Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 07, 2026

• Logikal Solutions ☛ COBOL - Because I Can - Pt 1

  Yippee! I’m gonna do Triangles and use REPORT WRITER. Then reality screwed me from afar. Version of COBOL on Eisner (and most likely where I will contract) didn’t have that. The difficult part of the Triangles problem is dealing with the fact COBOL doesn’t have dynamic strings. COLUMN CENTER would make the problem go away.

• James G ☛ Complements: Art history, writing

  Earlier this week I was chatting with a friend about the skills I am learning from art history. One of the most influential concepts I have learned is to “look closely”. The idea is to spend time with a single thing – to study it closely – and think about what you see in more depth. This helped formalise an experience I was already having in galleries: I didn’t want to see every piece as fast as I could, rather I wanted to slow down.

• Zach Kehs ☛ There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

  TL;DR: Metaphors like "a sinking ship" are often used to describe codebases, but are misleading. A business will sink long before code quality reaches a hypothetical floor. Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset, so metaphors that imply an end provide a false sense of security.

• Conflict resolution is “fun”

  One of the hardest problems in distributed systems is conflict resolution, or the same basic problem as merge conflicts in Git. Git merge conflicts happen when your branch differs from upstream in a way that Git can’t easily work its way around so it exposes both sides of the changes to humans and has the human (or their agent) figure out which side is “correct”. Distributed systems don’t really have this same flow as the scale of changes is often impossible for any human or team of humans to keep up with.

• Jon Chiappetta: AES-256 ARM Hardware Instruction Usage In C!

  I wanted to eventually experiment with using the AES hardware instruction but for the ARM architecture because there are ways to turn block ciphers into stream ciphers for future usage. There appears to be a C header include file that exists on both Mac and Ubuntu (arm_neon.h) and you can compile this small C program file with standard gcc options (no special arguments needed).

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFarmHash 0.0.4 on CRAN: Maintenance

  Another minor maintenance release of the RcppFarmHash package is now on CRAN as version 0.0.4.

  RcppFarmHash wraps the Surveillance Giant Google FarmHash family of hash functions (written by Geoff Pike and contributors) that are used for example by Surveillance Giant Google BigQuery for the FARM_FINGERPRINT digest.

• Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: plocate 1.1.25 released

  I've released version 1.1.25 of plocate. This time around, there's two security issues of unknown severity; if you chain them with other bugs, they could lead to being able to list files (but of course not their contents) that you should not normally be able to see. So an update is probably in order; you can never be too safe these days.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ ZigZag Reorder with Raku

    This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #389.