Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 29, 2025

• MaskRay ☛ LLVM integrated assembler: Engineering better fragments

  In my previous assembler posts, I've discussed improvements on expression resolving and relocation generation. Now, let's turn our attention to recent refinements within section fragments. Understanding how an assembler utilizes these fragments is key to appreciating the improvements we've made. At a high level, the process unfolds in three main stages: [...]

• Linuxiac ☛ When Passion Isn’t Enough: Small Linux Projects, Big Problems

  However, here’s something you don’t often see mentioned: a massive chunk of that variety—approximately 80% or more—comes from a particular corner of the Linux world. I’m referring to these one-man-show projects, or others built and maintained by a small team of developers.

  As I’ll explain, while these can be a lovely territory reserved mainly for distro hoppers, they can also be a bit of a gamble—especially if you’re not fully aware of what you’re getting into. In the sections that follow, I’ll break down why diving into this part of the ecosystem can be risky for the average Linux user.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ MetaCPAN's Traffic Crisis: An Eventual Success Story

    "Amelia's Sad Face" by donnierayjones is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

    MetaCPAN.org, the essential search engine for Perl’s CPAN repository, has faced months of severe traffic issues that brought the service to its knees with frequent 503 errors. Here’s how the team fought back against an army of misbehaving bots and hostile traffic.

• Python

  • Ned Batchelder ☛ Coverage.py regex pragmas | Ned Batchelder

    The basic behavior: coverage finds lines in your source files that match the regexes. These lines are excluded from measurement, that is, it’s OK if they aren’t executed. If a matched line is part of a multi-line statement the whole multi-line statement is excluded. If a matched line introduces a block of code the entire block is excluded.

  • The New Stack ☛ Python: Introduction to Timestamps and Time Strings

    Most people would have trouble knowing or calculating a timestamp. Because of that, it would be very challenging to use a timestamp in your Python scripts or applications. On top of that, hardcoding timestamps wouldn’t exactly be a good practice for coding because of their length and complexity.

    Fortunately, Python has a built-in ability to convert timestamps to time strings, without your having to first calculate the current timestamp. This is done with the datetime module.

  • Ivan ☛ Python and NixOS: A match made in hell

    Unfortunately, Python is a different beast. Much has been said about the absolute state of Python packaging, and while this will be pertinent soon, let’s just keep it aside and try to get it to work. Which is, by my criteria: [...]

  • University of Toronto ☛ Python argparse and the minor problem of a variable valid argument count

    Argparse is the standard Python module for handling arguments to command line programs, and because for small programs, Python makes using things outside the standard library quite annoying, it's the one I use in my Python based utility programs. Recently I found myself dealing with a little problem where argparse doesn't have a good answer, partly because you can't nest argument groups.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ How to program a drone using Python: A beginner’s guide

    If you’re controlling your drone manually with a remote controller, it’s not truly autonomous. And autonomy is what defines a real drone. To unlock true autonomy, you’ll need to pre-program your drone’s flight path. Fortunately, learning how to program a drone using Python is easier than you might expect — especially with the right tools and a little coding background.

    Whether you’re building a drone from scratch or experimenting with a simulator, Python gives you access to powerful open-source libraries and APIs to control your drone’s behavior programmatically. Below is everything you need to get started, plus a discount on a top-rated Python drone programming course from Drone Dojo.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • The BSD Cafe Journal ☛ The Bard and The Shell

    It shows some common commands (not too many to make it easy to follow), the advantages of the idea of pipelining, and iteratively solving a problem. We’re going to find out the 25 most-used words in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing“. ⁠If you’re working with a GUI, you’ll quickly see that it’s not as simple as it seems. It’s not easy to log the steps you need to take to get the results you’re looking for.

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

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ This site runs on Laravel

    I love 11ty but it was becoming clear that — for my site in particular — I was hitting a bit of a wall. The backend for my site has and continues to work well. Directus writes to postgres, data is fetched from optimized views using rest calls to postgREST. I already had PHP written. Classes and utilities for fetching data, single file APIs and several other artifacts. I'd looked at Laravel before when considering other projects — it's well-supported, has a large community and countless tools. It's fair to say that using it for this site is overkill.

  • Security Week ☛ Flaw Allowing Website Takeover Found in WordPress Plugin With 400k Installations

    A researcher discovered in May that the plugin is affected by a serious broken access control issue allowing any registered user, including subscribers, to gain access to sensitive data. The security hole is tracked as CVE-2025-24000.

• Education

  • Rlang ☛ Efficient R – How to write faster code workshop

    Description: Writing efficient R code is key to handling large datasets, reducing runtimes, and making your workflows more scalable. In this workshop, you’ll learn practical strategies to find and fix performance issues and how to use packages that improve code speed and memory efficiency. The topics include: [...]

  • APNIC ☛ Strengthening Internet governance through community collaboration

    The recent 2025 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Lillestrøm, Norway, and the WSIS+20 High-Level Event in Geneva were important milestones in global digital cooperation. As preparations for the WSIS+20 review continue, conversations around digital governance, Internet fragmentation, and inclusive participation have taken on renewed urgency.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Inside Open Sauce, a science festival for makers, with over 500 projects on display

    The YouTube element sets Open Sauce apart from other festivals. YouTube creators were invited to host panels and presentations on a number of topics, like 3D printing, science education, animation, prototyping inventions, rocketry, and much more. They also shared strategies for becoming a successful YouTuber. When they weren’t on the stage, fan favorite creators could be spotted touring the exhibits and giving autographs. Presentations were live-streamed for a Virtual Open Sauce experience and recorded for on-demand playback through Sauce+, a streaming service dedicated to Open Sauce creators.

    I had a chance to sit down with founder William Osman, a well known YouTuber and engineer to ask him why he started the festival. “I did it for the community," he said, “YouTube in the early days was a bunch of people who had a weird hobby, who would get together and collaborate making videos.”