Elliptic curve point addition in projective coordinates

Introducing scdoc, a man page generator

A man page generator is one of those tools that I’ve said I would write for a long time, being displeased with most of the other options. For a while I used asciidoc, but was never fond of it. There are a few things I want to see in a man page generator:

All of the existing tools failed some of these criteria. asciidoc hits #1, but fails #2 and #3 by being written in XSLT+Python and targetting man pages as a second-class citizen. mdocml fails #1 (it’s...

Redirecting stderr of a running process

During the KDE sprint in Berlin, Roman Gilg leaned over to me and asked if I knew how to redirect the stderr of an already-running process to a file. I Googled it and found underwhelming answers using strace and trying to decipher the output by reading the write syscalls. Instead, I thought a gdb based approach would work better, and after putting the pieces together Roman insisted I wrote a blog post on the topic.

gdb, the GNU debugger, has two important features that make this possible:

With this it’s actually quite straightforward. The...

Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

Microsoft infamously coined the euphemism “embrace, extend, extinguish” to describe their strategy for disrupting markets dominated by open standards. These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becoming a good citizen of the technology community. It’s time to turn our concerns to Google.

Google famously “embraced” email on April Fool’s day, 2004, which is of course based on an open standard and federates with the rest of the world. If you’ve read the news lately, you might have seen that Google is shipping a big update to GMail soon, which adds “self-destructing” emails...

Sway reporting in from KDE's Berlin development sprint

I’m writing to you from an airplane on my way back to Philadelphia, after spending a week in Berlin working with the KDE team. It was great to meet those folks and work with them for a while. It’ll take me some time to get the taste of C++ out of my mouth, though! In all seriousness, it was a very productive week and I feel like we have learned a lot about each other’s projects and have a strengthened interest in collaborating more in the future.

The main purpose of my trip was to find opportunities for sway and KDE to work together on improving the Linux...

2018-04-11

farbfeld 4 released: download

Achtung! Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize!

I can hardly believe it, but the media is finally putting Facebook’s feet to the fire! No longer is it just the weird paranoid kids shouting at everyone to stop giving all of their information to these companies. We need to take this bull by the horns and drive it in a productive direction, and for that reason, it’s time to talk about decentralization, federation, and open source.

This article has been translated into Russian by Get Colorings.

It’s important to remember that Facebook is not the only villain on this stage. Did you know that Google keeps a map of everywhere you’ve been? That Twitter is analyzing your tweets just...

2018-03-20

st 0.8.1 released: download

This release fixes some regressions introduced in the 0.8 release.

2018-03-19

Registrations for slcon5 are now open.

Hack everything without fear

We live in a golden age of open source, and it can sometimes be easy to forget the privileges that this affords us. I’m writing this article with vim, in a terminal emulator called urxvt, listening to music with mpv, in a Sway desktop session, on the Linux kernel. Supporting this are libraries like glibc or musl, harfbuzz, and mesa. I also have the support of the AMDGPU video driver, libinput and udev, alsa and pulseaudio.

All of this is open source. I can be reading the code for any of these tools within 30 seconds, and for many of these tools I already have their code...