@alcinnz@floss.social
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

alcinnz

@alcinnz@floss.social

A browser developer posting mostly about how free software projects work, and occasionally about climate change.

Though I do enjoy german board games given an opponent.

Pronouns: he/him

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alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Now I'm going though my previous writing on my hypothetical internet-communicator & adjusting it to pretend like I had the "FPMA" coprocessor in there from the beginning...

Also for the sake of consistency I wrote that the Input Preprocessor and include a CRC circuit to be used by parsers for common fileformats & wire protocols.

And I've refined my description of the "Arithmetic Core" to better suit the programs I'd run in it.

1/2

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Primarily I extended my description of FLAGS register in this hypothetical rudimentary 16bit RISC machine, adding bits for:

  • Indicating when the processed datastream is ending.
  • Enable a different memory architecture I described elsewhere for LZ compression
  • Enable autoincrementing ADDR register to simplify code processing data in RAM.

Also I refined my description of pausing programs, running trivial tasks, & operating the "privileged mode" to access entropy, clock, etc.

2/2Fin!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Redrafted my recent-ish OpenSSL threads, that was quick! Honestly I put less work into these.

Now to figure out where I'm putting this text on my site...

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Since its relevant to a discussion I just had...

Passkeys: A Shattered Dream - William Brown "Firstyear's blog-a-log":
https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shattered-dream/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

LibPoppler's primary OutputDev subclass is an adaptor to its vendored "Splash" vector graphics library. I'll discuss Splash itself someday very soon.

It tracks which colour mode to use, row padding, paper colour, screen parameters, the document & its XRef, a Splash instance, bitmap, font engine, T3 font cache & stack, current font, clip path, transparancy group, & plenty of flags.

With the aid of some additional Splash "patterns" the implementation includes:

1/2?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar
  • Plenty of code converting from Poppler's types to Splash's, especially relating to fonts (various formats) hence the caching!
  • Custom colour blending functions.
  • Cache of matrix transformed fonts from within the PDF file with a glyph's bounding box.
  • Instantiate & free Splash objects.
  • Abstractions around drawing Poppler's parsed types via Splash, some exposed as OutputDev hooks.

Note: pdf2html disables the text rendering via subclassing.

2/2.5!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

The glyph stack tracks char code, presence of d0/d1 op, caching flag, cache & tag, bitmap, Splash object, & a couple CTM doubles.

The Transparency Group linked-list tracks x/y offset coordinates, a couple bitmaps, colour space, isolated flag, knockout flag & coordinate, font anti-alias flag, & original bitmap/Splash objects.

2.5/2.5 Fin for today! Tomorrow: page-rendering method; followed by Splash vector graphics then Goo JS engine!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Solarpunk Meets Better Business: Reimagining a Sustainable Digital Future - Hannah Smith @ Branch:
https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-8/solarpunk-meets-better-business/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Much ado about "nothing" - Xe:
https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/much-ado-about-nothing/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

The web is not dying - Manuel Moreale:
https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/SWz1dvj7fs0CM5Zw

I have this debate somewhat regularly, & I strongly agree with Moreale here. I believe we're coming from the same perspective!

cdarwin, to random
@cdarwin@c.im avatar

It’s almost enough to make you stop doomscrolling:
dull devices are now cool.

The Boring Phone is a new, featureless flip phone that is feeding the growing appetites of younger people who want to ditch their smartphones in favour of a dumbphone.

The latest model is a collaboration between Heineken beer and the fashion retailer Bodega,
and caused a storm when it was unveiled this month at Milan design week,
the place where trends are anointed by the world’s designers.

The Boring Phone is part of a new dumbphone boom,
built on the suspicion of gen Z towards the data- and attention-harvesting technologies they have grown up with.
That suspicion has fuelled reinventions of retro cultural artefacts
– a trend known as
– and seen in the revival of vinyl records, cassettes,fanzines, 8-bit video games and old-fashioned mobile phones.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/the-boring-phone-stressed-out-gen-z-ditch-smartphones-for-dumbphones?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@cdarwin I guarantee you: I'd be aboard this "boring phone" train if I knew where to buy one, & could be guaranteed that it works well with my carrier!

zersiax, to accessibility
@zersiax@cupoftea.social avatar

The case for AI in is a hotly contested one but I do feel the baby's being tossed out with the bathwater just a tiny bit. Yes, it is bad that AI is being used to phase out hoomans in all sorts of pursuits. And yes, it is also true that at least at the moment, Ai-generated anything is generally lower quality than hooman-generated stuff. And yes, it is also true that we're seeing AI in places we really shouldn't be seeing it (MDN anyone?) and that people, just like always with a new toy, are going absolutely nuts with it and putting it front and center like it's Cthulhu's new miracle to end all toilet paper shortages. But it CAN, at times, actually be an enabler. It CAN, OCCASIONALLY, actually be used for good, and I don't think people who find this out and do this should be villified

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@zersiax The case I like to make is that neural networks aren't new technology, what's got Silicon Valley excited is making them larger than ever before. (personally I don't find this strategy interesting, & I question its value)

We've long used it for accessibility! We should continue! But then its banal.

The narrative & the reality of this tech seem to be frustratingly different at the moment... Its the narrative that's harmful, not so much the tech...

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

I'm consolidating my writing on how I'd implement Internet Communicator features for my hypothetical device. Mostly I'm combining paragraphs, but I'm also rearranging & merging some remarks I've made over the past month.

Incorporating clarifications suggested by @freakazoid (clarifying which step is FLAC's "autocorrelation", & mentioning sticking to UTC is an option).

Also I discussed autotagging emails as what sounds like a nice UI to me!

More credits to give out when I linkify...

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Something I love about the design of the web standards: It takes next to no effort from browserdevs to implement reasonable fallbacks for features they've yet to implement! If they ever will.

We call this "graceful degradation". It makes things easier on (patient) webdevs, & on the browser devs.

JS btw does not have this. It throws errors upon encountering unknown APIs, making it the webdev's problem. HTML & CSS don't.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

LibPoppler's Output Devices' ProfileData tracks total, min, max, & count for all the numbers fed to it. It has refcounted void-pointers for its colour profiles. I expected to see more here!

It has multiple GfxICCBasedColurSpace objects stored in those pointers & a parallel-array cache. These track:

  • of colour components

  • an alternate "colour space"
  • min & max values for each component
  • sourcefile reference
  • refcounted void pointer to its "profile"
  • PostScript CSA string
    ...

1/2!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

...

  • Colour transformation matrices
  • integral mapping "CMS cache"

There's other GfxColorSpace (which as mentioned this one references) subclasses, all of which tracks an integral overprint-mask & an int-pointer mapping.

The implementation largely consists of accessors, parsing, & apply the transformations. The central code for applying those transforms is proving to locate even with grep, I guess its provided by embedders? But I should still be finding it in that case?

2/2 Fin today!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

P&B: Chris Coyier - Manuel Moreale:
https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/sdex5YNIyGbFsbCj

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

What Would My Dream CMS Be? - Kev Quirk:
https://kevquirk.com/what-would-my-dream-cms-be

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

P&B: Veronique - Manuel Moreale:
https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/uzescngN6jxTDEb3

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Passkeys: A Shattered Dream - William Brown "Firstyear's blog-a-log":
https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shattered-dream/

From the outside, a lot of this looks like bikeshedding over threat models (personally I don't care for attestation, but I see why that's in there now). Which yes, easily gets coopted into lock-in.

Passwords (aka "shared secrets") are a poor solution for webservice authenticates, & I hope password managers like BitWarden can do away with most of their issues whilst paving the path away from them!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Progressively enhancing a Web Component - Go Make Things:
https://gomakethings.com/progressively-enhancing-a-web-component/

alcinnz, (edited ) to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Popquiz: Which component of an OS is the most complex?

I could relate this to my hardware-browser hypothetical, but that's pretty irrelevant.

(I'm leaving off scheduling, since that's as complex or simple as you want it)

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@LovesTha Depends on who you're serving...

For some its vital. For most (depending on how the OS uses it) its a nuisance.

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@seindal Definitely! Arguably an OS does little else, practically everything serves the end goal of hardware support!

A bit too obvious of an answer to include in the poll...

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Anyone here watched Darkman?

Its a gothic-style superhero film Sam Raimi made before he got the opportunity to adapt Spiderman. In many ways it feels like a less-polished version of those movies. Still very enjoyable!

(depicting tech which isn't near as advanced now as when this film was set & made, though it doesn't work near that well as disguises)

I'm getting a similar sense from listening to The Shadow!

The Red Panda is more Canadian Shadow than he is Canadian Batman...

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