matt

matt, 7 months ago to random

Interesting post about the "Handmade" programming community: https://www.rfleury.com/p/the-marketplace-of-ideals

Unfortunately, the author isn't on the fediverse, or I'd mention him.

matt, 5 months ago to random

I'm getting tired of simplistic, indignant characterizations of generative AI like this one: https://social.ericwbailey.website/@eric/111584809768617532 "a spicy autocomplete powered by theft that melts the environment to amplify racism and periodically, arbitrarily lie"

It's a tool like any other; it can be used for good as well as bad. Yes, the copyright issue is real, but we can presumably overcome it by using models whose developers are more scrupulous about their sources of training data, not throwing out the whole thing.

matt, 2 months ago to random

I, like other nerds, sometimes romanticize open desktop platforms. Or, because the term "open" is so overloaded, maybe we should call them permissive platforms. Windows, outside of Microsoft's unloved UWP sandbox, is as permissive as it gets.

Then, occasionally, I have a day like today, when I had to do tech support for a family member. This time, it was my mother. Yes, the most tired stereotype of a person who's clueless about tech. Except, my mom has been using computers since 1988. 1/?

matt, 1 year ago to random

I'm trying to remember why, 12+ years ago, I thought it was a good idea to use Mercurial rather than Git for source code version control. Supposedly better Windows support? Anyway, I'm moving an older project to Git.

matt, 9 months ago to random

Question for my #blind followers: Does anyone have a LevelStar Icon or first-generation APH Braille+ PDA that they'd be willing to sell me? I had an Icon on loan from LevelStar while I was working for Serotek, but I dutifully sent it back. And now I want to play with one again.

matt, 6 months ago to random

Question for NVDA users: In the keyboard section of settings, there's a checkbox called "Handle keys from other applications". This setting is enabled by default. If it's disabled, it prevents remote access tools from working well with NVDA on the remote target machine. But this isn't clear to someone just looking through the settings. The setting was added due to an issue with a specific Vietnamese input utility. Does anyone have any other reason to turn it off?

matt, 2 months ago to random

TFW I'm thinking about recording a demo of an early piece of assistive technology (the BEX word processor and Braille translator for the Apple II) running under emulation, and then the song I happen to be listening to comes to the line "don't live in the past".

matt, 9 months ago to random

I sometimes wonder if the transition to 64-bit architectures for personal computers was a mistake. The popular 64-bit architectures do have some benefits (e.g. more registers), primarily IMO because they're newer and not because they're 64-bit. But the doubling in size of all pointers (and many indices and lengths) contributes to software bloat, and the architecture change rendered a bunch of hardware obsolete in one stroke. At least on Windows, compiling applications as 32-bit is an option.

matt, 9 months ago to random

I wonder which virtualization solution for macOS currently has the most optimized data path for disk I/O. Apple's Virtualization framework? qemu? Parallels Desktop? VMware Fusion?

matt, 6 months ago to random

Came across this article on the decline of usability which, among other things, puts GNOME 3 in the same category as the notorious Windows 8. https://datagubbe.se/usab2/

I know that classic Mac/Windows conventions like menu bars and title bars aren't sacred forever. But this article does make a convincing case that the industry at large, including GNOME, has gone backward. And, at least for me, that's uncomfortable to contemplate.

matt, 2 months ago to random

Update on Newton, the Wayland-native accessibility stack I'm developing for GNOME and (eventually) other desktops: I have an end-to-end prototype, using a Wayland protocol extension for the connection between applications/toolkits and the compositor, and D-Bus for the AT-to-compositor interface. I have an experimental branch of Orca with basic focus announcement and mouse review working. 1/?

matt, 5 months ago to random

Been thinking lately about what programming language and server-side web framework I want to use for future web application projects, starting with a rewrite (or maybe just a translation) of an old internal tool that I'm planning to do soon. I think my two top candidates at this point are Python/Django and C#/ASP.NET Core. Would like to use JavaScript, but not sure that there's a mature, full-stack JS option for classic database-backed server-rendered web apps, on par with the other two. 1/?

matt, 2 months ago to random

One problem with my new PC: I'm getting intermittent "connection reset" errors, both in Edge and now in Rust tools like rustup and cargo. They're happening immediately, so it doesn't seem like it could be packet loss. Any ideas? Maybe a Windows 11 bug?

matt, 3 months ago to random

It's clear that the name of my AccessKit project (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit) is a recurring stumbling block. When mentioned without appropriate context, it carries the connotations of being an Apple API. Plus, there's actually another AccessKit, which ranks higher in a DuckDuckGo search: https://accesskit.media/

So I'm actually thinking about renaming my AccessKit. The best names I can come up with are:

accesslib
libaccess
a11ylib
liba11y

None of those are particularly inspired.

matt, 1 year ago to accessibility

I'm speaking about #accessibility and #AccessKit at #RustConf! https://rustconf.com/schedule/making-guis-accessible-across-platforms-and-languages-with-rust

matt, 1 month ago to random

So, while the xz backdoor disaster has us thinking about how we interact with maintainers of open-source dependencies, I thought I'd ask for advice on resolving a dilemma I'm facing with AccessKit (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit). I want to add this dependency: https://crates.io/crates/immutable-chunkmap Like xz (before the long attack began), immutable-chunkmap is a one-person project; he's doing it in his spare time. But, at the risk of sounding entitled, there are things I want fixed before I depend on it. 1/?

matt, 11 months ago to random

If any of my followers have an ARM-based Windows laptop and would be willing to run a simple test program with a screen reader (even Narrator), please DM me.

matt, 6 months ago to random

Looking forward to getting my new AT&T gigabit fiber Internet service set up tomorrow morning. I've been on Cox cable Internet for the past few years, with speeds of roughly 500 megabits down and 60 megabits up. The new fiber service is supposed to be symmetrical.

matt, 3 months ago to random

Does any user of Windows Narrator actually like the Narrator Home window that comes up by default when Narrator is started? Am I the only one that wants Narrator to just slip into the background and stay out of the way? Of course, you can easily configure it to do that. Maybe I've just re-installed a Windows VM one time too many, and I'm annoyed at all of the little things that come up on first boot.

matt, 7 months ago to random

I know I shouldn't be up this early (I'm on US Central time), but I am, and now I've found that my work email account has disappeared from Thunderbird. That account is on Office 365, so I was using the Owl add-on that adds exchange support to Thunderbird. Seeing if I can get the account back without having to redownload everything that was cached.

matt, 9 months ago to random

Obscure trivia question about a pop song: Tonight I listened to "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House on Apple Music, while preparing to possibly sing the song at karaoke (I ended up leaving the bar early instead). I was surprised to hear, in the fade-out ending vamp, an extra repetition of "don't ever let them win", that I hadn't heard before. 1/2

matt, 4 months ago to random

I'm going to geek out a bit about the song "Subdivisions" by Rush. Some of my friends might recall that I first discovered this song about 12 years ago (some 30 years after its release), and obsessed over it at the time. I promise I haven't obsessed over it these past 12 years, but something made me think of it again today. I think this song, especially the first verse, probably resonates with many nerds or geeks as it did with me. 1/?

matt, 9 months ago to random

Been thinking lately about how to expose a Rust library to managed languages like Python and Java.

For Python, it seems like the PyPy folks pushed for years to encourage use of cffi, and ctypes before that, rather than the Python/C API. And now there's a new C API, HPy (https://hpyproject.org/). But Rust projects like PyO3 and rust-cpython keep right on using the Python/C API. And that seems to work well for CPython, but I bet it frustrates the PyPy folks. 1/?

matt, 6 months ago to random

I wonder, what is the least powerful computer that can run a web browser with HTTPS support (including TLS 1.2 with reasonably up-to-date ciphers), correct HTML5 parsing, and essential features like links and forms, but no JavaScript? And how much of the web would be practically usable on such a machine?

matt, 5 months ago to random

I can't stop wondering if, to truly meet my goals for the #AccessKit project (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit), it will be necessary to rewrite it as a C library. Not a Rust library with a C API, but actually in C. I've had doubts before; you'd think the question would be settled by now. But two things prompted me to think about this again. 1/?