Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 27, 2025

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.116 released

  Version 0.116 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• Matt Palmer ☛ Matthew Palmer: Object deserialization attacks using Ruby's Oj JSON parser

  tl;dr: there is an attack in the wild which is triggering dangerous-but-seemingly-intended behaviour in the Oj JSON parser when used in the default and recommended manner, which can lead to everyone’s favourite kind of security problem: object deserialization bugs! If you have the oj gem anywhere in your Gemfile.lock, the quickest mitigation is to make sure you have Oj.default_options = { mode: :strict } somewhere, and that no library is overwriting that setting to something else.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ From Perl 6 to Posterity

    My Raku presentation at the Nordic Perl Workshop 2018. Note that this is the original presentation, using «Perl 6» instead of «Raku».

• Python

  • Armin Ronacher ☛ From Async/Await to Virtual Threads

    Last November I wrote a post about how the programming interface of threads beats the one of async/await. In May, Mark Shannon brought up the idea of virtual threads for Python on Python’s discussion board and also referred back to that article that I wrote. At EuroPython we had a chat about that topic and that reminded me that I just never came around to writing part two of that article.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Hold The Robot LLC ☛ Heredocs Can Make Your Bash Scripts Self-Documenting

    One option is to write a bash script for the automation and a markdown file for the documentation, but they inevitably end up duplicating information and/or getting out of sync. The other is to just have a single markdown file with a bunch of inline bash that you manually copy into a terminal. But "running" it is clunky, tedious, and easy to mess up.

    I tend to prefer the latter despite the annoyances, because "keeping information in sync" is such a big problem. But recently I've been playing with a third option. Rather than maintaining two files or putting bash in markdown; put markdown in bash.