Venam's Blog — Patrick Louis (Lebanon)

A year, and an eternity, has passed since my last update.

Let's explore and deobfuscate the input stack on Linux.

Time flows through us so quickly, like rivers and ravines; but also, like travelers, we're advancing on its endless plains, mountains, and ridges.

Throughout the countless years of research on this blog a common thread always comes up: Some features and toggles are often hidden under mountains of hubris that nobody understands.

Take a look at your process tree, it's likely that you might notice a new service: rtkit-daemon, the RealtimeKit Daemon.

Here's something that's shocking to say: Most of what you think of as traditional, regardless of where you live, has only appeared 3 generations ago, three generations only.

We often get absorbed in the moment, it's tough to take a pause and reflect.

Life is pretty bland today!

Every so often we need to regroup and give shape to our scattered ideas, turning them into well-structured paragraphs so that they make sense.

Is someone that is subjectively experiencing something more knowledgeable than someone who didn't or currently isn't?

´Life is what happens in the space between´.

Plenty of cheesy quotes often say that total security stands on the opposite of total freedom.

Ten years ago I had an inner urge to lay my ideas on the web, on a place I owned.

It's already been quite a while since the last update article in Spring last year.

After writing a whole book about internet and narrative control I want to share what I personally do, in my own limited ways, to try not to get stuck in bubbles.

The PipeWire project is slowly getting popular as it matures.

It's been seven months since the last update article in October 2020.

An internet studies about narrative control.

Our mini internet study has come to an end.

We can attempt to patch things, use tools and software as countermeasures, to add laws and regulations, or to let the market decide, but in the end we are at the center of everything.

When free market and regulations fail, when the laws of rights can't properly protect anyone and trust has eroded, we're left only with ourselves.

The market and corporate self-regulation have their limits.

In this last part of the series we'll go over the adaptations we are undergoing to remove the frictions we have with the internet — anything to make it better suited for us.

The internet brings with it technological advancements that reminds us of dystopia that sci-fi writers have written about.

Nobody likes to be put in a box, nobody likes to be paralyzed.

In this part of the series, we'll explore the bigger picture and the generic issues and 'ill effects' on societies that are brought by the emergence of the internet or accelerated by it.

To be a netizen means to be part of the online social sphere.

Humans are prone to manipulations by their own experiences and biases.

Since ancient times, nations have tried to write history from their own point of view.

The internet is a new resource and when introduced in our social structures it has fueled the construction of utilities around it.

The artifacts we've previously seen have given rise to new types of economies, tools, and arsenals that can be used by different actors for different incentives.

In this last section of our first part about artifacts and places, we'll explore memes, internet memes, and cults, their definitions, how they have transformed and crisscrossed, their relationship, their role as communication vectors, and the extreme forms

The internet is littered with nuggets of information, some made of gold and some worthless.

With the advent of smartphones, social media platforms are on the rise.

Our journey begins with three terms, propaganda, influence, and persuasion.

To no one's surprise, the internet has permeated all aspects of our lives.

Audio on Unix is a little zoo, there are so many acronyms for projects and APIs that it's easy to get lost.

The year of the Linux desktop is coming, and it looks like a piñata of micro-services.

Resolving hostnames (DNS?)

Seven long and perilous months have gone by since my previous article, what feels like an eternity, and yet feels like a day — Nothing and everything has happened.

We live in a world that is gradually and incessantly attracted by over-rationality and order.

Freetype, included in the font stack on Unix, is quite complex.

Compilers, these wonderful and intricate pieces of software that do so much and that so many know little of.

Computer architecture can be considered a boring topic, one that is studied during CS education, then put aside, and leaves place to the shiny new toys that capture the attention.

Finally, The project about mapping wild mushrooms in Lebanon is out!

Dbus and Polkit are two technologies that emanate an aura of confusion.

In a previous post, I've underlined the philosophy behind Domain Driven Design, DDD, and now I'd like to move to a practical approach that handles real issues in software development and architecture, requirements that constantly change, and models that a…

We're used, as software engineers to try to make things perfect, to see things from above, to think we're great architects and creators.

An article covering everything you need to know about time on Unix.

What are software distributions?