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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (28w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I was drafting support for showing ā€œapplication iconsā€ in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didnā€™t show the icon. šŸ¤”

I like the looks of your window manager. Thatā€™s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. Itā€™s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think itā€™s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it canā€™t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so itā€™s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to ā€œreplicateā€ my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, Iā€™d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I donā€™t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. Iā€™ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so itā€™s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. šŸ˜…

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png šŸ˜…

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (donā€™t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasnā€™t a fan of those, either. šŸ„“

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lyse
lyse.isobeef.org
 (28w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I was drafting support for showing ā€œapplication iconsā€ in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. Thatā€™s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really donā€™t get it how people can work like that. You canā€™t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then thereā€™s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! Thereā€™s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a ā€œregularishā€ 16:10 monitor and donā€™t see shit, because itā€™s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesnā€™t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (donā€™t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (28w ago)

Hereā€™s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type ā€œcardinalā€. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of ā€œcardinalā€. I am already not really familiar with that word and Iā€™m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an ā€œintegerā€ today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that theyā€™re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So itā€™s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, youā€™d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didnā€™t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldnā€™t know how to fix without breaking clients.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (28w ago)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They are optional dependencies and listed as such:

$ pacman -Qi pinentry
Name            : pinentry
Version         : 1.3.1-5
Description     : Collection of simple PIN or passphrase entry dialogs which
                  utilize the Assuan protocol
Optional Deps   : gcr: GNOME backend [installed]
                  gtk3: GTK backend [installed]
                  qt5-x11extras: Qt5 backend [installed]
                  kwayland5: Qt5 backend
                  kguiaddons: Qt6 backend
                  kwindowsystem: Qt6 backend

And itā€™s probably a good thing that theyā€™re optional. I wouldnā€™t want to have all that installed all the time.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (28w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing ā€¦ a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. šŸ˜¢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that itā€™s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and youā€™re done.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (28w ago)

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. Thereā€™s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you donā€™t configure it? Whatā€™s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and itā€™s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment ā€¦

ā€¦ and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk ā€¦

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lyse
lyse.isobeef.org
 (29w ago)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I fully agree with you on https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/POSTING-en.html!

Although, in the first screenshot, the window title background is much darker in the new version than the old one!1!1 :-P Kidding aside, the contrast in the old one is still better.

Also, note the missing underlines for the Alt hotkeys now. I just think that the underline in the old one is too thick.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (30w ago)

The WM_CLASS Property is used on X11 to assign rules to certain windows, e.g. ā€œthis is a GIMP window, it should appear on workspace number 16.ā€ It consists of two fields, name and class.

Wayland (or rather, the XDG shell protocol ā€“ core Wayland knows nothing about this) only has a single field called app_id.

When you run X11 programs under Wayland, you use XWayland, which is baked into most compositors. Then you have to deal with all three fields.

Some compositors map name to app_id, others map class to app_id, and even others directly expose the original name and class.

Apparently, there is no consensus.

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lyse
lyse.isobeef.org
 (31w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » This aggressive auto-logout on my bankā€™s website ā€¦

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, itā€™s a shitshow. MS overconfirms all my prejudices constantly.

Ignoring e-mail after lunch works great, though. :-)

Our timetracking is offline for over a week because of reasons. The responsible bunglers are falling by the skin of their teeth: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/timetracking.png

  1. The error message neither includes the timeframe nor a link to an announcement article.
  2. The HTML page needs to download JS in order to display the fucking error message.
  3. Proper HTTP status codes are clearly only for big losers.
  4. Despite being down, heaps of resources are still fetched.

I find it really fascinating how one can screw up on so many levels. This is developed inhouse, Iā€™m just so glad that weā€™re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (33w ago)

I did a ā€œlectureā€/ā€œworkshopā€ about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. šŸ’¾ Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. šŸ„³

  • People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  • Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  • DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  • This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  • At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  • (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. šŸ„³ Itā€™s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (33w ago)

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

  1. You will regret complexity when on-call
  2. Stop falling in love with your own code
  3. Everything is a trade-off. Thereā€™s no ā€œbestā€ 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
  4. Everyone hates code they didnā€™t write
  5. Donā€™t use unnecessary dependencies
  6. Coding standards prevent arguments
  7. Write meaningful commit messages
  8. Donā€™t ever stop learning new things
  9. Code reviews spread knowledge
  10. Always build for maintainability
  11. Ask for help when youā€™re stuck
  12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
  13. Software is never completed
  14. Estimates are not promises
  15. Ship early, iterate often
  16. Keep. It. Simple.

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed ā€“ but this doesnā€™t ā€œaddā€ to the program. Donā€™t use ā€œsoftware is never doneā€ as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

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