Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 16, 2026

• APNIC ☛ Getting network automation right: A practical strategy for enterprise networks

  As always, when I encounter an interesting question or challenge at work that could add value for readers, I can’t resist sharing it on the APNIC Blog. Recently, while training a team of IT professionals in the heart of Europe on network automation tools, I was asked a particularly thought-provoking question that prompted me to dive deeper and do some additional research: What is the best strategy for implementing network automation in an enterprise network?

  It’s a simple yet thoughtful question, which I’ll address in this post.

• Hackaday ☛ Disassembling Opcodes With A Font

  Those who stay into the forbidden realm of font rendering quickly learn how convoluted and arcane it can be – LaTeX is a fully Turing-complete programming language, Unicode has over eighty invisible characters, and there are libraries that let you execute WebAssembly in a font. A great example of a font’s hidden capabilities is Z80 Sans, a font that disassembles Z80 opcodes to assembly mnemonics.

• Serge Zaitsev ☛ VisiCalc reconstructed

  Spreadsheets rule the world for almost half of a century. I strongly believe that it’s one of the best UXs ever created. Being fairly minimal and easy to learn, it allows users to quickly manipulate data, describe logic, visualise results, or even create art and run GameBoy games.

  It all started in 1979 when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software. With a few thousand lines of hand-written 6502 assembly, VisiCalc could successfully run on 16K RAM machines. It quickly became a “killer app” for Apple ][, selling over 1 million copies and turning early personal computers into serious business tools.

  I thought it would be an interesting exercise trying to rebuild minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch. All we need is a data model, formula evaluator, and a simple UI to display the cells. At the end we’ll have something like this: [...]

• GonzaloR ☛ GotHub all the things

  Well, the thing just got (;)) real and if you don't know what I am talking about... let me introduce you: GotHub.

  Yes, it is pretty cool and of course it runs all over OpenBSD. You can always fire up your own setup by running "$ doas pkg_add got gotd gotwebd", but have the peace of mind that your repositories and data are safe "in the cloud" feels much better. I’ve already copied all my repositories from github to GotHub and I plan to keep working on them right there. I’ll just take advantage of Microsoft (github) storage space and for all the mainstream stuff that typically requires it.

• Jazzband ☛ Sunsetting Jazzband

  I’m not pulling the plug overnight. There is a detailed wind-down plan that covers the timeline, but the short version: [...]

• Moment ☛ Lies I was Told About Collaborative Editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs / Moment devlog

  In part 1 of this series, we found that users generally view the most popular collaborative text editing algorithms (including the most popular library, Yjs) as silently corrupting their documents when the algorithms resolve direct editing conflicts. We argued that, while this is potentially ok for live collaborative editing (since presence cursors help users to avoid direct editing conflicts), this property makes them generally wholly inappropriate for the offline case, as users will have no ability to avoid such conflicts.

  This time, in part 2, we’re going to argue that these same popular algorithms—and Yjs in particular—are also currently inappropriate for the live-collab case. Mostly it comes down to two points: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ String Goal with Raku

    This task is suitable for gather/take, where we use gather to collect the parts (the numeric values), the first - and hardest - part of this task.

  • Perl ☛ Musical Rhythms with Math in Perl

    Let’s talk about music programming! There are a million aspects to this subject, but today, we’ll touch on generating rhythmic patterns with mathematical and combinatorial techniques. These include the generation of partitions, necklaces, and Euclidean patterns.

    Stefan and J. Richard Hollos wrote an excellent little book called “Creating Rhythms” that has been turned into C, Perl, and Python. It features a number of algorithms that produce or modify lists of numbers or bit-vectors (of ones and zeroes). These can be beat onsets (the ones) and rests (the zeroes) of a rhythm. We’ll check out these concepts with Perl.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Little useless-useful R functions – Date Palindrome

    It is a rare thing that a date can be a palindrome. But it happens.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppClassic 0.9.14 on CRAN: Minor Update

    A maintenance release 0.9.14 of the RcppClassic package arrived earlier today on CRAN, and has been built for r2u. This package provides a maintained version of the otherwise deprecated initial Rcpp API which no new projects should use as the normal and current Rcpp API is so much better.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: tidyCpp 0.0.10 on CRAN: Even More Maintenance

    Yet another maintenance release of the tidyCpp package arrived on CRAN this morning, a mere week and a half after the previous release. It has been built for r2u as well.

  • Rlang ☛ Exploring Piperacillin/Tazobactam Probability of Target Attainment (PTA) in Pseudomonas

    First, we’ll obtain the population PK parameters, make a model, and then perform the simulation, and visualize the PTA. We’ll be exploring A Pooled Pharmacokinetic Analysis for Piperacillin/Tazobactam Across Different Patient Populations: From Premature Infants to the Elderly. This model is more sophisticated than the previous one as it’s a pooled popPK model. We’ll then compare the PTA of the recommended dosing and infusion time, compared to standard dosing of 30 mins. And then look at some maximum amount of fT>mic used in the literature, and then explore the PTA given the threshold of fT>mic. Also, a curious question is, why do we need tazobactam for pseudomonas when piperacillin itself has activity against it? Could it be because of co-resistance of beta lactamase? Let’s take a look at all pseudomonas isolate that is pip/tazo susceptible and check for proportion of these beta lactamase genes in NCBI.

  • Rlang ☛ Text Analytics in R: Dense embeddings and RAG pipeline with ragnar and ellmer

    This earlier post, explored building a text analytics pipeline using quanteda. We created a Document Feature Matrix (DFM), weighted it with TF-IDF, and measured document similarity using cosine similarity.

    It worked, but we also ran into a limitation – cosine similarity alone might not be enough since the top most similar document did not match the document's sentiment

• Python

  • Cemrehan Çavdar ☛ The Optimization Ladder

    Every year, someone posts a benchmark showing Python is 100x slower than C. The same argument plays out: one side says "benchmarks don't matter, real apps are I/O bound," the other says "just use a real language." Both are wrong.

    I took two of the most-cited Benchmarks Game problems -- n-body and spectral-norm -- reproduced them on my machine, and ran every optimization tool I could find. Then I added a third benchmark -- a JSON event pipeline -- to test something closer to real-world code.