Been spending a lot of time researching campers as I want to / plan to upgrade our current Camper Trailoer (forward fold) Stoney Creek XL-FF6 to a slightly larger Hybrid Camper/Caravan with ensuite, internal kitchenette, external full hitchen, pop-top roof and twin bunks.

This is the summary and whittling down of my research so far: https://wiki.mills.io/s/1103bc9c-dd75-4a98-b64b-8dadc5b0e51f/doc/comparision-Ln03Moiibq

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• 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. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

Okay, here’s a thing I like about Rust: Returning things as Option and error handling. (Or the more complex Result, but it’s easier to explain with Option.)

fn mydiv(num: f64, denom: f64) -> Option<f64> {
    // (Let’s ignore precision issues for a second.)
    if denom == 0.0 {
        return None;
    } else {
        return Some(num / denom);
    }
}

fn main() {
    // Explicit, verbose version:
    let num: f64 = 123.0;
    let denom: f64 = 456.0;
    let wrapped_res = mydiv(num, denom);
    if wrapped_res.is_some() {
        println!("Unwrapped result: {}", wrapped_res.unwrap());
    }

    // Shorter version using "if let":
    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 456.0) {
        println!("Here’s a result: {}", res);
    }

    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 0.0) {
        println!("Huh, we divided by zero? This never happens. {}", res);
    }
}

You can’t divide by zero, so the function returns an “error” in that case. (Option isn’t really used for errors, IIUC, but the basic idea is the same for Result.)

Option is an enum. It can have the value Some or None. In the case of Some, you can attach additional data to the enum. In this case, we are attaching a floating point value.

The caller then has to decide: Is the value None or Some? Did the function succeed or not? If it is Some, the caller can do .unwrap() on this enum to get the inner value (the floating point value). If you do .unwrap() on a None value, the program will panic and die.

The if let version using destructuring is much shorter and, once you got used to it, actually quite nice.

Now the trick is that you must somehow handle these two cases. You must either call something like .unwrap() or do destructuring or something, otherwise you can’t access the attached value at all. As I understand it, it is impossible to just completely ignore error cases. And the compiler enforces it.

(In case of Result, the compiler would warn you if you ignore the return value entirely. So something like doing write() and then ignoring the return value would be caught as well.)

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m trying to call some libc functions (because the Rust stdlib does not have an equivalent for getpeername(), for example, so I don’t have a choice), so I have to do some FFI stuff and deal with raw pointers and all that, which is very gnarly in Rust – because you’re not supposed to do this. Things like that are trivial in C or even Assembler, but I have not yet understood what Rust does under the hood. How and when does it allocate or free memory … is the pointer that I get even still valid by the time I do the libc call? Stuff like that.

I hope that I eventually learn this over time … but I get slapped in the face at every step. It’s very frustrating and I’m always this 🤏 close to giving up (only to try again a year later).

Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess I could “just” use some 3rd party library for this. socket2 gets mentioned a lot in this context. But I don’t want to. I literally need one getpeername() call during the lifetime of my program, I don’t even do the socket(), bind(), listen(), accept() dance, I already have a fully functional file descriptor. Using a library for that is total overkill and I’d rather do it myself. (And look at the version number: 0.5.10. The library is 6 years old but they’re still saying: “Nah, we’re not 1.0 yet, we reserve the right to make breaking changes with every new release.” So many Rust libs are still unstable …)

… and I could go on and on and on … 🤣

fn sub(foo: &String) {
    println!("We got this string: [{}]", foo);
}

fn main() {
    // "Hello", 0x00, 0x00, "!"
    let buf: [u8; 8] = [0x48, 0x65, 0x6C, 0x6C, 0x6F, 0x00, 0x00, 0x21];

    // Create a string from the byte array above, interpret as UTF-8, ignore decoding errors.
    let lossy_unicode = String::from_utf8_lossy(&buf).to_string();

    sub(&lossy_unicode);
}

Create a string from a byte array, but the result isn’t a string, it’s a cow 🐮, so you need another to_string() to convert your “string” into a string.

• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#method.from_utf8_lossy
  
• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/borrow/enum.Cow.html
  

I still have a lot to learn.

(into_owned() instead of to_string() also works and makes more sense to me, it’s just that the compiler suggested to_string() first, which led to this funny example.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Rust is so different and, at the same time, so complex – it’s not far fetched to assume that I simply don’t understand what’s going on here. The docs appear to be clear, but alas … is it a bugs in the docs? Is it a lack of experience on my part? Who knows.

By the way, looks like there was a bit of a discussion regarding that name:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/120048

So I was using this function in Rust:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.display

Note the little 1.0.0 in the top right corner, which means that this function has been “stable since Rust version 1.0.0”. We’re at 1.87 now, so we’re good.

Then I compiled my program on OpenBSD with Rust 1.86, i.e. just one version behind, but well ahead of 1.0.0.

The compiler said that I was using an unstable library feature.

Turns out, that function internally uses this:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ffi/struct.OsStr.html#method.display

And that is only available since Rust 1.87.

How was I supposed to know this? 🤨🫩

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s difficult, you often don’t get what you’d expect. They also make heavy use of 3rd party libraries. IIUC, for random numbers, they refer to this library. I’ve read many times that the Rust stdlib is intentionally minimalistic (to make it easier to maintain and port and all that).

I’m struggling with this, using 3rd party libs for so many things isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ll probably make my own tiny little “standard library”. It’s silly, but I don’t see any other options. 🤷

Which one does it handle? Vim:tw=50: at the foot of doc or :set tw=78? ⌘ Read more

De-Abstraction and Conditional Escape Analysis
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The fastest Postgres inserts
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Fortran For C Programmers
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Documentation done right: A developer’s guide
Learn why and how you should write docs for your project with the Diátaxis framework.

The post Documentation done right: A developer’s guide appeared first on The GitHub Blog. ⌘ Read more

PostgreSQL 18 Beta 1 Released
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @quark@ferengi.one In 2014 one person created protocol ii. Later it forked in IDEC. Why i said this? Because it’s simple “federated” forum-like protocol where from your station fetch another every 5-10 minutes. Stations has topic-based channels like idec.talks, linux.16, haiku.os, zx.spectrum. In short it’s FIDO but.. more modern? Documentation: https://github.com/idec-net/new-docs (mostly Russian, but you can use translator, also protocol already translated to english)

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

Nobody writes emails by hand using RFC 5322 anymore, nor do we manually send them through telnet and SMTP commands. The days of crafting emails in raw format and dialing into servers are long gone. Modern email clients and services handle it all seamlessly in the background, making email easier than ever to send and receive—without needing to understand the protocols or formats behind it! #Email #SMTP #RFC #Automation

Another war story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
I recently stumbled on Jacob Voytko’s Google Docs bug story and it reminded me of the weirdest bug I ever chased.

It started with a user reporting their webcam was rotated by 90° — but only sometimes. This turned into a wild hunt across browsers, OS quirks, WebRTC, and even HTTP redirects.

Comments ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Reduce, Reuse… Refactor: Clearer Elixir with the Enum Module

“When an operation cannot be expressed by any of the functions in the Enum module, developers will most likely resort to reduce/3.”

From the docs for Enum.reduce/3

In many Elixir applications, I find Enum.reduce is used frequently. Enum.reduce can do anything, but that doesn’t mean it should. In many cases, other Enum functions are more readable, practically as fast, and easier … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I skimmed through the gamja docs and they say you need an “IRC WebSocket server” – no idea what that is. Does gamja not speak IRC directly but essentially “IRC over HTTP”? Curious. 🤔

7k words of docs on deploying a livejournal folk. you absolutely want to read 7 thousand words of me forcing dreamwidth into production shape in docker https://stash.4-walls.net/selfhostdw/

Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
Article URL: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378239

Points: 503

# Comments: 181 ⌘ Read more

IN MEMORIAM: doc. PhDr. Dušan Čaplovič, DrSc.
Pred sto rokmi, 5. marca 1925, zomrel v Kovačici evanjelický farár a senior Ján Čaplovič. O storočie, takmer v rovnaký deň, iba jeden deň neskôr, 6. marca 2025, vo veku 78 rokov zomrel jeho vnuk, doc. PhDr. Dušan Čaplovič, DrSc., významný historik, bývalý minister školstva, podpredseda vlády SR a čestný občan Kovačice, kde jeho dedo zanechal hlbokú stopu. ⌘ Read more

How to Upload Documents to ChatGPT
ChatGPT allows you to upload documents, which you can then describe, analyze, summarize, explain, or even get assistance with that particular document. ChatGPT works with just about any document type that you might be working with or come across in the world of tech and computers, including .pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, .xls, .xlsx, .csv, … Read More ⌘ Read more

The Firefox “Terms of Use” Backlash Threatens to Destroy What’s Left of Mozilla
Mozilla accidentally shares internal Google Doc with Lunduke (for one minute). ⌘ Read more

https://github.com/yshavit/mdq like jq but for Markdown: find specific elements in a md doc

@prologic@twtxt.net I believe @andros@twtxt.andros.dev is referring to the one on the original twtxt docs . I’ve been meaning to contribute to the discussion on the git but I’m just lazy 😅 amma throw in a little something in a minute Poke a bee hive and run away style 😆

@bender@twtxt.net oh yeah i remember that part of the docs lol! honestly yeah i think sqlite is fine for the number of users i have which is like, 5 including me, and active users is just… me, but if i were to have more active users i could always spin up a separate instance as jank as that is

asciinema is really cool. thought about self hosting my own upload site which they have docs for but i don’t need to host everything even if it’d be a fun project. the default/main site is fine enough for me when i won’t be uploading a whole lot.

@eapl.me@eapl.me A way to have a more bluesky’ish handles in twtxt could be to take inspiration from Bridgy Fed and say: If NICK = DOMAIN then only show @DOMAIN
So instead of @eapl.me@eapl.me it will just be @eapl.me

And it event seem that it will not break webfinger lookup: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=%40darch.dk (at least not for how I’ve implemented webfinger on my sever for a single user;)

Cyrix126 releases Gupaxx v1.5.4
Cyrix1261 has released Gupaxx 2 version 1.5.43 with lots of UI improvements and various bugfixes:

[UI] Use fixed size of fonts, do not resize them
[UI] Rework Top/Bottom bar
[UI] Rework widgets/fonts
[UI] Status: human friendly display of hashrate with right metrics
[Internal] Bundle: bump version of XMRig to 6.22.2
[Internal] deprecate support for mac os 12
[Docs] improve grammar and syntax of various doc files
[Fix] when n ... ⌘ [Read more](https://monero.observer/cyrix126-releases-gupaxx-v1.5.4/)

Can’t Open Microsoft Office Files in MacOS Sequoia? Fix Microsoft Word, Excel, Office File Associations
Some Mac users have noticed that Microsoft Office files and documents, whether that’s Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations, or otherwise, are not opening in the intended apps, or properly associating with the relevant Microsoft Office app, after updating their Mac to MacOS Sequoia. To make matters worse, some … ⌘ Read more

Using an AI Assistant to Read Tool Documentation
Explore how to use Docker and LLMs to streamline workflows for command-line tools to enhance the process of reading docs, troubleshooting errors, and running commands. ⌘ Read more

@quark@ferengi.one It looks like the part about traditional topics has been removed from that page. Here is an old version that mentions it: https://web.archive.org/web/20221211165458/https://dev.twtxt.net/doc/twtsubjectextension.html . Still, I don’t see any description of what is actually allowed between the parentheses. May be worth noting that twtxt.net is displaying the twts with the subject stripped, so some piece of code is recognizing it as a subject (or, at least, something to be removed).

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org based on Twt Subject Extension, your subject is invalid. You can have custom subjects, that is, not a valid hash, but you simply can’t put anything, and expect it to be treated as a TwtSubject, me thinks.

@mckinley@twtxt.net

HTTPS is supposed to do [verification] anyway.

TLS provides verification that nobody is tampering with or snooping on your connection to a server. It doesn’t, for example, verify that a file downloaded from server A is from the same entity as the one from server B.

I was confused by this response for a while, but now I think I understand what you’re getting at. You are pointing out that with signed feeds, I can verify the authenticity of a feed without accessing the original server, whereas with HTTPS I can’t verify a feed unless I download it myself from the origin server. Is that right?

I.e. if the HTTPS origin server is online and I don’t mind taking the time and bandwidth to contact it, then perhaps signed feeds offer no advantage, but if the origin server might not be online, or I want to download a big archive of lots of feeds at once without contacting each server individually, then I need signed feeds.

feed locations [being] URLs gives some flexibility

It does give flexibility, but perhaps we should have made them URIs instead for even more flexibility. Then, you could use a tag URI, urn:uuid:*, or a regular old URL if you wanted to. The spec seems to indicate that the url tag should be a working URL that clients can use to find a copy of the feed, optionally at multiple locations. I’m not very familiar with IP{F,N}S but if it ensures you own an identifier forever and that identifier points to a current copy of your feed, it could be a great way to fix it on an individual basis without breaking any specs :)

I’m also not very familiar with IPFS or IPNS.

I haven’t been following the other twts about signatures carefully. I just hope whatever you smart people come up with will be backwards-compatible so it still works if I’m too lazy to change how I publish my feed :-)

I just manually followed the steps at https://dev.twtxt.net/doc/twthashextension.html and got 6mdqxrq. I wonder what happened. Did @cuaxolo@sunshinegardens.org edit the twt in some subtle way after twtxt.net downloaded it? I couldn’t spot a diff, other than ‘ appearing as ’ on yarn.social, which I assume is a transformation done by twtxt.net.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, fetching the twt by hash from some service could be a good alternative, in case the twt I have does not @-mention the source. (Besides yarnd, maybe this should be part of the registry API? I don’t see fetch-by-hash in the registry API docs.)

Ignite Realtime Blog: Openfire 4.8.2 Release
Openfire 4.8.2 has landed!

This release addresses a number of issues in the real time collaboration server created by the Ignite Realtime Community that aim to reduce bugs and increase stability and performance.

Interested in getting started? You can [download installers of Openfire here](https://igniterealtime.org/downloads/#op … ⌘ Read more

Docker Documentation Gets an AI-Powered Assistant
Learn about the Docker Docs AI, a documentation assistant designed to provide instant, accurate answers directly from the Docker docs pages. ⌘ Read more

https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq Interesting point of view #systemd #elogind #chimeralinux

ProcessOne: ejabberd Docs now using MkDocs

Image

The ejabberd Docs website did just get a major rework: new content management system, reorganized navigation, improved markdown, and several improvements!

ejabberd started in November 2002 (see a timeline in the ejabberd turns 20 bl … ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: ejabberd Docs now using MkDocs
The ejabberd Docs website did just get a major rework: new content management system, reorganized navigation, improved markdown, and several improvements!

ejabberd started in November 2002 (see a timeline in the ejabberd turns 20 blog post). And the first documentation was published in January 2003, using LaTeX, see [Ejabberd Installation and Op … ⌘ Read more

Empower Your Development: Dive into Docker’s Comprehensive Learning Ecosystem
Find out about Docker’s multifaceted approach to developer education, including partnerships with platforms like Udemy and LinkedIn Learning, official docs and use-cases, and content created by Docker Captains and the developer community. ⌘ Read more

Thanks @prologic@twtxt.net, I also just manage to get my own version of webmentions working. Please have a read at Webmentions vs. Custom Mentions Spec for Twtxt/Yarn - HedgeDoc and User Lookup for Twtxt/Yarn - Webfinger or Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) - HedgeDoc for how it sorta works

Did another write up on #webfinger and DIDs for twtxt/yarn that you can read and edit/comment in: User lookup for twtxt/yarn - Webfinger or Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) - HedgeDoc

I’ve gathers my ideas about mentions for twtxt/yarn here: Webmentions vs. custom mentions spec for twtxt/yarn - HedgeDoc
You are welcome to edit and comment in the doc, so our ideas are not fragment into a bunch of treads

Ignite Realtime Blog: Openfire 4.8.1 Release
The Ignite Realtime Community is pleased to announce the release of Openfire 4.8.1. This release addresses a number of issues found with the major 4.8.0 release a few months back.

Interested in getting started? You can download installers of Openfire here. Our documentation contains an [upgrade guide](https://download.igniterealtime … ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Automatic schema update in ejabberd
ejabberd 23.10 has a new feature that is currently in beta testing:

Automatic relational schema creation and update.

Previously, if you were using ejabberd with an external relational database, you might have to manually apply some schema changes that come with new features when you upgrade to a new ejabberd release. ejabberd can now handle this schema upgrade automat … ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Automatic schema update in ejabberd
ejabberd 23.10 has a new feature that is currently in beta testing:

Automatic relational schema creation and update.

Previously, if you were using ejabberd with an external relational database, you might have to manually apply some schema changes that come with new features when you upgrade to a new ejabberd release. ejabberd can now handle this schema upgrade automat … ⌘ Read more