What's that? According to the Wordle homepage, ``Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.'' Just like the tag cloud of my blog... :-)

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A few teasers:

Check F!XMBR for more!

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• There was some progress on puffs, the userland filesystem stemming from last year's Google SoC, some time ago. More example userland filesystems are now available with sysctlfs and ssshfs, see src/share/examples/puffs.

  Rumours say that ssshfs works pretty well, which is a final reason to ditch the (abandoned first cut of the) netbsd-4 branch and make a -current kernel to play with this. BTW, for those wondering what ssshfs is, see ssshfs.c:

   * simple sshfs
   * (silly sshfs?  stupid sshfs?  snappy sshfs?  sucky sshfs?  seven sshfs???)
   * (sante sshfs?  severed (dreams) sshfs?  saucy sshfs?  sauerkraut sshfs?) 

• People complained that there's no ready-made VMware image with NetBSD available, and this has changed now. The #NetBSD blog points at a NAMP (NetBSD + Apache + MySQL + PostgreSQL + PHP) image that has quite a lot of software installed in 187MB size. See the arudius homepage for more information on NAMP.

• Elad, chief security hacker of NetBSD's infrastructure has proposed to add PaX Segvguard as yet another building stone in NetBSD's security architecture:

       PaX Segvguard monitors the number of segfaults in a program
       per-user, in an attempt to detect on-going exploitation attempts
       and possibly prevent them.  One common attack PaX Segvguard can
       help mitigate is when an attacker tries to brute-force a function
       return address, when wanting to perform a return-to-lib attack.  

  See Elad's proposal for more details! Note that a start of the implementation is already in NetBSD-current, but that this is still work-in-progress.

• BSDtalk did an interview with pkgsrc developer Johnny Lam (jlam@), it's available in mp3 and ogg.

• Last, if you don't know what to wish for Xmas, there's something for the average BSD geek: a daemon-themed bag (which is probably not really authorized by the Daemon owner, but well).

For those not sure what this is about: you probably know the Google search box in Firefox. This can replaced with other search engines in FF2, and there's your favourite cool aid now. See the upper right corner of this screenshot for how it looks, and what it returns.

[Tags: firefox, images, pkgsrc]

Please note that the CD was assembled the previous weekend, and that some newssites prematurely announced this. As a result, some people may have a file with the wrong checksum - the correct MD5 hash is "22a7496a2bb37910aeb312d053755a2a".

Thanks to Jörg Braun, Rosa Riebl all the folks at C&L for their longtime support of NetBSD, and also to Michael Schneider, Daniel Sieger, Martin Laubach and Florian Stöhr for their help in translating the German-language README file into english.

The CD is made available for everyone at no cost, please note that commercial distribution requires a license from C&L.

Available files include:

• a torrent file for downloading with Bittorrent (recommended)
• an ISO file
• the MD5 checksum
• a README in English and German language.

Update: Chris from The Coding Studio let us know that he has a screenshot walkthrough of the Live CD's startup and operation. Show this to everyone who wonders what NetBSD looks like!

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Enjoy!

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