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Programming Leftovers
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Stewart C Russell ☛ The Broken BASIC Years
So in a feat of mass emulation (and sometimes using real vintage hardware), here are some BASIC systems that always execute a FOR loop at least once: [...]
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Paweł Grzybek ☛ Difftastic — my new favourite diff viewer
I don’t remember how that happened, but over the years I also abandoned Delta, and I trained my eye to be good at scanning the default git diff output. Occasionally I still miss side-by-side view though. Recently my good friend Oliver recommended Difftastic to me. It works fundamentally different than Delta, and can be used as an individual diff tool to compare files/folders or as a git diff pager. Let’s look at the example.
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Olaf Alders ☛ On Cooldowns and Dependabot Tuning
The idea behind cooldowns is essentially that unless you’re constantly in YOLO mode, you probably don’t need something that was released to the world 5 minutes or even 5 days ago. Yes, there are exceptions (security updates, some brand new thing, etc). Just waiting a few days (or a week) can reduce your exposure to supply chain attacks because a large percentage of compromised packages will have been discovered in the hours/days after a release. It’s not a silver bullet, but it mitigates your exposure to some extent.
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Himanshu Anand ☛ score by collisions, patch by panic
The current model treats every report as if it lives in a vacuum, One reporter, One bug, One timeline. That was the assumption the old playbook ran on It no longer holds. Here is what severity should look like in 2026.
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Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die
Weekend at Bernie’s showed that a good chunk of the most-depended-on open source packages are dead, and there are a lot of different ways for a project to end up that way.
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Ruby
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Ruby ☛ CVE-2026-46727: Use-after-free in pthread-based getaddrinfo timeout handler
A use-after-free vulnerability has been discovered in the pthread-based
getaddrinfotimeout handler of Ruby. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-46727. This issue has been fixed in Ruby 4.0.5. We recommend upgrading Ruby. -
Ruby ☛ Ruby 4.0.5 Released
Ruby 4.0.5 has been released.
This release only contains a security fix for CVE-2026-46727: Use-after-free in pthread-based getaddrinfo timeout handler and a build system regression in Ruby 4.0.4 under C locale [Bug #22065].
Please see the GitHub releases for further details.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Make Use Of ☛ This Linux shell gives you the terminal features Bash forgot to add
Setting up a Linux terminal for a modern workflow can be daunting. Still, it remains an important task since the default Bash shell has not evolved at the same rate as the modern desktop. The terminal should do more than just run automation scripts; it should also enable fluid interaction with Git, Docker, package managers, and SSH sessions.
Interestingly, the fish shell is a hidden upgrade you can get right from your package manager, and it changed everything for me. Fish treats modern Linux features as the baseline, and it's one of the best and easiest recommendations I can make for anyone.
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