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

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 14, 2026

• Rachel Kaufman ☛ 30 Days of coreutils: ls

  ls is how you list files in a directory. Along with many of the other utils I’ve already covered, this one is also very basic. If you’ve used the command line, you’ve used ls.

  But oh, the options.

• Events

  • The Great Video Migration

    I just realized it has been a full year since I blogged last. Time flies and I will try to do (much much) better this year.

    My last entry was about foss-north 2025 and now foss-north 2026 has just passed. It was a successful event and Tobias really helps bringing new energy to the event – including a whole crew of volunteers.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Web servers, and researching alternatives

    My history with web servers is entirely unremarkable, and likely mirrors yours. I first ran Apache/httpd when I was kid, before moving onto lighttpd in my first paid gig—lighty for those in the know—then onto nginx where I’ve mostly remained since, save for running Bozotic on a 486 with NetBSD because of course. Also IIS for a project, but we don’t speak of that.

  • Den Odell ☛ Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently

    Some browsers ship code that checks which domain you’re visiting and changes how the page renders based on it.

    Yup, you read that right. If site == X, do Y.

    TikTok gets special treatment. So does Netflix. So does Instagram. And so does SeatGuru.

    Safari and Firefox both do this. Chrome doesn’t. That tells us something interesting.

    [...]

    This creates a feedback loop. Developers build for Chrome because Chrome dominates. Their sites work best in Chrome. Users who hit bugs elsewhere blame the browser, not the site, so they switch to Chrome, reinforcing its dominance.

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Tooling Announcements: MozPhab 2.15.1 Released

      Bugs resolved in Moz-Phab 2.15.1: [...]

    • Evan Hahn ☛ Open Link in Unloaded Tab, a little Firefox extension

      In short: I just published Open Link in Unloaded Tab, a little Firefox extension that adds “Open Link in Unloaded Tab” to the right-click context menu.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The Register UK ☛ DBase debased: Database titan fades to black after 47 years

    It's an interesting telling of the decline and fall of what was once an industry titan, and for us, the disappearance of the site itself once the blog post went up is just the cherry on top.

  • PowerDNS ☛ Automatic authenticated DNSSEC Bootstrapping in PowerDNS Authoritative

    The DNSSEC Bootstrapping protocol (RFC 9615) allows automated and authenticated in-band DS provisioning. It is now built in as a feature in PowerDNS. How does it work?

    In short: The Bootstrapping Protocol uses an existing chain of trust within the DNS to authenticate information for DS provisioning: [...]

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

  • Amit Gawande ☛ Moving off Ghost

    I have moved this site off Ghost and onto my custom blogging engine. Why? I had lost interest in the space. In the form it existed.

• Education

  • Lund Linux Con ☛ Lund Linux Con

    May 21-22, 2026.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Durations of wars by @ellis2013nz

      How long do wars last, on average? If a war such as that currently under way in Iran has lasted 74 days so far, how long do we expect it to last in total? For all sorts of reasons, inquiring minds are interested. Luckily there are some very well curated datasets out there, including the Correlates of War, that make it easy to answer these questions.

      A caveat to all this applies that I am not a military historian, just an interested amateur. I’m very open to having mistakes of interpretation or method pointed out to me.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Buttondown LLC ☛ Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure

    I'm in the middle of redoing the Logic for Programmers diagrams and this has surfaced a really annoying problem. The book is formatted in LaTeX using a pseudo-grid of 10.8pt × 7.2pt. The diagrams are done in Inkscape using a 10.8pt × 7.2pt.

    Last week I found out that these are not the same points.

    Latex defines a point as 1/72.27 inches (0.3515 millimeters). Inkscape instead uses 1/72 inches (0.3528 mm). It's only a difference of 0.4% but it still floors me that two widespread digital technologies would be different!

    So, uh, what happened?