Ariadne's Space

Chrono Cross was one of my favorite games from my childhood.

Many readers of my blog will note that I used to be quite enthusiastic about Jellycat stuffed animals, especially their Bashful series, but I haven’t talked much about them lately.

There’s an old saying about not meeting your heroes.

The Linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations: the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl.

I hate sudo with a passion.

I want you to understand what it is like to be transgender during this time.

A poorly kept secret is that the X11 graphics stack is under-maintained as resources shift towards the maintenance of Wayland’s graphics stack instead.

I recently attended FOSDEM, and saw a talk in the SBOM devroom about a software engineer’s attempts to build an SBOM for a C project.

On March 29th, Andres Freund dropped a bombshell on the oss-security mailing list: recent XZ Utils source code tarball releases made by Jia Tan were released with a backdoor.

Readers of my blog will note that while I believe Rust is an excellent tool for developers to leverage when building software, that there is a disconnect between the developers leveraging Rust features to improve their software and many of the advocates w…

An unfortunate side effect of the rising popularity of Apple’s ARM-based computers is an increase in unportable assembly code which targets the 64-bit ARM ISA.

During the height of the pandemic, I set up a community using Discord.

Readers will have noticed that two maintenance releases of pkgconf were cut over the weekend, 1.9.4 and 1.8.1 respectively, to address CVE-2023-24056, a pkg-config specific variation of the now-classic “billion laughs attack”.

Since the beginning of the Internet, determining the trustworthiness of participants and published information has been a significant point of contention.

Earlier today, I deleted all of my tweets and left Twitter forever.

Over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that the Internet as we know it is utterly broken.

Recently a friend of mine told me that he was planning to start a free software consultancy, and asked for my advice, as I have an extensive background doing free software consulting for a living.

A frequent complaint I see from users and inexperienced contributors concerning free software projects is that they are allegedly not doing enough to grow the userbase, sometimes even asserting that a fork is necessary to right the course of the project.

Astute followers of this blog might have noticed that the layout has dramatically changed.

There have been a few initiatives in recent years to implement a new userspace base system for Linux distributions as an alternative to the GNU coreutils and BusyBox.

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about various silos and their activities, notably GitHub and an up and coming alternative to Tumblr called Cohost.

You’ve probably seen the “I’d like to interject for a moment” quotation that is frequently attributed to Richard Stallman about how Linux should be referred to as GNU/Linux.

A frequent complaint expressed on a certain website about Alpine is related to the deficiencies regarding the musl DNS resolver when querying large zones.

As many of my readers are likely aware, I have a large collection of stuffed animals, but my favorite one is the first generation Jellycat Bashful Bunny that I have had for the past 10 years or so.

Frequently I have been told by developers that it is impossible to have extensible JSON documents underpinning their projects, because there may be collisions later.