Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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December GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Seventeen new GNU releases!
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FSF: Help us defend the freedom to share: Membership drive extended to January 20
Our fundraiser is extended until January 20, which means you have more time to participate in helping us reach our goal! Miriam discusses how memberships help drive our advocacy.
Since the start of our fundraiser, more than 260 new associate members -- and even more donors! -- have answered the call to stand strong with the FSF in support of the freedom to share. We're thrilled and grateful to have received all the donations and membership renewals that have contributed to our year-end drive. Because we are ambitious, we had a goal of 455 new members by December 31. We haven't achieved our membership goal yet, but since we've seen a strong show of support in the latter half of our appeal we're extending the date to join, receive all the benefits of membership, and still receive one of this year's snazzy and secure webcam covers we're offering, to January 20.
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It still surprises me what some find difficult to do
And he goes on to implement a scheme that adds complexity to the configuration of the server, plus the issues with scheduling a program to scan the logfiles for Gemini requests. I've done the logfile scanning for “Project: Wolowizard” and “Project: Lumbergh” and it was not any easy thing to set up. Okay, in my case, it was checking the logs in real time to see if messages got logged as part of testing, but that aside, checking the logs for requests might not be straightforward. In this case, it soulds like he has easy access to the log files—but that is not always the case. There have been plenty of systems I've come across where normal users just don't have access to the logs (and I find it annoying, but that's a rant for another time). Then there's scheduling a script to run at a regular schedule. In the past, this would be cron and the bizarre syntax it uses, but I'm not sure what the new hipster Linux systemd way is these days (which itself is a whole bag of worms).
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Brave: A Great Browser With a Questionable Business Model
It’s too bad that Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser, bases its business model on cryptocurrency. If not for that, I would be using it as my daily online driver, because it’s a great browser.
In case you’re not familiar, Brave is an open-source browser based on Chromium that’s designed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Google Chrome. It’s fast, said to be lightweight enough to make a noticeable difference in laptop battery life, and like most privacy-focused browsers, it comes configured out-of-the-box to block ads from being served from third party sites such as Google’s and Microsoft’s adservers (full disclosure: FOSS Force displays ads from Google).
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Serious Investors And A Web3 Takeover Have Come To The Mastodon World: Is That Good Or Bad?
In one of Mike’s recent posts about the radical reshaping of the social media landscape currently underway, he noted that Mastodon/ActivityPub might have a “Gmail moment“, when bigger players enter and boost the sector. Although that could be good in terms of broadening the appeal of Mastodon, the emergence of huge, dominating “instances” (Mastodon servers) might undermine the federated approach that makes Mastodon so interesting.
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Some notes on working with old C code
The post is briefly about testing the old game Star Trek that was popular in the 70s, and in this case, it's been ported to C probably sometime in the 80s. The game is interactive so writing any form of tests (much less “unit tests”) will be challenging, to say the least. (the post does go on to say that possibly using expect would probably be in order).
I have a bit of experience here with older C code. At one point, I got interested in Viola, an early graphical web browser from 1992, and is the type of C code that gives C a bad name. It was written in a transition period between K&R C and ANSI C, so it had to cater to both, so function prototypes were spotty at best. It also made several horrible assumptions about primitive data types—mainly that pointers, integers and long integers were all interchangable, and plenty of cases where signed quantities were compared to unsigned quantities.
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A Quarter Century of Web Coding: Tracing the Fractal of Complexity
The year 2023 marks two special occasions for me: I have now been using computers for 35 years and worked professionally with programming for 25 of them. A quarter century - the mind boggles.
What follows is a retrospect of the evolution of programming for the web, and some attempt to come to terms with why it's turned into the obscenity it is today.
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Perl Weekly Challenge 198: Max Gap and Prime Count