Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 24, 2025

• PowerDNS ☛ Second alpha release of PowerDNS DNSdist 2.0.0

  This release fixes a lot of issues, most of them related to either the new YAML configuration format or the new meson build mechanism. It also fixes CVE-2025-30193 and CVE-2025-30194, which have already been fixed in the 1.9.x stable branch.

• Nick Barrett ☛ Adventures with Elasticsearch

  At old work we did some pretty wild things with Elasticsearch. It’s been a few years for my memories to rot but roughly we’re talking thousand node clusters, a petabyte of data and billions of documents.

  We didn’t just do search though, nor just metrics. We combined the two together so you could generate metrics over time filtered by many fields including paragraphs of text. Documents were large and contained both searchable text, keywords and associated metrics. I am not aware of another database that can do that at this scale (probably does exist by now).

• Stephen Turner ☛ Writing a book with Quarto

  Quarto showed up on my radar in 2022 at the last rstudio::conf (before it became posit::conf), where Posit announced the name change, public benefit corp status, Shiny for Python, and, Quarto. I’ve slowly switched most of my technical authoring from RMarkdown to Quarto. I had always been a big fan of the rticles package, and now Quarto is starting to catch up with journal article templates (I wrote the biorecap paper using a generic arXiv Quarto template).

  I have bookmarks to so many great reference books including R for Data Science, Hands on Programming with R, and Python for Data Analysis, all of which are written as Quarto books.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Clayton Errington ☛ Journa11ty

    That is how journa11ty became a new starter template. I was looking to use something that was simple, easy to use and quick to store these different thoughts in. I knew a simple css framework would keep the dev work quick while looking good still.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Harvard University ☛ Marine vet’s future was a puzzle. Then he found archaeology.

      Upon returning to Cambridge, Rice immediately set about structuring his own research project. Foundational to his approach was Ur’s graduate-level course on archaeological applications of Geographical Information Systems. Rice started searching government databases that semester for declassified intelligence photos that fit his needs in terms of resolution, timescale, and coverage of the 3,000-square-kilometer survey area.

      That’s how he discovered a cache of high-resolution landscape images, declassified in 2013, that were collected in June 1980 by the KH-9 Hexagon U.S. photo-reconnaissance satellite. “In a perfect world, you would compare photos taken right before and right after the point of impact,” Rice said. “But 1980 was pretty close to the time we were looking at.”

• Programming/Development

  • Yoshua Wuyts ☛ The Waker Allocation Problem

    The entire point of futures and Rust’s async/.await system is to introduce two new capabilities: arbitrary concurrent execution of computations, and arbitrary cancellation of computations. The difference between blocking and non-blocking computation is unimportant if we then don’t also capitalize on it by scheduling work concurrently.

    But there’s a problem - In order to schedule work concurrently futures have two bad choices in how to organize their internals: [...]

  • Building a Local Bugzilla RAG System

• Standards/Consortia

  • Ruben Schade ☛ A very silly website rebuild

    I love blogging, but I prefer maintaining my silly Retro Corner.

    Reading Wesley’s awesome self-hosted site recently made me wonder if I’m going about this whole blogging thing wrong, and if I shouldn’t somehow meld these two approaches.

    I have some… absolutely ridiculous ideas for how to make my blog as fun to maintain, or at least read. They’re all mutually incompatible and silly for their own reasons, but is a word with three letters.

    I might prototype a few examples and upload them for people to review and provide feedback.

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Webkit’s New Color Picker as an Example of Good Platform Defaults

      I’ve written about how I don’t love the idea of overriding basic computing controls. Instead, I generally favor opting to respect user choice and provide the controls their platform does.

      Of course, this means platforms need to surface better primitives rather than supplying basic ones with an ability to opt out.

      What am I even talking about? Let me give an example.