Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Development, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 03, 2026

• Obnam ☛ 2026-01-25 [Older] Obnam 3: Server HTTP API authentication and authorization

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

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

    • Crooked Timber ☛ A big thank you …

      … to reader and commenter Doctor Memory. We noticed recently that old posts weren’t displaying properly, apparently because we’d used a markup language (Textile) that our current setup doesn’t support. We put out an appeal on Bluesky, and Dr M was one of several people who volunteered to clean up the database for us. After backing everything up and doing the necessary editing, he’s just advise me the job is done.

• Public Services/Government

  • The Cyber Show ☛ NOP

    It's nice to engage on different scales, to think about bigger and smaller pictures all at once. There, tactics and strategy meet, and there is much to be learned. Working on a document to support the EU Commission call for evidence AREAS69111 meant international communication back and forth to others in the Software Freedom network. Working on a "Digital Parenting Guide" has keept us grounded in the realism of local working mums and dads.

• Programming/Development

  • Gábor Melis ☛ Untangling Literate Programming

    A literate program consists of interspersed narrative and code chunks. From this, source code to be fed to the compiler is generated by a process called tangling, and documentation by weaving. The specifics of tangling vary, but the important point is that this puts the human narrative first and allows complete reordering and textual combination of chunks at the cost of introducing an additional step into the write-compile-run cycle.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Converting data to hexadecimal outputs quickly

    Given any string of bytes, you can convert it to an hexadecimal string by mapping the least significant and the most significant 4 bits of byte to characters in 01...9A...F. There are more efficient techniques like base64, that map 3 bytes to 4 characters. However, hexadecimal outputs are easier to understand and often sufficiently concise.

    A simple function to do the conversion using a short lookup table is as follows: [...]

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ 2026.05 Periodicity

      Thanks to a sterling initiative by Marc Lentczner, an updated version of the Raku Periodic Table of the Operators is now available for your perusal. Print copies were on sale at Fosdem and proceeds of the sale have been generously donated by Marc to The Perl and Raku Foundation (any errors were a joint effort between Marc and yours truly).

  • R / R-Script

    • Rlang ☛ Designing Sports Betting Systems in R: Bayesian Probabilities, Expected Value, and Kelly Logic

      This post is a code-heavy blueprint for designing sports betting systems in R using Bayesian probabilities, market odds, EV, the Kelly Criterion, and practical betting strategies. You’ll also get a backtesting and Monte Carlo framework to evaluate drawdowns, ruin risk, and performance stability.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Chris Done ☛ Proposal to extend JSON with sum types (variants)

    A small syntactical addition that I propose to add to JSON is variants. It looks like this: [...]