Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 09, 2025

• Nolen Royalty ☛ Be Skeptical of All Code - Not Just the Funny Stuff

  I don’t fully disagree. But I’d like to stress one point: this code requires no special permissions on Windows or Linux 2.

  If you’re on one of those platforms, any code a stranger gives you could be doing the exact same thing. If you want to be intellectually consistent, I think you should apply the same mindset to any other program whose source you haven’t read.

  At least my code is an easy to read open-source 200 line python script!

• Ben Hearsum ☛ A Brief History of Code Signing at Mozilla

  Mozilla has been signing Firefox in some form beginning with Firefox 1.0. This began with detached GPG signatures for builds, and progressed to Authenticode signing for Windows installers in Firefox 1.0.1. Since then it has evolved over time to encompass other platforms, other types of files within our products, and other ways that we ship (such as our own update packages). This post will provide a overview of the what, when, why, and how of code signing at Mozilla over the past ~20 years.

• Antirez ☛ We are destroying software

  We are destroying software by no longer taking complexity into account when adding features or optimizing some dimension.

  We are destroying software with complex build systems.

  We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and fragile.

• Zig ☛ No-Libc Zig Now Outperforms Glibc Zig

  I feel that this is a key moment in the Zig project's trajectory. This last piece of the puzzle marks the point at which the language and standard library has become strictly better to use than C and libc.

  While other languages build on top of libc, Zig instead has conquered it!

• Java

  • Erich Schubert: Azul’s State-of-Java report is nonsense

    Azul’s State-of-Java report is full of nonsense, and no worth looking at.

    The report claims various stuff about the adoption of Hey Hi (AI) in the Java ecosystem.

    But its results do not make any sense when looked at in detail.

• Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Why does Go's io.Reader have such a weird signature?

    I found out why it’s designed this way while watching this excellent GopherCon Singapore talk on understanding allocations by Jacob Walker. It mainly boils down to two reasons.

• Education

  • Mandaris Moore ☛ Homebrew Website Club Meeting (2025-02-05)

    I stopped by the European chapter of the IndieWeb group during my lunch and I feel that I got a lot of out it. We went over a lot of different things but here are some of my favorite highlights.

  • Jan Piet Mens ☛ Ansible one hundred

    Little did I know when I became interested in Ansible in 2012, that I would be contacted by Ingo five years later and be asked whether I’d be interested in giving Ansible trainings at the Linuxhotel.

  • Henrik Warne ☛ Programming Conference – Jfokus Stockholm 2025

    This week I attended the Jfokus software development conference in Stockholm, Sweden. I first went in 2011, and I have been back many times through the years. The conference has a Java focus (duh!), but many talks cover general topics as well.

  • Open Data

    • Vincent Lammens ☛ Using the Skyz interpolated dataset

      I got the request from a bunch of users to make all the weather station data available with a single API request. Since I didn't want to do that directly, I did decide to open up the interpolated temperature maps raw data. I might add other parameters to the file later (but I won't promise anything just yet)

      The data is build using the 500+ stations within the skyz database, and is what I use myself for the skyz maps.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • GitLab ☛ IETF SSH Signature Format

      The latest output can be read here: [...]