DragonFlyBSD 1.0 near

Matt Dillon announced DragonFlyBSD 1.0RC1. The 1.0 is planned for next week. As the website lists 1.0 for yesterday, they took the tradition from FreeBSD to plan their releases too optimistic.
I will probably try the 1.0. They have managed to add some features that FreeBSD is still missing like gcc34 in the base system and dual console boot. They are also talking about a new installer, something FreeBSD wanted for years. The screenshots look interesting.

Digital Communities

Yesterday, Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, visited Vienna. He took part at a discussion round at ORF with the title Digital Communites, because Wikipedia won a “Golden Nica” at the “Ars Electronica Prix”. The other participants were an austrian historian, a representative from Creative Commons, and Andreas Hirsch from Ars Electronica.
They discussed various online knowledge commuties, their past and future and special aspects like copyright, vandalism and the digital divide. Unfortunately i was already occupied with taking pictures with Jimbo’s Digicam, so I didn’t wrote down summary keywords. BTW, the UI of my Nikon is much better than his Olympus, and mine does not play an artificial “click”-sample when taking a picture.
To my surprise the historian didn’t attack the quality of Wikipedia articles compared of the articles by his project, so Horst would have been a much better participant :-). Later it became obvious that the historian was pretty clueless about Wikipedia and encylopedias in general, as he tried to persuade Jimbo that he should rewrite Wikipedia presenting a “European Point of View” (as in European Union).
The ORF also installed a livestream to New York, where representatives of other projects tried to take part in the discussion. Someone needs to tell the camera guy in New York, that it is a bad idea to do nonstop-Zooming, because the Stream was full of compression artefacts all the time.
The most useless participants were the director of the Austrian Culture Institute in New York and Franz Morak the austrian culture secretary. The moderator in New York introduced them to the discussion participants in English, but they failed to recognize that most of them did not understand German, and babbled in german how cool all these digital communities are and nobody except the ORF people understood them…
After the discussion we watched Portugal vs. England on a beamer, or more precisely the ORF people watched Football, and we discussed various Wikipedia aspects with Jimbo, while they tried to explain to Jimbo what this Football thing is about.

EuroBSDCon talks and tutorials

I just noticed that the EuroBSDCon Website was updated and now contains descriptions of the scheduled talks and tutorials. BTW the Website is one of the ugliest I have ever seen. Why couldn’t they keep the nice clean layout of the last con?

I am a bit disappointed, there are less FreeBSD topics than two year ago.

I am considering booking the IPv6 Tutorial, it looks quite promising.
Other talks that sound interesting:

  • Running the NetBSD Kernel as a Server Personality on Top of the L4 Microkernel
  • Crossbuilding NetBSD packages, although it is probably similar to the one Krister held at pkgsrccon
  • Implementation of OpenBSD’s bgpd
  • brooks’ talk on Dynamic Interfaces
  • And probably one of those pf/altq Firewall talks

Looks like there will be a lot of time for hanging around.

My First Math Exam

The highlight of this term is history, my first math exam, and it looks like there is even a slight chance that I managed to succeed, at least it looked easy and I wrote something to all four tasks. The results will be available in July and I really hope that I don’t have to do it again.
Oh, and note to self, I should practice solving improper integrals without a math book :-S.
One week left until summer holidays start.

No Blogentry today

No, I have not written a blogentry today, you must be dreaming. You can’t read this post, as it does not exist. Go away!
Instead of posting to this blog I am busy learning math. Hopefully I am back on Tuesday evening.

tjr announces Linux32 emulator

tjr just posted to freebsd-amd64 that he has got the linuxulator working.
He wrote, that jdk, OOo and Acrobat work.

tjr > *

I have not tested it, because the countown for the math exam started. His linux-base is based on Slackware, if noone beats me I will try to make a port of it in July, (The first ONLY_FOR_ARCHS= amd64 port :-).

Relieving statistics

Thanks to Diman, who pointed me to the “Hochschulstatistik 2002/2003” a collection of various figures about Austria’s universities.
I now know that the average CS student at my university finishes after 14.5 terms. So I still have 7 terms or three and a half year to finish :-).
I have also found out that the new baccalaureate degrees are very unpopular. Although there are now tuition fees only one student at our university took the chance to finish university earlier with a “Bakk.” instead of a “Dipl.” degree.
The other surprise the many opponents of the tuition fees, who claimed that with the fees the proportion of female students will decrease, were proved wrong. Of course, never trust a statistic unless you forged it yourself.

Planet BSD anyone?

Via Capzilla I read about the latest internet hype, Planet. I should play with it, as it is written in python and doesn’t stink of PHP. Or I should add a planet mode to rssfetch. Hm, Yet another project for the summer holidays.
But if anyone has time and webspace, there is still a BSD planet missing in the list of planets.

FreeBSD Core team elections II

Okay, the voting has started. After writing the last blog article and while writing this article, it became quite clear, who will be my favorites and I have placed my votes.
Here are the remarkable paragraphs added in the last 24 hours.

marcel added a good analysis of the project to his statement: We do need to make sure that knowledge and understanding is not as volatile as the people who have it. There are various ways to achieve that, but unfortunately they all depend on somebody doing something. And frankly, we’re not exactly cooperative and forthcoming when it comes to action.
We seem to like to talk about how things should be done, without actually doing it. We all have good intentions, but if push come to shove, we’re all too busy.

I think one of the goals of the future core team should be, that there should be at least two developers overseeing a subsystem. This involves forcing people to share their knowledge and to work in teams.

green commented on the question “Does FreeBSD need a vision?”: I don’t feel that FreeBSD has a unified vision — and I don’t think that this is a problem.�[..] Various individuals in FreeBSD do, however, have their own strong visions!

Yes, thank you. That’s exactly my idea, nothing to add.

FreeBSD core team elections

The application period for candidates is over. We have 23 candidates. alfred and obrien jumped into the boat in the last hours. Although some candidates are still working on rewriting their statements, there are some interesting statements I like to cite, as the voting period will start tomorrow, and I have not yet decided who will sit in my dreamcore.

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