Free Sofrware, Open Data, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 27, 2025

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • [Old] Andrew Blackman ☛ No, RSS isn't dead!

    So why do we still need RSS in 2025? I want to put together a case for the old-fashioned RSS feed as a technology whose time has come again. But first, we need to go back and see why it almost died in the first place.

  • [Old] It's FOSS ☛ Why I Still Love and Use RSS Feeds in 2025

    Remember RSS feeds? If you are old enough to have used the internet around 2010, you must have come across them.

    If you started your internet journey with smartphones filled with apps, I don't blame you for not knowing about them.

    RSS feeds are basically a way to learn about the newly published articles on your favorite websites and read them.

    Sounds old schools, right? But I still use and in fact love RSS Feeds, specially in this age of algorithm-driven content discovery.

    Let me tell you why.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: duckdb-mlpack 0.0.2: mlpack is now a duckdb community extension

    A couple of days ago in a short post, I announced duckdb-mlpack as ‘ML quacks’: combining the powerful C++ machine learning library mlpack with the amazing analytical database engine duckdb. See that post for more background.

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

  • Mark Phillips ☛ A Hugo render hook for a terminal in CSS

    Over the 28 years this website has existed, it’s gone through various iterations with many tools to build it. Static HTML, WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo. Given that my engineering career was grounded in infrastructure, frontend development was mostly a mystery to me. So I’ve often used the excuse of rebuilding this site to learn something the day jobs never exposed me to.

• Education

  • CCC ☛ 39C3 Presale: Modus Operandi

    We’ll again be using our system of replicating vouchers. The presale will run in two phases: the voucher phase and the open sale. We’ll explain this as briefly as we can here. If you want to read more about it, we also have a documentation page available, where we’ll add more information in the coming days.

    The voucher phase will run from 2025-10-21 until 2025-11-12 and works as follows: [...]

• Licensing / Legal

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Shake Shack Is Restricting Its Customers’ Legal Rights

    Arbitration courts are a pay-for-play private justice system in which cases are overseen by judges hired by the company being sued, and the chances of consumers ever winning a lawsuit are extremely low — upwards of 90 percent of cases rule in favor of companies. These contracts have spread across the economy, from health care to live entertainment. But until recently, fast-food chains were generally only able to wield them over their workers in employment contracts.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Kieran Healy ☛ Manhattan Plot of Manhattan

      I made a version of this plot a few years ago. I ended up revisiting it this morning because I’m updating various datasets and code. A Manhattan plot is a term sometimes used to describe a kind of scatter plot where the x-values are fairly continuous, and the y values have distributions with long tails, so the plot looks like a skyline. This one here is a bar chart rather than a scatter plot but it’s still a kind of Manhattan plot of Manhattan.

    • Rlang ☛ Mapping Antarctica

      Creating maps with R is usually straightforward, but representations that cross the International Date Line or that use polar projections can be tricky.

      Different spatial-data providers use different conventions: some break geometries at certain longitudes (for example, cutting the Chukchi Peninsula), while others omit portions of the data. These inconsistencies can produce awkward artifacts near the poles.

      In this post I fix the GISCO (European Commission) shapefile for Antarctica and produce clean orthographic maps. I walk through the manual corrections and then create a few example maps.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ AsciiDoc over Markdown

    Markdown is amazing, but it has strong limitations. I wrote my latest book with Markdown, in the Doc-as-Code tradition. The experience was so painful that I vowed never to do it again.