Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 15, 2026

• University of Toronto ☛ A GNU Emacs learning experience with text-mode hooks

  For a while, one of my little irritations with my Emacs environment was that sometimes, when I fired up Emacs to edit some code and then quit out of it, Emacs would complain that there was still an ispell process running and ask me what to do with it. This was especially mysterious to me as I don't normally use flyspell-prog-mode (I find it too irritating for general use). Recently I got sufficiently irritated to use a combination of the ELisp debugger and strategic '(message ...)' usage to track this down, which initially looked like one issue and actually turned out to be another one that I discovered only as part of writing this entry.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • TecMint ☛ 6 Open Source Tools to Monitor MySQL Performance in Linux

    Getting uptime and query statistics from a live MySQL server once meant manually digging through SHOW STATUS output, but these tools turn that data into readable, real-time views that help you spot performance issues before they take down your site.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Hackaday ☛ British Street Addresses, When Licenses Collide

      British address data is in a sense open to all, in that there’s nothing to stop anyone walking down Acacia Avenue and noting the position of Number 1, Number 2, Number 3, and so on. This is what happened with OpenStreetMap worldwide, as people with GPS devices contributed their data and mapped the UK and everywhere else. The Ordnance Survey used to have a nice little earner charging top dollar for UK geospatial data which has been slashed by the arrival of OpenStreetMap, and we’re guessing that the prospect of losing another income stream to an open source equivalent has them worried.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Dan Q ☛ Wikipedia @ 25: Wesley Merritt

      To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

• Standards/Consortia

  • Dan Q ☛ CSS or BS

    Well this is a fun (and frustrating!) game. You’ll be presented with 20 (alleged) CSS properties, but some of them… are convincing-looking fakes! You’ve got 10 seconds to identify whether each is real or not. Every few you get right increases the difficulty level, but also the score potential. How high can you score?