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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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FOSS Force ☛ LibreOffice 26.8 Will Bring a Better Tabbed Interface — Not a Single 'Best' One
Let us begin by granting what is true. The ribbon is a capable piece of design. It was built to help an occasional or intermediate user discover features by browsing rather than by memorizing, and for that user it does its job well. Saying so is not a concession wrung out reluctantly; it is simply accurate, and any honest discussion should start there.
But “well-designed for a particular user” is not the same thing as “best interface,” and treating the two as equivalent is where the reasoning slips. An interface optimized for one persona is, by construction, less suited to the others: the power user who works from the keyboard and resents losing vertical screen space, the migrating user carrying twenty years of muscle memory, the user who depends on assistive technology, the user on a small or low-resolution display. A single fixed layout cannot be best for all of them at once. It can only be best for some, at the expense of the rest.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Wrlach ☛ Glean Dictionary + DuckDB
As a sort of demonstration that documentation about an application can be treated as a data product in and of itself, I hacked up a quick ETL pipeline to dump the JSON output of the Glean Dictionary into a DuckDB database that can be queried standalone.
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GNU Projects
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Escaping the Grue: Freeing The Inform 6 Documentation
Late last year, I wrote about the state of interactive fiction. One issue I highlighted was a classic trap the GNU Project warned about: free software needs free documentation. While the Inform compiler and standard library were eventually freed, its definitive guide, The Inform Designer's Manual, was not.
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Licensing / Legal
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Eric McClure ☛ What is the Nature of Evil In LICENSE.MD?
Developers, however, have been upset with the status-quo for years. Nearly a decade ago, I made a repository full of licenses written as jokes, alongside real licenses so poorly written they seemed like jokes. Eventually it expanded to include licenses that weren’t just badly written but had incredibly awful consequences.
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Programming/Development
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Python
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Didier Stevens ☛ Update: base64dump.py Version 0.0.31
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Rust
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The Register UK ☛ Canonical backs quest to translate mountains of C into safe Rust with AI [Ed: Turning mature code into experimental stuff]
Canonical's fondness for AI and Rust is no secret. Now it is co-funding a three-year PhD project investigating whether the former can translate large C codebases into the latter.
Engineering veep Jon Seager announced the investment on Ubuntu's Discourse forum. The PhD project will be conducted at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group.
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