Daemon News

Wes takes on another industry pundit who fails to understand yesterdays solutions do not apply to tomorrows problems.
Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200502
I've been thinking once again about Poul-Henning Kamp's rant about tools. A decade ago, I worked for a small division of a very large company that made equipment for television broadcasters. It was an interesting business, small volume, high value, with lots of custom work for most of the customers.
Sometimes we had to send an engineer on-site to finish the custom work. Often the customer would have some weird piece of equipment we had never encountered before, but needed to interface to. The customer of course never had a spare, and we had little to no ability to acquire another of these gizmos, usually because the manufacturer had departed or stopped making the item years ago. We would dutifully package up an entire HP workstation, complete with 19" monitor, and send it to the customer site in advance of our engineer arriving. When the engineer arrived, he often found various parts of the workstation broken or missing, so we would order spares while he became familiar with the customer site.
Daemon's Advocate (Long, Scott)(Watson, Robert) 200501
There has been a lot of recent talk and advocacy for NetBSD 2.0 from the NetBSD team. Most recently there were a series of articles posted by Chritos Zoulas describing why NetBSD is relevant and why it's a better choice than either FreeBSD or OpenBSD. While I strongly applaud the accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD.
Daemon's Advocate (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200412
When I hear somebody like Robert Watson complain about not being able to find features and options in OpenOffice, I am reminded of my own introduction to UNIX: "I'm sure there is a way to do this, but I wonder what the program is called...".
As the deadlines made me older I came to know the contents of /usr/bin by heart, and it now feels like my organised but cluttered workshop where I can almost always find a gadget and thingmajic which can be used to solve the problem at hand.
Over time new things have appeared in /usr/bin but that has not been a problem for me, because it did not rename the old commands so all the tricks I learned on System III still work.
Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200411
Between rumors of updates to the ubiquitous Gnu Public License (GPL) to the open source release of Solaris and the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) from Sun have fueled new discussion on this old topic, raising issues of whether we really need hundreds of slightly different licenses, and renewed interest in one or a very few open source licenses that can easily be understood by businessmen.
While remaining skeptical as to whether most businessmen really care about licensing at all, I am curious to learn how (or if) all this open source licensing and software have translated into the business world? Let us take a tour through some corners of the open source business you may not be familiar with.
A few months ago I was casting about for a small system to use as a mail server for a handful of users, preferably one that would run NetBSD.
Daemon's Advocate (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200410
I met Peter Salus the other evening, he was in Copenhagen for a talk and he invited me out because he has started writing yet a computer history book (If you have not yet read "A quarter century of UNIX" and "Casting the NET" by all means do so).
He told me that Kirk had told him to talk to me about FreeBSD, and his first question, while we waited for our "Galletes" to arive was "Why bother ?"
Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200409
One of the columns I read regularly is the BackSpin column at the back end of Network World magazine each week. I enjoy Mark Gibbs' sense of humor, and this column helps me keep in touch with what's going on in the minds of my customers. I don't always agree with what Gibbs has to say, but I rarely actively disagree with his viewpoint.
This summer, however, Gibbs came up with a doozy. It's been quite a summer for the IT types here in the USA, and one of the current hot spots is a conflagration between hospital IT departments, medical device vendors, and the US government Food and Drug Administration.
Daemon's Advocate (Watson, Robert) 200408
Robert Watson's been very busy working on the FreeBSD 5.3 release. This is summary of just a few things that are going on.
Daemon's Advocate (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200407
I remember when the Alpha chip was first unveilled in sufficient detail that we could try to understand what kind of beast it was. And I remember seeing and installing the first one, and doing some heavy duty math on it to see if the performance was interesting.
Then we heard the NetBSD crew were porting to the Alpha and we got a bit envious about that. But since none of us had Alphas we could play with much less time to do so, it did not take long before we realized that we could lift 64-bit cleanup patches from NetBSD rather than have to do the hard work ourselves.
Daemon's Advocate: SIGALARM (Peters, Wes) 200406
My wife and I have a problem. Alarm clocks don't work for us. It's not that ours are faulty, but more that they're just so limited. Mine, for instance, starts bleeping loudly at 6:55 each morning, again at 7:00, and again at 7:05. Each time, it will bleep increasinly loud and increasingly fast for 1 minute, then stop, or will stop when I mash the big "shut up" button on the top.
Other than that, it tells the time and nothing else. Oh sure, it displays the date too, in such small digits you can't see it unless you're holding the clock, but it's a pretty limited functionality. Where's the alarm at 2:20 pm, when it's time to pick up my daughter from school? Why does the stupid thing insist on waking me at 6:55 Saturday morning, when I don't have to be up?