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The last years
August 14th, 2019 PYONGYANG IN CHAOS AS PANDEMIC DECIMATES LEADERSHIP. Sources within the country have reported that a fast-acting and deadly infectious disease has suddenly infected the population of Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, where most of the country’s political elite live. Unconfirmed reports suggest that a significant fraction of the leadership has been affected.
The reclusive country has appealed for immediate aid from the international community and it is reported that a group of medical experts from Seoul have been permitted to enter via the Joint Security Area. Representatives from the United States Center for Disease Control and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention have...
Introduction to POSIX shell
What the heck is the POSIX shell anyway? Well, the POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface) shell is the standard Unix shell - standard meaning it was formally defined and shipped in a published standard. This makes shell scripts written for it portable, something no other shell can lay claim to. The POSIX shell is basically a formalized version of the venerable Bourne shell, and on your system it lives at /bin/sh, unless you’re one of the unlucky masses for whom this is a symlink to bash.
Why use POSIX shell?The “Bourne Again shell”, aka bash, is not standardized. Its grammar, features, and behavior aren’t formally written up...
Coming back from FOSDEM 2018
Salut! I usually write a FOSDEM retrospective every year, although, as you might have (not) seen, last year was different. While I'm sure 2017's FOSDEM was a nice weekend I almost can't remember anymore. I had a severe cold (already when coming there, usually I only have a cold when coming home…) and I'm afraid I was only 50% physically present – hence there was no blog post. Anyways, moving on to FOSDEM 2018. This year was one of the better ones. Typically I only select a handful of presentations from the schedule, since neither the presentations nor the stands...
Sway and client side decorations
You may have recently seen an article from GNOME on the subject of client side decorations (CSD) titled Introducing the CSD Initiative. It states some invalid assumptions which I want to clarify, and I want to tell you Sway’s stance on the subject. I also speak for the rest of the projects involved in wlroots on this matter, including Way Cooler, waymonad, and bspwc.
The subject of which party is responsible for window decorations on Wayland (the client or the server) has been a subject of much debate. I want to clarify that though GNOME may imply that a consensus has been reached, this is not the case. CSD have real problems that...
Fee breakdown for various donation platforms
Understanding fees are a really confusing part of supporting creators of things you like. I provide a few ways for people to support my work, and my supporters can struggle to understand the differences between them. It comes down to fees, of which there are several kinds (note: I just made these terms up):
Transaction fees are charged by the payment processor (the company that takes down your card number and runs the transaction with your bank). These are typically in the form of a percentage of the transaction plus a few cents. Platform fees are charged by the platform (e.g. Patreon) to run their operation, typically in...Learn about your package manager
Tools like virtualenv, rbenv, and to a lesser extent npm and pip, are occasionally useful in development but encourage bad practices in production. Many people forget that their distro already has a package manager! And there’s more– you, the user, can write packages for it!
Your distro’s package repositories probably already have a lot of your dependencies, and can conveniently update your software alongside the rest of your system. On the whole you can expect your distro packages to be much better citizens on your system than a language-specific package manager will be. Additionally, pretty much all distros provide a means for you to host your own package repositories,...
fork is not my favorite syscall
This article has been on my to-write list for a while now. In my opinion, fork is one of the most questionable design choices of Unix. I don’t understand the circumstances that led to its creation, and I grieve over the legacy rationale that keeps it alive to this day.
Let’s set the scene. It’s 1971 and you’re a fly on the wall in Bell Labs, watching the first edition of Unix being designed for the PDP-11/20. This machine has a 16-bit address space with no more than 248 kilobytes of memory. They’re discussing how they’re going to support programs that spawn new programs, and someone has a...
Firefox is on a slippery slope
For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve discovered an advertisement in the form of browser extension was sideloaded into user browsers. Whoever is leading these decisions at Mozilla needs to be stopped.
Here’s a breakdown of what happened a few days ago. Mozilla and NBC Universal did a “collaboration” (read: promotion) for the TV show Mr. Robot. It involved sideloading...