W O R D S https://garbados.github.io/my-blog/regarding-software.html

I love working with 3rd Party software. When you have an issue you get to put in a ticket and then wait weeks for a response.

This is a very hot take and also not a new one but here we go: the goal of a properly functioning software engineer is to obviate themselves, not by solving the customer’s specific problems but by blurring the line between using a computer and programming one to the point where users can solve their own problems.

Pet peeve: the 6+ news outlets that titled their coverage of OXU in 2014 as ‘Software project gets release after 54 years’ as though there wasn’t a release in 1999, another in 2007, one in 2014, and one in 2016 (and this is just the translit & just the stuff you can download now)

it’s free software, as in free will, aka not really free but you won’t notice

Penti Chorded Keyboard https://software-lab.de/penti.html

We shouldn’t let people get used to the idea that software fails - Rakhim.org https://rakhim.org/2018/07/software-shouldnt-fail

Software only becomes ‘enterprise grade’ if, when its behavior is described to an outsider flatly and precisely, the outsider assumes the description is some kind of elaborate joke.

The Shape of Code » Premium mediocrity is software engineering’s demographic http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2018/05/21/premium-mediocrity-is-software-engineerings-demographic/

When I say ‘luckily software has nothing to do with business’, what I mean is that software is uniquely positioned, compared to all other engineering, to be free of economies of scale: it is cheap to develop and has near zero cost of reproduction.

Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw

Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs – Embedded in Academia https://blog.regehr.org/archives/861

Software utopianism in a flawed universe – Rococo Modem Basilisk – Medium https://medium.com/@/software-utopianism-in-a-flawed-universe-20dd51cad195

RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing by Joe Duf… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k

Greg Young - The art of destroying software on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/108441214

As a software engineer, being ignorant of sociology & psychology is just as bad as being ignorant of cryptography. Treat toxic communities the way you would treat any other security vulnerability: as an emergency.

Social engineering is engineering. When you design software used by people, the community is not an externality – it’s shaped by your design, & therefore your responsibility.

AdBlock Adds Feature to Cache … https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/adblock-adds-feature-to-cache-popular-javascript-libraries/

The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

Dissecting Software Component‘s Reproductive System - 250bpm http://250bpm.com/blog:51

GitHub - s-macke/SAM: Software Automatic Mouth - Tiny Speech Synthesizer https://github.com/s-macke/SAM

Semi-autonomous software agents: A personal perspective. - Mondo 2000 http://www.mondo2000.com/2017/11/08/semi-autonomous-software-agents-personal-perspective/

These glasses trick facial recognition software into thinking you‘re someone else - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13507542/facial-recognition-glasses-trick-impersonate-fool

why call it software exploitation and not glitchcraft

After their deaths, the great translators of their times are scanned and distilled into software, so that they may be eternal ambassadors

Clocks for Software Engineers http://zipcpu.com/blog/2017/09/18/clocks-for-sw-engineers.html

Software is a Long Con – emptywheel https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/09/14/software-is-a-long-con/

GitHub - mr-mig/every-programmer-should-know: A collection of (mostly) technical things every software developer should know https://github.com/mr-mig/every-programmer-should-know

CCC | Software to capture votes in upcoming national election is insecure ⌘ https://ccc.de/en/updates/2017/pc-wahl

Boffin rediscovers 1960s attempt to write fiction with computers • The Register https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/29/ibm_1960s_story_writing_software/?mt=1504125155672

The jing-jang of hardware and software support ⌘ https://blog.cosmix.org/2017/08/14/the-jing-jang-of-hardware-and-software-support/

so basically, software forks are like blockchain forks but you get to doublespend 0days instead

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net Thanks for the pointer to heads. Didn’t know that tails uses nonfree software.

The “ant hill” model of software development: With enough bugs, surely there will emerge swarm intelligence

Haskell is the Dark Souls of Programming: http://deliberate-software.com/haskell-is-the-dark-souls-of-programming/

PhD thesis: A Reference Architecture for Distributed Software Deployment
Today Sander van\
 der Burg successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled A\
 Reference Architecture for Distributed Software\
 Deployment! It describes (among other things) [Disnix](https://github.com/s … ⌘ Read more

NixOS switched to systemd
NixOS has switched from Upstart to systemd!
Systemd brings many advantages such as better dependency
management, socket-based activation of services, per-service
logging, cgroup-based process management, and much more. (Read
the announcement.) ⌘ Read more

Hydra talk at Inria
Ludovic Courtès gave a talk on Hydra at Inria (which has
its own Hydra instance for building Inria software) entitled “Hydra:\
 continuous integration for demanding people”. ⌘ Read more

ISSRE paper on NixOS-based system testing
The paper “Automating System\
 Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der
Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at
the 21st IEEE International\
 Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010).
It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the
en … ⌘ Read more

NixOS talk at LSM
Ludovic Courtès gave a talk about Nix and NixOS at the Libre Software\
 Meeting
in Bordeaux, entitled “NixOS:\
 The Only Functional GNU/Linux Distribution” ( slides). ⌘ Read more

DisNix paper accepted at HotSWUp
The paper “Atomic Upgrading of Distributed Systems” (by Sander
van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra and Merijn de Jonge) has been
accepted for presentation at the First ACM Workshop on Hot\
Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp). A draft\
of the paper is available. It describes Sander’s master’s
thesis research on DisNix, an extension … ⌘ Read more

Linuxers for Obama

Linuxers for Obama – LinuxersForObama is a campaign for all Free and Open Source Software advocates to contribute to the Obama campaign. Sorry for the shorthand “LinuxForObama”, I know it should have been “FLOSSGNUX11BSDApacheMySQLForObama”, but I went for short and simple.

Hopefully team LinuxForObama can do some nice fund raising for Obama and we can settle once and for all the argument about which operat … ⌘ Read more

Jacquard grant proposal accepted!
The Jacquard\
program of
NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull
Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the
deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous
environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4
years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these
positions, please h … ⌘ Read more

SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter
This doesn’t surprise me. What surprises me is that they are still on business.

SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter — Yahoo! Finance

The SCO Group, Inc. (“SCO”) (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), a leading provider of UNIX™ software technology and mobile services, today announced that it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for … ⌘ Read more

Programmers != Antisocials
BBC NEWS: Business: Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

This isn’t true at all.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with cu … ⌘ Read more

Checking out http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Heavy Microsoft ads on Freshmeat
Freshmeat is, in their own words, “the first stop for Linux users hunting for the software they need for work or play.” and it also “offers a variety of original content on technical, political, and social aspects of software and programming, written by both Freshmeat readers and Free Software luminaries.”

I have been very surprised to see, more and more, Microsoft ads on Freshmeat. All over the place. Quite often. Fre … ⌘ Read more

You can’t do that!
Technology, Technology news, Times Online

“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us … ⌘ Read more

Service deployment paper accepted for SCM-12
The paper “Service Configuration Management” (accepted at the
12th\
 International Workshop on Software Configuration\
 Management) describes how we can rather easily deploy
“services” (e.g., complete webserver configurations such as our
Subversion server) through
Nix by treating the non-component parts (such as configur … ⌘ Read more

PGP Corporation Decadence
Recently PGP Corporation released their latest version of the PGP software created by Phil Zimmerman and made famous by millions of users around the world (me included). I wish I could say such latest release is great, but I can’t.

The new PGP Desktop 9.0 (or 9.0.1 beta as of this writting) come with a few new “features” and lacks of a few others that any old school PGP user might notice right away. It also comes with it fair amount of bugs and programming slopiness. The … ⌘ Read more