Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 22, 2024

• Mike Gabriel: Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals

  Here comes the 3rd article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH.

• Ruud van Asseldonk ☛ A type system for RCL: Implementing a typechecker in Rust

  I am building a new configuration language: RCL. It extends json into a simple functional language that enables abstraction and reuse. In this series we take a closer look at the type system, because I think it is interesting, but also because I hope that exposure to the wider PL community can help me to validate some of the ideas, or find problems with them.

• Rlang ☛ How to use read.table Function in R | Read table in r

  The read.table function in R is essential for importing tabular data into data frames.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • PostgreSQL ☛ New Podcast Talking Postgres

    What is Talking Postgres?

    Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano is a monthly podcast where we talk about the human side of Postgres, databases, and open source. Previously called “Path To Citus Con”, each of the 17 episodes published so far includes 1 or 2 amazing guests from the Postgres world. As for the new Talking Postgres name, it’s been called “a sensible move”, “a great name”, and “more fitting”—since the episodes are all about Postgres things.

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Episode 438 – CISA’s bad OSS advice vs the Whitehouse good advice

    Josh and Kurt talk about two documents from the US government that discuss open source in very different ways. The CISA document lays out a way to measure open source, but we take issue with the idea of trying to measure which open source projects are “good”.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Differentiating rate limits in Apache APISIX

    In my talk Evolving your APIs, I mention that an API Gateways is a Reverse Proxy "on steroids". One key difference between the former and the latter is that the API Gateway is not unfriendly to business logic. The poster child is rate-limiting.

    Rate-limiting is an age-old Reverse Proxy feature focused on protecting against DDoS attacks. It treats all clients the same and is purely technical. In this day and age, most API providers offer different subscription tiers; the higher the tier, the higher the rate limit, and the more you pay incidentally. It’s not technical anymore and requires to differentiate between clients.

  • Sean Conner ☛ Fixing an Apache pthread error

    Thousands of such lines. And the weird thing is that libgcc_s.so.1 does exist on my system. I guess I missed that library when I installed Apache from source. I'm not even curious as to why this is an issue, nor why libgcc_s.so.1 is needed. At this point I'm like “give the system what it wants, not what I want to give it” (which I can't say in polite company). Running configure –help didn't show any obvious means of enabling the use of libgcc_s.so.1, and not wanting to dive deep into a maze of twisty Makefiles all alike, I decided on the next best thing. I went to the Apache build directory, deleted the existing httpd binary and ran make. This gave me the final line used to build the executable:

• Licensing / Legal

  • Systemd Free ☛ In Holly Triad of Liberation we trust

    We are very much against a/v overloaded communication/media, we prefer the format we all can have the upper hand, read/write/speak to each other, with out high cost of production dominating human communication (facebook twitter and generally corporate media) but this picture needs little text and talk.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Analog Office ☛ Digital is Ephemeral

    Some of the things I wrote down about what my kids said and did when they were little, disappeared forever due to my using a 1990s word processing program with a now defunct file format. Thankfully at some point I switched to plain text and printouts; but those earlier files are lost for good.

    Digital documents and writings and images are subject to all kinds of hazards: Websites, articles, e-books, and apps disappear. Devices fail or are subject to planned obsolescence. File formats change. Links rot.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Gear 24.08 branches created

    Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.08 [...]