Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 22, 2026

• Daniel Lemire ☛ How fast do browsers correct UTF-16 strings?

  What happens if you break the rules and have a high surrogate followed by a high surrogate? Then you have an invalid string. We can correct the strings by patching them: we replace the bad values by the replacement character (\ufffd). The replacement character sometimes appears as a question mark.

• Carlo Zancanaro ☛ Forgejo, AGit, and Pull Request Templates

  I've raised a few PRs against the Guix Codeberg repository recently, and each time I've done so with Forgejo's agit workflow. This workflow is pretty nice, and allows me to raise a PR entirely from within Emacs. To do that, I've been using this code in my Emacs config to add an extra option to the magit-push transient to use the agit flow to push to the upstream branch: [...]

• Adolfo Ochagavía ☛ Fix your tools

  What a paradox, I realized afterwards. The very desire to fix the bug prevented me from seeing I had to fix the tool first, and made me less effective in my bug hunt. This blog post is a reminder to myself, and to every bug-hungry programmer out there: fix your tools! They will do wonders for you.

• Hackaday ☛ In Praise Of The Proof Of Concept

  Your project doesn’t necessarily have to be a refined masterpiece to have an impact on the global hacker hivemind. Case in point: this great demo of using a 64-point time-of-flight ranging sensor. [Henrique] took three modules, plugged them into a breadboard, and wrote some very interactive Python code that let him put them all through their paces. The result? I now absolutely want to set up a similar rig and expand on it.

• Vincent Delft ☛ Two small tools facilitating usage of gameoftrees

  While working with my self-hosted Got server, I added two lightweight tools to improve everyday usage of got repositories. Both aim to solve practical features while keeping the spirit of simplicity of gameoftrees.

  Both tools are totally independent. One is a cgi scrip to install on a gotwebd instance; the other is pure local on the dev machine.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Fitting time-to-event models with an environmental covariate

    In a previous post we have shown that we can use time-to-event curves to describe the time course of germinations/emergences for a seed lot (this post). We have also seen that the effects of experimental factors on seed germination can be accounted for by coding a different time-to-event curve for each factor level (this post).

    In this post, we would like to consider the environmental variables, that are, perhaps, the most important factors to trigger germination/emergence. For example, let’s consider either humidity content in the substrate, or temperature, or oxygen availability; it is clear that these variables play a fundamental role in determining germination extent and velocity and, therefore, they are very much studied by seed scientists. In principle, germination assays with environmental variables are straightforward to set up: several Petri dishes are submitted to different environmental conditions and germinations are inspected over time. What is the best method to analyse the resulting data and retrieve some important parameters, such as threshold temperatures (base, optimal or ceiling temperature) or base water potential?

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.1.0 on CRAN: Easier Calendar Switching

    The eighteenth release of the qlcal package [...]

• Java/Golang

  • Carlos Becker ☛ Announcing GoReleaser v2.14

    If you need to release in an air-gapped environment, you may now export your key and validate it offline: [...]