Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 26, 2022

• Nibble Stew: Experimenting on how to add CMYK and color management to Cairo

  Cairo is an amazing piece of tech that powers a lot of stuff, like all of GTK. Unfortunately it is not without its problems. The biggest one being that it was designed almost 20 years ago with the main use case of dealing with "good old" 8 bit uncalibrated RGB images. There has been a lot of interest in adding native support for things like CMYK documents, linear RGB, color calibration, wide gamuts and all of that good stuff. Sadly it has not come to be.

  The reasons are mostly the same as always. The project is sadly understaffed and there does not seem to be a corporate sponsor to really drive the development forward. What makes things extra difficult is that Cairo supports a lot of different platforms like Postscript, Win32, Quartz and SVG. So if someone wants to add new features in Cairo, not only do they need to understand how color math works and how to do C, they would also need to handle all the various backends. That is a rare combination of skills. In any case the patchset needed to make all that happen would be enormous and thus hard to get reviewed and merged.

• An Ultimate Guide to Kubernetes Role-Based Access Control - Earthly Blog

  Kubernetes has many resources and components that must be kept out of reach of certain users and service accounts. Resources such as secrets have to be encrypted and have strict access. If everyone in a company who has access to the cluster is given limitless power when using the cluster; this is dangerous because Kubernetes secrets and keys can be stolen and used inappropriately. Mostly, anyone can change the cluster’s configurations, and it will be hard to know who made changes in case of vulnerability detection.

• GoReleaser v1 — one year later

  Since v1.0.0, we continue making steady progress towards making it easier to release increasingly more complex projects, with increasingly more integrations, and with good defaults — especially regarding security and supply chain, thanks to our friends at Sigstore and Anchore.

• Always use [closed, open) intervals. A programmer's perspective

  Intervals or ranges pop-up everywhere in the programming world. The classic example is picking a start and end date, like you would when booking an AirBnB or a flight. But that's just one example: from slicing a JS Array, to Java's List#sublist and even SQL's LIMIT operator, ranges are everywhere.

  Have you ever wondered why they are always implemented as [closed, open) as opposed to [closed, closed]?

• Ignore RuboCop changes in Git Blame

  Have you ever run git blame, looked at the commit for a line, and seen some big refactoring or formatting commit? It’s so frustrating not to be able to find the useful context on changes when this happens. When adding StandardRB or RuboCop, or when making changes to your .rubocop.yml configuration, you’ll probably end up with a large commit like this that doesn’t include valuable context when spelunking history.

• C Quines - Susam Pal

  A quine is a computer program that produces an exact copy of its own source code as its output. It must not consume any input, so tricks involving reading its own source code and printing it are not permitted.

• Eagle's Path: podlators 5.00 (2022-11-25)

  podlators is my collection of POD formatting modules, which generate *roff or text (possibly with escape sequence markup) from the documentation format used by Perl and some other packages.

  This is a major release, the biggest since the Pod::Simple rewrite in 2005. The headline news is that after some fairly extensive investigation, this release of Pod::Man finally changes the default output format to Unicode. No more replacement of characters in people's names, or text in non-English languages, with ugly X characters! There is a new encoding option to set the output encoding, and new options groff (which uses the groff extension for Unicode code points and is the default on EBCDIC systmes) and roff (which does the old, broken X substitution).

  Since this was a major backward-incompatible change, I also finally removed most of the formatting touch-ups that Pod::Man tried to do for troff output but which would be invisible for the (by far more commonly used) nroff output. These have been an endless source of bugs and are very difficult to maintain, most of them were of marginal utility, and I am dubious many people are using troff to print Perl manual pages these days instead of, say, printing the rendered output from one of the many excellent POD to HTML modules.

• This Week in PSC (088) | Perl Steering Council [blogs.perl.org]

  A smaller-than-usual meeting because of the US Holiday; only Paul and Philippe today.