My "production stuff":
- https://github.com/festivus-es/festivus - public holidays calendars for Spanish cities
- https://github.com/remote-es/remotes - companies hiring in Spain for remote positions
Usable WIPs:
- https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/ - track self-hosting package updates (such as YunoHost)
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/ubpkg/ - package manager for "upstream binaries"
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/termflux - Miniflux terminal client
The computing industry is weird about history. People fail to understand it in two opposite ways:
A lot of things just fail to pay attention to the fact that other people have seen and solved the same problem before. You get people not just reinventing the wheel, but ignoring the huge design space of wheels that’s been explored and deciding that cubes are ideal shapes for wheels and concrete the ideal building material. See pretty much every recent GUI for hundreds of examples.
But at the other extreme you get a weird worship of the past. Smart people in the past did something this way, therefore we must do things that way! The fact that their target audience was PhD students and their constraints included a processor that was barely faster than a pen and paper and had 128 KiB of RAM is irrelevant. Early UNIX did glob expansion in the shell not because that’s more sensible than providing a glob and option parsing API in the standard library, but because they didn’t have enough disk space or RAM to duplicate code and they didn’t have shared libraries. If you have shared libraries, the right choice is very different. Similarly, ‘everything is a text stream’ is a good idea when you have a computer that you connect to via a serial terminal because everything that the user produces or consumes is a text stream. When you have a system that has graphical displays, speakers, cameras, microphones, and network connections, it is much less sensible.
@david_chisnall @whitequark but I think the answer for globbing and adjacent matters would lie in programs declaring the "types" of their arguments and shells understanding them? This would also help with tab completion, etc.
But in the end, I guess lowest common denominator tends to win, because innovation is always pushing against limits, and inertia is a big force...
It’s easy to forget that these days we may have colleagues in the software industry for whom an iPad was their first ever computing device.
So just to remind you: The idea that software should come from a central authority is new, it’s radical, and it’s wrong.
https://guild.pmdcollab.org/@StaticR/115098597647157516
[Continuation of my previous post about QEMU-Wasm]
Also check out elfconv (AOT ELF-to-Wasm translator) by Masashi Yoshimura
More than 60 times faster than emulation.
https://yomaytk.github.io/elfconv-demo/
@alexhall @robin_kipp @matt if you have already a VPS, you can run a reverse proxy there to your service at home to expose it. There are a few tools that will take care of the networking
My daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
@alexhall with how streaming services suck, I've been experimenting with ripping DVDs and Blu-Ray with good success.
However, not all shows I like get physical releases, and if they do, they make delays even larger.
@alexhall I have switched to planning a bit, and getting one month of a streaming service when there's enough content to saturate me for a month.
(We have Crunchyroll though, and we leech one big Spanish streaming service that comes with HBO and a few other small services from family.)
I even started to write a planning tool to do that.
The main issue is not being able to participate in some online discussions about shows, but the money savings are significant.
@lzg IMHO, chat is not really async because of societal conventions. With chat not being async, it's true that chat is not the best way to discuss complex issues.
Email is.
However, I joined my first company that did not use email in 2019, so somewhere before that we decided to kill the best tool we had to discuss complex issues.
Since then, we've been searching for reinventing email. (Zulip came a bit close!)
Figuring out memory usage on Linux (and likely other modern operating systems with modern applications) is not as easy as one would expect.
By asking questions around people who know everything, I've found out about systemd-cgtop, which I added to smem at:
https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/linux/misc.md#memory-usage-queries
@dabeaz I do something similar, https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/ ... I just don't have enough interesting stuff...
AWS is easy (not). I have only managed very simple accounts for personal use. Now I wanted to set up an account with support for multiple users and environments. Taking some notes here:
https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/misc/aws/account_setup_notes.md
A few hours into trying out Trixie on my sandbox laptop. Quite uneventful; the biggest change is that 2022 Gnome was getting a bit long of the tooth and some extensions I wanted to try out are not available for that.
(I can wiggle my mouse now to embiggen my pointer. Yay.)
My provisioning scripts only required minor tweaks.
Now five "production" hosts to update. But that will wait a bit.
A little RSS planet-like toy I made:
https://alexpdp7.github.io/frozenplanetoid/beings.html
It's an SSG, so it can be hosted for free on GitHub Pages or less-MS-made services, or even on tildes.
It's not even close to beta right now, but details in the repo:
Jetbrains just sent me an email for an interview about developing blockchain with Rust.
What day is it? OF WHAT YEAR?
You can install Docker Desktop, or equivalent tools, on Linux, to assess how things behave on macOS (and Windows without WSL, if anyone cares).
However, I understood immediately why there are so many projects to replace Docker Desktop.
The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey is out, and it's an important resource. I already mentioned[1] how I'm worried about the future of the survey; perhaps more than about the q&a site.
[1]: https://alex.femto.pub/@coder/posts/458497280777236416/
Deflating a bit about Supabase after figuring out Docker is practically a hard requirement for local development, despite Podman support claims.
(Which is a pragmatic decision, but not ideal for my tastes.)
Supabase looks nice. I didn't realize it was such a thin wrapper around things like PostgREST. So many people relying on Haskell for production. (And it also has an Erlang component.)
Doing some self-learning at work about Next.js and Supabase. About Next.js, maybe modern full stack development has figured out how to be as usable (or more) than traditional server-side rendering.
And Next.js seems to *default* to something that works on lynx.
Those are just first impressions, but who knows...
I'm presenting Knuth's LR parsing paper at Papers we Love Berlin tomorrow. Parsing nerds (and other types) come hang out. https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-berlin/events/307287436
@nedbat if I click the "move icon", the panel that appears shows a "current location" that matches what I expect (moved a document to a folder and the current location pointed to the folder).
But it's very confusing. I think documents exist in a single place. They also have a unique internal id that "persists" even if the name changes.
I finally sat down and figured out a process to establish a virtual network over two hosts when I only have a pipe (such as SSH).
https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/linux/remote-networking.md
There must be a better way, but this works.
@ccothrun hah, thanks, very interesting. Replied via the email in your GitHub profile, hope you don't mind.