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...

Fabrique Noir – Space Travel

I'm enjoying creating music since 1981. First on analogue synthesizers (SIEL OPERA 6) and drum machines (ROLAND TR-505), later on with digital synths and workstations (KORG M1, KORG 01/Wfd). From 1986 to 1989 I created my music mainly on the COMMODORE AMIGA. The PC platform almost killed my motivation. Switching from hardware sequencers to a software sequencer was tough for me, later on an abundance of possibilities (I earned money and bought too many devices) somewhat paralyzed me. The birth of my daughter Lara-Marie in 2011 did add a share to my "uncreative pause". Still, I never stopped enjoying (making)...

Status update, July 2019

Today I received the keys to my new apartment, which by way of not being directly in the middle of the city1 saves me a decent chunk of money - and allows me to proudly announce that I have officially broken even on doing free software full time! I owe a great deal of thanks to all of you who have donated to support my work or purchased a paid SourceHut account. I’ve dreamed of sustainably working on free software for a long, long time, and I’m very grateful for all of your support in helping realize that dream. Now let me share with you what your...

Announcing code annotations for SourceHut

Today I’m happy to announce that code annotations are now available for SourceHut! These allow you to decorate your code with arbitrary links and markdown. The end result looks something like this:

NOTICE: Annotations were ultimately removed from sourcehut.

The annotations shown here are sourced from a JSON file which you can generate and upload during your CI process. It looks something like this:

{
  "98bc0394a2f15171fb113acb5a9286a7454f22e7": [
    {
  ...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2019-07-08 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

The other day a friend of mine (an oper on Freenode) wanted to talk about IRC compared to its peers, such as Matrix, Slack, Discord, etc. The ensuing discussion deserves summarization here. In short: I’m glad that IRC doesn’t have the features that are “showstoppers” for people choosing other platforms, and I’m worried that attempts to bring these showstopping “features” to IRC will worsen the platform for the people who use it now.

On IRC, features like embedded images, a nice UX for messages longer than a few lines (e.g. pasted code), threaded messages, etc; are absent. Some sort of “graceful degradation” to support mixed channels with clients...

Subtle ways to lose data

Status update, June 2019

Summer is in full swing here in Philadelphia. Last night I got great views of Jupiter and a nearly-full Moon, and my first Saturn observation of the year. I love astronomy on clear Friday nights, there’s always plenty of people coming through the city. And today, on a relaxing lazy Saturday, waiting for friends for dinner later, I have the privilege of sharing another status report with you.

First, I want to talk about some work I’ve done with blogs lately. On the bottom of this article you’ll find a few blog posts from around the net. This is populated with openring, a small Go tool I made...

My personal journey from MIT to GPL

As I got started writing open source software, I generally preferred the MIT license. I actually made fun of the “copyleft” GPL licenses, on the grounds that they are less free. I still hold this opinion today: the GPL license is less free than the MIT license - but today, I believe this in a good way.

If you haven’t yet, I suggest reading the MIT license - it’s very short. It satisfies the four essential freedoms guaranteed of free software:

Initial pre-release of aerc: an email client for your terminal

After years of painfully slow development, the aerc email client has seen a huge boost in its pace of development recently. This leads to today’s announcement: aerc 0.1.0 is now available! After my transition to working on free software full time allowed me to spend more time on more projects, I was able to invest considerably more time into aerc. Your support led us here: thank you to all of the people who donate to my work!

I’ve prepared a short webcast demonstrating aerc’s basic features - give it a watch if you’re curious about what aerc looks like & what makes it interesting.