ebassi

ebassi, 4 days ago to random

Got to love early morning ChatGPT spam "answers" on Matrix channels

ebassi, 23 days ago to random

In retrospect, we should have figured out that Jia Tan was a plant from the fact that they showed up to do releases. In 20+ years of contributions to FLOSS projects I haven't found anybody willing to do the same.

ebassi, 23 days ago to GNOME

Finally added a page for the GTK inspector on the GNOME developers docs website: https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/tools/inspector.html

This way, I won't have to point people at the wiki any more.

#gtk #gnome #docs

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

When Netflix’s “Three Body Problem” slows down, and remembers that science fiction is about characters instead of plot receptacles and drama machines, it’s actually not that bad

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

This is the wrong week for showing up out of the blue in projects with low maintenance effort and telling people what to do with the project.

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

With Fedora 40 reaching beta, it's time to upgrade to GNOME 46…

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

After nearly a year of light maintenance, I’ve finally managed to spend some time cleaning up json-glib: mopped up the build system, added the copyright and licensing metadata, and did some spring cleaning of the internals…

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

Why on earth would you design a local IPC/RPC mechanism and use JSON, of all the stupid serialisation formats, as the payload.

JSON is terrible at anything at scale; it's wildly inefficient for constant time access, and the only reason it works at all on the Web is that you can count on an optimised JavaScript engine to paper over the format inefficiencies.

Seriously, folks: go look at how bad the Language Server Protocol is with large data sets.

ebassi, 1 month ago to GNOME

Happy GNOME 46 release day!

#gnome

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

Ah, yes: the day with 4 hours of work meetings is the perfect day for my ISP to shit the bed and leave me with no broadband

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

My day to day cooking vastly improved once I got these tools:

1. a Microplane; the zesting one is also perfect for quickly and efficiently grating garlic and ginger
2. a mandolin—just be careful and use cutting gloves or the handle
3. heat resistant silicon spatula and spoons; super easy to clean
4. the Japanese powder to solidify frying oil; this one is a complete game changer
5. digital thermometer; fundamental for meat and oil

ebassi, 1 month ago to random

Finally landed a bunch of changes in JSON-GLib that I've been working off and on for the past three months, mainly dealing with proper JSON conformance.

Had to undo a lot of generic/extensible code in the tokeniser I lifted out of GLib, in order to get to a decent state; I've also added a whole conformance test suite to ensure that we don't deviate (too much) from RFC8259.

Can't wait to see bugs getting filed because the parser got stricter.

ebassi, 2 months ago to random

On the one hand, it’s nice that people equate GNOME to something designed and built with a specific purpose; on the other hand, not everything you see is the result of a conscious decision: some times a bug is just a bug

ebassi, 2 months ago to random

I fucking hate the fact that I can't mute the sound made by GMail's chat notifications, and I have to mute the whole conversation. Can't even put my desktop in do-not-disturb mode, because Firefox doesn't know anything about that…

ebassi, 2 months ago to random

It was a Dune double bill at the IMAX kind of night

ebassi, 2 months ago to random

TIL that Jenkins switched its own internal XML files to version 1.1, a spec that was declared DOA pretty much on the day of its publication, 20 years ago.

This has the hilarious side effect of preventing validation of XML files generated by Jenkins from anything that parses XML that is also not Jenkins. Well, it's one way to get people not to poke at your state files, I'll give them that…

ebassi, 2 months ago to random

Oh, nice: the first SEO spam comment filed by an AI has hit the issue tracker of a project I watch on GNOME's GitLab instance

ebassi, 2 months ago to random

The real reason why design teams should document a decision process in a shared space, instead of documenting the final design, is that so they don't end up asking the exact same questions 5 years down the line.

If I have to document the reason why I wrote something the way I did into a commit log, designers can cope with writing down a text file with what they were thinking at the time.

ebassi, 2 months ago to random

Had to go to Milan for a couple of days for bureaucratic matters, and I was greeted by the worst air quality I’ve experienced in years. I immediately got hit with massive cold-like symptoms that made me worry I got a third round of COVID even if I masked on every public transport—but all tests were negative and I got slightly better when indoors.

It’s amazing just how better the London air quality is, compared to Milan’s.

ebassi, 3 months ago to random

A possibly helpful note to people who want to contribute to free and open source software, and go to the extent of submitting code for review: write down what problem you're experiencing, and why you chose the solution you implemented. We can see what you're doing, but if we're missing all the context then your contribution is just throwing spaghetti to the wall, and doesn't have a chance in hell of being integrated.

ebassi, 3 months ago to random

Took the tram to the ULB, dropped by the GNOME booth at FOSDEM (fully masked), chatted for a bit with a few folks around it, then went out for lunch, and now I’m back to the Airbnb we use for the GTK hackfest. Total FOSDEM venue time: 15 minutes, give or take. I’d say that’s enough for the next few years.

ebassi, 3 months ago to GNOME

Day 2 of the 2024 GTK hackfest—today we have a lot of visitors, so the place has gotten lively with discussions and work on the whole stack

#gtk #hackfest #gnome

Matthias and Robert in the kitchen, talking about zero copy buffer handovers

ebassi, 3 months ago to random

Ah yes, 45 minutes before leaving the house for a four day trip is the absolute best time to find out that the laptop you’re supposed to take with you does not work unless plugged in the mains, and the other laptop is still running an OS that hasn’t been updated in a year and a half

ebassi, 3 months ago to random

It's 2023 and GMail's web UI still doesn't have a complete dark theme

ebassi, 3 months ago to random

Next time somebody shows up with an Alpine CI workflow for one of my projects, the precondition for merging it will be that they the author of the pull request also gets to maintain the thing