• 34 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Their primary purpose certainly isn’t the same, but with JavaScript being used to implement text editors, it’s in a playing field where many would argue that Rust is better suited.

    Well, and Rust can play in JavaScript’s playing field, too: You can implement webpages in HTML+CSS+Rust by going through WebAssembly.


  • Man, at $DAYJOB, if we open-source something, they tell us to check for checked-in passwords and whatnot, and force us to throw away the commit history, which always feels stupid when we’ve known upfront that we’re going to open-source it and so kept things clean from the start.

    But then, yeah, you see a post like that and just think that it really wouldn’t have been too difficult to search for swear words before publishing.
    I mean, I also don’t really care, since it’s code rather than an official communication channel, but I can understand why management might care.


  • The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:

    allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.

    It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.

    It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.

    And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
    Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.




  • I thought about creating something like that and the major problem that I see is that lots of meme templates do have copyright and the font that’s typically used for memes, Impact, isn’t free either. Well, and it isn’t done by merely developing a software and offering it for download. You would need to host the meme templates or some editor webpage, which is a whole 'nother skillset.

    If we say that users bring their own meme template, and it can be a free font that looks similar to Impact, and it’s not to be hosted as a webpage, then it would be quite doable.
    You would “just” need to call the ImageMagick library with the right parameters. Still not trivial, but the path to get there is fairly straightforward. I could imagine that something like that already exists as an open-source project…



  • I mean, modern package managers generally now come with lock files, which effectively auto-pin your dependencies, until you trigger a dependency update.

    And while it isn’t bullet-proof, it does result in you effectively having a dependency cooldown most of the time. You’re only vulnerable, if you trigger the dependency update while the compromised dependency release is public.

    Obviously, this can be bad enough, but it does also mean that an ecosystem with lock files is far less attractive to target with a supply-chain attack, since far fewer hosts will get compromised on average.


  • One time, I had to request firewall access for a machine we were deploying to, and they had an Excel sheet to fill in your request. Not great, I figured, but whatever.

    Then I asked who to send the Excel file to and they told me to open a pull request against a Git repo.
    And then, with full pride, the guy tells me that they have an Ansible script, which reads the Excel files during deployment and rolls out the firewall rules as specified.

    In effect, this meant:

    1. Of course, I had specified the values in the wrong format. It was just plaintext fields in that Excel, with no hint as to how to format them.
    2. We did have to go back and forth a few times, because their deployment would fail from the wrong format.
    3. Every time I changed something, they had to check that I’m not giving myself overly broad access. And because it’s an Excel, they can’t really look at the diff. Every time, they have to open it and then maybe use the Excel version history to know what changed? I have no idea how they actually made that workable.

    Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, please just let me edit an Ansible inventory file instead. I get that they have non-technical users, but believe it or not, it does not actually make it simpler, if you expose the same technical fields in a spreadsheet and then still use a pull request workflow and everything…



  • Personally, I find that (complex) software implemented in Python tends to be so unreliable that I typically don’t want to use it after all, but I only find that out after wasting a bunch of time learning the software.
    It’s just frustrating, especially if I come back to the software every so often, naively thinking that it’s been a few versions, so maybe they’ve fixed it. It’s always just different bugs, which still end up being too frustrating to use the software.


    To give an example, I like to compose music using Lilypond, which is more-or-less a programming language to create sheet music. And there is a program that’s supposed to give you a well-integrated workflow for that (i.e. an IDE), called Frescobaldi.
    The first time I tried it, playback of the composed music wouldn’t work.
    The second time, I couldn’t click on notes to jump to the respective code snippet.
    And I tried it again a few weeks ago and it just crashed immediately with an obscure error message.

    Instead, I’ve slapped together a script, which just opens the sheet music in my PDF viewer, the code in my normal editor and then uses a CLI tools to generate and playback the sheet music. And while it’s definitely not perfect, it has been working more reliably for me than Frescobaldi ever has.







  • From the bug report:

    […] will require moving some config & data files from ~/.phoenix to probably $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/phoenix and […]

    According to Wikipedia, the browser was already renamed to “Firefox” when that bug report was opened, but still wild to see that even back then, they already had some technical debt for the name of that directory.

    Unfortunate that they did not go straight from ~/.phoenix to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mozilla, but hard to say, if that was as obvious of a choice back then…


  • I find it so tricky, too. With the maintainers that I see struggling, it’s rarely a lack of contributions that fucks them up, but rather a lack of maintainers. And they can’t easily onboard other maintainers, because:

    1. there’s hardly anyone willing to invest enough time into your project to be a particularly helpful maintainer.
    2. everyone’s just strangers on the internet, who may or may not want to ship malware as part of your project.

    Like, I even have a friend who’s excited for a project that I’m building, but so far, they’re purely cheerleading (which is appreciated), because they do have projects of their own that they find fun, and in particular also a life outside of programming.
    I do not currently struggle with maintainership (because I haven’t announced my projects anywhere publicly 🤪), but yeah, it just feels like it’s asking for a lot, if I were to try to get that friend on board. In particular also, because not many aspects of maintainership are fun.