Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Tim Bray ☛ Storage Churn
What are the highest-impact Cloud services? Storage would be near the top of any list. Where by “Storage” I mean what S3 does: Blobs-of-bytes storage that is effectively unlimited in capacity, credibly more durable than anything you could build yourself, and easily connected to the world, either directly or through a CDN. I think we’re entering a period of churn where there’s going to be serious competition on storage price and performance. Which, by the way, is crucially relevant to the Fediverse.
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Kev Quirk ☛ Mastodon Is DDoSing Me
Whenever I, or someone else, posts a link to this blog on Mastodon, it DDoS's me and brings the site down for a couple minutes.
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University of Toronto ☛ What affects what server host key types OpenSSH will offer to you
Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I was checking the various SSH host keys that some of our servers were using, by connecting to them and trying to harvest their SSH keys. When I tried this with a CentOS 7 host, I discovered that while I could get it to offer its RSA host key, I could not get it to offer an Ed25519 key. At first I wrote this off as 'well, CentOS 7 is old', but then I noticed that this machine actually had an Ed25519 host key in /etc/ssh, and this evening I did some more digging to try to turn up the answer, which turned out to not be what I expected.
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Andy Bell ☛ Full text RSS is back
We sleuthed on their open source codebase and found they approached RSS with an interesting React DOM render-to-string sorta deal. Astro components aren’t React, but for us at least, they’re JSX, so after a heroic effort from Leanne, we managed to utilise a similar approach to Jhey and actually get full text RSS working.
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Anne Sturdivant ☛ How often do you redesign your site?
I don't often post polls on Mastodon because I rarely get enough engagement to make them useful, but last month I posed the question "How often do you redesign your personal site, be it a blog or something else?" and the people responded!
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Idiomdrottning ☛ Masto's “explore” tab
A reader wrote in asking why I hate Mastodon’s “explore” tab so much.
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Best Open Source Software List For Data Management In 2024
Interested in the best open source software? Read our 2024 list for innovative data management solutions.
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Linux Magazine ☛ OSJH and LPI Release 2024 Open Source Pros Job Survey Results
See what open source professionals look for in a new role.
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Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Surveillance Giant Google Bazel
Bazel is a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system for building both client and server software. We recommend alternatives.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice
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Document Foundation ☛ Projects selected for LibreOffice in the Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code 2024
The LibreOffice Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code projects have been selected for 2024. Adam Seskunas – More and better tests: the project aims to add automated tests for fixes related to document export as well as converting tests written in Java to C++.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Lykolux ☛ Other advantages of using a password manager
Password managers have other advantages than storing and using credentials. I’ve been toying with the idea for weeks.
At a glance, it lists all my accounts, which is very practical. I know I have exactly 150 accounts. I know what my accounts are. Grocery stores? Media accounts? I can list them. Why should I? It’s useful to know that I have an account when I log on less than once a year. This list is also useful for a later point.
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Branur Leach ☛ The Notifier Pattern for Applications That Use Postgres
Listen/notify in Postgres is an incredible feature that makes itself useful in all kinds of situations. I’ve been using it a long time, started taking it for granted long ago, and was somewhat shocked recently looking into MySQL and SQLite to learn that even in 2024, no equivalent exists.
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Robert Haas ☛ Robert Haas: The PostgreSQL Documentation and the Limitations of Community
In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are direct results of the process by which the documentation is produced. The PostgreSQL documentation is stored in the same git repository as the source code, and anyone who patches the source code so as to change documented behavior must also patch the documentation to match.
This means that nearly all documentation updates are made by the developer who is most familiar with what is changing in the code, or sometimes by another developer who has studied those changes closely. Therefore, the documentation is usually extremely accurate. Sure, there are oversights, but it would be incredible to discover that some PostgreSQL command has a documented option which doesn't actually exist, or that a parameter which is documented to take a string argument actually takes an integer or a Boolean. Typically, the descriptions of what SQL statements do and how that behavior is changed by parameter settings or options passed to the command itself are crisp and precise.
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The Register UK ☛ Council drops apostrophe from street names, blames databases
Implemented in 1890, the BGN's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) "discourages" the use of the possessive apostrophe in place names, with only five exceptions granted since enforcement began: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; Ike's Point, New Jersey; John E's Pond, Rhode Island; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona; and Clark's Mountain, Oregon.
While the GNIS doesn't define road names (those are governed at the state level) the precedent it set has generally been followed, with many rules in place throughout the US that discourage or ban the use of apostrophes in geographical place names – including roads.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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MBition becomes a KDE patron
MBition supports the work of the KDE community with its generous sponsorship.
MBition designs and implements the infotainment system for future generations of Mercedes-Benz cars and utilizes KDE's technology and know-how for its products.
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