Link Roundup

The best of the Internet today, according to me:

  • OpenBSD 4.5 comes out May 1st, but is available on their site now. Check out the changelog.
  • For whatever reason, they don’t provide a torrent. (Likely because, unlike Ubuntu, it’s rarely distributed as one ISO.) I’d assume the mirrors are going to be crushed soon. I found this Pirate Bay torrent, a good reminder that not everything there is illegal. I’m downloading it now, but it’s quite lonely.
  • Here’s a decent OpenBSD install guide, thought it’s not 4.5-specific. Although far from impossible to install, OpenBSD was not designed with ease of install in mind. (OpenBSD 4.5’s official install guide is available, too, of course.)
  • I’ve posted about it before, but pfSense is meant to be a spiffy FreeBSD-based firewall and router platform with a good web GUI, for those of you who find OpenBSD really tough to install, or who have a pf.conf with a lengthy QoS section that doesn’t actually work. It’s got a pretty impressive list of features, too.
  • For a complete change of pace, Popular Mechanics has a new post, the Top 50 Important Tools. So pointless and yet so interesting. I’ve got to say, though, that I love my Leatherman, which should really be #51, if not higher.
  • Everyone is a little bit baffled, but Xapbr posts a Thank You for MySQL 5.4 Community. I think the baffling is due to several things: (1) There wasn’t much talk about MySQL 5.4 as a community release, (2) No one’s entirely sure where MySQL 5.2 and 5.3 went, and (3) Xapbr’s post makes reference to how we’re more fortunate than we realize for there being a community release for MySQL 5.4, which a paranoid person such as me takes to mean, “I can’t say it, but Sun/MySQL Corp. almost didn’t release a GPL version of 5.4.” Here’s a summary of what’s new. Based on the legalese disclaimer, I think it’s legal for me to link to it. A very incomplete summary: better performance on multi-core machines, and a Query Optimizer that’s worth a hoot when doing sub-selects. (“SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM t2)” would never, ever use an index, for example, and would often behave even worse than you’d expect.)

One thought on “Link Roundup

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *