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Nitter and other Internet reclamation projects
The world wide web has become an annoying, ultra-commercialized space. Many websites today are prioritizing the interests of the company behind the domain, at the expense of the user’s experience and well-being. This has been a frustrating problem for several years, but lately there’s been a heartwarming trend of users fighting back against the corporate web and stepping up to help and serve each other’s needs in spite of them, through what I’ve come to think of as Internet reclamation projects.
I think the first of these which appeared on my radar was Invidious, which scrapes information off of a YouTube page and presents it in a more pleasant,...
Status update, September 2021
It’s a quiet, foggy morning here in Amsterdam, and here with my fresh mug of coffee and a cuddly cat in my lap, I’d like to share the latest news on my FOSS efforts with you. Grab yourself a warm drink and a cat of your own and let’s get started.
First, a new project: visurf. I announced this a few days ago, but the short of it is that I am building a minimal Wayland-only frontend for the NetSurf web browser which uses vi-inspired keybindings. Since the announcement there has been some good progress: touch support, nsvirc, tabs, key repeat, and so on. Some notable medium-to-large efforts...
visurf, a web browser based on NetSurf
I’ve started a new side project that I would like to share with you: visurf. visurf, or nsvi, is a NetSurf frontend which provides vi-inspired key bindings and a lightweight Wayland UI with few dependencies. It’s still a work-in-progress, and is not ready for general use yet. I’m letting you know about it today in case you find it interesting and want to help.
NetSurf is a project which has been on my radar for some time. It is a small web browser engine, developed in C independently of the lineage of WebKit and Gecko which defines the modern web today. It mostly supports HTML4 and CSS2, plus...
Status update, August 2021
Greetings! It’s shaping up to be a beautiful day here in Amsterdam, and I have found the city much to my liking so far. If you’re in Amsterdam and want to grab a beer sometime, send me an email! I’ve been making a lot of new friends here. Meanwhile, I’ve also enjoyed a noticable increase in my productivity levels. Let’s go over the month’s accomplishments.
First, I have spent most of my time on the programming language project. I mentioned in the last update that we broke ground on a codegen rewrite, and yesterday all of our tests finally passed and I merged it. The new design...
Tips for debugging your new programming language
Say you’re building a new (compiled) programming language from scratch. You’ll inevitably have to debug programs written in it, and worse, many of these problems will lead you into deep magic, as you uncover problems with your compiler or runtime. And as you find yourself diving into the arcane arts, your tools may be painfully lacking: how do you debug code written in a language for which debuggers and other tooling simply has not been written yet?
In the implementation of my own programming language, I have faced this problem many times, and developed, by necessity, some skills around debugging with crippled tools that may lack an awareness...
Police to begin regular, warrant-free searches of homes for child abuse material
The Federal Bureau of Investigations announced a new initiative today to combat the proliferation of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) in the United States. Starting next year, police will be conducting regular searches of US homes, as often as once or twice per week per home, to find child sexual abuse materials. This initiative will bring more child abusers to justice and help abuse victims to find solace in the knowledge that records of their abuse are not being shared in perpetuity.
To facilitate frequent and convenient searches, the FBI will be working with lock manufacturers to institute a new standard for home locks in the United States which...
proxy.golang.org allows many Go packages to be silently broken
GOPROXY (or proxy.golang.org) is a service through which all “go get” commands (and other module downloads) are routed. It may speed up some operations by providing a cache, and it publishes checksums and an “index” of all Go packages; but this is done at the cost of sending details of all of your module downloads to Google and imposing extra steps when using Go packages from an intranet.
This cache never expires, which can cause some problems: you can keep fetching a module from proxy.golang.org long after the upstream version has disappeared. The upstream author probably had a good reason for removing a version! Because I set GOPROXY=direct in...
In praise of PostgreSQL
After writing Praise for Alpine Linux, I have decided to continue writing more articles in praise of good software. Today, I’d like to tell you a bit about PostgreSQL.
Many people don’t understand how old Postgres truly is: the first release1 was in July of 1996. It used this logo:
After 25 years of persistence, and a better logo design, Postgres stands today as one of the most significant pillars of profound achievement in free software, alongside the likes of Linux and Firefox. PostgreSQL has taken a complex problem and solved it to such an effective degree that all of its competitors are essentially obsolete, perhaps with the exception...