Don't sacrifice the right ideas to win the right words

There is a difference between free software and open-source software. But you have to squint to see it. Software licenses which qualify for one title but not the other are exceptionally rare.

A fascination with linguistics is common among hackers, and I encourage and participate in language hacking myself. Unfortunately, that seems to seep into the Free Software Foundation’s message a bit too much. Let’s see if any of this rings familiar:

It’s not actually open source, but free software. You see, “open source” is a plot by the commercial software industry to subvert the “free software” movement…

No, it’s free-as-in-freedom, not free-as-in-beer. Sometimes we call it “libre” software, borrowing the...

Status update, September 2019

Finally home again after a long series of travels! I spent almost a month in Japan, then visited my sister’s new home in Hawaii on the way eastwards, then some old friends in Seattle, and finally after 5½ long weeks, it’s home sweet home here in Philadelphia. At least until I leave for XDC in Montreal 2 weeks from now. Someday I’ll have some rest… throughout all of these wild travels, I’ve been hard at work on my free software projects. Let’s get started with this month’s status update!

Great view from a hike on O'ahu

First, Wayland news. I’m happy to share with you that...

How I decide between many programming languages

I have a few old standards in my toolbelt that I find myself calling upon most often, but I try to learn enough about many programming languages to reason about whether or not they’re suitable to any use-case I’m thinking about. The best way is to learn by doing, so getting a general impression of the utility of many languages helps equip you with the knowledge of whether or not they’d be useful for a particular problem even if you don’t know them yet.

Only included are languages which I feel knowledgable enough about to comment on, there are many that aren’t here and which I encourage...

Building interactive SSH applications

After the announcement of shell access for builds.sr.ht jobs, a few people sent me some questions, wondering how this sort of thing is done. Writing interactive SSH applications is actually pretty easy, but it does require some knowledge of the pieces involved and a little bit of general Unix literacy.

On the server, there are three steps which you can meddle with using OpenSSH: authentication, the shell session, and the command. The shell is pretty easily manipulated. For example, if you set the user’s login shell to /usr/bin/nethack, then nethack will run when they log in. Editing this is pretty straightforward, just pop open /etc/passwd as root and...

Shell access for builds.sr.ht CI

Have you ever found yourself staring at a failed CI build, wondering desperately what happened? Or, have you ever needed a fresh machine on-demand to test out an idea in? Have you been working on Linux, but need to test something on OpenBSD? Starting this week, builds.sr.ht can help with all of these problems, because you can now SSH into the build environment.

The next time your build fails on builds.sr.ht,...

Status update, August 2019

Outside my window, the morning sun can be seen rising over the land of the rising sun, as I sip from a coffee purchased at the konbini down the street. I almost forgot to order it, as the staffer behind the counter pointed out with a smile and a joke that, having been told in Japanese, mostly went over my head. It’s on this quiet Osaka morning I write today’s status update - there are lots of existing developments to share!

Let’s start with sourcehut news. I deployed a cool feature yesterday - SSH access to builds.sr.ht. You can now SSH into a failed build to examine...

DRM leasing: VR for Wayland

As those who read my status updates have been aware, recently I’ve been working on bringing VR to Wayland (and vice versa). The deepest and most technical part of this work is DRM leasing (Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Restrictions Management), and I think it’d be good to write in detail about what’s involved in this part of the effort. This work has been sponsored by Status.im, as part of an effort to build a comprehensive Wayland-driven VR workspace. When we got started, most of the plumbing was missing for VR headsets to be useful on Wayland, so this has been my focus for a while. The result...

FOSS contributor tracks

Just like many companies have different advancement tracks for their employees (for example, a management track and an engineering track), similar concepts exist in free software projects. One of the roles of a maintainer is to help contributors develop into the roles which best suit them. I’d like to explain what this means to me in my role as a maintainer of several projects, though I should mention upfront that I’m just some guy and, while I can explain what has and hasn’t worked for me, I can’t claim to have all of the answers. People are hard.

There are lots of different tasks which need doing on...

Bugzz Smaher

Первую версию этой игры я написал на даче за два выходных, где-то в 2015 году. От полной версии она отличалась лишь добавлением Facebook мелкими фиксами интерфейса и доработкой генератора волн. В игре поддерживалось сохранение и синхронизация прогресса между различными устройствами …

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Dice or Die

Логическая игра для мобильных устройств, смесь жанров 2048, Color Lines и Match-3. Эта игра, как и игры Krakoid и Bugzz Smasher, написана на собственном движке. Движок поддерживал всего несколько платформ – Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android. Разработка в основном велась …

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