news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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It's FOSS ☛ openEuler and the Race to Build Asia's Hey Hi (AI) Infrastructure
openEuler is an open-source project incubated and operated by the OpenAtom Foundation. The community is expanding international collaboration through local user groups, industry partnerships, and participation in global open-source events.
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Events
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FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, September 18, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)
Join the FSF and friends on Friday, September 18 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, September 26, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)
Join the FSF and friends on Friday, September 26 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers
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James G ☛ Loading bold and italics fonts on my website
This synthesised font, while achieving its functional requirement – being bold – was not optimal because the font family I was using did in fact have a designed bold typeface. This bold typeface, however, was in a separate file. I recently l learned this can happen with italics, too: if no italic version of a character is available in a font file, the browser will try to synthesise one 1.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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PlanetScale ☛ The lifecycle of a sharded Postgres query
Before we execute this query, there's one important thing to understand about sharding: the point is to scale databases beyond the constraints of a single server. This means we are now part of a distributed system. Our rows can now live on different servers, so we need rules for where to store them and how to find them.
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Standards/Consortia
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John D Cook ☛ Guessing the meaning of a number
Suppose I give you an n-digit number and ask you what it represents. This seems impossible, and in theory it is impossible. But in practice it’s often possible.
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Gianni Rosato ☛ The case against JPEG XL
Historically, I've been a big proponent of JPEG XL for all use cases. I endorsed JPEG XL for Interop 2024, and I've interacted with Jon Sneyers and Jyrki Alakuijala (two of the format's primary authors) personally many times. I'm consistently impressed with their public conduct, level-headedness, technical aptitude, and passion for the field.
This piece does not seek to discredit the format's authors or their work, nor to claim any political affiliation relative to the codec's symbolism in free software. The spirit of this post is educational; I want to offer an empirical look at the current state of image compression and the Web platform in 2026. Some inspiration is drawn from RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better by Dmitry Grinberg.
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