktop environments from big ones to small ones requires the work of many. The last link isn't really a desktop environment (though Durden is a DE implementation using Arcan) but a mega graphic and input, and whatever multimedia building block library, we've shared it before in "Awk for multimedia" in 44.

• Executables & default program
  https://ownyourbits.com/2018/05/23/the-real-power-of-linux-executables/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Binfmt_misc_for_Java

  We've had three podcasts related to this topic (Unix Executables, Processes On Unix, and Default Programs) but never touched what the author of this article is talking about, binfmt misc: Setting default programs internally in the Linux kernel via the procfs interface.

• Security and networking
  https://lulucid.com/ssl_handshake.html
  http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/network_security_audit
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05/a-cartoon-intro-to-dns-over-https/

  The first article is a rough simplification/introduction to TLS handshakes, somehow related to "TLS 1.3" in 68. The second is an audit of the NetBSD network stack. I admire the patience taken to do those security audi, perusing the code for days looking for typos, overflows, mistakes, ways to abuse it.

• Meta build systems
  https://codingnest.com/basic-cmake
  https://github.com/edrosten/autoconf_tutorial
  http://www.twigtechnology.com/blog/2013/05/09/type-safe-struct-wrappers-in-c/

  In continuation with "I haven't covered cmake" in 65, let's add autoconf to the tool set. The last article is somewhat unrelated, it's a C programming tip so that gcc gives a warning when using generic pointers.

• Stop buffering
  https://blog.plover.com/Unix/stdio-buffering.html
  https://blog.plover.com/Unix/stdio-buffering-2.html

  When you run into a problem, curse at the world for not implementing a solution, think of a possible solution, and then finally find what you were looking for in the beginning. All the great phases of our everyday life that makes us humble.

• Device Mapper
  http://narendrapal2020.blogspot.com/2014/03/device-mapper.html
  https://nnc3.com/mags/LM10/Magazine/Archive/2006/72/032-037_dmcrypt/article.html

  Remember the podcast about data storage well I've been revisiting it on my personal blog and adding illustrations. One of the confusing part of the explanation was related to role of the device mapper and the various modules that implement it. Those posts, though old (distros now support full disk encryption), should clarify that.

• Why replace netstat
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ReplacingNetstatNotBad

  Remember our adventure with netlink in issue 59 "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks", well, we continue on, this is one of the reason according to the author why the deprecation of netstat and ifconfig were made. But here's the question: Will we replace all the tools that use procfs and replace them by netlink/binary-blobs/IPC&RPC-whatever everytime we think it might affect their performance.

Random

• Don't be so hard on yourself
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/smarter-living/why-you-should-stop-being-so-hard-on-yourself.html
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmzKmTIe_m4#t=8m29s

  We're social animals, comparing one another is the drive that leads to progress. However in today's world interactions are leading to some harm when it comes to self-love. Somehow related to "..State of the mind" in 75. The following video is my response to the one thing I thought was enraging in the first article: It's nice to focus on bringing back self-worth however the article sounded like it was written for the management team of a business. Making people less judgemental of themselves shouldn't be about increasing their productive outputs, it should be about making them feel better and the rest is out of scope.

• More on urban planning
  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/this-is-what-happens-after-a-neighborhood-gets-gentrified/432813/
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/opinion/democrats-gentrification-cities-voters.html
  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/does-gentrification-help-or-hurt-our-major-cities/

  While those opinion pieces are by nature about an American centered issue, this topic still brings light to something I had never thought about when it comes to social movements. It is related to "Public transportation" 76, "The WWW is awesome, (continue)" in 71, and "Game theory" in 34 (also to http://ncase.me/polygons/ by the same author).

• A history of the picnic table
  https://placesjournal.org/article/an-illustrated-history-of-the-picnic-table/

  There are things we overlook so much and beauty is found in their details, in the same spirit as "A story on privacy" in 65. And maybe also related to urban planning.

• Attention span
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368117301687

  A quick easy to read, and open, research paper about the effect of delegating mental power to individuals around us or our tools. This is a must read after "Are we our tools" in 68, and "The extended mind" in 64.

• Retro gaming
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0
  https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/870d5g/eli5_how_did_the_nintendo_game_duck_hunt_know/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k

  A lot of excellent content about retro gaming, special techniques used, smart puns, and much more.

Thoughts

You never fully realize how inept mainstream media is until they cover a topic you know a lot of. - /r/showerthoughts

This was the longest newsletter I've compiled since the start of this project. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am enjoying reading all those articles every week. Let me know if you find anything interesting to share with our close circle of readers. If you're intested in contributing in whatever form or way, there's always a list of ideas at the bottom of this newsletter on how you can do so.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Segmentation fault
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/04/28/debugging-a-segfault-on-linux/

  From using valgrind to check why your program failed to getting a core dump and analysing it with gdb, this article does a quick overview of those important topics.

• More reasons to use BSD
  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/guest-blog-what-i-learned-during-my-freebsd-internship/
  https://sivers.org/openbsd

  Pondering about what's so great or not so great about other OS, maybe even doing that before the first hand testing, then those articles are for you.

• Contain and protect
  https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2018/tarballs-the-ultimate-container-image-format/
  https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2018/05/16/revisiting-using-docker/

  Capabilities, packages, and containerization, those topics interlace in some way.

• Becoming a UNIX admin
  http://seann.herdejurgen.com/resume/samag.com/html/v07/i07/a6.htm

  Oldschool magazine article on some steps to learn the skills necessary to administer a UNIX server.

• Recursive make
  https://ndmitchell.com/downloads/paper-non_recursive_make_considered_harmful-22_sep_2016.pdf

  A follow up on #73 "Recursive make", here we get the not only recursive Make but "all Make are evil". Their solution is arguably more confusing than Makefiles, smells too much of Haskell fanaticism, and maybe is only suited for a paper and not practical usage outside the Haskell community. Interesting nevertheless!

• More fanaticism with vim
  https://matthias-endler.de/2018/ten-years-of-Vim/

  A reflection on learning and using vim after 10 years. Vim users are always beginners/students even after 10 years of vim.

• Printf in details
  http://www.maizure.org/projects/printf/index.html

  The past few weeks I've been teaching programming to a friend and he keeps asking questions that never end, going deeper and deeper, starting from a simple question about a for loop and ending up discussing cpu architectures. This is the kind of articles I'll link him to.

• Hackathon and secure chats
  https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/05/16/fractal-hackfest-in-strasbourg/
  https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/05/16/banquets-and-barbecues/
  https://blogs.gnome.org/jsparber/2018/05/15/fractal-hackfest-2018/
  https://eishagsoc.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/internationalization-of-fractal-3rd-and-last-part/
  http://danigm.net/fractal-hackfest1.html
  http://bytesgnomeschozo.blogspot.com/2018/05/fracturing-fractal.html

  It's nice to read the progress of open source team projects in blog posts like those. It is especially the case for fresh ones as it attracts eyeballs and incites contributors. It's also amazing to see everyone in the team writing their own experience of the hackfest, I never participated in anything resembling this but it makes me want to. If anyone knows of a hackathon or conference that would be interesting hit me up, I might join. Moreover, I'll try to write more about my own projects, and you should too.

• The Love of learning
  https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
  http://blog.rekawek.eu/2017/02/09/coffee-gb/

  A deep research in the field of HCI about pie menu, their does and don't, and a wonderful blog post about writing a gameboy emulator and learning new things along the way.

• Autotrace
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/05/21/autotrace-debug-on-steroids/

  A nice tool to automate the tracing of running processes.

Random

• Public transportation
  https://popupcity.net/estonia-to-become-the-worlds-first-free-public-transport-nation/
  https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/the-amazing-psychology-of-japanese-train-stations/560822/

  Makes you wonder about the state in your own city, wherever you are on the economic or political spectrum this can spark discussions.

• Human-like
  https://notesfrombelow.org/article/a-basic-lack-of-understanding

  Larry Tesler puts it succinctly: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." I'd like to call it the AI of the gaps, for the believers.

• How to disappear
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/19/exposed-how-to-disappear-from-the-internet

  Related to "Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity" in issue 63. How to disappear and what would be the reasons for that.

• You might have heard of gopher, what about Xanadu
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA
  http://xanadu.com/xuSampleXanadoc-D12.html

  Quite an interesting concept I hadn't encountered before. Give it a go, there's a demo page. It's sort of similar to Wikipedia's interface when you think of it.

Thoughts

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. - Dostoyevsky

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Shells and pipelines
  https://github.com/anordal/shellharden/blob/master/how_to_do_things_safely_in_bash.md
  http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
  https://ambrevar.bitbucket.io/emacs-eshell/

  Lots of great ideas in those 3 posts. Here's a quote from the first one: "A variable in bash is like a hand grenade – take off its quotes, and it starts ticking." Related to "Emacs as PID 1" in 48 and "Bash the bash for bash the bash" in 23.

• The power of ed
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/05/11/batch-editing-files-with-ed/

  The next thing to do is to put this in a pipeline using sed instead!

• Manuals
  http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7998
  http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/05/13/scdoc.html
  http://pinfo.sourceforge.net/

  Raymond's new article about his long term project of converting Unix manual pages to HTML and another article related to manpages.

• "The mouse is so fast on your machine"
  http://who-t.blogspot.no/2018/05/x-server-pointer-acceleration-analysis-part1.html

  Pointer acceleration can mean almost nothing to a lot of users but it's the smallest differences that make the big ones. A four part series going in the depth of it.

• Oh no a malware found in the "store"?
  https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/05/malware-found-in-ubuntu-snap-store.html

  Before today I had never heard of the SnapStore (I've only used the official repo). Apparently there's no restrictions on who and what can be uploaded there, so it's not very surprising.

• Sandboxes
  https://www.morbo.org/2018/05/linux-sandboxing-improvements-in_10.html
  https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/you-can-now-run-linux-apps-on-chrome-os/

  "That means you could now, for example, run Microsoft’s Linux version of Visual Studio Code right on your Chrome OS machine." The world is mixing up a lot of stuffs, better build boxes to containerize them.

• Flags you need to go faster
  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GCC_optimization

  In issue 60 "Lots of C, or more precisely compiler, preprocessor, and linker features" we mentioned POGO, which is a nifty and rarely used compiler opimization trick. So here are more of those.

• Composition
  http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/pipelogic/index.php
  http://www.tedinski.com/2018/05/08/case-study-unix-philosophy.html

  Let's seriously talk about composition, what does it mean to put pieces together.

• BSD papers
  https://papers.freebsd.org/
  https://www.openbsd.org/events.html

  Presentations and papers for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

• But didn't you write an embedded os
  http://www.tnhh.net/posts/but-didnt-you-write-an-embedded-os.html

  Some programming jobs are like contractual job, or more like a temporary service offering. This type of work brings a management team that assumes possible workers will have a certain skillset to join in instantly and start fixing whatever they have or want to have. Other jobs are more long term, employee types of job where you're required to grow along the way and learn from senior to become an essential part of a team. Now what do we get when the requirements of one mixes with the other because of confusion emerging from the HR team.

• A useful regex
  https://dassur.ma/things/regexp-quote/

  Directly related to "Fast regex" in 62 and "Afraid your regex won't work?" in 21.

Random

• The internet is awesome (continue)
  https://mapofmetal.com/

  This week we get a map of the metal music genre.

• State of the web...
  https://medium.com/@cvitullo/a-brief-history-of-web-app-loading-ab8409e48812
  http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html
  https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/
  https://makefrontendshitagain.party/
  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/16/whois_privacy_shambles/
  https://jacquesmattheij.com/gdpr-hysteria

  Some thoughts about web technology, new laws affecting it (less than one week left for GDPR to take effect), the ad-revenue business model, and web content.

• ..State of the mind
  https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/why-the-luddites-matter/
  https://medium.com/@richardnfreed/the-tech-industrys-psychological-war-on-kids-c452870464ce
  https://www.mathwashing.com/

  Related to issue 72 "Ludites or not" and maybe even "Pedantic and semantic" in 66. I'll step aside and leave you to judge.

• Why we should use plain text emails
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/attention-pgp-users-new-vulnerabilities-require-you-take-action-now
  https://efail.de/
  https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/
  https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2018-May/060315.html
  https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2018-05-14_PGP_Security_Alert.html

  This newsletter is sent in multipart, both plain text and html. On a side note, this has been blown out of proportion and it seems to be out of a love for fame and creating cringy logo and websites.

Thoughts

"Yep, that's the point of public key cryptography, never share your privates in public" - A user on reddit

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• As Needed
  http://www.bnikolic.co.uk/blog/gnu-ld-as-needed.html

  I recently faced some compilation errors on certain machine only when the order of the source file was in a specific way. After some research this is what I found as the cause, libraries that aren't needed aren't included.

• Whining
  https://www.voidlinux.eu/news/2018/05/serious-issues.html
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/753646/a6ebb50040c5862c/

  Distributions and open source projects all have their internal political disputes, which seem to multiply in the past few years with the trend of drama and turning everything into controversial topics. The one of Void is that the project leader disappeared... Remember, two-man-rule. The one of glibc is that they want to remove jokes.

• Network based backup
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/bareos-backup-server-on-freebsd/

  BareOS let's you do incremental backups over the network with a WebUI, compression, hardware and software based encryption, and much more.

• Blocksize in ZFS
  http://brian.candler.me/posts/the-importance-of-zfs-blocksize/

  A dive into some parameters for the ZFS, which you can also use as good knowledge for other file systems and volume managers.

• Notes to install Linux on a dead badger
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/

  Bookmark this for the next time you have an unused dead-badger around.

• Leaks
  https://blog.nelhage.com/post/three-kinds-of-leaks/

  When working with a language that allows memory manipulation the programmer usually has to keep the memory management in mind so to not mess up with leaks. That's when frameworks like valgrind comes into play to help. However you need at least to understand what the terms that valgrind shows mean. This article should clear things up on much more than that.

• SSH ascii art
  https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-work-art

  These days I've been working a lot with public/private key pairs. This article touches both my ascii art love and this.

• zsh tmux & emacs
  https://blog.d46.us/zsh-tmux-emacs-copy-paste/

  "What a horrible hack" I've heard someone say... This is the state of clipboard, "Dear old vain teaches us yet again" in 34 and "X11 Clipboard" in 9, maybe even "Term emulators" with the "bracketed paste" in last week 73, also come to mind.

• Redirecting standard output when the process is already running
  http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/05/04/Redirecitng-stderr-of-running-process.html

  Yet another fun article from sircmpwn blog. This one is about redirecting stderr of a running process... A very hacky way.

• How to do X11 compositing
  http://www.talisman.org/%7Eerlkonig/misc/x11-composite-tutorial/

  In continuation with last week's "Display servers and graphic operations" in 73 and "More on Xorg magic almost-no-documentation" in 69, to not read before you've gone through the previous content. Now that you've assimilated the basics, let's read this article and learn about a certain way of implementing a compositor.

Random

• Access economy
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_economy

  The world is moving in that direction so let's get familiar with the terms and what it implies.

• Useless jobs
  https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job

  When life gives you lemon, you make lemonade. When no one wants lemonade your job becomes to remind them that you may have lemons in stock or maybe not. "You’re making an active negative contribution to people's day".

• Adblock & the web
  https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-but-not-why-you-think-13280e76c8e7

  I'm not a fan of adblockers, not because I like ads but because of the whole drama and politics that happens behind them. I'd rather use a full only allow whitelisted cross requests addons.

• Choosing the right typography
  https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-complex-data
  https://alok.github.io/2018/04/26/using-vim-s-conceal-to-make-languages-more-tolerable/
  http://dotsies.org/

  The first article is aimed at graphic designers but can be read by anyone that is interesting in fonts. The second delves into another topic, replacing words by specific characters in source code. The third link is about even more obscure characters.

Thoughts

Sand mandalas are incredibly intricate works of art that take many people many days to construct. They’re very expressive, but fragile, works of art.

After a mandala has been constructed – and displayed – it is ceremoniously deconstructed – which is meant "to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life."

_why’s entire online presence and code was presented in the sand mandala that was '_why'. The person behind '_why' simply decided to move on and close that portion of his life.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Display servers and graphic operations
  http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/
  https://keyj.emphy.de/files/linuxgraphics_en.pdf
  https://seasonofcode.com/posts/how-x-window-managers-work-and-how-to-write-one-part-i
  https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Programming_OpenGL_in_Linux:_Creating_a_texture_from_a_Pixmap
  https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2015/12/gaming-on-linux-move-to-next-generation/

  There aren't a lot of good approachable articles explaining how to develop in the X windowing system. I'm currently planning on writing more on this topic myself and if you're able to then join in and also write. Other articles that were mentioned in the newsletter: "Explaining X11" in 3, "Dark is the history of X11" in 36, and the X11 section in "Low level graphics" in issue 42. However, even those can be quite confusing with terms like pixmap, rendering, redirecting, unredirecting, reparenting, composition, etc.. And so that's the reason I'm going to be writing the articles.

• Fast file system
  https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/05.fastfs/paper.pdf

  A paper about how the original UNIX file system was optimized for throughput. Increase of block size, allowing block fragmentation, allocating on the same cylinder, long file names, symbolic links, and more.

• CPU optimizations
  https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2018/04/22/What-optimizations-you-can-expect-from-CPU

  Compilers optimize according to how the CPU may react to how the code is spread out, but the CPU also does it too, eliminating useless instructions. In this article there's some discussion about that, somehow related to "About memory" in 58 and "A summary" in 64.

• mdoc
  https://manpages.bsd.lv/mdoc.html

  Writing man pages is not easy. This book is a guide on writing good manpages using mdoc, keep it bookmarked for the next time you have to use it.

• Recursive make
  http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

  Relates to the earlier "Recursive Make" in 71, the paper, which is smooth to read, goes into the crevasses of why this isn't such a good idea and how to remediate.

• Term emulators
  https://lwn.net/Articles/749992/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

  A big overview of the features, support, usability, and speed of different terminal emulators. It was the first time I hear about some of those features.

• Unix philosophy
  https://nedbatchelder.com//blog/201804/do_one_thing.html

  It's not called "philosophy" for nothing, let's dig deeper in the semiotics. Taking the words too literally or not, having problems with ambiguity.

• Concurrency
  https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-go-statement-considered-harmful/

  Exploring a new way of doing concurrent tasks. You may somehow find this related to "More Pike Wave?" in 30 and "PikeWave by jmbi/ibmj" 27.

• CAs are big and powerful -> bad?
  https://scotthelme.co.uk/the-power-to-revoke-lies-with-the-ca/
  https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas-phishing-lets-encrypt/

  Are CAs too powerful, are they allowed to revoke certificates that they deem are dangerous to the security of the PKI, should CA pass moral or legal judgement, should the CA act when they have the opportunity, are EV certs really worth it as human control or they make no sense because they depend on the UI display, should the guy of the first article have been left with his cert, should we follow the letter of the law or the spirit of the law? I'll let you make your own opinion.

• Data security
  https://theintercept.com/2018/04/28/computer-malware-tampering/
  http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

  The field of forensic is deep, and this is giving me new ideas for a scavenger hunt.

Random

• Kopimi
  https://kopimi.com/

  A movement to spur more copying on the web.

• State of the web (continue)...
  https://0xadada.pub/2018/05/01/against-facebook/

  One last article for the ride.

Thoughts

HTTPS & SSL doesn't mean "trust this." It means "this is private." You may be having a private conversation with Satan. - Scott Hanselman

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unicode
  https://julialang.org/utf8proc/
  http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2011/02/utf-8-good-utf-16-bad_07.html

  Working with UTF is a bit of a pain. The first link is a mini lib to help you handle that. Personally I've recently used the fontconfig string utilities instead (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-devel/x103.html#AEN4792). The second article is an opiniated one, as usual the comments are insightful in this case.

• Perl CGI, captchas, and just web related stuffs
  https://perlhacks.com/2015/12/long-death-cgi-pm/
  http://ezinearticles.com/?Captchas-Considered-Harmful---Why-Captchas-Are-Bad-And-How-You-Can-Do-Better&id=1104207
  https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/scan-ping-the-internet-hilbert-curve

  One article about how moving a "legacy" Perl package from core to external deps could break some web hosting because they'll forget to install it, another about captchas and how to do it better (we're already seeing a lot of companies ditch captchas), and mapping the whole internet.

• GUIs
  http://wormsandviruses.com/2018/03/the-menu-bar/
  http://www.charlesetc.com/gui-development-is-broken/

  The WIMP, the defacto UI design is fading in the trend, the first article discusses why. As far as the second one is concerned with the developer side of GUI devs, the author considers a bunch of very interesting options while not talking about others such as kivy, tk, shoesrb, etc..

• BSD on desktop and laptop
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot/
  https://www.romanzolotarev.com/setup.html

  Why would you silence the boot process? IDK but this is what is explained, and also another an OpenBSD setup on a fanless box with a lot of hardware show off.

• Libre laptop review
  http://www.davidrevoy.com/article341/review-purism-librem13-laptop

  This blog is dedicated to digital artists using completely open source softwares. A rather intriguing nice that deserves respect.

• Command line for the data scientists
  https://kadekillary.work/post/cli-4-ds/

  Closely following "Unix commands from a data-scientist eyes" in issue 28, we got another set of commands and tricks for them.

• You wouldn't believe what this ssh can do
  https://zinovyev.net/blog/ssh-client-configuration-tricks
  https://nero.github.io/2018/02/11/ssh-hidden-service.html

  You can access ssh over tor, and cool simple beginner tricks to make your ssh sessions more pleasing.

• Long term storage, keeping data alive
  https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html

  Somewhat related to "Web literacy and more" in 68. We need standards for good formats that can be used for long term storage, the article tries to demonstrate why xz isn't one of those.

• Firewalls on Linux
  https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/
  https://cilium.io/blog/2018/04/17/why-is-the-kernel-community-replacing-iptables/

  A continuation of the discussion happening in the KML about BPF. "ELF modules" in 69 and "So many tracing tools it makes me dizzy" in 43.

• Public access Multics
  https://ban.ai/multics/
  http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/
  http://www.multicians.org/multics-commands.html

  After the public access UNIX we get the public access Multics. Great if you want to give it a try. Read up a bit of commands from the second and third links. It's surprising that it's Y2K compatible.

Random

• CC music
  http://cchound.com/

  I find it hard to select a creative common song for the podcast, so this will be my next stop for the new one.

• The Shirky principle
  http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/
  https://www.macrumors.com/2018/04/20/apple-verizon-att-switching-collusion/

  There were a bunch of news related to this in the past days. Fortunately this time some big player has opposed it before it came into actions. Also, the first blog is cool, add it to your list.

• Ignosticism
  http://www.control-z.com/czp/pgs/ignostic.html
  https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2006/10/29/the-god-conundrum/

  I've had an interesting discussion this week and this came up.

• Signatures as biometric, probably not
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/business/credit-card-signatures.html
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0IZhqq2bmQ
  http://hackingdistributed.com/2018/04/26/online-signing-broken/

  Analysing signatures isn't a good mean to identify someone. As anyone that has ever listened to documentary about tracing history and how handwriting can be reassign to their original author knows, it's not as simple as it sounds. You need many pages of documents to be able to somehow, approximately, probably, say it was the right person. In the legal field this isn't even considered strong evidence anymore.

• Ludites or not
  https://nomasters.io/posts/dumber-phone/
  https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2018-more-privacy-blog
  http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-kids-of-today/9637570
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/magazine/what-good-is-community-when-someone-else-makes-all-the-rules.html
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2018/01/16/online-convergence.html

  The history of the word ludite is interesting by itself, and also the current definition. There are some persons that have difficulties with tech, or maybe those are difficulties with addiction and not the technology itself. Some others have a morbid fascination with efficiency and control of themselves. Maybe passionately, like the n=1 movement and nootropics, regardless of their validity or not. In the end it comes down to doing things deliberately. The second blog is about detaching yourself from "harmful to privacy" services. The last two articles come in pair, and I'm shamelessly pushing one of my own article because the NYT one reminded me of it. Also related to "Compartmentalization" in 62.

Thoughts

For they do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.

An essay about epistemology by Locke. http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/johnlocke/BOOKIIChapterXI.html

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• HardenedBSD World
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/introduction-to-hardenedbsd-world/

  A good summary on HardenedBSD against FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

• More on BSD and POSIX related topics
  https://www.romanzolotarev.com/openbsd/webserver.html

  A quick article about setting up an OpenBSD web server, it's always useful to have those laying around the web as a reference. All until configurations are deprecated, keep that in mind, tag the software versions you are using in such tutorials to help your fellow web travelers.

• Porting mksh to a Plan9 fork
  http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20180415-tg.htm

  Porting mksh to a Plan9 system isn't straight forward, the author had to study well the POSIX specs and implement a simulation/compatibility layer.

• Everything is color
  http://no-color.org/

  Maybe related to "A colorful man" in 64. This page is clear: it wants to set a new standard for command line tools so that they respect this environment variable: $NO_COLOR.

• Commands
  https://monades.roperzh.com/tags/weekly-command/
  https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/04/12/elasticsearch-linux-man-pages.html
  https://github.com/bootandy/dust#overview

  A series of articles about ideas and topics that can inspire you on your command line journey, or frighten you depending on your views about new toy-techs.

• Recursive Make
  https://owen.sj.ca.us/~rk/howto/slides/make/slides/makerecurs.html
  https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Recursion.html

  I've never really had to use recursive make before so I always thought there was some clean built in way to automatically do that. But that's not the case, so I've opted to simply not do it.

• Let's play with encoding and formats
  https://florianjw.de/en/octal_zero_considered_harmfull.html
  https://davesteele.github.io/gpg/2014/09/20/anatomy-of-a-gpg-key/

  These days I've been working so much with ASN.1 DER that it has become ingrained in me, I see it everywhere... So it's time to finally read up about the specific format of GPG keys.

• Necessary jerks?
  https://blog.eldrid.ge/2017/04/11/the-myth-of-the-necessary-jerk/

  Another one related to "Assholes" in issue 15. I think the idea is clear but it's good to keep repeating it. I'm wondering, is it a social persona influence by the media, putting those caricatures on a pedestal, that creates this or are those people really like that from the get go?

• Linux firewall & binding to all tcp ports
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-spectrum/

  Other than being an implicit technical marketing post, it explains a bunch of networking configuration tricks.

• VDO, A new layer to add to the data storage stack
  https://www.redhat.com/de/blog/look-vdo-new-linux-compression-layer

  Remember the podcast about data storage (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164), there were so many layers, right? Well this time we insert a new one between the block and partition/volume-management one that has for role to deduplicate and compress data sent or coming from the disk. As it's placed here it is thus file system independent but requires this VDO to be able to read properly from the physical SCSI layer.

Random

• State of the web (continue...)
  https://medium.com/@anildash/the-missing-building-blocks-of-the-web-3fa490ae5cbc
  https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/its-time-to-rebuild-the-web
  http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-internet-from-the-people-who-built-it.html
  https://www.feld.com/archives/2018/04/the-price-of-free-is-actually-too-high.html
  https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/fashion/before-the-web-hearts-grew-silent.html

  I think I've shared so much related to this topic this year that I don't need to put a summary. I'm glad those conversations are taking place, this is a historical moment, I hope 2018 will be remember as a year that reflected this. The four articles stand in pair, the second ones in the pair are reply to the first. While the first pair is more or less technical, the second one is pungent with technology and social network mysticism. I'm inserting those links here but if you want relief check the series "The WWW is awesome" and "Beauty is found in details" I've started in the Random section. The last link doesn't seem directly encroached with the others but it is, a beautiful peace.

• The WWW is awesome (continue)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yITr127KZtQ

  In continuation with past weeks "The WWW is awesome!" in 70. Ever been stuck in graphic? Check what a bit of software simulation and civil engineering could possibly do in Eutopia land.

  • Chinese fonts
    https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme

  "Beauty is found in the details", this time we're tackling Chinese fonts. Language is such a complex topic. The past month I've been working with fonts, discussing fonts with a graphic designer friend, etc.. A character, aka grapheme, are only a single aspect, logograph, phonograph. So much to learn, so much to respect!

• Cognitive fallacies map
  https://www.breakdown-notes.com/makemap

  There's so many of them and some are obsessed with memorizing them all in the hope to never make any. However, it's not as simple as that.

• Usability
  https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-contrast-scale.html
  https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/399
  http://mqtest.io/

  It's quite hard to make a website that is accessible on all devices and by most persons, even the ones with disabilities. I've been lately checking this specification regarding contrast and text readability, the website should be accessible when zoomed at 200%, however not all browser's change, nor agree if they should, their screen.width when zooming. Firefox doesn't, Chrome does, I have no clue about others.

Thoughts

In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Another sandboxing solution
  http://www.plash.beasts.org/index.html

  Related to issue 49 "Wrap it in a sandbox on Linux". Nothing novel, simply a mention.

• Microcode
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Microcode

  Until a while ago (spectre and meltdown), I had no clue the encoded instructions inside the processor could be upgraded. It still bugs me.

• New public service in town
  https://devnull-as-a-service.com/one-less-to-go.sh

  In the land of useless we've got a new contender.

• Regression and ports to other OS
  https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/7401

  Sometimes the price of using some technology is high but maybe the benefits are big enough to compensate. Filesystems are one of those, you don't want it to break. However without testing there is no polishing, here's a case of beautiful polishing.

• Process tree
  https://phoxis.org/2013/11/25/process-tree-of-linux-system/
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1925

  An explanation on how to write a program to trace a Linux process tree and a discussion about finding the PID of the terminal a script is running on.

• A myth about security
  https://gettys.wordpress.com/2018/04/09/mythology-about-security/

  And as with every myth it is debunked in the article.

• UCLA Unix
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/55f7/e4d8719cbdfe8cdc9fa77ed7a5f62bfba784.pdf

  A research paper about an OS built with demonstrable data security in mind. This OS, as old as it is (remember the previous link), already implemented and advanced version of the concept of process capabilities.

• Network audio, mpd+sndio
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20180410063454

  Most readers of this newsletter have used mpd and so are familiar with the audio_output configuration. This articles goes into skipping the http output and replace it by a direct sndio output (it has network support).

• Kernel lockdown and uefi secure boot
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/50577.html

  A discussion about a recent patch that would enable kernel lockdown directly when booting from UEFI with secure boot. The kernel built to look like an EFI executable.

• New ways of thinking for devs
  https://hackernoon.com/unconventional-way-of-learning-a-new-programming-language-e4d1f600342c
  https://sonniesedge.co.uk/talks/dear-developer

  Two new ideas to integrate in your learning experience as a dev or hobbyist. The last articles is a great segue into the random section.

Random

• The WWW is awesome!
  http://jjwargames.blogspot.co.uk/
  http://jjwargames.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Books
  https://www.theramenrater.com/

  You can find anything on the web. Recently I've been into some pretty narrow subject and could still stumble upon those super cool and passionate blogs.

• State of the web, again, why not?
  https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/dont-give-away-historic-details-about-yourself/
  https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/04/your-pretty-face-is-going-to-sell/

  In contrast with the above links.

• Beauty is found in the detail2
  http://jamie-wong.com/post/color/

  Remember "Beauty is found in the detail" in issue 61, this article is an example of this. Colors are taken as the subject.

Thoughts

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Debugging issues on unknown boxes
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/03/26/w/

  last, who, w, history, etc.. When checking why a system is suddenly failing for "no apparent reasons" it's smart to see who has done what on it.

• Is there a command that is as ingrained in our muscle memory as cd
  https://olivierlacan.com/posts/cd-is-wasting-your-time/

  Moving from directories to directories isn't efficient enough, raise up your game skills by using this rad trick.

• execpromises
  https://medium.com/@_neerajpal/openbsd-pledge-1-vs-pledge-2-8313bb4d22b8

  The article is of arguable (low) quality but does the job at introducing the concept of execpromises, pledge on the child of the pledged parent.

• Filesystem discovery
  https://opensource.com/article/18/4/ext4-filesystem

  Let's keep going on our never-ending wannabe understanding of the data storage layers. This time we will revisit the history and features of ext4.

• ELF modules
  https://lwn.net/Articles/749108/

  The introduction of a new kind of kernel module, inspired by the recent bpfilter proposal (standing as a replacement translation for iptables).

• In-memory-only ELF execution
  https://magisterquis.github.io/2018/03/31/in-memory-only-elf-execution.html

  What kind of usage could this possibly have... What a fun article!

• XIM
  https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/libX11/specs/XIM/xim.html
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/scim/
  https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~little/OldSites/CSE_Uptime/v4.10/kanji.sidebar.html
  https://fcitx-im.org/wiki/Input_method_related_environment_variables

  Internationalization of input and languages is hard, it's not straight forward at all. This is the standard protocol for implementing it in X, though I've rarely seen it done properly.

• More on Xorg magic almost-no-documentation
  https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/renderproto/renderproto.txt
  https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2001/xrender/

  I've been reading about the render extension in the past days and I can clearly assess that this is a similar issue as with the font stack ("More on typography" in issue 63): It's the same small group of persons that know about this tech that is scarcely documented. So, read up, educate yourself about it and maybe we can turn this around.

• The Association for Computer Heresy
  http://sigbovik.org/

  "Every year they hold some kind of conference named SIGBOVIK where the participants present absolutely absurd creations, many of them are funny and/or interesting, like the powerpoint punch card machine."

• Futurist state of the internet
  http://web.archive.org/web/19970702192520/http://www.thebee.com:80/bweb/iinfo31.htm

  Can we predict the future, probably not but it's fun to go back in time and check what people were looking for.

Random

• Naming a new machine
  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178

  An actual rfc about how to choose a hostname.

• About the newsfeed
  https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/4/2/the-death-of-the-newsfeed

  An insightful breakdown of why filtered and spammy newsfeed aren't meant for long-term usage, connection, and communication.

• Keeping thieves away
  https://medium.com/@umpox/be-careful-what-you-copy-invisibly-inserting-usernames-into-text-with-zero-width-characters-18b4e6f17b66

  This blog post goes into a method to store username inside text using invisible (zero-width) unicode characters.

• The world in colors
  http://web-owls.com/2006/06/25/a-bit-of-color/
  https://www.romaexperience.com/rome-blog/2016-the-colours-of-ancient-rome/
  http://www.ancientworldalive.com/single-post/2015/06/23/Greeks-and-Romans-in-colors

  We picture the past as we see it with today's eyes, but it's a flawed perception.

Thoughts

"GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions." - Doug Gwyn

Probably one of the most cliché quote of all time, maybe it needs more pondering. Is it a limitation from the medium or from ourselves, what other types of media are we not using that could solve this?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Navigate the history of Unix tools
  https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-history-man/

  A very well made page that has a list of the appearance and history of most unix tools, something I should've had during this podcast: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2191.

• Odd coments and strange doings in Unix
  http://orkinos.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~kosar/odd.html

  The title says it all, it goes on to explain the stories behind weird behaviors and commands.

• Void linux
  https://michaelwashere.net/void/linux/culture/2017/09/18/into-the-void.html

  What makes the void distribution special.

• Nix Os
  http://nmattia.com/posts/2018-03-21-nix-reproducible-setup-linux-macos.html

  Another distro related (somehow) post. It's about managing dot files and reproducible setup. It is related to the podcast "less ties with a machine" https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2051.

• Are we our tools
  https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/03/23/you-are-not-your-tools/

  It might not look like it at first sight but this is related to "The Grand Analogy" in 66 and "The extended mind" in 64, and a bit of "Keeping track of your things" thread on the forums (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1637). This one challenges both of those ideas, true or not this will make it a good subject of discussion for the week.

• .Net Core dev on Linux
  https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2018/03/20/net-core-linux/

  Many don't like dotNet, but with it being now open source there's no reason not to give it a try. Also this should be of use for anyone going to a university that requires programming using dotNet.

• Web literacy and more
  https://mozilla.github.io/content/web-lit-whitepaper/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
  https://archive.org/about/

  A Mozilla initiative related to literacy and contribution in the ever-changing world of technology we live in. This is related to "Digital and technological literacy" in issue 65.

• The definitive resource for imagemagick scripts
  http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/index.php

  Imagemagick has always been for me... Magical! There's so much you can do and so many tools that comes in the set.

• XIM and unicode
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input#In_X11_(Linux_and_Unix_variants)

  There's the Altgr/compose key but there's also a way to insert unicode by entering their number via XIM, the X input module.

• Macro expansion
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2224334/gcc-dump-preprocessor-defines/2224357
  http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/an_introduction_to_gcc/gccintro_36.html

  Macros can be confusing so here's the best way to debug them.

Random

• 20 years of cURL
  https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/03/20/twenty-years-1998-2018/

  A review of how cURL came to be, the state of mind of the author.

• TLS 1.3
  https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg17592.html
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-tls13/?include_text=1

  If you're into sec/crypto/pki topics then this is for you. The standard is coming together, read the section about "major differences from TLS 1.2" or enjoy the whole document.

• For my text art fans out there
  https://archive.org/details/hackercons-notacon-2007-Building_Character_ANSI

  Archive.org is doing something incredible by preserving history, do what you can to help this organization stay alive.

• Dictatorship of the small minority
  https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15

  This article brings to light a reality we don't always notice, I'm not going to spoil it for you.

• Identity as a service
  https://auth0.com/blog/identity-as-a-service-in-2018/

  Remember all the articles about digital identity (I'm not going to link them, I've been doing it too many times with those, just check the archive for that), well this is the state of affair for 2018.

Thoughts

A good model makes reality look normal, not weird; a good model assigns high probability to that which is actually the case.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Let's review this one more time
  https://codeexplainer.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/have-fun-with-unix/

  We've shared a lot of articles related to not-so-obvious C behavior, so here's one more. It's the same puzzle as in "Why does it do this?" of issue 45 but better explained.

• sudo and setuid
  https://rcoh.me/posts/sudo-science/

  A walk through how sudo works by taking advantage of the setuid bit. Somehow related to "Bash is secure" in issue 13, "Oh so confusing setuid" in issue 8 and "Setuid... again!" in issue 28.

• Extended attributes
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes
  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes/
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/chattr
  https://linux-audit.com/using-xattrs-extended-attributes-on-linux/

  I haven't seen any custom extended attributes being frequently used in the wild other than for ACL and SELinux. The second link gives a general overview of common usage they can have, as metadata outside the file itself. It also explains something I've missed during the "default programs" podcast, such as setting user.mime_type to explicitly state the mime type of a file, along with other "proposed" attributes that could possibly be respected by softwares (http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/). The last 2 links are about the usage of the command line tools that can be used on linux and BSD to change the attributes.

• ACL
  http://softpanorama.org/Access_control/acl.shtml
  https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs155old/cs155-spring09/lectures/17-access-os-sec.pdf
  https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/fs-acl.html
  http://bencane.com/2012/05/27/acl-using-access-control-lists-on-linux/
  https://www.linux.com/learn/how-manage-user-permissions-gui-linux

  In continuation with the previous links, let's discuss another type of metadata used for security, the POSIX ACLs. This is related to "Securelevel" in issue 34, "And more on real security" in issue 45, and "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks" where we discussed capabilities in issue 59. The eiciel gui can manage both ACLs and extended attributes.

• Role based access aka rbac
  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/security/custom-roles-rbac-jsp-140865.html

  Similarly, Oracle/Sun has their homebaked version of it they call rbac.

• Controlling resource usage
  http://coldattic.info/post/40/
  http://blackbird.si/checking-limits-of-a-linux-process-ulimit/

  In a world of ever growing bloatware how do we cope with it. One solution is to increase the machine capacity, the other is to limit what the software can have access to. I think from now on whatever bloat software I want to keep running on my machine I'll start with a wrapper shell script adding memory limit.

• Checking all you did works fine
  https://jaroslawr.com/articles/mastering-linux-performance-cpu-time-and-cpu-usage/

  Monotoring CPU performance and usage isn't straight forward, this article tackles the topic.

• Interactive Linux kernel map
  http://www.makelinux.net/kernel_map/

  The usual SVG showing a Linux system with zoomable and clickable text that sends you straight to the source. I've tackled the whole (or at least I've tried) storage one in the data storage on unix podcast (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164), maybe we should do others about different layers.

• Raw sockets on Linux
  https://www.schoenitzer.de/blog/2018/Linux%20Raw%20Sockets.html

  How to manipulate sockets so that you can receive them raw.

• Building and mp3 decoder
  http://blog.bjrn.se/2008/10/lets-build-mp3-decoder.html

  Ever wanted to build your own mp3 mplayer, this is the start.

Random

• Thinking in new ways
  https://medium.com/the-mission/mental-models-how-to-train-your-brain-to-think-in-new-ways-ad538ca9052c

  This is an article that sums up a lot of what I hold close to my heart, namely building a base, not limiting yourself to a single domain, being inter-disciplinary at a minimum level.

• Facebook
  All the clickbaity articles that have been spammed in the media the past few days

  I don't think I have to say anything other then point you back to other issues in order, have fun going back in the archive: "SSI" 13 , "Social Networks" 20 , "It's leaking from everywhere" 26 , "Digital Identity" 27 , "More on digital identity" 36 , "In need of a website to understand a process that should be simple" 39 , "Well researched and timely articles" and "Differential privacy" 47 , "A continuation of last week "Random"" 48 , "Wear some colorful tight pants and continue on this crazy train with Ozzy!" 50 , "Propaganda" and "A timely article" 52 , "Are you tired of the articles of two weeks ago because there's more" 53 , "Create a category and people will get attached to it" 55 , "Will Geocities websites make a comeback?" 56 , "Compartmentalization" 62 , "A story on privacy" 65

Thoughts

Organisms organize. human organisms organize reality - William Perry

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• OpenBSD getting some work done in the VM field
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2018-vmm-slides.pdf

  OpenBSD is getting its game up where it was lacking for years, its native hypervisor "vmm" is slowly getting better.

• NetBSD sum up on meltdown and spectre patches
  http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mef/PDF/NetBSD-2018-AsiaBSDCon.pdf

  Kind of boring to read through this presentation but it still has some important information.

• A blogger's experience with Linux in the 90s
  https://medium.com/@fun_cuddles/linux-of-the-90s-or-why-i-have-linux-desktop-ptsd-1f276a7887fb

  Get ready folks for your "usual blog post"! This one makes you appreciate how far we've come.

• Reducing/Shrinking the Linux kernel
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/748198/6fa400001570fb39/

  This article is more precisely about how to do all that for microcontrollers.

• VDSO
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19938324/what-are-vdso-and-vsyscall
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSO
  http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/vdso.7.html
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/creating-vdso-colonels-other-chicken

  Sort of related to the previous link. Those links should clear your mind about how system calls can be mapped and used in a process. The linuxjournal article should covert the implementation part, which is super fun.

• Legalities
  http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-beats-internal-legal-threat/

  A guy takes the laws in his own hands, for personal benefits or not. Check out what happens and make your own opinion, be it according to the law or according to moral.

• Sync folklore
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TheLegendOfSync

  One reason why learning about your system removes this sort of mysticism.

• Some thoughts about init systems
  https://nick.groenen.me/posts/2014/01/20/screen-is-not-a-process-control-system/
  https://www.avidandrew.com/the-great-init-system-debate.html

  I've been delaying the podcast about init system for a long time, maybe even avoiding it purposefully. The next episode is about the role of distros, it's not even related at all. In all cases, read up those old articles, maybe we'll be able to do something about init and daemon managers soon, we've done one on daemons already.

• Make
  http://gromnitsky.users.sourceforge.net/articles/notes-for-new-make-users/

  Yet another great guide to make. Refer to "Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles" in issue 38 and others.

• Extra content
  https://nixwindows.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/ed1-is-turing-complete/
  http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html

  The last podcast mentioned ed (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2191) and this article just came out. I couldn't resist sharing it.

Random

• A subreddit for once
  https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/

  I don't usually link to reddit. This sub is great, I don't really like places that have one sided arguments and this is totally the opposite.

• Production
  https://jefffinley.org/our-obsession-with-productivity/
  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/be-more-productive/415821/

  Some thoughts about the productivity craze. Related to "The busy trap" in issue 32.

• Pedantic and semantic
  http://www.science20.com/science_autism_spectrum_disorders/pedantic_semantic_or_i_do_not_think_word_means_what_you_think_it_does
  http://www.vistaseeker.com/2007/12/04/the-pedantic-programmer/

  We all know someone like that, or at least we've met someone like that in our lifetime.

• The Grand Analogy
  https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25335

  Related to "The extended mind" in 64. The current "invention of the century" will always be used as an analogy for how the mind works.

• Corporate nightmare
  https://foliovision.com/2018/03/why-not-buy-ibm

  It's always a mess when big corps are trying to earn revenue and divide tasks.

• A fascinating blog
  https://www.atlasobscura.com/

  The weird and obscure, all agglomerated in one place.

Thoughts

You need to be your own universe, to have your own dynamics, and only then there'll be a place for others to be part of. Relationships are stars in colliding universes.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• State of...
  https://www.giantpockets.com/?p=5615
  https://www.limelight.com/resources/white-paper/state-of-online-video-2017/

  The state of handheld Linux devices and the state of online video. Both are interesting articles.

• More on Debian ranting
  https://tingping.github.io/2018/03/02/when-distros-get-it-wrong.html

  Remember the past week series of nag about Debian, issue 64 "Nagging about Debian", it seems like there's a continuity there. The message has gone around and now people feel entitled to give their opinions. Read up, it's an interesting debate, is it ok to bring back to life old software projects. Is it more ok then to add new projects to the repo?

• Bash completion
  https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/03/01/bash-programmable-completion-tutorial.html

  zsh has a reputation for its completion system, but we shouldn't forget bash has something similar and that it's the default on many systems.

• XFS
  https://lwn.net/Articles/747633/

  You might have heard of XFS once as the fs for "big files", you might have read a bunch of articles in the past weeks about filesystems in general and how data is layed out. This is time to mix those together and see what's up these days with XFS in the Linux realm. There's a nice talk about what subvolumes actually mean.

• POSIX
  https://sortix.org
  https://sortix.org/man/#system
  https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html

  It's nice to explore different OS that are POSIX compliant. sortix has a lot of interesting stuffs going on, apart from all the underlying base, it has its own editor, package manager and much more. Download it and try it out.

• Wihtout libc
  http://weeb.ddns.net/0/programming/c_without_standard_library_linux.txt
  https://github.com/ericherman/eh-no-libc

  On the topic of starting from scratch, very similar to "Tiny ELF" in issue 47 and "The world most prominent virus has erased all the source code" in issue 52, we're going to write executables without libc.

• Virtuallyfun, once more
  https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/03/01/fread-and-fwrite-demystified-stdio-on-unix-v7/

  This is probably the blog I've shared the most so far but it's worth it. Related to the previous two posts, we again ask about the common root, this time we're taking a look at fread and fwrite.

• Finally a new podcast
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2191

  After a hiatus of 4 months here comes a new episode of the podcast. In this episode we're tackling scripts, glue code, the original Unix tools, and their history. We're going to see why it matters nowadays. Be sure to also check the comments on the thread, as picky as they might seem they still bring some new info to the topic.

• I haven't covered cmake
  https://github.com/pyk/cmake-tutorial

  In the last section of the podcast I didn't cover any build tool, which there are way too many. I thought of mentioning cmake in this issue as I'm not familiar with it and this tutorial is good but cmake itself is kinda complex after all.

• Xlib architecture and XCB
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix04/tech/freenix/full_papers/sharp/sharp_html/index.html

  There aren't many documents about Xlib internals, this one is a must read for anyone wanting to understand it.

Random

• The user agent war
  https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

  If you've ever wondered why there is a "Mozilla" in every single user agent out there then this is your answer. It's fun to think about how the technology has to squish itself to fit the current expectation of the users and not the other way around, even when sometimes it seems like the opposite.

• Digital and technological literacy
  http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

  We had quite the discussion about this rant thread during the week so I thought of sharing it so that you can have the same discussion (once more) with your peers.

• A story on privacy
  https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e

  A continuation on issue 63 "Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity". This article emphasize how the perception of privacy evolved through time.

Thoughts

"Our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. We have to artificially invent ways to forget..." - Bruce Sterling

https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/comp_game_designers.article

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Volume management, RAID, and FS
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/zfs
  http://www.unixarena.com/2013/07/solaris-zfs-free-tutorialtraining.html
  http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/features/article.php/11192_2026611_2

  I haven't shared enough about ZFS in this newsletter. It's a great volume manager and fs, you gotta give it a try.

• Kernel module
  https://saurvs.github.io/post/writing-netbsd-kern-mod/

  In continuation with issue 62 "DKMS", let's explore how to write kernel modules on NetBSD.

• Tun/Tap
  http://backreference.org/2010/03/26/tuntap-interface-tutorial/

  What's the difference between tun and tap, what usage do they have, how to create them?

• Writing a terminal emulator
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2018-02-24/0/POSTING-en.html
  https://github.com/vain/eduterm

  Vain takes us on a journey to explore how to build a terminal emulator from scratch. Vain's approach at explaining is explorative, which brings it to life. As we all know this topic doesn't have many great articles and we're in need of more similar to this one. You can also check the nixers podcast about Terminals https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2108 to refresh your mind about line discipline, escape sequences, and others.

• A colorful man
  https://russellparker.me/2018/02/23/adding-colors-to-man/

  I like colors but I can't help but think of this https://www.gilesorr.com/vim/slides/vimSyntaxOn.jpg, it must be the meme invasion that is influencing me. Regardless, we're reminded of something related to the previous article, termcap and terminfo and how it affects other programs such as less. It was nice to learn about lesskey.

• Window managers
  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/WindowUITaxonomy.pdf
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7b93/785d1d84b06d36badb59a0c6b779d76743c5.pdf

  The ins and outs of window managers. Those are quite old papers, 1988 and 2003 respectfully, and shamelessly we didn't innovate that much since then. The papers also debunk a lot of misconceptions, some discussions we already had on the forums too: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2135 https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2048.

• Let us never speak of it again
  http://boston.conman.org/2018/02/28.2
  https://lobste.rs/s/ybw6tg/potential_way_have_spaces_filenames_not

  What is a special character, what is not, how did we decide that? Why does it break everything. This is somewhat related to issue 59 "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks".

• Using bash not only for small scripts
  https://oscarforner.com/2018/02/24/Software_development_using_Bash

  The article goes over how to do good software engineering using the dreadful shell scripting languages. There's a lot to learn from this, open your eyes.

• A summary
  http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blog/2015/12/11/wepskn.html

  I found this amazing person who made a summary of two articles I've shared, the paper of Drepper in issue 58 "About memory" and Eric Raymond in issue 61 "On a roll with C". So if you've felt like you missed content from the previous two then here's your chance to get it back. Also, pay attention to the conclusion, some assumptions were wrong.

• Everything you need to know about crypto in 1h http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/schedule/attachments/135_crypto1hr.pdf

  Extravagant title and it holds it. This is a good overview of many crypto concepts.

Random

• Recall this?
  http://rekall.me/archive

  An inspo wall.

• Punching up
  https://www.crummy.com/2013/11/27/0

  Maybe a rule that we should follow on the internet. I'm not a fan of bots but this sounds legit.

• The extended mind
  http://cognitivemedium.com/tat/index.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Mind

  I wanted to include this in the Unix section but I wasn't sure it fitted properly. On the topic of HCI, what makes an interface so good, are we too attached to technology, is it wrong. Similar topics have also been tackled on the forums: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1637, https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2051.

• Reading more
  https://hackernoon.com/how-the-godfather-of-cyberpunk-would-write-software-aaaa0f2155c7

  This is an article for both writers and software developers.

Thoughts

Many of us always think interesting things in their minds, but no one other than themselves get to hear them because we don’t say those things out loud, we don’t communicate them or sometimes can’t find the exact words to describe them.

The only places in the world where this is possible might be the internet.

A black box for anonymized speech which unfortunately is misused.

I'm going to link the archived newsletter from now on because it seems like not everyone sees them. I'm also going to use different email titles for every issues, including the issue number in it, which is something I should've done a long time ago. Thanks for all the feedbacks, we now have 197 subscribers.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Nagging about Debian
  http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9317-has-linux-lost-its-way-comments-prompt-a-debian-developer-to-revisit-freebsd-after-20-years
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2018/02/17/what_is_debian_all_about_really_or_friction_packaging_complex_applications/
  http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/futures_of_distributions/
  https://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2018/02/21/attacks-against-secure-apt-repositories/

  This week there's a surge (resurge) of "typical blog posts", this time the "internet mind" has chosen Debian. Get your popcorn ready because this is gonna be fun. Would you call it the package managers war? Where do you stand on this, to centralize package management or not, discuss on the forums https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1883 and https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2049 are relevant. The last post is the nail in the coffin, remember entry 60 "APT and https", well this guy is putting it down so badly it hurts.

• Vertical white space
  http://oceanpark.com/papers/vertical_white_space.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20120223181226/http://oceanpark.com/papers/vertical_white_space.html

  I'm failing at this so badly, my life is shattering before my eyes. These days we have more control over all the parameters mentioned, no need to insert invisible images, so no excuses anymore. (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/line-height) However, this isn't as straight forward as it seems to do it properly using common markdown implementations.

• More on typography
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html#AEN36
  https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xtc2001/paper/xft.html#fig-xft-name
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-devel/fcpatternformat.html
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2065
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=627088
  https://github.com/jamesni/fonts-tweak-tool/

  This is a fascinating topic that was shared multiple times, the links are not new, check issue 34 "Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips". However, I still felt like sharing them again. I've dig into fontconfig from a developer point of view last weekend and noticed that I was wrong about the following assumption: I thought it was the Xft library that had the job of parsing the string representing how to match a font but it's not, it's a feature of fontconfig, and this makes sense, and a lot of articles online are full of misinformation about this. Xft sits in the middle, as the glue code only. This reminded me, once again, that: The font stack isn't that well understood. That we're still missing tools to manipulate fontconfig, though some exists such as fontik and fonts-tweak-tool, both from fedora. That the fontconfig xml language isn't well understood either. That the persons that are heavily involved in the projects are now Google employees and might be busy, Raph Levien and Behdad Esfahbob for example. And finally that maybe we can start to bring awareness to this topic if only we push out more demystifying posts in the wilderness for others to read.

• Viruses on Unix?
  http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/White-Paper-Viruses-in-a-Unix-world

  An "old" white paper about the advent of viruses in the Unix world, something we got accustomed to hear with the recent iot hacks and Ddos botnets.

• BSD hacking and security
  http://www.mit.edu/~xela/simsong_bsd_story.html
  https://www.soldierx.com/news/libhijack-PoCGTFO-0x17
  https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8968-are_all_bsds_created_equally

  From old to new, how the average blogger realized that BSDs are, like all, not-immune to security flaws. As was said in the previous article: "The promotion of the concept of magical immunity to computer viral attacks surfaces on a regular basis. This concept, while desirable, is misleading and dangerous since it tends to mask a real threat." Related to issue 60 "Cruncy click baity" (yes it's typo), the CCC presentation is what was discussed, it's a great presentation. The soldierx paper technical details are a bit beyond me but I could grasp the gist of the privilege escalation technique.

• Emails
  https://github.com/vedetta-com/caesonia
  https://jamey.thesharps.us/2018/02/16/how-not-to-replace-email/

  Setting up a mail server from scratch in 2018 is difficult, we need automation, like with iredmail and the likes. Does this mean emails are dead, probably not. The second article is about Wave a project that was meant to be a "revolutionary communication protocol". It didn't catch on and the author, which is also the creator of XCB, meditates on why.

• Building a Wayland compositor from scratch
  http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/02/17/Writing-a-Wayland-compositor-1.html
  http://sircmpwn.github.io/2017/06/10/Introduction-to-Wayland.html

  The lead dev of Sway starts a series of articles about how to use the new lib wlroots to allow building compositor pieces more easily, so it's not really from scratch after all. However, even though you have a library get ready to be faced with a totally new world and learning curve (the author doesn't do that good of a job at explaining and throws specific words around assuming they are obvious).

• Not so wget
  http://libdill.org/tutorial-sockets.html

  This isn't a copy of wget, not even close, it's an example on how to use libdill, a new C concurrent library for concurrency (go-like). The low-level stacking of protocols was nice to read, it couples well with tls wrapping.

• Dtrace for Linux
  https://gnu.wildebeest.org/blog/mjw/2018/02/14/dtrace-for-linux-oracle-does-the-right-thing/
  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris/dtrace-tutorial-142317.html

  Dtrace is getting ported to Linux, this mean we'll get some new very powerful debugging and tracing tool to play with from now on other than perf.

• Console codes
  https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/4-console_codes/

  I didn't know this was a man page, man 4 console_codes. It would certainly have been useful during the research about terminals. Check it out and test/refresh your knowledge of what you've learned.

Random

• A discussion we most probably all once had
  https://dev.to/ben/its-perfectly-fine-to-only-code-at-work-dont-let-anyone-tell-you-otherwise--25i3
  https://lobste.rs/s/hebw9j/it_s_perfectly_fine_only_code_at_work_don_t

  What is passion? This is a big question, should it be limited to work hours, 9 to 5? Should we be biased against the ones that don't work extra hours? Can we be passionate about something and not put the extra efforts into it, not choosing it as a priority? What's the effect of competition in today's world, is it a requirement to work more?

• Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity
  https://breakthroughanalysis.com/2017/04/14/privacy-vs-confidentiality-vs-anonymity-who-knows/
  https://www.soldierx.com/tutorials/Cyber-Ninjitsu-Art-Invisibility-Online
  https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2013/10/how-does-privacy-differ-from-anonymity-and-why-are-both-important/

  For the average person those terms might not look like they have a different meaning but they do and this is quite important to put forward what exactly we're talking about. Related to issue 47 "Differential privacy" and all the digital identity related ones.

• Locus of control
  https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/SOC-3/

  Free will and determinism, let's add "locus of control" in the mix. Take the test and see how much you score. How much do you think you are responsible for your own actions, who's to blame?

• Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
  http://bigthink.com/the-proverbial-skeptic/those-who-do-not-learn-history-doomed-to-repeat-it-really

  Fancy, memorable quote, what lies behind it? Here's an article to start some discussion.

Thoughts

"Rationality worship is central to many, perhaps most, of the twistednesses of our culture."

This is a controversial quote but one that couldn't be more timely. Rationalizing our behaviors has become the everyday toy of many.

PS: There are some new changes on the forums, let us know what you think of them.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Predicting unix commands
  http://papersdb.cs.ualberta.ca/~papersdb/uploaded_files/712/paper_korvemaker00predicting.pdf

  HCI applied to the command line. We already have backward search, now think about a kind of way the shell could help you write the next command, not only complete it.

• Performance tunning hasn't changed much
  http://oceanpark.com/papers/gem01.html

  Some excellent and valuable tips that passed the test of time. sar seems like the universal Unix logging tool.

• Blocking processes
  https://linux.die.net/lkmpg/x1052.html

  I can't sum it up better than: If you're a human being and you're bothered by a human being, the only thing you can say is: "Not right now, I'm busy. Go away!"

• DKMS
  https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BuildingKernelModules#head-d313bd351f90d4f25a2143b7bbcff73f927731f0
  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6896
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support

  Starting on a series of articles related to kernel modules on Linux. Those first ones should cover how to add, build, install, uninstall, and remove the modules.

• VFS in more details
  http://www.linux.it/~rubini/docs/vfs/vfs.html

  Technical implementation details on how to write a VFS compliant FS on Linux.

• So much details in history...
  http://multicians.org/unix.html

  ...That it doesn't really matter anymore. There is a group of persons that are fanatics about that sort of things, not missing any tiny bit of info. I personally think that it's interesting but that the importance is not in those overly narrow details.

• Fast regex
  https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

  Regular expressions are one of the trademark of Unix history, in this article there's a discussion on the theory of it: automatons, which you might remember if you've ever taken a CS class.

• Unix as an IDE
  http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/michaelochurch/wp/index.php/2013/01/09/ide-culture-vs-unix-philosophy/
  https://mkaz.tech/geek/unix-is-my-ide/
  https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/

  An idiom that is embraced by many of us, put together by the novel concept of software as tools that was brought by Unix and more precisely pipelines. I don't agree with most of the opinions expressed in some of those articles nevertheless they're worth a read.

• Linux as a firmware
  https://www.linuxboot.org/
  https://trmm.net/NERF

  Linux everywhere! Sounds good to some and bad to others. This still looks like a work in progress and not very accessible to anyone.

• 1995 and 1998 NT vs Unix in the IT world
  http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/unix-perspective
  http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/nt-vsunix-one-substantially-better

  Those are timely articles, The Open Group was formed (by merging two other groups, OSF and X/Open) in 1996 and published the Single UNIX Specification: The end of the UNIX wars. Get ready for that second article because it's full of topics that were covered by this newsletter.

Random

• Patience is a virtue
  https://www.gilroygardens.org/play/circus-trees
  https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/living-bridges-in-india-have-grown-for-500-years-pics.html
  https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/vine-bridges-japan

  At different scales of time we can still appreciate and live in symbiosis with trees.

• Compartmentalization
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psychology)

  Hello there people that like to read stuffs related to psychology (and those who don't). The topic of compartmentalization has been one of my "Baader-Meinhof" aka frequency illusion for some time now... Well, it's more of a temporary kind of focus on a certain topic and what relates to it, it's deliberate and not really and illusion (I've seen the idea repeated in multiple books and articles I've read). Compartmentalization is the fabric of everyone of us, there are extreme cases like when those separated parts are contradictory but even so our personality lies within the connections of the compartment (which might explain why when there opposites it leads to personality disorders). This has been proven by many psychological experiments. Without them we do not exist, boundaries with links between them are what define an individual as a self. We can't be everything at once, we can't fulfil all our roles in life at once, we can't be all of our personality traits at once. The father cannot be at the same time the lover cannot be at the same time the worker cannot be at the same time the friend, etc.. And those have to stay within their confined boxes. Some social platforms nowadays try to destroy those and put everything in the same box. This turns an individual into a single blob, flattening their existence, labelling, simplifying, breaking down, and leading to the destruction of the self. Take this as food for thought for the week (and let me know if going on a tangent like that in the newsletter is too much).

Thoughts

We might be fighting with someone, and in the midst of the fight the phone rings. After some heated argument as to who will pick it up, we finally answer the phone with a voice and attitude that are in total contrast with what we were just portraying of ourselves in the argument.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Copyrights
  http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html

  A ridiculous copyright claim from AT&T on an empty program.

• Fun in the console
  https://cmcenroe.me/2018/01/30/fbclock.html
  https://cmcenroe.me/2017/05/05/linux-console.html
  https://github.com/tombh/texttop

  Some ideas that you might want to use during the TTY week we usually do in summer. The tip that surprised me was that compose keys are supported in the console!

• On a roll with C
  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/?p=9705
  http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4306186/structure-padding-and-packing#4306269

  We discussed efficiency and optimization (pogo) in earlier issues, this time let's put an emphasis on C structures. This is something that is written in arguable depth in the paper of Drepper in issue 58 "About memory" but that I felt needed more articles and discussion (because it's a super long paper packed with info).

• A tool to go along with the previous docs
  https://github.com/jmesmon/pahole
  https://lwn.net/Articles/335942/

  I've had difficulties using pahole (which is also mentioned in Eric Raymond previous article but that he also hasn't tried himself either) so if anyone can figure it out properly and write a tutorial it would make the world a better place.

• What to use other than statically linked executables
  https://github.com/Intoli/exodus

  Well, it actually rebuilds a statically linked executable, which is really nifty in my opinion. Let's quote: "Exodus works around these issues by compiling a small statically linked launcher binary that invokes the relocated linker directly with any hardcoded RPATH library paths overridden. The relocated binary will run with the exact same linker and libraries that it ran with on its origin machine." If you have no clue what that means you might want to read issue 54 "LD.SO".

• Bring back to life using NetBSD
  https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-retro/#1

  NetBSD is supported on a lot of platforms that are marked as deprecated for other OSs, this presentation quickly goes over some of the reasons why and examples of this.

• Writing filesystem drivers for Linux
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2017-09-09/0/POSTING-en.html

  There's a lot to learn about filesystems, what better way to do it than to have fun writing the interface to one. It's weird that I discovered this post after having done the research for the podcast about data storage on Unix, it could've been useful.

• This week there are videos
  http://www.ixbrian.com/blog/?p=192

  Quick tutorials mostly about systemd real world sysadmin usages.

• BSD from scratch, source to OS (NetBSD)
  https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-bsd/#1
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JctBMLQ_IdA

  Flashy title, slow presenter (watch at least at 1.25x). To be fair the presentation is about teaching how to build and present BSD systems from scratch on boards (Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard), though it goes a lot off topic with resources and OS ideas. Aka, "get a copy of the source, compile, build the OS, boot it on the ARM board, and work through some exercises".

• OpenBSD as a VPN box
  https://undeadly.org/features/2018/02/eurobsdcon2017-branch-vpn.pdf

  OpenBSD has a good reputation as a platform that is to be put on the fighting lines of the network peripherals. The presentation goes over setting up a VPN solution using OpenBSD. Warning alert for the high amount of networking jargon (way more than I could grasp).

Random

• Remember digital identity and self-sovereign identity?
  https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/

  Issue 44 "The new Face ID is already a meme", issue 36 "More on digital identity", issue 27 "Digital Identity", issue 9 "Identity", we've been discussing this topic over and over again and I hope this becomes more and more of a hot topic in the coming years.

• Beauty is found in the detail
  http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail

  An article about how the more we stop and look the more we can go deep down in details, deep down in thoughts, and maybe get in touch with reality.

• Mistakes and happenstance
  http://www.historytoday.com/alexander-lee/slips-tongue

  The power of Chinese whispers and the repercussion over time.

• Compiler madness
  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/abc/
  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/abc/paper.pdf

  Fun DOS self-compilable chiptune player and research paper.

Thoughts

Have you ever noticed that when somebody says "That’s a good question?" it’s usually because they don’t yet have an answer?

That quote couldn't be more wrong.
Every single time I hear someone say "That's a good question" and remember the saying I pay extra attention to the discussion and realize that it's the total opposite.

What do you think?

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• ID3 tags
  https://phoxis.org/2010/05/08/what-are-id3-tags-all-about/
  https://www.linux.com/news/manage-your-music-id3-tag-editors

  A comprehensible explanation of what the meta tags on mp3 are, the ID3. Plus an article about their management under Linux (but it's more about using free software).

• APT and https
  https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/

  This is something I had no idea about but that makes total sense. It's funny how nowadays "app stores" are learning a lot from package managers that have been there for years.

• An hymn to tmux
  https://medium.com/actualize-network/a-minimalist-guide-to-tmux-13675fb160fa
  https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/html_node/Default-Key-Bindings.html

  Yet another starter guide to tmux, plus some screen.

• Cruncy click baity
  https://www.csoonline.com/article/3250653/open-source-tools/is-the-bsd-os-dying-some-security-researchers-think-so.html

  Despite the title this article poses a question worth asking. Are BSDs truly more secure? Also, is security the only factor?

• Lots of C, or more precisely compiler, preprocessor, and linker features
  https://mort.coffee/home/obscure-c-features/
  https://dom.as/2009/07/27/profile-guided-optimization-with-gcc/
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Building_with_Profile-Guided_Optimization
  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2008/11/12/pogo/

  There are many links in there, some about tricks to use the preprocessor, some about optimization using the linker.

• Even more C
  https://davmac.wordpress.com/2018/01/28/understanding-the-c-c-memory-model/
  http://c-faq.com/misc/xor.dmr.html

  This time about some memory access concepts and locks (Which is also covered in the book/paper by Drepper that I've mentioned the past weeks), and about why there's no xor condition (which I found a pretty weird question to ask in the first place).

• How the Linux kernel uses some C tricks to do initcall
  http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~moz/kernelnewbies/documents/initcall/kernel.html
  http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~moz/kernelnewbies/documents/initcall/ex_simple.html

  The second link relates to constructor and destructor in C of last week, which is useful here. You're probably overdosing on C articles for now.

• Fixing time on V7
  https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/28/date-and-time-on-unix-v7/

  We've already shared many articles from virtuallyfun, the name of the blog certainly stayed true to itself in all of them. I hope you're enjoying them as much as I am. Kudos for the great experimentations the author is doing. The article specifically deals with something we've discussed in the podcast about "bits and words".

• Logos and artworks
  https://sylviaritter.deviantart.com/gallery/59957223/Ubuntu-Animals
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1920

  Artistic pieces of the Ubuntu logos.

• Car dashboard running Linux
  https://opensource.com/article/18/1/my-delorean-runs-perl

  I'm probably not the only one that kept thinking throughout the article about the security implications, what about the crashes and laws regarding those.

Random

• Owning your own DNS node
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/01/26/how-and-why-i-run-my-own-dns-servers/
  https://dns.he.net/

  I've recently set adsuck on my machine, it's not really a full dns server but it does the job of filtering ads and unwanted traffic. What are other reasons for running your own DNS?

• Websites ideas
  https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/posts/web-books.html
  https://alternativebit.fr/posts/lightweight-blog/

  The first article is about a direct application of nihilism into websites (sarcasm). Second one is about extremism in blog size. The common thread going through those articles: the love of blogging and sharing information.

• Futuristic view of HCI
  https://css-tricks.com/tools-thinking-tools-systems/

  New ideas about how to design interfaces.

• Typical online rant
  https://www.rdegges.com/2018/please-stop-using-local-storage/

  I wonder why those blog posts are so popular, a new technology comes out and someone nags about others taking advantage of it.

• Hotel music
  https://gkbrk.com/2016/05/hotel-music/

  Beautiful reverse engineering of an unknown UDP packet.

Thoughts

"There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time." - Those don't necessarily happen in this order.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Code alignment (again)
  https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2018/01/18/Code_alignment_issues

  Remember the post of last week (issue 58) "About memory", you certainly didn't finish reading it (I didn't either, there are 30 pages left) so keep this blog post queued for when you reach a point where you've grasped how alignment affects code efficiency (as crazy as this sounds).

• Compiler features
  https://phoxis.org/2011/04/27/c-language-constructors-and-destructors-with-gcc/
  http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2006/n1966.html

  More interesting compiler options that you may want to know about. There are ton of small features in C compilers for optimization to twiddle.

• strace vs dtrace vs strace
  https://sysdig.com/blog/sysdig-vs-dtrace-vs-strace-a-technical-discussion/

  We've discussed sysdig in issue 18, let's talk about it again and about other process tracing programs. The tool itself is open source and the company seems to be making money from the web interfaces that it constructed around it, sort of added value benefits. There's also csysdig a very cool open source curses interface for it which resembles htop.

• Packing bytes natively what does that mean
  https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/04/byte-order-fallacy.html

  This article destroys misconception about byte ordering and how to do it properly.

• grep your way to freedom
  https://anniecherkaev.com/grep-your-way-to-freedom

  In 2013 the Oxford dictionary added grep as a noun and a verb: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/grep. In this article you learn about the magic of hardcoded values and adventures to dig them out of the ground.

• Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks
  https://lobste.rs/s/fjyy12/proc_pid_stat_is_broken
  https://linux.die.net/man/7/capabilities
  https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Capabilities
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/accounting/taskstats.txt
  https://lwn.net/Articles/79185/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/632520/

  There was a fruitful discussion on https://lobste.rs last week about procfs formatting. It made me think of netlink and other interfaces to get the same information. Then I've started testing with taskstats which forced me to set capabilities on a copy of a python interpreter so that I can try out a script using the gnlpy library without making my system insecure.

• vi modal way changed the UX world
  http://blog.ngedit.com/2005/06/03/the-vi-input-model/

  A story some of us might have lived first hand. Highly keyboard oriented editor in general give that liberty, not only vim.

• Containers vs OS
  https://dave.cheney.net/2018/01/16/containers-versus-operating-systems

  Insightful discussion about the way that processes should be managed if containerized (or not?). A bit of a reminder of the podcast about processes intro sections. I love this kind of article, a monologue based on questions after questions, expanding into deeper topics.

• Unix influence in history
  http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch001j.c11

  A tool for human view of the history of unix. "The coupling between such a utility and the community it serves, is so strong that the community is actually a part of the system itself." The article is quite long but it's worth the read.

• I've always wondered about those
  https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial

  Encoding, codecs, audio, video, container, etc.. This finally demystifies it a bit for me!

Random

• Good search engine and quick documentation
  http://symbolhound.com/
  http://www.cheat-sheets.org/

  If you're a software developer then those resources are super helpful.

• Using the computer hardware to send radio waves
  https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio

  I wish I could test this but I didn't find a device that has AM bands.

• Beware of rogue networks
  https://thejh.net/written-stuff/want-to-use-my-wifi?

  This is from the guy that warns about not copy pasting command from a webpage, and that also worked on the recent Intel CPU bug.

Thoughts

"It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards." - Søren Kierkegaard, in his journals (1843)

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Time shattering environment
  https://idea.popcount.org/2013-07-19-how-to-sleep-a-million-years/

  This is an ingenious idea and the sorting proof of concept blew my mind.

• Package management
  http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/01/10/Learn-your-package-manager.html

  A case against not mixing multiple package managers but to use the one of the distro. I'm in the favor of using a package from the repo instead of one from a pkg manager for a specific language.

• Network and servers
  http://rasp.sourceforge.net/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inetd
  http://www.acme.com/software/micro_inetd/

  Low bandwith and want to download something, let it be stopped by a proxy, saving the links to the usb, download on a computer with fast internet, put back on the first machine, and proxied again and downloaded from the usb. The other links are about inetd, which I just learned about. Proxying the connection and piping it to stdin to a program it will spawn on the fly to handle it.

• dc online
  http://pr0.uk/linux/dc/calculator/2017/12/07/dc-calculator-online-and-via-telnet.html

  Ever wanted to have it online, now you do. This is an example of how inetd can be used.

• Doing it in V7
  https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/10/life-in-unix-v7-an-attempt-at-a-simple-task/
  https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/17/teaching_an_almost_40-year_old_unix_about_backspace/
  https://github.com/DoctorWkt/Apout
  http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/

  Simulating PDP-11 Unix a.out binaries and reliving Unix V7. Those are some really cool tasks to put things of today's world into perspective. Remember when we discussed line discipline in the podcast about Terminals?

• Trying more old stuffs
  https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/01/reading-disks-from-1988-in-2018/

  Have you ever put back to life some old machine or data storage so that you can read your old work?

• A view on digital minimalism
  http://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/digital-minimalism-for-the-working-hacker.html

  I like differing ideas about all subjects but be sure to take them with a grain of salt. Especially when the author seems a bit too enamored with being similar to and justifying his idols. Somewhat related to "Another old one that fires up arguments in the efficiency world" of issue 55. The usage of the terms "places" vs "tools" fits properly in my opinion.

• Gdb, one of a kind
  http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/something-rotten-in-the-core/

  Lasagna softwares can be tricky when its base is an ed-like ui. This is related to the above, gdb being a "place" and not a "tool". Remember the GUI for gdb in "A gui for gdb" of issue 23, this is criticized here too.

• About memory
  https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf

  I've been reading this book for about 2 weeks now and I'm halfway through. It is by Ulrich Drepper which is the infamous lead developer of glibc. There's a lot of low level discussion so beware (from how the cpu cache works, to how the alignment affects performance, to how code structure affects it, prefetching, etc..)

• New blog to follow
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2015-04-20-going-write-only.html
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-04-13-longterm-computing-reading.html
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-05-17-openbsd-workstation-guide.html

  In the recent days it seemed like I was seeing his blog posts almost everywhere. They sure are quality posts.

• VFS, proc and root filesystems
  https://harrys.fyi/2015/03/31/vfs-proc-and-root-filesystems/

  Another article about the basics of VFS, reminding me that even if you do a research about a topic "Data storage on Unix" you might still forget it after a while.

Random

• You think it's a fad, you're not the only one
  https://github.com/hwayne/awesome-cold-showers

  Here's a list of tech that are trendy.

• Review on what happened
  https://cyber.wtf/2018/01/05/behind-the-scene-of-a-bug-collision/

  The story behind one of the researcher that worked the spectre and meltdown papers.

• The cool web is fading away from Google
  https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory
  https://www.google.com/patents/US9407661

  I've noticed it first hand, it's getting harder and harder to get specific results from Google and the GoogleFu is getting removed from it.

Thoughts

The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it. - Robert Morris

Note: There used to be a bug related to gmail where links weren't clickable. This has been fixed with the help of mort.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Virtual memory, fork, and processes
  http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/01/02/The-case-against-fork.html
  https://serverfault.com/questions/606185/how-does-vm-overcommit-memory-work#606193

  Related to issue 25 "malloc never fails on Linux... or does it?" and the fork() part of the podcast called "Processes on Unix". After reading those you can continue with the new articles and learn about cloning and spawning paradigms like rfork, clone and spawn.

• More on VM
  http://go2linux.garron.me/vmstat-cpu-memory-monitor-linux-fix-low-mem/

  A little article about tracking virtual memory on Linux.

• On a roll with Make
  https://github.com/qznc/annoying-build-systems

  In the spirit of the last few weeks, let's continue on this series on articles about automating build. This is an ongoing public domain list of regrouping all annoying build systems (all of them basically) and why they are annoying.

• Magnificent resource
  https://linuxjourney.com/

  I've seen that website a while ago but it has grown so much since then. It has become a beautiful resource that regroups a lot of the basic knowledge around Unix/Linux. I would definitely recommend it for anyone starting on their "journey".

• Hardcoded strings horror
  https://www.sigbus.info/software-compatibility-and-our-own-user-agent-problem.html

  Yet another case of "the more I learn, the less I'm surprised by the stupidity". The author says it best: "This sad situation is simultaneously a bit funny to me."

• Running the latest Linux on 486
  http://yeokhengmeng.com/2018/01/make-the-486-great-again/
  https://github.com/yeokm1/gentoo-on-486/

  There was a lot of efforts going into putting this together. It takes 11min to boot even with a minimized kernel but it still runs.

• Bash and shells
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/01/06/ten-things-i-wish-id-known-about-bash/
  https://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.html
  https://freebsdfrau.gitbooks.io/serious-shell-programming/

  I don't usually click on articles that have numbers in their titles (the nasty "listicles") but this one was more or less good with some obvious content to many readers (though promoting the sale of a book - This was to be foreseen!). This is put in contrast with an unfinished mini book about shell portability, see issues 13 "Linters" with shellcheck, 49 with "josuah's shell tricks", 17 with "Expansion & Globs" for the Bash Beginners Guide. Actually there are so many issues discussing shell tricks and compatibility, I can't mention them all.

• Plain text
  https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/a-love-letter-to-plain-text/
  http://engineering.cerner.com/blog/the-plain-text-is-a-lie/
  https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy

  I'm not really sure how "plain text" has anything to do with the first post... But the author seems to imply what he's doing is plain text manipulation (inside a memory DB?). The other article is a case against plain text or a circular argument against encodings. The last project tries to fix unicode, it's impressive to see.

• Egg hunting, what's that?
  https://pentesterslife.blog/2017/11/24/x64-egg-hunting-in-linux-systems/

  Thie pentester does a great job at explaining this concept.

• Deduplication
  https://www.borgbackup.org/
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/08/21/20127.html

  A backup that uses deduplication just like Hammer, this is truly fascinating. I don't know about many projects that uses this, maybe it would be nice to hear about them.

Random

• How to read math
  http://www.people.vcu.edu/~dcranston/490/handouts/math-read.html

  A tutorial in the form of a paper for novice (like me) who'd like to learn how to read mathematic scientific paper amongst other mathematical documents.

• I'm seeing it everywhere now
  https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm

  It has a name, this phenomena that happens every time we open our eyes to something new.

• Real-time and synchronicity
  http://www.yodaiken.com/2016/05/11/synchronous-processors/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_I/O

  Lots of CPU discussion after Meltdown and Spectre.

• More esoteric content
  http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/

  Diving into TempleOS the right way, taking its OS designs seriously. For a cheesy quote "There's something worthwhile to be found in everything."

Thoughts

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece. - Proverbs 16:27

We live in an age where we don't have to lift our fingers, so much that it has become an issue. This might be of religious origins but can easily be taken out of this context and applied to anyone.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• New year, new scavenger hunt
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2183

  Some older issues of the newsletter are required to solve parts of the hunt. The next two links are also hints for two of the early steps, newsletter readers will have an advantage.

• dig, nslookup, drill
  http://imdjh.github.io/toolchain/2015/10/07/drill-if-you-can-dig-if-you-have-to.html

  I had no idea what drill was until I wanted to use dig on ArchLinux. Just like with ss and netstat I'll have to relearn how to use the tool.

• Font editing done good
  http://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

  Fontforge has the weirdest UI I've seen, it's gtk based it seems.

• Without history nothing makes sense
  http://www.lubutu.com/soso/a-history-of-sifmt

  This is one of those "the more you know, the more everything seems strange and nothing is strange anymore". You can take that as an extension of the podcast about "Bits and words" https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2071.

• Sane default or not
  https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.txt

  Sec folks like to break the system so that it's rugged. It might not please everyone.

• Ricing your lockscreen
  https://www.devpy.me/the-best-linux-lockscreen/
  https://geoff.greer.fm/2018/01/02/linux-laptop-locking/

  I'm confused, since when did display manager start using HTML?

• Linux running behind OpenBSD?
  http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-mysterious-case-of-the-linux-page-table
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-415-x86pti
  https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/03/kernel-panic-what-are-meltdown-and-spectre-the-bugs-affecting-nearly-every-computer-and-device/
  https://spectreattack.com/
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631&w=2
  https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/more-details-about-mitigations-for-cpu_4.html

  OpenBSD has something similar that it newly implemented https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/openbsd-will-get-unique-kernels-on-each-reboot-do-you-hear-that-linux-windows/, at each reboot you have a different kernel (Linux had it since 2013). Linux wants, KASLR, on the fly different memory mapping of the kernel, read up to know more... There's some weird conspiracy theory in the background which unfolded in the recent days. If you remember "JS is strong" from issue 33, it's related.

• Another build system
  http://gittup.org/gittup/
  http://gittup.org/tup/

  The tup build system is interesting http://gittup.org/tup/ex_a_first_tupfile.html, now mixing it with git to make a distro is impressive.

• We discussed a lot of forensic...
  http://linuxforensicsbook.com/code.html

  ...and here are some scripts that can help you do an analysis of your system.

• The year was 2002
  http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

  Sweet story and I didn't know about the units tool used at the end, it's nifty.

Random

• Will Geocities websites make a comeback?
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter
  https://flowerhack.dreamwidth.org/3230.html

  State of the internet, again, nostalgia is growing. The cringiness aside I like this article.

• Doesn't anyone care about those starving spams?
  https://spa.mnesty.com/

  Send them to spamnesty, they'll take care of them. Great idea, let's see if this grows. I love how you can take a peek at the email threads. Go post it on the forums https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=437 if I haven't already!

• Cargo cults
  http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/cargo_cult_programming.shtml
  http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/c/cargocultprogramming.html

  As usual. "Working in isolation from the mainstream community, attempts to reinvent the bicycle, abuse of jargon and re-implementing older technologies under the new fancy names."

• Do you consider yourself a craftman?
  http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/

  ...I don't think so, I didn't sign it. It's a bit weird.

• TLS v1.3
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-tls-1-3-isnt-in-browsers-yet/

  Cloudflare always has good articles about the PKI.

Thoughts

"Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job."

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Those random bugs
  http://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-sometimes-couldnt.html

  This is the kind of issues that keeps you up at night, a nightmare.

• Get some gdb under your belt
  http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/GDB-Commands.html
  http://unknownroad.com/rtfm/gdbtut/gdbtoc.html

  We've shared a lot of articles related to gdb in the past but not about the basics of the basics. So here are some to fill your curiosity.

• Complementary content
  http://www.thrashing.com/thrashing-in-computer-science.html
  http://www.firmcodes.com/memory-thrashing-in-operating-system/

  Remember all those articles about optimization, well here's one bottleneck we're trying to avoid.

• Kernel to userspace IPC
  https://staaldraad.github.io/2017/12/20/netstat-without-netstat/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlink
  http://www.infradead.org/~tgr/libnl/
  https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/kqueue_tutorial/
  http://www.kohala.com/start/papers.others/doors.html

  There are many ways to pass messages between the earth and the moon, here I present procfs, sockets and message queues.

• An old question
  http://www.linfo.org/dot_slash.html

  It comes down to shell interpretation and avoiding confusion and safety bugs.

• Another old one that fires up arguments in the efficiency world
  https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/

  That's it, read this up and you won't have to enter the heated arguments anymore.

• A backup solution
  http://www.teejeetech.in/p/timeshift.html

  I love the idea of incremental backups that use rsync only for system files. This is an interface to this mechanism making it painless.

• Summarizing BSDs
  https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2016/08/20/how-to-choose-your-bsd-os-to-begin-with/

  If you have no clue where to start in the BSD world this article does an excellent job at summing up the philosophy of the different choices.

• Nagging about Makefiles
  http://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-simple-makefile-is-unicorn.html

  A continuation of "boilermake" of issue 53 and "Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles" of issue 38.

• The love of Wayland
  https://blogs.s-osg.org/wayland-zombie-apocalypse-near/

  This is a tricky bug related to the C implementation of the Wayland protocol. It has to do with endless (fd) events going to non-existent objects which are redirected to a singleton object and never cleaned.

Random

• Yet another horror stories
  http://9tabs.com/random/2017/12/23/evil-coding-incantations.html

  Learn to abuse the evil code that resides within some programming languages. Those C trigraphs and digraphs blew my mind! At least in gcc to enable trigraphs you have to add -trigraphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C

• Waiting
  http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait/
  http://static.duartes.org/img/blogPosts/latencyAndThroughputFull.png

  This is part of what we've discussed the past few weeks, optimization, caching, data storage. It shows where most of the time is spend while traveling through the computer.

• Create a category and people will get attached to it
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_personality_theory
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_identity_theory
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy

  Wikipedia links about interesting topics that can be linked together.

Thoughts

"It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else and still unknown to himself" - Francis Bacon in The Essays (Of Great Place, referring to men in positions of power)

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• LD.SO
  http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/ld.so.8.html
  https://cs.nyu.edu/~xiaojian/bookmark/linux/ld_so%20%20Dynamic-Link%20Library%20support.htm

  The dynamic loader is a program in itself and has options, those are implicit most of the time but you can be explicit about them. Here are some links to learn more about the topic, follow along using objdump -x <program>. LD_DEBUG is my favorite new finding.

• Ever installed a Unix-like system for a friend who's not technie?
  https://freedompenguin.com/articles/how-to/poor-mans-guide-to-remote-linux-desktop-support/

  Funny article about something we've all experienced and a solution to it. You can share your own experience in this old thread https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=307.

• One of those big article about software comparison
  https://snork.ca/posts/2017-03-04-the-quest-for-a-desktop-email-client/

  This one goes over the list of Unix mail clients. I'm definitely a fan of those type of articles, Kirby wrote one on the forums about reverse engineering tools, and I did three, one about game emulators, another about UML, and the last one about mind map creators.

• When life gives you lemons, make lemonade
  http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/bits/Interdata/32bit/unix/univWollongong_v6/miller.pdf

  What today seems like a gargantuan tasks were tasks that could actually be tackled.

• In continuation with the previous post
  https://dave.cheney.net/2017/12/04/what-have-we-learned-from-the-pdp-11

  Let's read up more about how the PDP 11 influenced so many.

• The omnipresent
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_(computing)
  http://csillustrated.berkeley.edu/PDFs/handouts/cache-3-associativity-handout.pdf
  https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Memory/fully.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_replacement_policies
  https://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/167038/is-there-any-way-to-know-the-size-of-l1-l2-l3-cache-and-ram-in-linux

  They're everywhere, at every single level, hardware and software, everything is cache. Thus you need to know your share of info about them. In "Desktop Management Interface (DMI)" of issue 18 (Getting info from the bios and hardware) we discussed some of that topic too, hwloc is an amazing addition to the list.

• Another fantastically deep article
  http://careers.directi.com/display/tu/Understanding+CPU+Utilization+and+Optimization

  Remember "Memory and optimizations" of issue 39, well this is from the same team called Directi, I'm not so sure what the company does but they do publish some amazing content online about optimization. It's probably more about the author, Bhavin Turakhia, also a founder of CodeChef amongst other companies. The article, which is really good, emphasises on processes scheduling and CPU utilization, you can read/listen to the podcast about processes before tackling it.

• We use it everyday but do you know the small details
  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/cp.html

  For example, do you know what's the difference between the -R and -r flags?

• Automatic builds and reproducibility
  https://reproducible-builds.org/
  https://reproducible-builds.org/tools/

  This is the paradise for anyone in QA. A lot of distributions (Debian, Fedora, Arch, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc..) use this concept to ensure their packages are lean and clean. The documentation about it is more extensive than I had imagined and there are many tool to help with the process.

• systemd gui
  https://github.com/mmstick/systemd-manager
  https://github.com/pentix/qjournalctl

  Those are my first finds about systemd graphical service manager and log viewer (one in rust the other in c++). They look quite nifty, though a sorrow reminder of the Windows-like aspect of systemd internals.

Random

• Again another ECC tutorial
  https://www.royalfork.org/2014/09/04/ecc/

  This is in continuation with "More Crypto?" of issue 31. This particular tutorial has an emphasis on the rudimental basics of signature.

• A memento
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061500492.html

  "Many of us want to be influenced by corporations, by the government, by the media, so where there is that demand, there will be a supply."

• Planned obsolescence
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

  A concept hardware manufacturer love.

• Personal likes
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects

  This is the podcast I've been listening to during the holiday traffic, I highly recommend it.

Thoughts

You need huge material wealth, acquired only through intense engagement with the affairs of the world, to build monuments that inspire us to abandon wealth and to leave the world behind.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Safely removing SATA
  http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2009/05/04/linux-sata-hot-plug-unplug/
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/43413/how-can-i-safely-remove-a-sata-disk-from-a-running-system#43450

  As far as I'm concerned I simply unmount the file system, I didn't know you could stop the disk this way, I'll try that next time.

• C all the way
  http://seenaburns.com/building-c-programs/
  http://wiki.c2.com/?CeeLanguage

  If you've ever had trouble understanding linking and compiling then the first article is for you. The second article (from the amazing c2) can be summed up in this quote: "The problem with C is the techniques that help it compete with modern dynamic languages are invariably the techniques that make it dangerous."

• Portable Linux binaries
  http://blog.gibson.sh/2017/11/26/creating-portable-linux-binaries/

  To continue on the topic of linking. This is hacky... A bit related to last week's "And override libc" entry.

• Resource for the {black,grey,white}hat
  https://github.com/xairy/linux-kernel-exploitation

  I'm no expert on kernel hacking, this is beyond me but might serve someone.

• Data structures in OpenBSD
  http://kindsoftware.com/documents/reports/Britt12.pdf

  There's nothing particular about OpenBSD in this document, it does a good job at hovering the advantages and complexities (interface, computational, space, implementation) of one type over another. There's a tool to calculate interface complexity that is linked in the Appendix (I couldn't extract it from the document though so this remains to be tested).

• c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs
  https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/09/optimizing-web-servers-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/
  http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html
  https://speakerdeck.com/mrfoto/what-are-flame-graphs-and-how-to-read-them

  Optimization is a really thorough topic, with graphs and nifty little knobs you can tweak. The network stack expertise shows up in this post.

• boilermake
  https://github.com/dmoulding/boilermake/blob/master/MANUAL
  https://github.com/igagis/prorab/

  The first make boilerplate looks promising clean and simple, the second one looks confusing. Or you can opt for a nice from scratch make like this one http://git.nixers.net/libgbt/file/makefile.html.

• tmux hooks
  https://devel.tech/tips/n/tMuXz2lj/the-power-of-tmux-hooks/
  https://robots.thoughtbot.com/a-tmux-crash-course
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3094946/move-window-between-tmux-clients

  I'm going to get into tmux more and more, I've only used dvtm before: http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/. It's great so far, I love the detach/attach part and the idea of sessions (unlike using something like abduco https://github.com/martanne/abduco).

• Analysis of tee (not tea)
  http://nanxiao.me/en/the-anatomy-of-tee-program-on-openbsd/

  It seems like queue.h (man (3) queue) is used in a lot of softwares https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/sys/queue.h, make sure to look into that. The post is straight forward and does a decent job at explaining what the software does and how it does it.

• sbrk and malloc
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sbrk
  https://medium.com/@andrestc/implementing-malloc-and-free-ba7e7704a473
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_segment
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19676688/how-malloc-and-sbrk-works-in-unix#19703860
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2079151/minimizing-the-amount-of-malloc-calls-improves-performance#2079182
  http://www.inf.udec.cl/~leo/Malloc_tutorial.pdf

  A lot of resources to get you started on the beautiful (or ugly) discovery of memory manipulation (and brainwash). Read those in the order posted, they are super fun.

Random

• I'd like to interject for a moment
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ame2PH67gnk

  If you've ever seen the "Mongo DB Is Web Scale" video then this will interest you.

• Things we'd like to think are true
  http://www.sicpers.info/2017/12/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-programming/

  Sort of like the mythology of programming.

• Are you tired of the articles of two weeks ago because there's more
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/break_up_google_and_facebook_if_you_want_tech_innovation_ever_again/
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society

  Yes, I'm talking about the "state of the internet" type of articles. Tighten your belt because we've actually advanced in the discussion. We've now reached the Messiah stage where if someone has "insights" on the matter or "disconnects" they get a surge of visions of the world and are now entitled to extract facts from subjectivity. Kind of admirable how the interviewers and spectators are captivated by the paranoia and conspirational theories, I guess that's one deep dark perverse pleasure we have. Well done guys! (Please tell me if I'm stretching those too far...)

• This is sooo hilarious
  https://www.troyhunt.com/im-sorry-you-feel-this-way-natwest-but-https-on-your-landing-page-is-important/

  I was reading in my head with a serious tone until I reached the part where they actually did buy that other domain...

Thoughts

One regular chatter noted that on the CB Simulator "you meet someone from the inside out. You judge them on their heart and values, not what kind of jeans they wear." - About the 1980 CompuServe CB Simulator.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The most important files
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vmlinux
  http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/initramfs.html

  Sometimes we overlook them, let's take a moment of silence to commemorate their lives.

• The mighty proc
  http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/proc.html

  More on Linux! Documentation about proc is scarce and the tldp makes a good at regrouping all the info. Going back to issue 41 "Almost everywhere but not POSIX" and the /proc/sys/kernel/ctrl-alt-del of last issue.

• sshtalk
  https://2ton.com.au/sshtalk/

  The assembly madness team hits again with a new tool, a secure chat.

• Following through with the low level hacks
  http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit
  http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/gbaunix/

  Those are impressive. The level of skills required for those is beyond my imagination. The second article is full of insightful information about early day Unix such as: "The ';' escape sequence put that terminal in full-duplex mode. Hence, the UNIX greeting message contained this sequence. A terminal that does not understand this sequence, such as our GBA TTY, would print the semi-colon.".

• The C10K problem
  http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html

  The quest for optimization never ends, let's continue with the low level hacks for this issue. Surprisingly, the one thread per client paradigm isn't the recommended one.

• Compare libc
  http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html
  http://www.etalabs.net/libc-bench.html

  Most of the time you don't have a choice to which libc to use as it's imposed by your distro, but when you do check this list.

• And override libc
  https://rafalcieslak.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/dynamic-linker-tricks-using-ld_preload-to-cheat-inject-features-and-investigate-programs/
  https://github.com/zardus/preeny

  Be it for debugging purpose or malicious intent, this is a nifty trick. The blog is a wonderful one, add it to your list.

• The world most prominent virus has erased all the source code
  http://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/11/17/

  And we have to write ELF from scratch (again?).

• The total opposite of what we've been discussing so far
  https://deftly.net/posts/2017-06-01-measuring-the-weight-of-an-electron.html
  https://css-tricks.com/apps-command-prompts-now/

  Every time I dig into those nodejs-like tech it seems I'm doing something similar to what is mentioned in this article.

• Evolutionary scheduler
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uupPOdmGukUJ:www.iit.edu/~elrad/esep.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=lb
  http://mypages.iit.edu/~elrad/xesep.html

  This is an original idea. It doesn't run out of the box, there are some patches in the archive that you need to apply to the kernel. If someone is up to the task then it could be interesting to test.

Random

• The birth of online memes
  http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

  How whimsical ideas can become concrete and spread like fire.

• Energy
  http://www.drones.com/
  http://www.drones.com/sitemap/

  I love how this guy implemented his sitemap, and that not forgetting that he's putting forward some great content too.

• It helps to do that
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_aloud_protocol
  https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/study-finds-reading-information-aloud-yourself-improves
  https://www.nngroup.com/articles/thinking-aloud-the-1-usability-tool/

  It's not only a common saying, it's proven and used in research.

• Propaganda
  http://250bpm.com/blog:108

  "We've been influenced", "We're not in control of our minds". Blame the media all you want...

• ...But we all know we crave for control
  https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/the-martian-sherlock-holmes-and-why-we-love-competence-porn/
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2017/10/28/will-for-control.html

  I'm shamelessly hijacking one of my article in here.

• A timely article
  http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

  Maybe if every online arguments went that way.

Thoughts

Heavy and full of technical topics, this is the 52nd issue which completes a year worth of newsletters. Let's see what this new year has in store. Share with the world what you've thought of those past newsletters and what you're looking for in the future. Which issues were your favorite ones?

https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Congratulations everyone!

It's starting to get cold outside, keeping a Unix machine next to you and running :(){ :|:& };: is a great way to stay warm.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Some key accelerator I haven't considered
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Keyboard_shortcuts

  Especially the "yanking" on the console and ctrl-alt-del to reboot systemd.

• Most voted useful command-fu
  http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

  There are some novel commands for me in the list. It's always good to learn new tricks.

• Tunneling/syncing data between machines securely
  http://blog.backslasher.net/ssh-openvpn-tunneling.html
  https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

  What should you go for depends on your use case, this post dives into the intricacies of it explaining small differences of data packing between openvpn and ssh.

• ARG_MAX https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax/
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/120642/what-defines-the-maximum-size-for-a-command-single-argument

  This is a bit confusing, do we use the value in limits.h or 1/4th of the stack size? Read up to find out.

• Xscreensaver and more
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop-shipping-xscreensaver/
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/

  This blog is fantastic, I like how there are links to previously related ideas. Very imaginative! About the first post, this discusses the issue with licenses, the dilemma between morality and legality, this comes to mind: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/).

• Zram
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

  "Yo Dawg, I herd you like RAM, so I put a RAM in your RAM so you can be fast while saving space."

• 'Security person' behavior
  http://www.securityweek.com/what-can-philosophy-unix-teach-us-about-security

  There's some good intentions in that article but it feels like the connection is forced.

• Linux power management
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/powertop
  https://01.org/sites/default/files/page/powertop_users_guide_201412.pdf

  I knew about the tool for a while but I never took the time to read the extensive manual (pdf).

• Containers from scratch
  https://ericchiang.github.io/post/containers-from-scratch/
  http://blog.z3bra.org/2016/03/hand-crafted-containers.html

  This is where all the hype is and the kind of article I haven't shared much in this newsletter so far.

• Running Unix V1 the easy way
  https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/run-the-first-edition-of-unix-1972-with-docker
  https://hub.docker.com/r/bahamat/unix-1st-ed/

  Now that we've got those container things we can run V1 with a single line. There's not much to do with V1 but it's still an oportunity to have fun.

• An extra because everyone has seen the horror
  https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/28/astonishing-os-x-bug-lets-anyone-log-into-a-high-sierra-machine/
  https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x24.html

  How hasn't this been discovered before, this makes no sense, how can this even happen?

Random

• Creepy pasta
  http://www.scp-wiki.net/about-the-scp-foundation
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation

  If you like sci-fi, horror, and research papers then this is for you.

• The BEST
  https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
  http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
  http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
  https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/

  I only deal with the best. Arguably those are freaking fast to load and simple.

• Where have we gone wrong?
  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born

  Interesting philosophy but this falls short, like any fatalism or absolutism, you need to go beyond that, it's but a stepping stone on the way you need to conquer.

• DRMs fight is coming to and end
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/drms-dead-canary-how-we-just-lost-web-what-we-learned-it-and-what-we-need-do-next

  And this isn't looking good.

• Awesome dude
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes

  If 4chan could be represented as a person.

Thoughts

"You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other’s imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine." – Jean-Paul Sartre talking about how consciouscness is freedom but hell for most.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• More of "terminal recording"
  https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/

  This is a follow up of issue 48 "Capturing and debugging user interaction on the shell". This blog regroups a gigantic extensive list of all available options to record the terminal.

• Food for thoughts
  http://turnoff.us/geek/inside-the-linux-kernel/

  This gets you thinking about the architecture... Anthropomorphizing our mystic view of the order of things. Hey, we might find ourselves in a future where we refer to computers the same way we refer to mythological gods!

• Missing games?
  https://www.gamingonlinux.com/

  An addition to issue 10 "Free games", it seems like we're referencing a lot of old issues, right?

• The year of the Linux desktop
  http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

  More Linux specific topic for this newsletter! Self proclaimed: "the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet". On a side note, the person writing the article got other interesting ones on the blog such as a list of good fonts and more "this is best, this is worse"-kind of articles.

• What's a thread
  https://www.schneems.com/2017/10/23/wtf-is-a-thread/

  This was mostly explained in the podcast about processes (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2141) however if explanation with BIG fonts and icons are your thing then this will really help.

• About groups
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/11/20/groups/

  This is also related to the previous link.

• More extra content related to the podcast
  http://www.tavi.co.uk/phobos/fat.html
  http://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/filesystem-recursion

  Recently I found myself wanting to do a simple implementation of a FAT16 fs manipulation tool and this is the resource I looked into. FAT is easy to grasp and should get you started in the world of file systems (well, I say that but I didn't dig into the technical implementation of other file systems myself. The related podcast about data storage https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164).

• Unix and Firefox 57
  https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20171119/
  https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf
  https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20171117/index.html

  First post is cool, and I think a lot experienced what happened in the second post. Great blog too! Skim through that PDF of the man pages of V4.

• X is considered harmful
  https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

  Let's get rid of this cliche and replace it by something more useful.

• Wear some colorful tight pants and continue on this crazy train with Ozzy!
  http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/modern-media-is-a-dos-attack-on-your-free-will

  Yet again on this railroad of "the state of the internet" articles. Like it or not it seems like a trend and it's fun to watch everyone going through the "Oh I just woke up to what the internet is about". You can't blame the trend, once you learn something you start to see it everywhere and want to shout your lungs out. Digital literacy is going up, non-technical persons are starting to be interested in the details. For us it's old news. It's also interesting how internet services are regarded as God-like entities that influences us and that we have to please, in the end the writers of those articles have to realize they can't anthropomorphize them, they can't consider them as carrier of the holy good will for the masses. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. This is not the internet this is their new religion; blaming it for the good days and bad days. But can we critic this behavior in a world that is frightening, slowly turning nihilistic, a world where its people are looking for a Leviathan to bring back the order.

Random

• Computer stupidities
  http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

  Old school website with real life cringe-worthy computer stupidities scenario we can relate to.

• Non-profit security organization book
  https://www.honeynet.org/book/export/html/50

  Your dose of security for the week, botnets and honeypots to analyze them. This small book gives a good overview of the topic for both experts and beginners.

• Living off hacking online games
  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59p7qd/this-man-has-survived-by-hacking-mmo-online-games

  AKA living the dream life of the Hollywoodian hacker.

Thoughts

Whatever requires a bit of effort without prestige isn't that popular

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address or patreon page: 19suN5V6nyKBvaeuAhghSMCzyQcZLGVNRy or https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• More terminal love
  https://flisks.site/vt420.html

  Resurrecting old terminals, it's yet another one of those, but do we really get tired of reading about this?

• Web is dying (continue)
  https://asininetech.com/2017/11/10/the-web-endures/

  If you've been following the past 3 weeks or so I've been sharing articles related to this subject. This person reiterates over it, yet again. Nothing new but it's nice to know someone is there to publish an article about it.

• Wrap it in a sandbox on Linux
  http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-in.html
  https://www.nexlab.net/2016/08/06/desktop-laptop-privacy-security-of-web-browsers-on-linux-part-1-concepts-and-theory/
  https://firejail.wordpress.com/
  http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/

  Want to make up for not having jail, here's a bunch of ideas. UML is kind of old.

• Some laughs
  http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/08/open_source_virus.html

  I like the Onions-type of writing, it's lighthearted and kicks in your day. GPLdaemon... We've shared it the other day, it's the vrms software!

• Myths buster
  https://www.idontnix.net/tech/linmyth.html

  It's fascinating how the vision changed with time, even if it's a mystified vision.

• More myth busting
  https://weirdfellow.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/the-myth-of-redundancy/

  We've discussed a bit about RAID during the last podcast (Data Storage on Unix), here's a ridiculous myth busting article (refreshing your knowledge of probabilities).

• josuah's shell tricks
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2169

  Having difficulty doing peculiar text substitutions on the shell, then this is for you.

• I still use netstat but I have to get used to ss
  http://www.binarytides.com/linux-ss-command/

  Great tool, I wish I'd learned its ins and outs earlier.

• Permission the easy way
  http://permissions-calculator.org/

  It's already easy to understand them, for non techie this could help as an intro.

• Linux ate my ram
  https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
  https://www.linuxatemyram.com/play.html

  Another light-hearted website with a little bit of learning behind it. (Also related to the podcast about Data Storage on Unix).

Random

• Intentionally blank
  http://www.this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org/whythat.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentionally_blank_page

  We've seen those in books, what are they there for, do they exist on the web?

• Dangerous food and explosions
  http://www.pmichaud.com/grape/
  http://www.pmichaud.com/toast/

  Also genius at the same time. Think about it, it's one of the author of Rakudo, a Perl 6 implementation.

• History of Ascii art
  http://www.chris.com/ascii/joan/www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/history.html

  Old school websites walks us through the evolution of "modern" text art.

• Our brains see patterns
  https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/10-print-in-python/

  So simple yet effective. No idea why there needs to be a video tutorial for this...

• Google-Fus are breaking?
  http://www.faganfinder.com/google/

  Use this website instead (for example for the date search).

Thoughts

If it seems too good to be true it probably is.

if wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Emacs as PID 1
  https://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html
  http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/

  We all made fun of this but it's possible. HEY! Why not Perl TOO!

• A continuation of last week "Random"
  http://www.filfre.net/2017/10/a-net-before-the-web-part-1-the-establishment-man-and-the-magnificent-rogue/
  http://tttthis.com/rememberwebsites.php/

  I wasn't sure last week if I should put the web rants in the Unix section or not. I think they fit somehow. Those two articles related to the "state and birth of the internet" + nostalgia kind of blog posts that are popular these days. Don't get me wrong, I love this kind of discussions, apart from the rosy retrospection there's some truth in them especially the kind of discoveries you make. The first link has a lot of politics and marketing topics, if you don't like that then skip it.

• ...And to complete this
  https://wiby.me

  Last week I was discussing on IRC about creating a sort of mini-version of the internet, a closely linked one, with a net-art or "tilde" style. Well, this does the job well already.

• X11 forwarding and multiplexers
  http://alexteichman.com/octo/blog/2014/01/01/x11-forwarding-and-terminal-multiplexers/

  A trick to make this as seemless as possible. X11, terminals, etc.. So many pieces that bleed legacy into their mechanisms.

• Virtual Stallman
  http://vrms.alioth.debian.org/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrms

  Ever wanted to get a part of that dude inside your machine, your dream comes true. To be fair it's a good piece of software, I'm not sure if that's something they use to make a distribution "libre".

• Schedulers
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14918797/difference-between-freebsd-scheduler-and-linux-scheduler#14925672
  http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/12933.html

  Scheduling processes is one of the core tasks of an OS, checkout some discussion about the implementation differences in the links. If you have no clue what this is about read up about processes in the podcast (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2141).

• Terminal coolness
  http://podstawczynski.com/retro/pics_big/P1200466.jpg
  https://github.com/cylgom/ly
  https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2702526/32404792-886a820e-c14f-11e7-9994-f27a0d048e39.gif
  https://github.com/p-e-w/ternimal
  https://p.iotek.org/teb.jpg

  Images and graphics that don't shame the terminal.

• The novel idea of dependency injection boot scripts
  http://www.atnf.csiro.au:80/~rgooch/linux/boot-scripts/

  Not so novel discussion about the state of init system and boot scripts.

• Remember that cdecl website
  http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html

  This is a simple technique to read c declarations until you're at ease with the language (instead of having to paste it in a web form).

• Capturing and debugging user interaction on the shell
  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-screenshots1/index.html

  Forget asciinema and others, actually not, it's just a novel way of seeing redirection.

Random

• The Origin
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum

  Sometimes things we take for granted have a deeper history and meaning.

• DANGER
  http://pages.swcp.com/~mccurley/danger/danger.html

  Weekly dose of security related content.

• All the world's money
  http://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/

  Great visualization of where the numbers go.

• Not a site you should frequently visit
  http://www.i-am-bored.com/

  Kind of "buzzfeedish" with less click-baity titles (WHAAAaaAt).

• Logical fallacies and biases of the week
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

  Just some things to keep in mind and know about.

Thoughts

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know - Michel De Montaigne

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address or patreon page: 19suN5V6nyKBvaeuAhghSMCzyQcZLGVNRy or https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Tiny ELF
  http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html
  http://www.cirosantilli.com/elf-hello-world/
  http://www.cirosantilli.com/elf101.png

  Want to go hardcore and learn how executables are made from the bottom up, read those links. The next question is: Does it matter if an executable is smaller than the size of a page? Let's make room for discussion!

• Learn git another cool way
  https://learngitbranching.js.org/

  Which is also a WM-like web page, go add it to this thread (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2142).

• Survivability program
  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.230.723&rep=rep1&type=pdf

  Programming flaws, "coding defects", everywhere, this is a nightmare we still live in. Pledge(2) is a life saver.

• Test suite for POSIX
  https://sortix.org/os-test/

  A "non-official" POSIX test suite. At the moment there's only the udp tests but I'm looking forward for more.

• A rant about word processors
  http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

  Could be a troll yet it has some legit claims.

• Why Unix?
  https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs252/s17/Public/whyunix/index.html

  Again another walk through the history of computers and how it lead to Unix, a good summary.

• Crocker's rules
  http://www.sl4.org/crocker.html

  It seems like a lot of people need to apply this rule to themselves these days.

• Same fashion as kmandla
  https://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools
  https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell

  ...but not as cool! That second link is a huge list.

• A weird one too
  https://github.com/TheTomster/lwe/

  Cursorless editing, as in you go in a mode (like vim) and then specify where to write. Kind of a weird concept, you have to try it.

• The mighty and dreadful xargs. http://offbytwo.com/2011/06/26/things-you-didnt-know-about-xargs.html

  find into xargs and other mischevious actions.

Random

• A very cool initiative for Belgians
  http://relearn.be/2017/

  A sort of interdisciplinary hackaton in the spirit of the libre open source software culture.

• Well researched and timely articles
  https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html
  https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/

  This summarizes what has been happening on the web the past few years.

• Differential privacy
  https://www.infoq.com/articles/differential-privacy-intro

  Your dose of new security topic for the week - this one is fascinating.

Thoughts

Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address or patreon page: 19suN5V6nyKBvaeuAhghSMCzyQcZLGVNRy or https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Don't REBOOT IT!
  https://www.infoworld.com/article/2623441/unix/when-in-doubt--reboot--not-unix-boxes.html

  Why and when should you reboot, does it solve all issues? The article is a bit "buzzfeedy" but not that bad.

• Video display terminals information website
  https://www.vt100.net/
  https://www.vt100.net/dec/vt_history

  A web-encyclopedia about DEC terminals, I like the history and reference manual pages. Those manual are thorough, even documenting things such as the arrow keys and their functions which we take for granted today: "Cursor down (0138) causes the cursor to move down one line until the cursor reaches the bottom line. Once the cursor is in the bottom line, receipt of the cursor down code has no effect."

• Still riding the wayback machine
  http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-rewriting.html

  The iconic pioneer of current UX brought back to life. We discussed a bit of the story in the following podcast about WMs and DEs https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2048. This article focuses on the smalltalk aspect of it.

• Set a full fledge plan9 network on OpenBSD
  https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html

  Trying to learn about what plan9 is all about, you've found the best way to do it by testing it on a Unix system.

• ls, find, stat, du, all mixed together
  https://github.com/chneukirchen/lr

  Not very Unixy but worth mentioning. It lists files recursively using useful colors, has some filtering/finding-options in there too.

• Mini alternative to gpg encryption
  https://github.com/skeeto/enchive
  https://github.com/adamierymenko/fenc

  When you just want to encrypt a file and don't want to type gpg -c <file>.

• Demystifying the PID 1
  https://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/init/

  I love demystifying topics, especially the ones that are complex - if it's complex it simply means you don't get it yet.

• OpenSSH escape sequences
  https://lonesysadmin.net/2011/11/08/ssh-escape-sequences-aka-kill-dead-ssh-sessions/amp/

  Today I learned something new, not that useful but nice to add to my toolbox.

• Interview with Dru Lavigne
  https://bsdmag.org/dru_lavigne/

  Some insights from a BSD maintainer, teacher, and founder of the BSD certifications. Are you certified, looking to be certified, or are you not, and why (not limited to BSD)? We can discuss that on the forums.

• Uninterruptible sleep
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_(system_call)#Uninterruptible_sleep

  We discussed that a bit in the podcast about signals (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2003), let's refresh our minds.

Random

• Java SecureRandom
  https://tersesystems.com/blog/2015/12/17/the-right-way-to-use-securerandom/

  The source of entropy for the ones who use Java, would it be /dev/random or /dev/urandom?

• A new blog to follow
  https://tinyhack.com/
  https://tinyhack.com/2017/09/05/mastercard-internet-gateway-service-hashing-design-flaw/

  Ingenious hacks humbly called "tiny hacks", this deserves respect.

• The world goes round and round
  https://blog.wirelessmoves.com/2017/10/change-of-times-data-over-voice-to-voice-over-data.html

  It's peculiar how evolution in technology always rotates and goes back to its root or make a total 180 turn.

• The opposite of the enlightment movement
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes>

  However it's not as dark as the name implies it to be, food for thoughts.

Thoughts

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address or patreon page: 19suN5V6nyKBvaeuAhghSMCzyQcZLGVNRy or https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Why does it do this?
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19210935/why-does-the-c-preprocessor-interpret-the-word-linux-as-the-constant-1
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19298778/why-does-the-1987-korn-oneliner-print-unix

  Nice puzzle where the key lies in the fact that arrays are pointers and can be written in different manners.

• Convinced about nix and nixOS or not yet?
  https://yakking.branchable.com/posts/what-and-why-nix/
  https://nixos.org/
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2006

  I'm starting to buy into the idea however just as a thought experiment I love it for how it renew the FHS or maybe I would just like it for developement work. I'm not sure if I'd use it as my everyday drive of if it's better than vagrant or docker for developement only purpose.

• What would the world be without Unix
  https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-would-your-world-be-without-nix.1364158/

  Let's start a discussion on the forums after this newsletter is published.

• The future of HDD
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/11925/western-digital-stuns-storage-industry-with-mamr-breakthrough-for-nextgen-hdds

  At the same time be sure to checkout the most recent podcast about data storage on unix (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164). After a long hiatus I finally managed to put it together.

• Free books and tutorials
  https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books
  http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/102/

  I can never and probably will never go through all this but if I ever need a book then I have a resource to go to.

• And when having too much trouble with C
  https://cdecl.org/

  Use this website to "demystify" your unfamiliarness with C declarations.

• Hacker's Wisdom
  http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/index.html

  "If one man asks another what a Hacker is And the other man answers him, Neither of them knows it." - Borrowed Zen Proverb

• Mozilla doing weird stuffs yet again
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/735973/17bdb163fddd41ae/

  As much as I like them they are really going in another direction by trying to please the click-economy.

• Project HowTo
  http://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/project.howto/project.howto/project.howto-1.html

  Follow this template to write a decent howto.

• Git as a zip bomb
  https://kate.io/blog/git-bomb/

  Sort of a simple idea. Don't miss the updates at the bottom of the article.

Random

• The daily life of a programmer
  http://www.ilikebigbits.com/blog/2016/11/22/the-unfixable-bug

  It's peculiar how every major bug turns out to be one of those stupid mistakes that makes us do a jaw dropping "AHHH, it was that" face.

• TIL anti-rape condoms
  http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/06/20/south.africa.female.condom/index.html

  This is ingenious but also sad that we have to use those for prevention.

• Crypto doom
  https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypto-failure-cripples-millions-of-high-security-keys-750k-estonian-ids/?amp=1
  https://www.krackattacks.com/
  https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/10/16/falling-through-the-kracks/

  If you haven't seen those already, October-November are going to be spicy for the crypto community. Though we've been through worse, it's ok, there are multiple layers of security and this is only one falling guard.

• And more on real security
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know
  https://mendafy.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/the-need-to-know-principle-and-its-various-methods-of-operation/
  https://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-Programs-HOWTO/security-principles.html

  Just some nice terms and principles that are cool to learn about.

Thoughts

Internet arguments in a nutshell:

ednos: technically, I'm not pedantic

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address or patreon page: 19suN5V6nyKBvaeuAhghSMCzyQcZLGVNRy or https://www.patreon.com/venam.