Michael J. Gratton @mjog@octodon.social

Loving this special secret GitHub profile feature…

#GitHub

I’ve just created an official fediverse account for Geary announcements: @geary

Feel free to follow that if you're just looking for Geary news and not my cool links and commentary. ;)

#Geary

Going to just leave this here, because frankly, everyone deserves to see this lovely bike.

#Velo #SteelIsReal

Passé: Never look into the private lives of your favourite bands lest they turn out to be dicks

Arrivée: Never subscribe to the mailing lists of your favourite softwares lest the developers turn out to be dicks

Ah a new WebKitGTK release, another chance to play everyone's favourite high-stakes guessing game "will the web process crash with gstreamer1.0-vaapi installed?"

Followed of course by everyone's favourite parlour game "how to debug a web process crash".

;)

Tech people are the problem with the Internet:

“By and large, technically skilled hackers wrapped themselves in the glow of their terminals the way politicians wrap themselves up in their country’s flags. They mostly ignored the forces of industrialization re-centralizing the Internet and turning it into massive digital strip malls like Facebook.”

— The Internet was always anarchist, so anarchists must learn to become responsible for operating it https://c4ss.org/content/53593

This is pretty funny coming from the guy who re-invented NIH syndrome.

Nothing like sitting down in the evening after a hard day's work and cosying up next to your emacs terminal to edit a diff by hand that fixes someone's non-standard Makefile so your ci can pass…

A story about colonialism and the Domain Name System:

> Diego Garcia is a case study in the ways in which secret regimes of surveillance and rendition distort geographical space. Its history is one of secret agreements and secret abuses, where the deliberate obscuration of information leads directly to the obscuration of people, and to the violence done to them.

— .io British Indian Ocean Territory http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io

#DNS #Colonialism

People using Emacs were filing for buffer bankruptcy *long* before people were filing for web browser tab bankruptcy.

#OldManYellsAtClouds

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Shruggie, aside from being the unofficial mascot for us gen-x'ers, is also an excellent litmus test for how well an app's or web site's input parsing/escaping/sanitisation code works.

Try searching for it and see how many botched jobs come up in the search results.

Scored my first CVE! https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-24661 🤘🤔🤘

Surely the only reason to learn C these days is to port existing C code to Rust?

Lots of codespell related fixes landing in GNOME lately, maybe because of Builder support for it landing?

Shame it doesn't do semantic analysis, would help reduce false positives like `uint` → `unit`

If a project is is using a source revision control system, puts out and archives previous tarballs per-release, what's the point of maintaining NEWS/ChangeLog/AppStream-releases that goes all the way back to the inception of the project? Why not just start with a new version for (say) each major revision?

GNOME's approach in particular of having per-release NEWS files on download.gnome.org makes it trivial to browse changes in different versions.

Python's ElementTree is the kind of library you can hold up and point at to demonstrate how much it sucks to manipulate XML; not because manipulating XML sucks, but because ElementTree's approach sucks.

It's literally a strawman argument, embodied in API form.