Lunduke’s BSD Thoughts (as BSD Week ends)
Listen now (24 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - Mar 1, 2023 ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Can’t Live with It, Can’t Live without It
I’d like to share some thoughts about Elixir’s with keyword.  with is a wonderful tool, but in my experience it is a bit overused.  To use it best, we must understand how it behaves in all cases.  So, let’s briefly cover the basics, starting with pipes in Elixir.

But like all tools, you should think about when it is best used…

Pipes are at their best when you expect your function … ⌘ Read more

Prosodical Thoughts: Prosody 0.12.3 released
We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch.

This is a bugfix release for our stable 0.12 series. Most notably, it fixes a
regression for SQL users introduced in 0.12.2, and a separate long-standing
compatibility issue with archive stores on certain MySQL/MariaDB versions.

It also fixes an issue with websockets discovered by the Jitsi team, some
issues with our internal HTTP client API, and we’ve improved the accuracy of
‘prosodyctl check dns’ in … ⌘ Read more

** Accessibility and the product person **
This post is a slightly modified version of a talk I presented to the product practice at my work. It presents a few ways that product designers and managers can help to move accessibility forward. It is a little bit different than what I normally share, here, but, I thought it may be interesting to some folks.

[![Picture of a slide with the title “Why though?” It also includes a quote from Kat Holmes’ book Mismatch. The quote reads: “There are many challeng … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Office and OneDrive for free?
I’m a bit of an indecisive (and frugal) person sometimes. ⌘ Read more

** Accessibility updates **
I’m feeling pretty chuffed! Last week I wrote about my intention to make this website more accessible. My motivations were many-fold, but, primarily, mostly shame. I’ve worked as an accessibility specialist in the past, and now spend a bunch of my days at work looking for ways to make public infrastructure online more accessible. It seemed fitting to at least make sure the little bit I contribute to the web here is also accessible.

I thought it was going t … ⌘ Read more

** week notes **
It got a wee bit cold here in Maine this weekend. It was thankfully uneventful for us. We hung around inside and watched it get real cold outside. Our home faired pretty well, too. Honestly pleasantly surprised about that!

We picked this weekend to go all in on potty training — pantsless days, treats, rousing bouts of encouragement sung, and a lot of spot cleaning. Fueled by hubris, I thought we had this potty trainin … ⌘ Read more

🎬🚄💶
Since I have YouTube Premium and log in to YouTube, YouTube is suggesting videos that seem to fit my interests a lot more (and it’s a little addictive again, but not as bad as when I was still studying). ⌘ Read more

My code is still a mess, but I’m learning
I taught myself Go (and programming in general) by learning by doing. I learned by making a lot of mistakes and after noticing them, doing the necessary research. My Go code is probably a big mess, but it’s so satisfying, after not touching some code for a while, to do a major rewrite and improve the code with everything I’ve learned since the last time. ⌘ Read more

H3: Instead of C3
[Updated with correct Gemlog link.]

A version of this was posted on on 2023-01-06 but I thought it might
also fit here. Go to my gemlog for somewhat more personal takes and
see what I publish first. IPv6 only!

gemini://gem.hack.org/mc/log/

As long-time readers know I have participated in the Chaos
Communication Congress (C3) in Germany every year since 2008.

Since C3 was cancelled this year I thought I’d arrange a very small
conference of my own. I would at least try to gather some friends and
acquaintances … ⌘ Read more

H3: Instead of C3
A version of this was posted on on 2023-01-06 but I thought it might
also fit here. Go to my gemlog for somewhat more personal takes and
see what I publish first. IPv6 only!

gemini://gem.hack.org/log/

As long-time readers know I have participated in the Chaos
Communication Congress (C3) in Germany every year since 2008.

Since C3 was cancelled this year I thought I’d arrange a very small
conference of my own. I would at least try to gather some friends and
acquaintances in chat and video conference and watch t … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net That was exactly my thought at first too. but what do we put as the rel for salty account? since it is decentralized we dont have a set URL for machines to key off. so for example take the standard response from okta:

# http GET https://example.okta.com/.well-known/webfinger  resource==acct:bob
{
    "links": [
        {
            "href": "https://example.okta.com/sso/idps/OKTA?login_hint=bob#",
            "properties": {
                "okta:idp:type": "OKTA"
            },
            "rel": "http://openid.net/specs/connect/1.0/issuer",
            "titles": {
                "und": "example"
            }
        }
    ],
    "subject": "acct:bob"
}

It gives one link that follows the OpenID login. So the details are specific to the subject acct:bob.

Mastodons response:

{
  "subject": "acct:xuu@chaos.social",
  "aliases": [
    "https://chaos.social/@xuu",
    "https://chaos.social/users/xuu"
  ],
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://chaos.social/@xuu"
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://chaos.social/users/xuu"
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe"
    }
  ]
}

it supplies a profile page and a self which are both specific to that account.

Trying to wrap my head around webfinger..

my first thoughts about it were that a subject of acct:me@sour.is would have a listing of rel’s for the different accounts that are related to me (ie. yarn, salty, twitter, mastodon, etc…)

but maybe my thinking is at the wrong level.. that each of those accounts would be on a subject level and the rels are describing different aspects of that account. so i would have salty:acct:xuu@sour.is, twitter:acct:xuu, mastodon:acct:xuu@chaos.social, yarn:acct:xuu@ev.sour.is and then i could have a main acct:me@sour.is that links them together as aliases.

I found okta will do something similar with its accounts to show as okta:acct:user@domain so maybe I am on to something?

Been using a ThinkPad T540 recently. Can’t stand the TrackPoint with fake buttons. Who thought this was a good idea? I hope they were fired.

My first Freeletics week
My first Freeletics week is complete. And I got a badge for the first “perfect week”. I hope this gamification (levels and badges for perfect weeks, perfect week streaks, training session milestones etc.) will make me pull through. My girl friend also joined me and started using Freeletics. 🤓 ⌘ Read more

Huh. I thought I had that one. Must be an unteste regression. Will add it to the list!

** I read some books in 2022, and have some thoughts about computer science writing **
At the start of this year I set out to revive my long dead reading habit. After having kids it fell by the wayside. I’ve read 41 books so far this year. Mostly a mix of science fiction and nonfiction computer science books. Here’s the complete list of everything I’ve read. I’ve got mixed feelings about keeping track and sharing cou … ⌘ Read more

Bitwarden Unified
Bitwarden (my favorite and recommended password manager) is offering a “new deployment option”. This new option combines all microservices into a single Docker container and doesn’t require 11 different containers anymore. And it supports PostgreSQL and MariaDB in addition to MS SQL. ⌘ Read more

** Thoughts on accessibility in smol computing **
What follows is my attempt to spark a conversation in a few converging, but separate communities I lurk in.

I’ve already had a bunch of amazing conversations around this topic with a lot of people. Those conversations helped to shape what follows. Thanks to everyone who was willing to think this stuff through with me.

Before I get into it I want to say at the top this isn’t meant as an accusation against anyone in these communities, nor the goals of t … ⌘ Read more

Should I sell my PC?
I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with my desktop computer (ASRock Deskmini A300), which I don’t really use anymore since I got my new laptop. ⌘ Read more

Prosodical Thoughts: Prosody 0.12.2 released
We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch.

This is a regularly delayed release containing a number of fixes for
issues that we have come across since the last release of the 0.12
series.

A summary of changes in this release:

• util.stanza: Allow U+7F when constructing stazas
  
• net.unbound: Preserve built-in defaults and Prosodys settings for luaunbound (fixes#1763: luaunbound not read … ⌘ Read more

** December adventure **
Over the past couple years I’ve done the advent of code to varying degrees. I thought I was going to do it again this year but decided to try something different. I’ve been calling what came together a“ December Adventure.”

It isn’t anything fancy; throughout December I aim to write a little bit of code everyday. So far I’ve written a bit of apl, bash, elisp, explored a bunch of flavors of scheme, and star … ⌘ Read more

GPT-3 is crazy 🤯
Do you want to read why Go is a great programming language? ⌘ Read more

GPT-3 is crazy 🤯
Do you want to read why Go is a great programming language? ⌘ Read more

Prosodical Thoughts: Bringing FASTer authentication to Prosody and XMPP
As our work continues on modernizing XMPP authentication,
we have some more new milestones to share with you. Until now our work has
mostly been focused on internal Prosody improvements, such as the new roles\
and permissions framework. Now we are starting to extend our
work to the actual client-to-server protocol in XMPP.

Prosody and [Snikket](https://snik … ⌘ Read more

@movq@uninformativ.de yeah.. i rewrote it a few times because i thought there was something breaking.. but was mistaken
though now i am seeing a weird cache corruption.. that seems to come and go.

Moving to another city
As I’ve probably written many times before (have I?), I’m currently moving with my girlfriend to her university town. I will keep my old apartment as a second home. But it’s still my first move to another city and I’m just realizing it. ⌘ Read more

**RT by @mind_booster: Who’d a thought. Golly gosh. Apple “privacy is a fundamental human right” .. but ….

“Apple Is Tracking You Even When Its Own Privacy Settings Say It’s Not, New Research Says”
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-when-off-app-store-1849757558**
Who’d a thought. Golly gosh. Apple “privacy is a fundamental human right” .. but ….

“Apple Is Tracking You Even When Its Own Privacy Settings Say It’s Not, New Research Says”

[gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-ana…](https://gizm … ⌘ Read more

Königsberg
⌘ Read more

Königsberg
⌘ Read more

Because I used Prometheus and Grafana at work, I also tried them at home and I must say, monitoring isn’t as boring as I always thought. Next up Kubernetes? 😅 ⌘ Read more

I was just reminded of this interpreter for an APL/J-like language by Arthur Whitney, the absolute weirdest bit of C code I’ve actually gotten something out of, and thought I’d share: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

After all, debugging is still fun!
One reason I use an Android smartphone is that there are apps like Indigenous (a MicroPub-compatible app for posting from your phone to a MicroPub-compatible blog). And even if the app ever disappears from the store, there’s still the option to manually install the app. And if you need to, you can also develop your own apps without having to invest nearly $100 a year. ⌘ Read more

Prosodical Thoughts: Mutation Testing in Prosody
This is a post about a new automated testing technique we have recently
adopted to help us during our daily development work on Prosody. It’s probably
most interesting to developers, but anyone technically-inclined should be able
to follow along!

If you’re unfamiliar with our project, it’s an open-source real-time messaging
server, built around the XMPP protocol. It’s used by many organizations and
self-hosting hobbyists, and also powers applications such as [Snikke … ⌘ Read more

First work day in my new job
My first day at my new job is over, and it went quite well despite the lack of sleep. Super nice colleagues and I am already full in the training. ⌘ Read more

Why can’t I sleep when I’m excited? And why am I not excited during the day, but then my thoughts are circling at night? Well at least I slept well yesterday. Maybe that helps to get through the day somehow after only 3 or 4 hours of sleep. ⌘ Read more

Hi, I am playing with making an event sourcing database. Its super alpha but I thought I would share since others are talking about databases and such.

It’s super basic. Using tidwall/wal as the disk backing. The first use case I am playing with is an implementation of msgbus. I can post events to it and read them back in reverse order.

I plan to expand it to handle other event sourcing type things like aggregates and projections.

Find it here: sour-is/ev

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The Circle
Some years ago, I started reading the novel “The Circle” by Dave Eggers. I never finished reading it, but today I watched the movie. It has an important message about privacy, transparency and surveillance and shows that there’s a thin line in-between those. I can definitely recommend watching it, although I sometimes wasn’t impressed by the acting. ⌘ Read more

‘Based’ Paganism vs. Christianity
I’ve been meaning to write about Paganism recently. I will frame it as a response to an email I received within the past day or so:

Hey Luke,

First off, I would like to thank you for all your efforts in making everything
you know accessible to everyone. You have exposed me to some of the most
thought-provoking people on the internet and Varg is one of them. I was
wondering if you can write an article or make a video on what you think about
Varg’s Paganism in r … ⌘ Read more

just thought to myself “hopefully a bigger pandemic hits, that sounds like it’ll delay ai capabilities progres”, which, no,,,

@prologic@twtxt.net Haha, of course, no worries! :-) Yup, I thought to try Go for this web application this time. REST API and web UI would be both needed in my opinion. I have at least two mates who would need a UI instead of a programmer-friendly interface. :-D

It’s far from complete, but I started writing something down: https://git.isobeef.org/lyse/kraftwerk2

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, for some reason I always thought that WeeChat was a graphical client. I will try out WeeChat then, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Aha, I never heard of PipeWire. Good thing you explained the context to @prologic@twtxt.net, I actually thought you’re quoting a real jackass phrase. :-D

@prologic@twtxt.net Back in the days in an R&D project we ran into something similar (or the same? – didn’t read the article). I don’t remember the details anymore, but each containerized JVM thought, that it could use up the whole hardware cluster system resources and didn’t obey the limits set in the container. And then of course it got killed.

The hardest technical solutions are right in front of your face.
Nassim Taleb had this old anecdote of the sheer absurdity that while the suitcase and other bags had existed for lifetimes, it was only in the 1990’s that people had the idea to put wheels on the things so they didn’t have to haul them around airports all day with their strength.

It reminds you of the fact that while children in the Incan Empire did indeed have some toys with wheels, apparently no one thought to use the wheel to make a simple … ⌘ Read more

the right level for solving the hard problem of consciousness is within existing science/within philosophy/within meta- or pre-philosophy/needs a fully new paradigm of thought

Yesterday, we had a heavy thunderstorm in the evening. At first it wasn’t too bad, just thunder in the distance and then a few drops of rain for at most five minutes. That was it. Alright, I thought, it’s over, let me call a mate and walk to the dairy farm. The heavy clouds looked awesome, a bit threatening but mostly harmless and just beautiful. We decided on a small detour to the home made ice cream vending machine and got ourselves some expensive, but very yummy pineapple/mint, yoghurt and raspberry/basil tubs. Mint was super strong, had to eat three spoons of some other flavors to actually taste it. A few spoons in and then the thunder rolled in from nowhere. So we quickly headed for the dairy farm while eating our ice creams. Half way there the sky floodgates opened and we took cover under a tree at the local playground. A minute later we decided to climb up the slide tower, because it had a proper roof. A tiny bit of hail cam down, but nothing serious.

About 15-20 minutes the rain stopped and the thunder and lighning rolled past. So we continued our journey and I finally filled my two one liter bottles successfully. Every now and then it drizzled a little bit through the forest. We reached our homes and a couple minutes later rain hit again. Thunder and lighning went crazy. The sky lit up every few seconds and this continued through half of the night.

Right after I hung up to meet my mate, another mate called and reported a few villages north of us they experienced hail sized a bit under golf balls. But he luckily managed to get the car in the underground carpark in time.

Today, it rained the whole morning. This was great since the temperatures stayed below 20°C, so my walk was a real joy. It’s going to get close to 30°C tomorrow, though, gnarf, örks, bwäh. :-(

W3C announces Web 3.11 “Web for Workgroups”
“The original code name ‘Everything is an NFT now’ didn’t focus test as well as we thought.” ⌘ Read more

Random thought: I think Freddie Mercury looked better with short hair than with long hair.

How old are our earliest human ancestors? A million years older than we thought, study finds
Discovery could alter our understanding of hominid history, which is ‘more complex than linear evolution’, says scientist. ⌘ Read more