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.…

I’m writing this in a tty console. No, not a terminal emulator, but the real thing. I can’t even take a screenshot right now, because that’s not how ttys work (2021-05-28: actually, you can!) And no, this isn’t just for the meme or trying to act h4cx0r g1rl… It’s actually part of my workflow. I’m a sway user. sway (or other WMs for that matter) is awesome for me because it makes my desktop almost totally free of any distractions.…

One thing I’m very proud of is me releasing cras 2.0.0 earlier this week! A very… unique release indeed! Very few new features… less features than the 1.x series! (Have I become a GNOME developer?? /jk) Which features have been removed, you ask? Those which I feel are easily reproduced by means of using shell commands. Let me show you a very practical example from cras itself. $ cras example 2021-05-21 #01 [TODO] First task #02 [DONE] Second task #03 [DONE] Oh no, what a busy day!…

The news is well-known. We’ve lost Freenode as a trustworthy actor in the world of IRC. We’re dealing with a hostile takeover of the network, including legal threats to the voluntary staff, a quick migration to the new Liberachat network… lots of confusion… lots of people and projects migrating there or to OFTC… It’s sad. Very sad. The solution, namely, massively migrating to another server brings in the huge problem of moving lots of communities in a very short time, before something bad happens again… Some of them will jump late or won’t catch the train in time… Sighs… And some will choose to jump to other networks… maybe due to features… maybe due to preferences… maybe due to not fully trusting the people behind Liberachat… This is going to be a mess and it already is……