Oh! Goto, thou who yieldeth immense strength! OK, not a literal ode. But, yes I’d love to take some time to give Goto a moment of appreciation. Goto is so vilified, yet it’s undeserved. The Culprit of Spaghetti Code? Nope! In fact, it might even save you from your code becoming a plate of pasta. Today, your lovely Ariadna is going to (pun intended) demystify Goto for ya. If you don’t like Goto, you don’t like Turing machines… meaning you don’t like computers!…

I’m back home after getting my first Pfizer shot earlier this morning. Feeling great, just some pain in my arm where I got the injection, and that’s all. Normal work day, writing emails… Another regular day, although yeah, sure, I’m very happy for finally getting my first dose. Finally! My next dose is already appointed in 3 weeks and I’m sure everything’s also going to be great. Yet, these last months have been awful in the stupid discussions department.…

It’s all over the news, so I won’t get into stuff everyone seems to know already: GitHub launched Copilot, an IA-powered service that is able to suugest you code, even entire functions, by reading your comments or the code you’re writing… And the FOSS community cried war: “If they used GPL code, then they’re violating GPL!” Disclaimer… and why I know a bit about copyright: I work as Foreign Rights Manager at Next Door Publishers.…

I’ve been learning about the termios interface… You may know it as a header that allows you to do stuff like switching terminal echo’ing off (for password input, for example) and you may also have heard that it’s arcane as hell, so much that people avoid it like the plague to manipulate it directly. I find it a fascinating piece of software and software history, though… and I think it shows quite some facts that are still relevant today.…

I wanted to write about static libraries. I had found out that static linking is actually way more advanced that I initially though, only importing the symbols that are actually required, which is a great solution to reduce the size of binaries and avoid name collisions under some circumstances… and I wanted that post to segue into a discussion on why I’m leaning towards never implementing dynamic libraries in my projects, but only static ones… The topic is certainly interesting, but to me it felt like a chore……

You’ve written a program. Awesome! You’re not a software tyrannt, though, so you want the user to be able to tweak some things here and there… and possibly save their preferences. Great, let’s store their settings into… wait… How do we do that? A config file? gsettings? The Windows Registry? OK, that’s a bit of a stretch… or do we ask the user to set things up at compile-time? A config.…

Long time no post. That’s bad. Well, it’s not that I’ve got any kind of schedule here, but I do like keeping a steady pace of sorts. I like writing, I love tech, I super love writing about tech! And I feel somewhat empty when Life™ prevents me to dedicate proper time to this my little place on the web. Earlier this week I released scalc 0.2.0.1 Horrible release cycle, seriously.…

Yesterday I found a very, very, very absurd bug on my project cras. It only affected the development master branch, not any of the stable releases, but… it was a very absurd one… In a nutshell, cras tried to overwrite itself. Yep, my lovely program tried to open itself, write some data on the binary itself, and call it a day… Being in C you might think that’s super dangerous and tell me that I should know better and consider using higher level languages, blah blah blah… Have you noticed though that I keep saying it tried doing that, not that it really succeeded in doing it?…

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, aka SICP, aka “The Wizard Book.” What a legendary piece of work! So today, after years going without any mentioning of this book, those initials came back in a casual chat I had with a colleague of mine. Nostalgia time… so, so many memories came back to me! More so when I decided to have a quick watch to the recordings of the ‘85 SICP lectures at MIT, freely available on YouTube.…

Some time ago, I wrote a piece under the title Why I Don’t Do Federation… Yet, if you’re a smart lady, gentleman, or non-binary person, you may have noticed that I’ve set up a Mastodon account: @arivigo@fosstodon.org So… what happened? In a nutshell, well, sort of quite many things. LOL. So nope, I didn’t hit my head or anything like that. First of all, some months ago, I set up an XMPP account because a project I occasionally help with uses XMPP chat rooms to communicate among themselves.…