Bloody AI clowns:

https://movq.de/v/34ccfc125c/s.png

How many IPs am I supposed to block, eh?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Looks like it. 🤔 Didn’t dig deeper into this, just uninstalled it. 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 4 years. 🫤

Do I buy a new monitor or do I live with the burn-ins all the time? It’s getting annoying. When I edit images in GIMP, I have to double check if something is a pixel or a burn-in.

@prologic@twtxt.net If anything looks expensive, then it’s that. 😅

Stuff that nobody needs:

systemctl uses ANSI escape codes to underline text (\e[4m) and then it also uses special escape codes – that Wikipedia classifies as “not in the standard”, but I haven’t looked it up – to change the color of the underline. That color change is barely noticeable in the first place.

Some terminals don’t support this and now my systemctl output is blinking because of that.

(Now why is that GNOME gcr thing running with debug logs enabled that print stuff like “sending secret exchange: …”? Is this healthy?)

You know you’re getting old when there’s quite a few scripts in your ~/bin that you use daily, but you haven’t edited them once in well over 10 years …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Advanced”, well, probably more “mature”. There aren’t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 … I just realized that Windows 3.x didn’t have icons, either. If I’m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz dmenu is such a great tool. So simple, yet so versatile.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. 😊

Here’s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type “cardinal”. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of “cardinal”. I am already not really familiar with that word and I’m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an “integer” today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that they’re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So it’s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, you’d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didn’t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldn’t know how to fix without breaking clients.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org So it might just be what the youngsters call a “skill issue”? 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They are optional dependencies and listed as such:

$ pacman -Qi pinentry
Name            : pinentry
Version         : 1.3.1-5
Description     : Collection of simple PIN or passphrase entry dialogs which
                  utilize the Assuan protocol
Optional Deps   : gcr: GNOME backend [installed]
                  gtk3: GTK backend [installed]
                  qt5-x11extras: Qt5 backend [installed]
                  kwayland5: Qt5 backend
                  kguiaddons: Qt6 backend
                  kwindowsystem: Qt6 backend

And it’s probably a good thing that they’re optional. I wouldn’t want to have all that installed all the time.

I was drafting support for showing “application icons” in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

https://movq.de/v/0034cc1384/s.png

Then I realized: Wait a minute, lots of applications don’t set an icon? And lots of other window managers don’t show these icons, either? Openbox, pekwm, Xfce, fvwm, no icons.

Looks like macOS doesn’t show them, either?!

Has this grown out of fashion? Is this purely a Windows / OS/2 thing?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing … a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. 😢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that it’s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and you’re done.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I might need that script as well. 🙈🙏

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The cynic in me says: “It’s not bleeding edge, it’s from 2008!” That’s not fair, though, looks like the issue only arose in libinput in 2019. And maybe these weird mice are super rare. Dunno.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The underlines are a bit much, yes. It appears to be related to my font (Helvetica) … Maybe they do some Unicode trickery these days, I don’t know. 🫤

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What’s bleeding edge? The mouse? Yeah, maybe. 😅 I didn’t buy that on purpose and didn’t even know hi-res mouse wheels were a thing …

Since Wayland compositors handle input devices on a lower level than X11 window managers, every compositor has to figure out on their own what a “mouse wheel click” is:

• https://github.com/labwc/labwc/issues/1068
  
• https://github.com/labwc/labwc/pull/2933
  

(I think “Wayland compositor” is a misnomer. They are full-blown display servers that also do compositing, plus Wayland window management, plus X11 window management.)

One can only hope that all this eventually gets moved into the wlroots library. (I’m not sure if that’s possible, nor if people would want that.)

I wore a Kubernetes shirt, in public, by accident, and now I feel dirty and ashamed. 😢

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I kind of like XML because it’s mostly well-defined and easy for humans to read (unlike YAML, which is a complete mess, imho) … and at the same time, it can get complicated really fast. 🫤 But at least it’s plain-text – that’s the important part in this case. 😅

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOME’s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

Nuke it from orbit: https://www.aaron.ai/

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, the doctors have started using AI voice agents and they understand jack shit. 😭😭😭

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, I don’t think so, the requested page was a Linux-specific post. 🤔 I sometimes wonder if privacy-oriented browsers might do this on purpose, to create garbage data? 🤔 No idea.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I honestly wish I could do more than just sit here and wait. It’s just a matter of time until they remove X.Org from the repos. 🫤 But I really can’t dedicate so much time to this …

I give up.

Let’s try again next year. I don’t have the stamina. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

Can’t set up a meaningful taskbar: https://github.com/labwc/labwc/discussions/2924 (This is not a labwc issue, it’s a generic issue in the broader Wayland ecosystem.)

HTTP referrers are quite broken, aren’t they?

Because of that recent storm on my blog, I had a peek at them. There’s a lot of garbage in there. For example, https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/disks-virtual.html is supposed to refer to one of my blog posts …

What’s going on here?

@bender@twtxt.net Even I don’t believe in that anymore. :‘(

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Don’t remind me about Morse. I really wanted to learn that and tried so for quite a while, but no success. 😢

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com And I read the following funny response to that:

Bluesky: Users verify their age by adding a payment method or uploading a photo ID.

Mastodon: Users verify their age by posting pictures of the vintage computer equipment in their homes.

https://beige.party/@maxleibman/114848276288629121

😏

AI this, AI that.

Tech is no longer interesting. I need to find a new field.

(… maybe followed by “tmux Thursday” to cool down …)

Thinking about doing “Wayland Wednesday”. Only use Wayland every Wednesday. Collect bugs, report bugs, fix bugs.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 06.jpg is quite funny. Block the road for 30 minutes! %)

@bender@twtxt.net Hm, it is now. 🤔 I should have made a screenshot when I first saw it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s not a strong sandbox in jenny’s case, it could still read my SSH private key (in case of an exploit of some sort). But I still like it.

I think my main takeaway is this: Knowing that technologies like Landlock/pledge/unveil exist and knowing that they are very easy to use, will probably nudge me into writing software differently in the future.

jenny was never meant to be sandboxed, so it can’t make great use of it. Future software might be different.

(And this is finally a strong argument for static linking.)

Looks like here’s something wrong with Markdown parsing. 🤔 The original twt looks like this:

>This extension was turned off because it is no longer supported

Thanks Google.
This browser was uninstalled because it absolutely sucks!

So only the first line should be a quote.

Landlock is still young and a bit unpolished, but it’s slowly getting more popular. 🥳

Another example:

$ setpriv \
    --landlock-access fs \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp \
    /bin/ls-static /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

The first argument --landlock-access fs says that nothing is allowed.

--landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static says that reading and executing that file is allowed. It’s a statically linked ls program (not GNU ls).

--landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp says that reading the /tmp directory and everything below it is allowed.

The output of the ls-static program is this line:

─rw─r──r────x 3000 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

It was able to read the directory, see the file, do stat() on it and everything, the little x indicates that getting xattrs also worked.

3000 and 200 are user name and group name – they are shown as numeric, because the program does not have access to /etc/passwd and /etc/group.

Adding --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-file:/etc/passwd, for example, allows resolving users and yields this:

─rw─r──r────x cathy 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

PSA: setpriv on Linux supports Landlock.

If this twt goes through, then restricting the filesystem so that jenny can only write to ~/Mail/twt, ~/www/twtxt.txt, ~/.jenny-cache, and /tmp works.

st tries not to redraw immediately after new data arrives:

https://git.suckless.org/st/file/x.c.html#l1984

The exact timings are configurable.

This is the PR that changed the timing in VTE recently (2023):

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2678

There is a long discussion. It’s not a trivial problem, especially not in the context of GTK and multiple competing terminal widgets. st dodges all these issues (for various reasons).

Something happened with the frame rate of terminal emulators lately. It looks like there’s a trend to run at a high framerate now? I’m not sure exactly. This can be seen in VTE-based terminals like my xiate or XTerm on Wayland. foot and st, on the other hand, are fine.

My shell prompt and cursor look like this:

$ █

When I keep Enter pressed, I expect to see several lines like so:

$
$
$
$
$
$
$ █

With the affected terminal emulators, the lines actually show up in the following sequence. First, we have the original line:

$ █

Pressing Enter yields this as the next frame:

$
█

And then eventually this:

$
$ █

In other words, you can see the cursor jumping around very quickly, all the time.

Another example: Vim actually shows which key you just pressed in the bottom right corner. Keeping j pressed to scroll through a file means I get to see a j flashing rapidly now.

(I have no idea yet, why exactly XTerm in X11 is fine but flickering in Wayland.)

The WM_CLASS Property is used on X11 to assign rules to certain windows, e.g. “this is a GIMP window, it should appear on workspace number 16.” It consists of two fields, name and class.

Wayland (or rather, the XDG shell protocol – core Wayland knows nothing about this) only has a single field called app_id.

When you run X11 programs under Wayland, you use XWayland, which is baked into most compositors. Then you have to deal with all three fields.

Some compositors map name to app_id, others map class to app_id, and even others directly expose the original name and class.

Apparently, there is no consensus.

Yeah, little fellow. I also just want to walk away. https://movq.de/v/bef8c35f01/ach.mp4

“🫩” is my new favorite emoji.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, if there’s no stable API, then it’s not a lot of fun … Bah. :|

… but you can’t set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland globally, because that breaks Wine again …

… okay, the SDL backend works if you also set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org dmenu is a great example.

There have been several attempts at porting dmenu from X11 to Wayland. Well, not exactly “porting” it, more like rewriting it from scratch. Turns out: It’s not that easy.

dmenu is super fast and reliable. None of the Wayland rewrites are (at least none of the popular ones that I know of). They are either bloated and/or slow.

It takes a lot of discipline and restraint to write simple software and not blow up the codebase. This is much harder than people think. It’s a form of art, really.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

… but the SDL backend is broken as well, albeit differently …

… which is probably a GTK bug.

QEMU on Wayland unusable, because it can’t grab the mouse … I’ll add it to my TODO list and investigate/report it eventually.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I wouldn’t say that. Go code could fall into that category as well.

Maybe this topic could use a blog post / article, that explains what it’s about. I’m finding it hard to really define what “suckless-like software” is. 🤔 (Their own philosophy focuses too much on elitism, if you ask me.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I’m referring to software that’s similar to that of suckless.org: Small, minimal codebases, small tools, but still useful. dmenu is probably the best example and also farbfeld.

Here’s the author of Anubis talking about some of their experiences:

https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05/

(You can skip the long config and keybinds part.)

The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

The Linux installation on my main PC turned 14 today:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This wasn’t always the case, though. Quake3, Quake4, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 are examples of games that used to run very well as native Linux games. But that was 20+ years ago …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (It’s either that, or the fact that it’s women’s football and “nobody wants to see that anyway”.)

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I have to say, this sounds much worse than our stuff at work. 🫩 (We don’t use any Microsoft services, at least not for core tools.)

Okay, now this is a very interesting Rust feature:

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/07/03/stabilizing-naked-functions/

This (and inline assembly) makes Rust really interesting for very low-level stuff. 🥳

It took about a year, I think, but I’ve now finished another run of Tomb Raider I, II, and III. And I have, for the first time, played the two bonus packs “Unfinished Business” (for TR I) and “Golden Mask” (for TR II). They’re available as a free download, if you have the original games. (The bonus pack for TR III is not free.)

I just love these games – and the game mechanics. It’s just the right balance between challenging and relaxing.

https://movq.de/v/c55a2a137d/the%2Dend.jpg

What kind of half-assed nonsense is this? They only broadcast half of the current european soccer cup … (Let me guess, I’m supposed to subscribe to some streaming service if I want to watch every game, right?)

This aggressive auto-logout on my bank’s website …

Dude, you want me to print something, sign it, and scan it back in. This takes forever and I’ll have to re-login a dozen times. Narf.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Uffpuh. Es Wetter spielt verrückt. 🫤

@prologic@twtxt.net That too, yeah. 🥴😩

@prologic@twtxt.net Bah! Why can’t we all have mild weather. 🥲

Is des äni Hitz!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yay, heat. 🫠

TIL: The logo of sudo is a sandwich. 🫠 https://www.sudo.ws/

Ted Unangst’s snarky (and entertaining) remarks this month:

• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/modern-software-2025-edition
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/killing-X11
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/forbidden-secrets-of-ancient-X11-scaling-technology-revealed

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

These are lists in your Inkscape example, right?

The font stuff? Yeah, that’s a scrollable list where you can select the current font.

Someone did a thing:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114763322251054485

I’ve been silently wondering all the time if this was possible, but never investigated: Keep doing X11 but use Wayland as a backend.

This uses XWayland’s “rootful” mode, which basically just gives you a normal Wayland window with all the X11 stuff happening inside of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-Useful

In other words, put such a window in fullscreen and you (more or less) have good old X11 running in a Wayland window.

(For me, personally, this won’t be the way forward. But it’s a very interesting project.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Heyho, welcome back. 👋 Did you guys have a nice trip? 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Probably. :-) I just saw that the account on Yarn is also gone. Maybe it didn’t survive the crash earlier this year.

Just realized: One of the reasons why I don’t like “flat UIs” is that they look broken to me. Like the program has a bug, missing pixmaps or whatever.

Take this for example:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/a.png

I’m talking about this area specifically:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/a%2Dhigh.png

One UI element ends and the other one begins – no “transition” between them.

The style of old UIs like these two is deeply ingrained into my brain:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/b.png
https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/c.png

When all these little elements (borders, handles, even just simple lines, …) are no longer present, then the program looks buggy and broken to me. And I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to un-learn that.

Alright, now for something fun! Taxes! Yay!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Wow. Just like Skyrim! 😃

@mckinley@mckinley.cc’s blog appears to have gone stale, hm.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh dear. 😩

@arne@uplegger.eu Stattdessen rutscht er seitlich vom Tisch? 🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can confidently say that I don’t remember ever having seen fireflys. (Nor Firefly.) 😳 I’m most surprised that you could count them. Naively, I would assume that these guys move around a lot and you’d lose track of them?

We’re entering the “too hot to think”-season in 3, 2, 1 … and we’re live!

Welcome to the family, Puffy. 🥳🐡

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

I love listening to good, well-structured talks. Problem is, not everybody is a good speaker and many screw it up. 🥴 I’m certainly not a great speaker, which is why I gravitate more towards “workshops”, in the hopes that people ask questions and discussions arise. Doesn’t always work out. 🤣 At the very least, I almost always have some other person connect to the projector/beamer/screenshare and then they do the stuff – this avoids me being wwwwaaaaaaaaayyyy too fast.

We are usually drowned in stress and tight deadlines, hence events like today are super rare … We used to do it more often until ~10 years ago.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though.

Oh dear, I’d love to participate in that. 🤯 That sounds like a lot of fun. (Why don’t we do this?!)

@prologic@twtxt.net This person isn’t particularly happy with this study:

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114717549619229029

I don’t know enough about these things to form an opinion. 🫤 I sure wish it was true, though. 😅

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Multi-Threading. Is. Hard. 🤯 And yes, that blog is great. 👌

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org lol – I explicitly kept them in there so that the code is easier to understand for non-Rust people 🤪😂

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d say: Yes, because in Go it’s easier to ignore errors.

We’re talking about this pattern, right?

f, err := os.Open("filename.ext")
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Nothing stops you from leaving out the if, right? 🤔

(Of course, if we’re talking about a project you’re doing for a customer and the customer keeps asking for new stuff, then you’re never done, and you have to think ahead and expect changes. Is that what they mean? 🤔)

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

1. You will regret complexity when on-call
   
2. Stop falling in love with your own code
   
3. Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
   
4. Everyone hates code they didn’t write
   
5. Don’t use unnecessary dependencies
   
6. Coding standards prevent arguments
   
7. Write meaningful commit messages
   
8. Don’t ever stop learning new things
   
9. Code reviews spread knowledge
   
10. Always build for maintainability
    
11. Ask for help when you’re stuck
    
12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
    
13. Software is never completed
    
14. Estimates are not promises
    
15. Ship early, iterate often
    
16. Keep. It. Simple.
    

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.