This was originally a Twitter thread, but long-form text is way less painful. Tonight’s rant sponsored by lukewarm Thai food that should have been inside me about 3 hours ago.
Continue readingOnline Communities are Ephemeral
Online communities spawn, grow, and die. Why? How? What can be done? Here’s my story of my time online.
Quoting a friend from years past: IRC channel death is similar to the slow process of erosion. Conversation has ceased, yet it may be years before the channel is empty. I think about that frequently.
Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a Wine fork integrated in Steam allowing almost any Windows game to work out of the box. To Linux users, life was good. However, with the recent announcement of the Steam Deck, a handheld device powered by Linux, Valve’s marketing towards developers explicitly mention no porting required. Valve’s been aggressive with this message enough that they’ve allegedly told developers simply not to bother with Linux ports anymore; enough that it makes commercial porters like Ethan Lee concerned.
However, I suspect this is the long-term result of other factors, and games are only one aspect of it. After all, we all know the Year of the Linux Desktop is around the corner, along with nice applications. Linux won’t rule the world just from games, even if some people really want it to be true. How did it come to this, and why?
After the Paradises, or How I Live in the Past
I collect vintage computers and phone systems. Why? They frequently require repair, obscure knowledge, or dwindling parts supplies. Let me tell you how and why.
Continue readingBrief thoughts on right to repair issues people don’t think about
While making devices more repairable is pretty much seen as universally a good thing, right? Unfortunately, engineering involves tradeoffs, but some of those tradeoffs that are seen as bad for repair (or are actually desirable in spite of it), or actually improves reliability. These are some things I suspect right to repair advocates forget.
This article is intended to unify some disparate thoughts on the subject I’ve had on Lobsters comment, this blog (i.e. the ThinkPad one), etc. as one post. I intend to do this more often for other things…
Continue readingWhat the Sporks? How We Built a Reasonably Competent Blog
After being successfully up and running for over a year with very few major changes needed, now seems as good a time as ever to break down how sporks.space runs, what secret sauce we use to run it how we like it, and so forth.
Continue readingWhat’s on my (alyx’s) desk?
Inspired by cb’s post earlier this week, and by the same friends’ musings, I felt it would be fun to go over what my every day equipment is. This probably won’t convince you to use it, but serves more as a clarification of why I use it. With that out of the way, let’s talk about what’s on my desk.
Continue readingWhat systems and applications do I (cb) use?
This is a stream of consciousness (so don’t expect my usual polish) based off of some friends’ musings on the tools they use. I’m doing this to explain some of the tools I use, in the hopes of conveying my feelings on them. I doubt (and sometimes probably hope I won’t) I’ll convince you on the merits or if you should use any of these tools, but you’ll at least know why I care. As I write this, I consider the tools I use to be fairly pedestrian, but perhaps this document might have sentimental or historic interest later. Consider it like usesthis.com – and I also use a Mac!
Continue readingScaling images with alpha blending properly with PHP gd
I had some code trying to scale an image in gd using the imagescale function, that looked something like this:
/* makes a copy of the image, instead of modifying in place */ $target = imagescale($image, $width, $height);
However, the images it created were heavily distorted when using bilinear filtering, and didn’t quite look right with neared neighbour either. For example, with bilinear filtering…
Continue readingPortable software is more complex than you think
I’m someone who cares about making software portable. In fact, I actually have a job basically doing so. For most Unix-shaped things (better known as things, since Unix destroyed all competition), the POSIX standard exists to codify common attributes and provide a common ground. Unfortunately, this is made far more complicated by systems both doing many things outside of POSIX’s lowest common denominator, and systems just not implementing POSIX correctly. People tend to think “portability” is whatever operating systems they use, and assuming the lowest common denominator is that. While many guides recommend writing software in a disciplined (or tortured, if you disagree) manner with separate compilation units for platform differences when possible, the reality is your codebase will have #ifdefs and a configure script if it does anything useful. Not to mention the increasing irrelevance of the standard itself.