We.Love.Privacy.Club

Erlang Solutions: MongooseIM 6.4: Simplified and Unified
MongooseIM is a scalable and efficient instant messaging server. With the latest release 6.4.0, it has become more powerful yet easier to use and maintain. Thanks to the internal unification of listeners and connection handling, the configuration is easier and more intuitive, while numerous new options are supported.

New features include support for TLS 1.3 with optional channel binding for improved security, single round-trip authent … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

thecanine

twtxt.net

Wed, Aug 20 7:54AM (18w ago)

After around 3 years, I managed to make my “smallest recognizable canine”, even smaller. So here’s the all new, smallest recognizable canine 2.0:

⤋ Read More

cats

feeds.twtxt.net

Sun, Aug 10 10:55AM (19w ago)

Regarding Mourning Posts 2.0 ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Fri, Aug 8 9:20PM (19w ago)

What’s Missing from “Retro”: gopher://midnight.pub/0/posts/2679

⤋ Read More

thecanine

twtxt.net

Wed, Jul 30 4:00AM (21w ago)

My website has 0 depreciated tags now and all identical IDs, were merged into a single class. This also improves, how the text on top of the page, is aligned on mobile.

⤋ Read More

lyse

lyse.isobeef.org

Fri, Jul 25 5:00AM (21w ago)

↳ In-reply-to » I was drafting support for showing “application icons” 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. That’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 don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’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 doesn’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 (don’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

⤋ Read More

lyse

lyse.isobeef.org

Wed, Jul 23 5:00AM (22w 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.

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Wed, Jun 25 12:02AM (26w ago)

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.

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Sat, Jun 21 6:21PM (26w ago)

Saw this on Mastodon:

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

18 rules of Software Engineering

You will regret complexity when on-call

Stop falling in love with your own code

Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs

Everyone hates code they didn’t write

Don’t use unnecessary dependencies

Coding standards prevent arguments

Write meaningful commit messages

Don’t ever stop learning new things

Code reviews spread knowledge

Always build for maintainability

Ask for help when you’re stuck

Fix root causes, not symptoms

Software is never completed

Estimates are not promises

Ship early, iterate often

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 – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Sat, Jun 21 5:44PM (26w ago)

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.)

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Sat, Jun 21 3:41AM (26w ago)

↳ In-reply-to » Just discovered how easy it is to recall my last arg in shell and my brain went 🤯 How come I've never learned about this before!? I wonder how many other QOL shortcuts I'm missing on 🥲

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I use Alt+. all the time, it’s great. 👌

FWIW, another thing I often use is !! to recall the entire previous command line:

$ find -iname '*foo*'
./This is a foo file.txt

$ cat "$(!!)"
cat "$(find -iname '*foo*')"
This is just a test.

Yep!

Or:

$ ls -al subdir
ls: cannot open directory 'subdir': Permission denied

$ sudo !!
sudo ls -al subdir
total 0
drwx------ 2 root root  60 Jun 20 19:39 .
drwx------ 7 jess jess 360 Jun 20 19:39 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   0 Jun 20 19:39 nothing-to-see

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Thu, Jun 19 3:05AM (26w ago)

↳ In-reply-to » Fuck me sideways, Rust is so hard. Will we ever be friends?

@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 … 🤣

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Tue, Jun 17 4:28AM (27w ago)

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

⤋ Read More

movq

www.uninformativ.de

Sun, Jun 15 3:41PM (27w ago)

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? 🤨🫩

⤋ Read More

prologic

twtxt.net

Sun, Jun 15 1:35AM (27w ago)

Hmmm 🧐 Not what I thought was going on… No bug…

 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="updating feeds for 8 users"
 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="skipping 0 inactive users"
 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="skipping 0 subscribed feeds"
 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="updating 80 sources (stale feeds)"

⤋ Read More

Searching We.Love.Privacy.Club