Migrating a G Suite Legacy Account

Google recently announced that all “G Suite legacy free edition” (formerly known as “Google Apps”, currently known as “Google Workspace”) accounts will need to transition to their paid workspace plans starting July 1, 2022. Legacy users will get access to a discounted rate of $3/user/month, which will turn into $6/user/month starting July 2023 at the lowest tier.

I’m the sole user on my G Suite account, so the new rates aren’t a big issue per se. I’ve been getting a ton of value from this service for over a decade — namely the ability to use Gmail and other Google services but with my own custom...

Status update, March 2022

Greetings! The weather is starting to warm up again, eh? I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t get any snow this winter. Yadda yadda insert intro text here. Let’s get down to brass tacks. What’s new this month?

I mainly focused on the programming language this month. I started writing a kernel, which you can see a screenshot of below. This screenshot shows a simulated page fault, demonstrating that we have a working interrupt handler, and also shows something mildly interesting: backtraces. I need to incorporate this approach into the standard library as well, so that we can dump useful stack traces on assertion failures and such. I...

It takes a village

As a prolific maintainer of several dozen FOSS projects, I’m often asked how I can get so much done, being just one person. The answer is: I’m not just one person. I have enjoyed the help of thousands of talented people who have contributed to these works. Without them, none of the projects I work on would be successful.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize and thank all of the people who have participated in these endeavours. If you’ve enjoyed any of the projects I’ve worked on, you owe thanks to some of these wonderful people. The following is an incomplete list of authors who have...

Why am I building a programming language in private?

As many readers are aware, I have been working on designing and implementing a systems programming language. This weekend, I’ve been writing a PNG file decoder in it, and over the past week, I have been working on a simple kernel with it as well. I’m very pleased with our progress so far — I recently remarked that this language feels like the language I always wanted, and that’s mission accomplished by any definition I care to consider.

I started the project on December 27th, 2019, just over two years ago, and I have kept it in a semi-private state since. Though I have not given its...

qTox gets funded for a year

Thanks to a generous sponsor, qTox development gets founded for a year! Anthony Bilinski got funded to work full-time for a year and sphaerophoria part-time for a few months. You can read more about this in qTox’s blog post, where Anthony goes into detail on his plans for the year.

Open Source is defined by the OSI's Open Source Definition

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) publishes a document called the Open Source Definition (OSD), which defines the term “open source”. However, there is a small minority of viewpoints within the software community which wishes that this were not so. The most concerning among them are those who wish open source was more commercially favorable to themselves, and themselves alone, such as companies like Elastic.

I disagree with this perspective, and I’d like take a few minutes today to explore several of the most common arguments in favor of this view, and explain why I don’t agree with them. One of the most frustrating complications in this discussion is the...

CPS-1: GFX system internals

Plaid is an evil nightmare product from Security Hell

Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to type in their username and password for the third-party service provider. If necessary, they will ask for a 2FA code. This is done without the third party’s permission, presumably through a browser emulator and a provider-specific munging shim, and collects the user’s credentials on a domain which is operated by neither the third party nor by Plaid.

The third-party...

DigitalOcean Sponsorship

We would like to thank a cloud hosting company DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Tox project as part of their program for sponsoring open source projects.

DigitalOcean has been providing us with reliable cloud server infrastructure for free since July 2015 — for over 6 years now! They have been very generous with supporting us and a pleasure to work with. Just as an example, in 2018 we asked them for a seemingly outrageous $660 in credits as a budget for that year, which they provided us without any questions asked.

Most of our infrastructure is running on DigitalOcean, including our website, wiki,...

Status update, February 2022

Hello once again! Another month of free software development goes by with lots of progress in all respects.

I will open with some news about godocs.io: version 1.0 of our fork of gddo has been released! Big thanks to Adnan Maolood for his work on this. I’m very pleased that, following our fork, we were not only able to provide continuity for godoc.org, but also to simplify, refactor, and improve the underlying software considerably. Check out Adnan’s blog post for more details.

In programming language news, we have had substantial progress in many respects. One interesting project I’ve started is a Redis protocol implementation:

const conn =...


						
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							Posted at 2022-02-15 00:00:00 | Software | read on