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……

There are so many tools that I love! I feel I should give them a little shout-out once in a while. And there is one which I discovered just recently which has challenged some preconceptions I had as well as being really useful. It’s Shellcheck. Shellcheck is a shell script analyzer. As far as I know, it supports both POSIX shell and bash and is able to identify errors, give you a way better error message than any of our beloved shells, and even suggests style improvements which are, in all cases I’ve encountered, very, very recommendable.…

The Linux Kernel Coding Style includes this famous rule, apparently written by Linus himself: Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you’re screwed anyway, and should fix your program. This is known as the Three Levels Of Indentation Rule, although “rule” is a word that usually doesn’t fit well to anything related to programming, IMHO.…

I love Tito Puente. There’s something in his way that made him special. King of Mambo after Dámaso Pérez Prado, but much more than just that… He mastered mambo, son in its various subgenres (montuno, guaracha, guajira, etc.), boleros, Latin jazz, you name it. One thing I respect him a lot for was his total respect for Cuban culture and the Afro-Cuban origin of the rhythms and genres he played. Unfortunately, some of his fellow Puerto Rican colleagues obscured this, especially during the Fania Era.…

It looks like I’m in a shell scripting fever lately… which is a great thing! You know, shell scripting is an amazing, very underestimated tool. How many things could’ve been easily tackled as shell scripts but aren’t… (sad noises) So this post is a bit of a follow-up to the last one: let’s dive into some more POSIX shell scripting! One thing I was doing in the very worst possible way in my shell scripts was parsing CLI arguments.…

There’s this meme in some dark places of the Linux community: Standard compliance is always greener on the other side of the fence, namely on the BSDs, Plan 9-based/inspired systems, etc. Sometimes I believe people who say those kind of things have never seriously worked with any of those systems and just like to vent off baseless rants. Today I’m here to debunk some misconceptions I’ve come across repeatedly, some of which I myself believed because I just followed the meme.…