Strike Commander: Interview with Frank Savage

There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't...

2019-12-01

On Wednesday, 2019-12-04 there will be scheduled maintenance of the suckless servers. It's estimated this will take about 2-3 hours from about 19:00 to 21:00 - 22:00 UTC+01:00.

The mailinglist, website and source-code repositories will have some downtime.

Update: the maintenance was finished at 2019-12-04 20:00 UTC+01:00.

Take action to save .org and prosecute those who sold out the internet

As many of you have no doubt heard, control of the .org registry has been sold to private interests. There have been attempts to call them to reason, like Save .ORG, but let’s be realistic: they knew what they’re doing is wrong, the whole time. If they were a commercial entity, our appeals would fall on deaf ears and that would be the end of it. But, they’re not a commercial entity - so our appeals may fall on deaf ears, but that doesn’t have to be the end of it.

The level of corruption on display by the three organizations involved in this scam: ICANN (Internet Corporation...

Software developers should avoid traumatic changes

A lot of software has gone through changes which, in retrospect, I would describe as “traumatic” to their communities. I recognize these sorts of changes by their effect: we might have pulled through in the end, but only after a lot of heartbreak, struggle, and hours of wasted hacking; but the change left a scar on the community.

There are two common cases in which a change risks introducing this kind of trauma:

Let’s call...

China

This article will be difficult to read and was difficult to write. I hope that you can stomach the uncomfortable nature of this topic and read my thoughts in earnest. I usually focus on technology-related content, but at the end of the day, this is my personal blog and I feel that it would betray my personal principles to remain silent. I’ve made an effort to provide citations for all of my assertions.

Note: if you are interested in conducting an independent review of the factuality of the claims expressed in this article, please contact me.

The keyboard I’m typing these words into bears “Made in China” on...

Status update, November 2019

Today’s update is especially exciting, because today marks the 1 year anniversary of Sourcehut opening it’s alpha to public registration. I wrote a nice long article which goes into detail about what Sourcehut accomplished in 2019, what’s to come for 2020, and it lays out the entire master plan for your consideration. Be sure to give that a look if you have the time. I haven’t slowed down on my other projects, though, so here’re some more updates!

I’ve been pushing hard on the VR work this month, with lots of help from Simon Ser. We’ve put together wxrc - Wayland XR Compositor - which does what it says...

An old-school shell hack on a line printer

https://spacepub.space/videos/embed/d8943b2d-8280-497b-85ec-bc282ec2afdc

It’s been too long since I last did a good hack, for no practical reason other than great hack value. In my case, these often amount to a nostalgia for an age of computing I wasn’t present for. In a recent bid to capture more of this nostalgia, I recently picked up a dot matrix line printer, specifically the Epson LX-350 printer. This one is nice because it has a USB port, so I don’t have to break out my pile of serial cable hacks to get it talking to Linux 😁

This is the classic printer style, with infinite paper and a lovely noise during printing....

A trip down NBA Jam graphics pipeline

I took some time to study how NBA Jam arcade cabinet worked. Here is what I learned.

Status update, October 2019

Last month, I gave you an update at the conclusion of a long series of travels. But, I wasn’t done yet - this month, I spent a week in Montreal for XDC. Simon Ser put up a great write-up which goes over a lot of the important things we discussed there. It was a wonderful conference and well worth the trip - but I truly am sick of travelling. Now, I can enjoy some time at home, working on free and open source software.

I have a video to share today, of a workflow on git.sr.ht that I’m very excited about: sending patchsets as emails from the...

How to fuck up software releases

I manage releases for a bunch of free & open-source software. Just about every time I ship a release, I find a novel way to fuck it up. Enough of these fuck-ups have accumulated now that I wanted to share some of my mistakes and how I (try to) prevent them from happening twice.

At first, I did everything manually. This is fine enough for stuff with simple release processes - stuff that basically amounts to tagging a commit, pushing it, and calling it a day. But even this gets tedious, and I’d often make a mistake when picking the correct version number. So, I wrote a...