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Become shell literate
Shell literacy is one of the most important skills you ought to possess as a programmer. The Unix shell is one of the most powerful ideas ever put to code, and should be second nature to you as a programmer. No other tool is nearly as effective at commanding your computer to perform complex tasks quickly — or at storing them as scripts you can use later.
In my workflow, I use Vim as my editor, and Unix as my “IDE”. I don’t trick out my vimrc to add a bunch of IDE-like features — the most substantial plugin I use on a daily basis is Ctrl+P, and...
Web analytics should at least meet the standards of informed consent
Research conducted on human beings, at least outside of the domain of technology, has to meet a minimum standard of ethical reasoning called informed consent. Details vary, but the general elements of informed consent are:
Disclosure of the nature and purpose of the research and its implications (risks and benefits) for the participant, and the confidentiality of the collected information. An adequate understanding of these facts on the part of the participant, requiring an accessible explanation in lay terms and an assessment of understanding. The participant must exercise voluntary agreement, without coercion or fear of repercussions (e.g. not being allowed to use your website).So, I pose the following question: if your...
A few ways to make money in FOSS
I work on free and open-source software full time, and I make a comfortable living doing it. And I don’t half-ass it: 100% of my code is free and open-source. There’s no proprietary add-ons, no periodic code dumps, just 100% bona-fide free and open source software. Others have often sought my advice — how can they, too, make a living doing open source?
Well, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. There are many varieties of software, each with different needs, and many kinds of people, each with different needs. The exact approach which works for you and your project will vary quite a bit depending...
We can do better than DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is one of the long-time darlings of the technophile’s pro-privacy recommendations, and in fact the search engine that I use myself on the daily. They certainly present a more compelling option than many of the incumbents, like Google or Bing. Even so, DuckDuckGo is not good enough, and we ought to do better.
I have three grievances with DuckDuckGo:
It’s not open source. Almost all of DDG’s software is proprietary, and they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy in what little software they have made open source. Who knows what else is going on in the proprietary code? DuckDuckGo is not a search engine. It’s more aptly described as a...Status update, November 2020
Greetings, humanoids! Our fleshy vessels have aged by 2.678×10⁶ seconds, and you know what that means: time for another status update! Pour a cup of your favorite beverage stimulant and gather ‘round for some news.
First off, today is the second anniversary of SourceHut’s alpha being opened to the public, and as such, I’ve prepared a special blog post for you to read. I’ll leave the sr.ht details out of this post and just send you off to read about it there.
What else is new? Well, a few things. For one, I’ve been working more on Gemini. I added CGI support to gmnisrv and wrote a few CGI...
Utility vs usability
In many fields, professional-grade tooling requires a high degree of knowledge and training to use properly, usually more than is available to the amateur. The typical mechanic’s tool chest makes my (rather well-stocked, in my opinion) tool bag look quite silly. A racecar driver is using a vehicle which is much more complex than, say, the soccer mom’s mini-van. Professional-grade tools are, necessarily, more complex and require skill to use.
There are two attributes to consider when classifying these tools: utility and usability. These are not the same thing. Some tools have both high utility and high usability, such as a pencil. Some are highly usable, but of...
What is this Gemini thing anyway, and why am I excited about it?
I’ve been writing about some specific topics in the realm of Gemini on my blog over the past two months or so, but I still haven’t written a broader introduction to Gemini, what I’m doing with it, and why you should be excited about it, too. Let’s do that today!
Gemini is a network protocol for exchanging hypertext documents — “hypertext” in the general sense of the word, not with respect to the hypertext markup language (HTML) that web browsers understand. It’s a simple network protocol which allows clients to request hypertext documents (in its own document format, gemtext). It is, in some respects, an evolution of Gopher, but...