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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...
I'm handing over maintenance of wlroots and sway to Simon Ser
Over the past several months, I’ve been gradually weaning down my role in both projects, and as a contributor to Wayland in general. I feel that I’ve already accomplished everything I set out to do with Wayland — and more! I have been happily using sway as my daily driver for well over a year with no complaints or conspicuously absent features. For me, there’s little reason to stay involved. This will likely come as no surprise to many who’ve kept their ear to the ground in these communities.
Simon has been an important co-maintainer on wlroots and sway for several years, and also serves as a maintainer...
Firefox: The Jewel^WEmbarassment of Open Source
Circa 2006, the consensus on Firefox was concisely stated by this classic xkcd:
This feeling didn’t last. In 2016, I wrote In Memoriam - Mozilla, and in 2017, Firefox is on a slippery slope. Well, I was right, and Firefox (and Mozilla) have only become worse since. The fuck-up culture is so ingrained in Mozilla in 2020 that it’s hard to see it ever getting better again.
In the time since my last article on the subject, Mozilla has:
Laid off 25% of its employees, mostly engineers, many of whom work on Firefox1 Raised executive pay 400% as their market share declined 85%2 Sent a record of all browsing traffic...SPM-ifying YapDatabase
Converting an existing Objective-C/Swift framework to Swift Package Manager I'm a big fan of the database library YapDatabase, which is a collection/key/value store for macOS, iOS, tvOS & watchOS. It comes with many high level features and is built atop sqlite. In the last 5 years, I have used this successfully for many of my projects. It is written in Objective-C and comes with a bunch of Swift files for more Swifty use. Since I recently announced to go all-in with Swift, I want to convert all my dependencies to the Swift Package Management system. I have never been a...
Status update, October 2020
I’m writing this month’s status update from a brand-new desktop workstation (well, I re-used the GPU), my first new workstation in about 10 years. I hope this new one lasts for another decade! I aimed for something smaller and lightweight this time — it’s a Mini-ITX build. I’ve only been running this for a few days, so let me tell you about the last few accomplishments which are accountable to my venerable workstation’s final days of life.
First, there’s been a ton of important work completed for SourceHut’s API 2.0 plans. All of the main blockers for the first version of meta.sr.ht’s writable GraphQL API are resolved, and...