Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 16, 2024

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • James G ☛ Finding complexity when writing technical documents

    I started to think: why should the user even need to change the value in their settings? Why can’t it be inferred on sign up? Better yet: why can’t I infer the user’s timezone according to their device timezone, and make it part of the sign up process so the user can still choose their own timezone? I felt like I was trying to communicate technical details that were not necessary if the app did more in the background. This was counter to my goal of communicating in as simple language as possible the what, why, and how behind the software.

  • Mozilla

    • Frederik Braun ☛ [Mozilla] Frederik Braun: Home assistant can not be secured for internet access

      The Goal: Smart Heating Control

      Home automation is a cool toy but also allows my house hold to be more energy efficient: My aim was to configure my home's heating to switch off when my family is away and turn back on when we return.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • [Old] Pekka Enberg ☛ Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O [PDF]

    Minimizing database access latency is crucial in serverless edge computing for many applications, but databases are predominantly deployed in cloud environments, resulting in costly network round-trips. Embedding an in-process database library such as SQLite into the serverless runtime is the holy grail for low-latency database access. However, SQLite’s architecture limits concurrency and multitenancy, which is essential for serverless providers, forcing us to rethink the architecture for integrating a database library.

    We propose rearchitecting SQLite to provide asynchronous bytecode instructions for I/O to avoid blocking in the library and decoupling the query and storage engines to facilitate database and serverless runtime co-design. Our preliminary evaluation shows up to a 100x reduction in tail latency, suggesting that our approach is conducive to runtime/database co-design for low latency.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Update: So CSS4 is going to happen?

    Just over a year ago, I wrote a post, So CSS4 is going to happen? I wrote it in response to a video that Zoran Jambor of CSS Weekly had posted. I recently read It’s Time to Talk About “CSS5” on Smashing Magazine and wanted to provide an update on the effort to find better approaches for how we describe the evolution of CSS over time and identify feature sets so that we have a common framework as Web practioners to educate other developers and set benchmarks to define modern web skills.