Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Programming, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 17, 2025

• Tedium ☛ The Node-Driven Future Of FOSS Image Editing

  I won’t use GIMP because it’s not like Photoshop. NextCloud doesn’t feel like Dropbox. And on and on. It becomes a limiting factor to growing interest in open-source software (especially on Linux, which is starved for options in certain categories) because we become obsessed with trying to make the thing like the other thing.

  But I wonder if the way to solve this issue is by building something genuinely different, that scratches the same itch but doesn’t really care about maintaining a 1:1 experience.

• Chiark ☛ PuTTY: a free SSH and Telnet client

  We have a new domain name for the PuTTY website!

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Viktor Löfgren ☛ Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs @ marginalia.nu

    The Marginalia Search index has been largely rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read sizes.

  • Jack McPherson ☛ Not So Direct I/O

    Recently, the CEO of Tigerbeetle, Joran Dirk Greef, posted an interview question for a (presumably hypothetical) DBMS engineering role. This nerdsniped me and lead me on a bit of a wild goose chase to try and find a satisfactory answer. In the end, Tanel Poder ended up answering the question with a fairly succinct demonstration. In an effort to do more and also share my thought process on the problem, this post will act as both a solution but also an exploration of how filesystems work and some of the Linux kernel source code.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ The (non-)Ethics of Capitalism

      Store all those information in a csv file, and then, add the honesty/ethics high-very high percentage, [...]

• Programming/Development

  • SciML ☛ LinearSolve.jl Autotuning: Community-Driven Algorithm Selection for Optimal Performance

    Linear algebra operations form the computational backbone of scientific computing, yet choosing the optimal algorithm for a given problem and hardware configuration remains a persistent challenge. Today, we're excited to introduce LinearSolveAutotune.jl, a new community-driven autotuning system that automatically benchmarks and selects the best linear solver algorithms for your specific hardware configuration.

  • SusamPal ☛ Mutually Attacking Knights

    How many different ways can we place two identical knights on an \( n \times n \) chessboard so that they attack each other? Can we find a closed-form expression that gives this number? This is the problem we explore in this article.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of XML and property lists – The Eclectic Light Company

    Before the arrival of Mac OS X, our Macs had remained almost free from the property lists and other XML files that now seem to fill them. Those owe their origin to the grandfather of markup languages, SGML, originally known as Generalised Markup Language. That was invented by Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie in 1969, when they were working at IBM, as a means of structuring text semantically, and first used a different form of markup, as in [...]

  • Hackaday ☛ Metric, Imperial, And Flexibility

    Al Williams wrote up a seemingly innocent piece on a couple of rules-of-thumb to go between metric and US traditional units, and the comment section went wild! Nothing seems to rile up the Hackaday comment section like the choice of what base to use for your unit system. I mean, an idealized version of probably an ancient Egyptian’s foot versus a fraction of the not-quite-right distance from the North Pole to the equator as it passes through Paris? Six of one, half a dozen the other, as far as I’m concerned. Both are arbitrary.