Conservative web development

Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It started by downloading a megabyte of data as it rendered the page over the course of eight full seconds. The page opens with an advertisement 281 pixels tall, placed before even the title of the article. As I scrolled down, more and more requests were made, downloading a total of 2.8 MB of data with 748 HTTP requests. An article was weaved between a grand total of 1419 vertical pixels of ad space, greater than the vertical resolution of...

ToxCon 2018 Update

As promised, here is more information on ToxCon 2018.

Tox developer community will be holding the conference from Friday, October 12th, to Sunday, October 14th — a 3 day event, at Metalab Vienna, a hackerspace located in the heart of Vienna, Austria. We have many talks prepared for you: from the progress Tox has made in the last 12 months, to security-related and other interesting topics. The the full schedule of the event is available online and there is also an Android app that you can use to get updates if more talks get added.

If you would like to learn more...

How to make a self-hosted video livestream

I have seen some articles in the past which explain how to build the ecosystem around your video streaming, such as live chat and forums, but which leave the actual video streaming to Twitch.tv. I made a note the last time I saw one of these articles to write one of my own explaining the video bit. As is often the case with video, we’ll be using the excellent ffmpeg tool for this. If it’s A/V-related, ffmpeg can probably do it.

Note: a demonstration video was previously shown here, but as traffic on this article died down I took it offline to reduce unnecessary load.

ffmpeg has a...

The Commons Clause will destroy open source

An alarmist title, I know, but it’s true. If the Commons clause were to be adopted by all open source projects, they would cease to be open source1, and therefore the Commons clause is trying to destroy open source. When this first appeared I spoke out about it in discussion threads around the net, but didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. Well, yesterday, some parts of Redis became proprietary software.

The Commons Clause promoted by Kevin Wang presents one of the greatest existential threats to open source I’ve ever seen. It preys on a vulnerability open source maintainers all suffer from, and one I can strongly relate to....

I don't trust Signal

Occasionally when Signal is in the press and getting a lot of favorable discussion, I feel the need to step into various forums, IRC channels, and so on, and explain why I don’t trust Signal. Let’s do a blog post instead.

Off the bat, let me explain that I expect a tool which claims to be secure to actually be secure. I don’t view “but that makes it harder for the average person” as an acceptable excuse. If Edward Snowden and Bruce Schneier are going to spout the virtues of the app, I expect it to actually be secure when it matters - when vulnerable people using...

Setting up a local dev mail server

As part of my work on lists.sr.ht, it was necessary for me to configure a self-contained mail system on localhost that I could test with. I hope that others will go through a similar process in the future when they set up the code for hacking on locally or when working on other email related software, so here’s a guide on how you can set it up.

There are lots of things you can set up on a mail server, like virtual mail accounts backed by a relational database, IMAP access, spam filtering, and so on. We’re not going to do any of that in this article -...

Writing a Wayland compositor with wlroots: shells

I apologise for not writing about wlroots more frequently. I don’t really enjoy working on the McWayface codebase this series of blog posts was originally about, so we’re just going to dismiss that and talk about the various pieces of a Wayland compositor in a more free-form style. I hope you still find it useful!

Today, we’re going to talk about shells. But to make sure we’re on the same page first, a quick refresher on surfaces. A basic primitive of the Wayland protocol is the concept of a “surface”. A surface is a rectangular box of pixels sent from the client to the compositor to display...

Git is already federated & decentralized

There have always been murmurs about “replacing GitHub with something decentralized!”, but in the wake of the Microsoft acquisition these murmurs have become conversations. In particular, this blog post is a direct response to forge-net (formerly known as GitPub). They want to federate and decentralize git using ActivityPub, the same technology leveraged by Mastodon and PeerTube. But get this: git is already federated and decentralized!

I already spoke at length about how a large minority of the git community uses email for collaboration in my previous article on the subject. Definitely give it a read if you haven’t already. In this article I want to focus on comparing this...

Input handling in wlroots

I’ve said before that wlroots is a “batteries not included” kind of library, and one of the places where that is most apparent is with our approach to input handling. We implemented a very hands-off design for input, in order to support many use-cases: desktop input, phones with and without USB-OTG HIDs plugged in, multiple mice bound to a single cursor, multiple keyboards per seat, simulated input from fake input devices, on-screen keyboards, input which is processed by the compositor but not sent to clients… we support all of these use-cases and even more. However, the drawback of our powerful design is that it’s confusing. Very confusing.

Let’s begin...

Simple, correct, fast: in that order

The single most important quality in a piece of software is simplicity. It’s more important than doing the task you set out to achieve. It’s more important than performance. The reason is straightforward: if your solution is not simple, it will not be correct or fast.

Given enough time, you’ll find that all software which solves sufficiently complex problems is going to (1) have bugs and (2) have performance problems. Software with bugs is incorrect. Software with performance problems is not fast. We will face this fact as surely as we will face death and taxes, and we should prepare ourselves accordingly. Let’s consider correctness first.

Complicated software breaks....