@underlap@fosstodon.org
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

underlap

@underlap@fosstodon.org

Husband, father, grandfather, follower of Jesus, but very much a work in progress.

Retired software developer, visiting lecturer, IETF editor. Likes repairability. BTW I use arch.

Hobbies: reading, blogging, running, sailing.

Delighted to live in Winchester, UK. Involved in a local church.

Banner: Derwent Water
Profile picture: Dorset coast

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

rjomara, to Blog
@rjomara@mastodon.social avatar

Spent the day trying to come up with a draft of the digital garden setup. It's been a tough one, because I'm not quite able to get to the point I’d like it to be.

But I'm resigned to making something to start with. Something I can improve when my skills and tools allow. So I'll keep plugging away at it.

https://microblog.rjomara.com/2024/05/09/playing-in-the.html

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@henrikjernevad @rjomara I've played with Logseq as an alternative to Obsidian. (Unfortunately, I can't find the resource requirements of either Logseq or Obsidian to know how big a VPS they'd need.)

underlap, to random
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

No, it's not Signal or WhatsApp. It's EncroChat whose encryption has apparently been cracked by French police. Not sure whether this is an impressive technical feat or an example of sloppy encryption algorithms. I suspect the latter since this is in the news.

Police and NCA infiltrate encrypted communication platform in UK’s biggest ever law enforcement operation
https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/police-and-nca-infiltrate-encrypted-communication-platform-in-uks-biggest-ever-law-enforcement-operation

ben, to ai
@ben@werd.social avatar

"I’m happy to use LLMs for all sorts of purposes, but I’m not going to use them to produce slop. I attach my name and stake my credibility on the things that I publish." https://werd.io/view/663d04995988d73dfc051f32

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@ben I adopted the term "slop" in the AI policy section of my /about page, thanks @simon!

https://underlap.org/about

jamescooke, to random
@jamescooke@fosstodon.org avatar

Definitely feeling like I'm doing a lot of "glue work" at the moment.

https://noidea.dog/glue

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@jamescooke Interesting article, if rather verbose. Certainly a good idea not to paint yourself into a corner when it comes to software career decisions.

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

TFW you write some semi-complicated code and then the unit test is pretty long and when it works the first time you run it you go and put print statements in the test to convince yourself it ran.

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@blikkie @timbray Making a test fail by changing the assertion only proves the test runs. I think it's better to change the code under test to make the test fail. That proves the test is testing something valuable.

underlap, to random
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

To maximise the interesting signal to noise ratio on my Mastodon home timeline, I intend to unfollow some accounts, or at least add filters.

I think the best approach to finding a community is to spread the net wide early on and then tighten it later.

My goal is to spend reducing amounts of time checking my home timeline.

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

Culled 14% of the accounts I was following, plus hid some boosts. Please don't take it personally if I unfollowed you.

underlap, to random
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

Currently getting my head round webfinger, webmention, indielogin, and the like: a mix of standards, experiments, and some decent results.

When does it make sense to use webfinger link relations vs link tags with rel(ationship) attributes in the <head> section of a web page? Are these equivalent features that just happen to have grown up in parallel or is there some rationale delineating the two?

Any clarifying articles greatly appreciated, as are boosts.

ellie, to random
@ellie@hachyderm.io avatar

I now block several known LLM crawlers from my site

https://ellie.wtf/notes/blocking-ai-crawlers

If you'd like to do the same, feel free to take my robots.txt

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@eamon @ellie A community robots.txt is maintained here: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt @cory

wader, to random
@wader@fosstodon.org avatar

Yesterday I read the recently published JSONPath RFC (RFC9535) and listening to an interview with one of the creators of SQL https://www.datacamp.com/podcast/50-years-of-sql-with-don-chamberlin and worst of all i poked around in sqlite code to figure out how the scheme table works...guess I just have to accept that I'm a query language nerd.

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@wader These posts relating to RFC 9535 may interest you: https://underlap.org/tag:IETF

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@wader Great! Do you know about the Compliance Test Suite? https://github.com/jsonpath-standard/jsonpath-compliance-test-suite

lulu_powerful, to random
@lulu_powerful@fosstodon.org avatar

I recently worked with someone with 10 years' experience in who thinks dependency management doesn't matter. He didn't even think it was worthwhile to just ensure we were all using the same versions of things.

I don't get it. It took me mere months to break an R script by carelessly updating packages - how did this guy make it to a decade with no mishaps?

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@lulu_powerful Are mishaps always obvious?

underlap, (edited ) to random
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

Just set up webfinger so "AT mastodon AT underlap.org" is an alias for my mastodon account on fosstodon.org. (I can't post the actual account because mastodon replaces it with the account it refers to!)

Thanks to https://guide.toot.as/guide/use-your-own-domain/ and https://stolley.dev/posted/getting-webfinger-to-play-nicely-on-nginx/

underlap, (edited )
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

Using webfinger also lets me declare my preferred profile page and avatar image file.

I wonder if there's a link relation type for my code hosting site.

What else would be good to include?

I should also investigate RFCs 7033 and 8288 further.

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@henrikjernevad I can't post as that alias at all, AFAIK. The webfinger resolution is early/immediate. But at least I can make my blog's contact page independent of a particular Mastodon server.

underlap, to random
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

"The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists." https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/ via https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/04/the-internet-is-in-decline-it-needs-rewilding

dalelane, to random
@dalelane@mastodon.org.uk avatar

Happy Birthday to me! 🥳

https://www.webtoons.com/en/comedy/safely-endangered/ep-459-upgrade/viewer?title_no=352&episode_no=459

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@dalelane Happy birthday!

ben, to random
@ben@werd.social avatar

About to launch a pretty fun iteration for shareopenly.org. If you're looking for a button to help readers of your site more easily share your content to today's social media sites (including Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, microblog, etc), what are your must-haves?

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@ben Include the option of copying the link to the clipboard, to cover cases not yet coded by the button. I like the way the bbc.co.uk share button does it, e.g. produces an unadulterated link (without ?CMP= or such like).

underlap, to random
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

After a record 7.5 hour drive, my wife and I arrived in the Lake District, which is one of our favourite places, for a long weekend. It's also one of the wetter places in England, but hopefully we'll get some walking in.

jtonline, to random
@jtonline@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Celebrating.

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@jtonline Congratulations!

cory, to SmallWeb
@cory@social.lol avatar

I'm super grateful to have been featured in Manuel Moreale's People and Blogs. Give it a read if you feel so inclined https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-cory-dransfeldt #IndieWeb #SmallWeb

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@cory Great to hear you are involved in https://www.underdogdevs.org/

harrymccracken, to random
@harrymccracken@mastodon.social avatar

I forgot to celebrate the 60th anniversary of BASIC yesterday. But in 2014, I tried to pull out all the stops in my 50th anniversary story. https://time.com/69316/basic/

underlap, (edited )
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@harrymccracken BASIC was my first programming language. We wrote programs on paper in maths lessons at school, our teacher typed them into a computer at the local university (correcting any obvious syntax errors), ran them, printed the output, and brought the results back to the next lesson.

I became a competent programmer in due course, contrary to Dijkstra's critique of the language.

jhpratt, to rust
@jhpratt@mastodon.social avatar

In , how can I leverage the type system to enforce that one object originates from another? Even requiring the lifetime be exact ('a: 'b and 'b: 'a) wouldn't work.

Basically, I have struct Bytes&lt;'a&gt;(&amp;'a [u8]); and want to prevent someone from creating an arbitrary value that can be swapped in for the correct one. Yet at the same time it is essential that arbitrary values can be created.

Basically I'm trying to enforce my own version of provenance…

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@jhpratt Yes, please write it up. Always good to have clear explanations of this kind of tricky area.

I look after LBORB, so if your write-up is really good, I could include it. https://lborb.github.io/book/

Please note some of the books deal with lifetimes, e.g. https://tfpk.github.io/lifetimekata/ and https://github.com/pretzelhammer/rust-blog/blob/master/posts/common-rust-lifetime-misconceptions.md

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@jhpratt Intriguing.

clobrano, to random
@clobrano@fosstodon.org avatar

How does anybody get good in writing software design docs? The more I try, the less I feel confident 🙄

underlap,
@underlap@fosstodon.org avatar

@clobrano @henrikjernevad Interesting. That kind of design document is geared towards planning. The other main kind is geared towards describing the (intended) state of the system you are building. The second type gives you an opportunity to think through the options for how to structure the code before you get too invested in a particular piece of code.

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