State of Sway December 2016 - secure your Wayland desktop, get paid to work on Sway

Earlier today I released sway 0.11, which (along with lots of the usual new features and bug fixes) introduces support for security policies that can help realize the promise of a secure Wayland desktop. We also just started a bounty program that lets you sponsor the things you want done and rewards contributors for working on them.

Today sway has 19,371 lines of C (and 3,761 lines of header files) written by 70 authors across 2,067 commits. These were written through 589 pull requests and 425 issues. Sway packages are available today in the official repos of Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, NixOS, openSUSE, Void Linux, and more. Sway looks like...

Audio texture synthesis and style transfer

by Dmitry Ulyanov and Vadim Lebedev

We present an extension of texture synthesis and style transfer method of Leon Gatys et al. for audio. We have developed the same code for three frameworks (well, it is cold in Moscow), choose your favorite:

A broad intro to networking

Disclaimer: I am not a network engineer. That’s the point of this blog post, though - I want to share with non-networking people enough information about networking to get by. Hopefully by the end of this post you’ll know enough about networking to keep up with a conversation on networking, or know what to search for when something breaks, or know what tech to research more in-depth when you are putting together something new.

The OSI model is the standard model we describe networks with. There are 7 layers:

Layer 1, the physical layer, is the electrical engineering stuff.

Layer 2, the link layer, is how devices talk to...

Electron considered harmful

Yeah, I know that “considered harmful” essays are allegedly considered harmful. If it surprises you that I’m writing one, though, you must be a new reader. Welcome! Let’s get started. If you’re unfamiliar with Electron, it’s some hot new tech that lets you make desktop applications with HTML+CSS+JavaScript. It’s basically a chromeless web browser with a Node.js backend and a Chromium-based frontend. What follows is the rant of a pissed off Unix hacker, you’ve been warned.

As software engineers we have a responsibility to pick the right tools for the job. In fact, that’s the most important choice we have to make when we start a project. When you...

2016-11-20

slock 1.4 released: download

Getting on without Google

I used Google for a long time, but have waned myself off of it over the past few years, and I finally deleted my account a little over a month ago. I feel so much better about my privacy now that I’ve removed Google from the equation, and self hosting my things affords me a lot of flexibility and useful customizations.

This one was the most difficult and time consuming to set up, but it was very worth it. I’ve intended for a while to make a new mail server software suite that’s less terrible to set up, so hopefully that situation will improve in the future....

I'm losing faith in America

I recently quit my job at Linode and started looking for something else to do. For the first time in my career, I’m seriously considering opportunities abroad. Sorry for the politically charged post - I promise to get back to tech stuff right away.

On November 8th, I’m going to step into the voting booth and will be presented with the following options:

The next president of the United States will probably be Hillary Clinton. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how ridiculous this is. This is a person who has pulled...

2016-09-26

Videos of the slcon 2016 talks are now available.

Comment on Curve extraction plugin by caiyong

Hello,I meet the same problem.I also want to port it into C++.Your description above is very useful to me. Thank you!

Using the right tool for the job

One of the most important choices you’ll make for the software you write is what you write it in, what frameworks you use, the design methodologies to subscribe to, and so on. This choice doesn’t seem to get the respect it’s due. These are some of the only choices you’ll make that you cannot change. Or, at least, these choices are among the most difficult ones to change.

People often question why TrueCraft is written in C# next to projects like Sway in C, alongside KnightOS in Assembly or sr.ht in Python. It would certainly be easier from the outset if I made every project in a...