Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 25, 2026

• [Old] Julia Evans ☛ Linux debugging tools I love

  I gave a talk this weekend about debugging tools I love (here are the slides, such as they are). I think of these tools like a swiss army knife – if something on your system is wrong or slow, in any programming language, knowing how to use them can really help you out. I’ve written pretty extensively on this, but I didn’t have a central list to refer to. So! Here’s the list of my current favorite tools. There are only 5! I’ve used all of them (except opensnoop) to debug actual problems.

• [Old] FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2016 - Interview with Daniel Pocock
  Free communications with Free Software. Is there any credible way to build a trustworthy communications platform without using free software?

  Hopefully this talk will engage more developers from the wider free software community. For example, it would be great if any application that stores or processes email addresses had a way to click those addresses and start an SIP or XMPP session. Another example would be people taking the DruCall module (for Drupal) and making similar modules for other CMS and web frameworks like WordPress, MediaWiki and Django.

  Many of the most successful and long-lasting projects, such as Debian, are successful because they make the community just as important as the technology. Engaging more developers in these goals will hopefully help create a sustainable community around this mission.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Stefan Eissing ☛ curl bitsets

    curl has two main APIs to perform internet transfers: the easy and the multi set of functions. If you want to do just a single transfer at a time, the easy interface is the right one for you. If you need to do several transfers in parallel or want connection reuse, the multi interface is best.

    A single multi handle can hold thousands of easy transfers at a time and progress them in an unblocking manner. Transfers may wait on a socket for data to arrive/send or transfers wait on other transfers to complete.

    For the multi handle, a transfer is either pending, processing or in msgsent state (the transfer is done, waiting for the application to pick it up again). They move between these states over their lifetime: [...]

  • Mozilla

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Firefox’s new tab page adds AI-powered daily crossword widget

      More widgets are coming to Firefox’s New Tab page, including an interactive crossword puzzle powered by the Hey Hi (AI) news reader Particle. The mini crossword game is updated daily, with puzzles based around recent content Particle‘s Hey Hi (AI) has ingested and summarised that day, and links to articles you can read to help deduce crossword answers. You click on a square to activate the row or column (clicking on it again switches between “Across” and “Down”). You read the clue at the bottom, and then you type in your answer. Use the hint button if you get stuck.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ New Frontier

      If we pull all the articles in PubMed for this journal and see how many were published per month, we get a plot like this. The dotted line shows the date of the rat penis incident.