Lars Wirzenius liw@identi.ca

In a car, in Indiana, on the road to LibrePlanet 2017

Wearing shorts! Off to Boston in 2 days so enjoying spring while I can.

Also I was at the library and internet was slow. Came home to get on the fast satellite. Stlll weird!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZpgnYhzdkI

This is.. not fast really, but good SNR and 200-1000 times faster than the dialup I've been using for years.

https://one-minute-modem.branchable.com/ may get fewer rants posted now, though I will still probably use dialup on gloomy winter days.

crossposted from my blog

In honor of International Womens' Day, let's celebrate a woman, Phyllis Fox, who may have saved Lisp from the dustbin of history... by documenting it. From her oral history:

HAIGH: So you say that you wrote the first LISP manual?

FOX: Now, this was not because I was a great LISP programmer, but they never documented or wrote down anything, especially McCarthy. Nobody in that group ever wrote down anything. McCarthy was furious that they didn’t document the code, but he wouldn’t do it, either. So I learned enough LISP that I could write it and ask them questions and write some more. One of the people in the group was a student named Jim Slagel, who was blind. He learned LISP sort of from me, because I would read him what I had written and he would tell me about LISP and I would write some more. His mind was incredible. He could give lectures. Have you ever seen a blind person lecture?

HAIGH: No.

FOX: They write on a black (or white) board, and then they put a finger on the board at the point they have stopped to keep the place. Then they talk some more and then they go on writing. His mind was remarkable. He was very helpful to me. But I wrote those manuals. I would ask questions from Minsky or McCarthy, and I got it done. I think it was helpful for people to have it. I guess, essentially I’m a documenter. If you’re looking for it, that’s what I am.

Phyllis Fox did a lot more than that, but as a Lisp enthusiast, thank you to Dr. Fox for preserving our programming knowledge!

Readium is available for both open source and proprietary applications.  For open-source, non-commercial applications, all the Readium code is available under a BSD-style license. For commercial applications,  the Readium SDK code is licensed under Gnu Affero General Public License Version 3 to help ensure the level of development and management support necessary for its ongoing development.

I mean, seriously — why can't I have Double Ratchet, OTR, secure timestamping, ZRTP, and some stupid blockchain nonsense running in FOSS on a secure smartcard? "Not a lot of people write smartcard software" and "when they do, it's proprietary" just don't excite me as explanations. #preachingtothechoir

I renewed my support to Software Freedom Conservancy at the beginning of the year. If you didn't, please consider join or renew today because it counts double.

They do a very important work providing financial, legal and administrative infrastructure to free software communities, caring that free software licenses are respected, and providing independence to many projects (from companies or “big donors” thay may want to win control).

Visit https://sfconservancy.org/ for more details.

Conservancy is excited to announce that an anonymous donor has agreed to match 150 new or renewing Supporters. They’ve challenged us to meet the goal quickly: the match starts now along with FOSDEM in Brussels, and runs about a week to the end of Monday, February 13 (noon on Tuesday, February 14 UTC).

This is Conservancy’s most aggressive match program to date. After an impressive rally from the community to meet the end of the Private Internet Access match last month, we’re eager to see whether we can build off that momentum and the buzz of FOSDEM to sign up 150 Supporters in a week. So don’t hesitate: join or renew as a Conservancy Supporter today!

We’re especially looking to use this opportunity to encourage new Supporters to join. If you’re already a Supporter, please spread the word about this match to your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up. The bigger our Supporter base, the more projects we can help with fiscal sponsorship, outreach, and compliance work. The more we can do, the more the community benefits, so make sure your friends know about this limited-time chance!

Pleased to see a lot of Haskell code in Linux Weekly News this week! :)

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/713653/736f4149dd967dac/

"The plus sign above indicates the addition of types — which is the sort of thing that Haskell developers apparently like to do."

The Debian System Administration Team needs to refresh hardware in 2017; interested partners contact partners@debian.org for details

That first glorious lazy day of late winter when it's comfortable to read outside in the sun.

I was hiding from the sun just 2 weeks ago in Australia, but still feel the need to soak it up now before winter returns.

GitLab.com Database Incident - 2017/01/31 (docs.google.com)

So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place.

/via https://lobste.rs/s/zdmvy5

Verify your backups, people.

All git commits I create are signed by default now. Yay!

https://github.com/strugee/dots/commit/aef8f061aaf326adc24b7169fefb0c0c40a2ddb2

Haskell is the only language where I've seen the author of a library sending patches to programs that use it, just to make their use of the library better, avoid breakage in new versions, etc.

Also, the author of the Raaz library recently got in touch with me, since I used it, looking for feedback from a user about how the API could be improved.

This seems very unusual, but also like something that should not be unusual..

"20 years of being a debian maintainer" by Riku Voipio http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-debian-maintainer.html

Walked the steepest part of the property line. And in places almost climbed. I'd not been up there in years..

Last sunset of 2016, far above my house.