Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 23, 2023

• A Smörgåsbord of Problems

  For the past several days, while combating another flu, I've been polishing Lagrange's dev branch for the v1.15 release. Preparing for a release typically involves solving a series of small(ish) problems. Here's a sampling of what I encountered this time.

  Operating systems have fundamental differences when it comes to windowing and event processing. I do most of my development on macOS, so a bunch of small issues typically pop up when testing on Windows, Linux, and *BSD.

• The writer of ahiru.pl also uses desktop email

  This was the impetus I had for merging my personal email hosted in Alpine back into Thunderbird too. Having everything in one place makes life much easier, even if I still invoke some specific keybindings sometimes.

• Keep FreeBSD Desktop Updated

  While its relatively easy (or brain dead easy with GhostBSD or NomadBSD distributions) to install and configure a FreeBSD Desktop – one have to keep in mind that its also important to keep that system updated and secure.

  There are many aspects about FreeBSD to keep it updates and secured.

• How Prometheus makes good use of the HTTP Accept: header

  Prometheus metrics exporters are queried ('scraped') by Prometheus and respond with metrics in some format. Historically there has been more than one format, as sort of covered in Exposition Formats; currently there's two text ones (Prometheus native and OpenMetrics) and one binary one (with some variations). The text based formats are easy to generate and serve by pretty much anything, while the binary format is necessary for some new things (and may have been seen as more efficient in the past). A normal metrics exporter (a 'client' in a lot of Prometheus jargon) that supports more than one format will choose which format to reply with based on the query's HTTP Accept header, defaulting to the text based format.

• Create your own website with Joomla!, an open source CMS

  Joomla! is among the leading open source content management systems (CMS) for publishing web content. It's user friendly, accessible, extensible, responsive, and multilingual. What's more, it's also search engine optimized. No wonder Joomla! has a 3.5% share of the content management system market.

  In this article, I'll introduce you to Joomla! and why I think it's an excellent choice for your website or online application.

• I’m NOT changing my license!

  I’m a free software person. I care about software freedom and that’s why I advocate for GNU GPL family of licenses. GNU GPL license makes sure that you have freedom to do anything with your copy but you have to keep it free. If I truly advocate for freedom, I think I wouldn’t want my piece of software to become proprietary. And I thought the same argument goes for other forms of published work.

• Open access accord ‘to weaken publishers’ negotiating position’

  Under a new commitment agreed by members of the N8 Research Partnership, whose institutions include the universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, researchers will be urged to retain their intellectual property (IP) rights, rather than sign them over to publishers.

  By doing so, scholars would be free to post final versions of research articles on institutional repositories, after obtaining a CC BY licence – a move that some publishers will not permit, or only allow after an embargo period, a route to publication known as green open access.