Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-08.

Paying people to work on open source is good actually - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, foss, sustainability

Making sure maintainers are well paid is indeed an ongoing problem. There is currently no perfect solution within the world we live in. This is indeed no reason to blame the maintainers themselves for the approach they picked.

https://jacobian.org/2024/feb/16/paying-maintainers-is-good/

Anatomy of a whistleblowing system

Tags: tech, anonymity, security

Interesting explanation of the guarantees such a system must provide and their consequences.

https://securedrop.org/news/anatomy-of-a-whistleblowing-system/

It Was 33 Years Ago Today: Happy Birthday Lemmings! - The Scottish Games Network

Tags: tech, gaming, culture

Happy birthday indeed. Was an excellent and culturally relevant game.

https://scottishgames.net/2024/02/14/it-was-33-years-ago-today-happy-birthday-lemmings/

A vintage network attack called smurf

Tags: tech, networking, security, history

A trip down memory lane when such attacks were indeed common. Nowadays, we know better though.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/02/21/bcast/

cohost! - “I broke IKEA.”

Tags: tech, phone, spam, hacking

Very funny glitch. This anti-spam system is smart… too bad the wrong victim got in the crosshair.

https://cohost.org/sirocyl/post/2891449-i-broke-ikea

The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

Tags: tech, streaming, criticism

The streaming trap is getting obvious at this point.

https://blog.raed.dev/posts/goodbye_spotify

100 things you can do on your personal website | James’ Coffee Blog

Tags: tech, self-hosting, blog

Lots of ideas indeed. Having your own website gives so much freedom in what you can do there.

https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/19/personal-website-ideas/

Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi # Chris Dzombak

Tags: tech, infrastructure, reliability, self-hosting, raspberry-pi

Looks like an interesting and comprehensive reference to squeeze as much reliability as possible from a Raspberry Pi.

https://www.dzombak.com/blog/2023/12/Considerations-for-a-long-running-Raspberry-Pi.html

ActivityPub Server in a Single PHP File – Terence Eden’s Blog

Tags: tech, fediverse

A little experiment to better understand how ActivityPub works.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/activitypub-server-in-a-single-file/

Popular git config options

Tags: tech, git, command-line, tools

Plenty of good tips in there. I knew quite a few, but there are a few nuggets that I’ll test drive I think.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/02/16/popular-git-config-options/

A highly customizable changelog generator | git-cliff

Tags: tech, git, command-line, tools, project-management

Looks like a nice way to automate the creation of changelogs.

https://git-cliff.org/

If you’re just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly - The Old New Thing

Tags: tech, api, design

Nice advices for API design. First time I see the term “inert” used in this context. Definitely one I should keep in mind and use when appropriate.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240216-00/?p=109409

How to debug your initramfs init - Linus’s blog

Tags: tech, debugging, systemd, system

Nice tricks to debug the very early boot process, starting at PID 1. gdbserver saves the day here.

https://linus.schreibt.jetzt/posts/debugging-pid1.html

Writing a scheduler for Linux in Rust that runs in user-space

Tags: tech, linux, rust, system, processes

Interesting, I didn’t know that user space schedulers were coming to Linux. It opens the door to exciting experiments.

https://arighi.blogspot.com/2024/02/writing-scheduler-for-linux-in-rust.html?m=1

Floats Are Weird

Tags: tech, floats, mathematics

Or how calculus can give a feel of why approximation errors can be great or small with floats.

https://a.exozy.me/posts/floats-weird/

Blazingly 🔥 fast 🚀 memory vulnerabilities, written in 100% safe Rust. 🦀

Tags: tech, rust, bug, safety

Check out the docs branch for detailed explanations. This exhibits a loop hole in the Rust compiler allowing to break lifetime inference… and from there all the usual guarantees go through the window.

https://github.com/Speykious/cve-rs

Database Architects: SSDs Have Become Ridiculously Fast, Except in the Cloud

Tags: tech, cloud, storage, ssd, performance

This is indeed an odd situation… there is no good explanation about why this is like this.

https://databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2024/02/ssds-have-become-ridiculously-fast.html?m=1

My Notes on GitLab Postgres Schema Design – Shekhar Gulati

Tags: tech, gitlab, databases, sql, postgresql, performance

Nice exploration of the GitLab database schema. This highlights and finds quite a few of the choices made with an eye on performances.

https://shekhargulati.com/2022/07/08/my-notes-on-gitlabs-postgres-schema-design/

JavaScript Bloat in 2024 @ tonsky.me

Tags: tech, web, frontend, javascript, quality

Something is definitely bonkers regarding the use of JavaScript on the web. The amount of bloat is staggering.

https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/

htmz - a low power tool for html

Tags: tech, web, frontend, htmx

Looks like an interesting trick for more dynamic HTML frontends with very limited used of Javascript. Inspired by htmx it seems to go one step further in the same direction.

https://leanrada.com/htmz/

This message does not exist | Mark J. Nelson

Tags: tech, ux

Or why wording matters… this is clearly a user design fail in this case.

https://www.kmjn.org/notes/message_existence.html

Okay, Color Spaces — ericportis.com

Tags: tech, gui, colors, mathematics

Neat article about colorspaces. Definitely worth reading if you’re curious about the topic. It also has interactive bits to ease the understanding.

https://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces/

Useful Uses of cat

Tags: tech, modules, design, shell

Turns out to be an interesting discussion about modularity. It’s probably a good approach even for a one liner in a script.

https://two-wrongs.com/useful-uses-of-cat

Agile is a tainted term

Tags: tech, agile, project-management, change

Definitely true. This is why I refrain from using the term nowadays… this allows to focus on the principles instead. Takes more time to explain but allow for slow and steady change management. Indeed it’s not perceived as an all or nothing situation anymore.

https://www.pcloadletter.dev/blog/agile/

On Managing Expectations - Leadership & Work

Tags: management, business, communication

Definitely this. Managing expectations is a big part of management. It’s also important for customer relationship. In both cases, clear communication and finding misunderstandings early are key.

https://poczwardowski.substack.com/p/on-managing-expectations

Coding interviews are effective

Tags: tech, hiring, interviews

Definitely true, this is mostly about avoiding false positives. Still I don’t like online assessments platforms either… you need to see how the candidate is doing, interact with them, etc.

https://www.pcloadletter.dev/blog/coding-interviews/

Gathering Structures

Tags: management, conference

Very comprehensive list of tips and ideas to organize events and get together. Nice for inspiration if you need to organize such a thing.

https://maggieappleton.com/gathering-structures

Bye for now!

It’s time for another foss-north again and the Call for Papers is open (as is the Call for Sponsors, hint, hint, nudge, nudge). Make sure to save the dates (April 15-16), get yourself a ticket, and submit your talk!

Happy weekend!

A new version of Kirigami Addons is out! Kirigami Addons is a collection of helpful components for your QML and Kirigami applications. With the 1.0 release, we are now supporting Qt6 and KF6 and added a bunch of new components and fixed various accessibility issues.

FormCard

We added a bunch of new FormCard delegates:

• FormPasswordFieldDelegate: A password field
• FormDataTimeDelegate: A date and/or time delegate with integrated date and time picker which use the native picker of the platform if available (currently only on Android).

The existing delegates also recevied various accessibility issues when used with a screen reader.

Finally we droped the compatibility alias MobileForm.

BottomDrawer

Mathis added a new Drawer component that can be used a context menu or to display some information on mobile.

FloatingButton and DoubleFloatingButton

These two components received significant sizing and consistency improvements which should improve their touch area on mobile.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Oxygen Icons is an icon theme for use with any XDG compliant app and desktop.

It is part of KDE Frameworks 6 but is now released independently to save on resources.

This 6.0.0 release requires to be built with extra-cmake-modules from KF 6 which is not yet released, distros may want to wait until next week before building it.

Distros which ship this version can drop the version released as part of KDE Frameworks 5.

sha256: 28ec182875dcc15d9278f45ced11026aa392476f1f454871b9e2c837008e5774

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/oxygen-icons/

Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

This project is creating a WS-Discovery client library based on the KDSoap library.

The name is short for Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB Simple Object Access Protocol Web Services Addressing Discovery Client.

It is used by the SMB KIO worker from kio-extras.

kio-extras will have two releases as part of KDE’s 6th Megarelease, one for Qt 5 and one for Qt 6. Distros should build and ship both versions of kio-extras but the Qt5 build should use the internal static copy of kdsoap-ws-discovery-client so does not need to be built separately. The Qt 6 build of kio-extras does need this external build of kdsoap-ws-discovery-client. Distros will need an up to date copy of KDSoap library.

There are no changes compared to 0.3.0 but this one is released as stable ahead of KDE Gear 24.02.

SHA 256: 2cd247c013e75f410659bac372aff93d22d71c5a54c059e137b9444af8b3427a
URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/kdsoap-ws-discovery-client/
Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

Some time ago, Marco started a series of articles on SObjectizer. It is starting to become the source for all things SObjectizer – it is currently at post number 19 – quite an endeavour.

For those who haven’t met SObjectizer before, it is a framework for writing concurrent applications which supports the actor model, publish-subscribe…

EDIT: The series are available on Marco’s blog as well as on dev.to