Web and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 28, 2026

• University of Toronto ☛ Getting a minimal environment for a third party GNU Emacs package

  Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you think you've found a bug in a package and that you have a complicated Emacs environment. If the package is a standard Emacs package, there's generally a simple way to reproduce the problem in a minimal setup; you can do 'emacs -Q' to get a stock Emacs so you can file a nice clean bug report. However, this doesn't work by itself with a third party package that you've installed through list-packages. If you start 'emacs -Q' and try to use the package, you'll probably get an error that your Emacs can't find it (and if it can find the package, you should be suspicious).

• [Old] Omar Polo ☛ I wrote a music player

  Moved by curiosity I wrote a small music player. The ideas was to see if it was possible to decode the audio files in a tightly sandboxed process.

  TL;DR: it was an error. I ended up writing a thing I like, now I have to maintain it!

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • It's FOSS ☛ FireDragon Browser Swoops in With New Wings

    It's been rewritten from scratch to provide some good gains.

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ HTTP Message Signatures with curl

    The specification describes this as a mechanism for creating, encoding, and verifying digital signatures or message authentication codes over components of an HTTP message. It is a way to verify that selected parts of the HTTP request arrives unmodified and exactly the same as when the request was created by the client.

    These days, it is very common that there are layers of proxies, load balancers, front-ends, CDNs, web firewalls and what not in between the client and the ultimate application. With HTTP Message Signatures, there can be assurances that the headers are components of the request end are unaltered.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • L F Projects, LLC ☛ The secret life of data in Valkey

    If you’ve used Valkey for very long you’re probably aware of the different primary data types in the core: strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, and streams. Each data type has an accompanying set of commands that manipulate that data type. For example, you use HSET to set a field and value pair to a hash, but you don’t use, for example, HSET to add an element to a list. What if I told you that there is an entire hidden layer that you never see unless you use a specific OBJECT command and can’t control unless you start tinkering with the configuration? And that this could have a profound effect on your total usable storage: enough that careful configuring could mean significant savings in your infrastructure. Read on to find out how you can understand and tweak the real underlying structures.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ UK, EU & Australia: sovereignty requires independent rival app stores

    While other candidates in the Clacton-on-sea by-election rush to create manifestos, my ideas on various topics are already well documented in previous posts on my blog. I'm ready to begin the process of implementing them immediately if the people of Clacton-on-sea want me to do so.