Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 29, 2023

• Ted Unangst ☛ terminal smooth scrolling

  I didn’t realize I needed this until I implemented it, and now, oh wow, can’t imagine life without it.

  Normally, a terminal draws lines of text at fixed intervals. Line 1 starting at pixel 0, then line 2 at 24 pixels, etc. When the text scrolls, line 2 immediately becomes line 1 and gets drawn at pixel 0. These sudden jumps are incompatible with how your eyes track motion, however. The result is a blurry mess that’s hard to read.

  Long ago, hardware terminals had the option for smooth scrolling, incrementally shifting each line of text up over several frames, but such wizardry has been lost to the ravages of time. I thought it would be fun to implement, and maybe a cool trick to show off, but before seeing the result figured it would be mostly a gimmick. Instead, it’s entirely changed how I scroll through text.

• Hackaday ☛ Linux Fu: Preprocessing Beyond Code

  If you glanced at the title and thought, “I don’t care — I don’t write C code,” then hang on a minute. While it is true that C has a preprocessor and you can notoriously do strange and — depending on your point of view — horrible or wonderful things with it, there are actually other options and you don’t have to use any of them with a C program. You can actually use the C preprocessor with almost any kind of text file. And it’s not the only preprocessor you can abuse this way. For example, the m4 preprocessor is wildly complex, vastly underused, and can handle C source code or anything else you care to send to it.

• Rlang ☛ Unveiling the Time Traveler: Plotting Time Series in R

  Ready to journey through time with R? Buckle up, because we’re about to explore the art of visualizing time-dependent data, known as time series analysis.

• Python

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Security Developer-in-Residence Weekly Report #23

    This week I spent time learning about the current state of proposals for solving the "index trust" problem for the Python Package Index. There are a few different proposals that have happened in the past being PEP 458 and RSTUF. This learning was to better review a draft proposal for publish provenance (stay tuned!) that also contained some mentions of the index trust problem. Some outcomes we're looking for when solving the index trust problem: [...]

• Licensing / Legal

  • Simon Josefsson ☛ Validating debian/copyright: licenserecon

    Recently I noticed a new tool called licenserecon written by Peter Blackman, and I helped get licenserecon into Debian. The purpose of licenserecon is to reconcile licenses from debian/copyright against the output from licensecheck, a tool written by Jonas Smedegaard. It assumes DEP5 copyright monopoly files. You run the tool in a directory that has a debian/ sub-directory, and its output when it notices mismatches (this is for resolv-wrapper): [...]

    [...]

    Noticing one-character typos like this may not bring satisfaction except to the most obsessive-compulsive among us, however the tool has the potential of discovering more serious mistakes.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress ☛ Leap into 2024 with these Site Editor Tools [Ed: More bloat. The editor ought not be part of the browser/page.]

    The Site Editor gives you a powerful way to visually create every part of your site and tell your story. It lets you handle everything from big stylistic changes to simple copy updates all in a single place.