2010-May-13
I haven't written in my technical blog for a very long time. So just want to give an update.
I have been serving on the board of The NetBSD Foundation. We have weekly meetings to help organize and manage the corporation. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please let me know.
At work, I have been working on BIND 10. testing new ideas, building and maintaining auto-build and testing servers, writing docs, etc. Also I did the release engineering for our two releases and plan to do releases every 4 to 6 weeks. BIND 10 is written in C++ and Python. It provides separate components for configuration management, auth server, XFRin, XFRout, and a command-line tool to talk to it.
On the side, I continue to work on various books. I am still trying to get my "Beginning DNSSEC" and NetBSD books complete. But I am more excited about my work on a detailed history of Berkeley Unix. I have enjoyed studying old code and reading docs from the 1970s. I am attempting to contact every contributor to BSD prior to 1981 and I have already reached over 17 people. Great stories! I have over 40 more contributors to interview. If you personally know any key BSD contributors prior to 1995 and will introduce me, please let me know.
Some interesting software I have used over the past few months include: py-coverage, LCOV and gcov, cppcheck, tesseract (OCR), cclive and clive (to play youtube), gphoto2, and geeqie (image viewer!). My current battle is to get my scanner to work or to find a new one that works on NetBSD.