posts

In several of my personal projects I have a need for tilde expansion, which means taking a filename such as ~/foo and expanding the tilde into the current user's home directory.

What is inconvenient is seldom secure.

The Subplot project announces the 0.2.2 release of the Subplot tool for documenting acceptance criteria and verifying them automatically.

I installed Debian 10 (buster) on a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 laptop today.

We'd like you to try Subplot, our new tool for documenting and verifying acceptance criteria.

I've just released version 0.4.0 of Obnam, my backup program.

Note: This is now moved to https://liw.fi/sponsored-by/ where it's easier to update.

The Linux kernel community is in the middle of a situation where a university submitted some bad patches to test how well the kernel patch review process would catch them.

For the book club this time I, Mark, and Daniel read Program Comprehension and Code Complexity Metrics: An fMRI Study.

I retired from Debian a couple of years ago (see 1 and 2).

Minutes of the planning meeting starting a new development iteration of Obnam, my backup program.

I’d like to help others make better free and open source software so I’m making this standing offer: I’ll review a project's README for free.

The free software community needs more people who set a good example.

Our little group of friends (me, Vince, Mark, and Daniel) have a book club and yesterday we discussed Hillel Wayne's What we know we don't know, a talk about things that we do know about how to develop software well, and the vast vistas of ignorance about…

I've just released version 0.3.0 of Obnam, my backup program.

I've been using libvirt for running and managing my local virtual machines for over a decade now.

Edited to clarify XDG_RUNTIME_DIR based on feedback from smcv.

Over my career I've ended up with an following approach to planning software development, and estimating how long it will take.

I develop software in iterations.

I've just released version 0.2.2 of Obnam2, the second generation of my backup program.

Backup systems could do with a common backup interchange format.

I've recently started writing a new backup program.

Some day Obnam, my backup program rewrite, will be ready for others to use.

I've been using Ansible for configuration management needs for a few years now.

This may be the stupidest thing I will ever have done, but I intend to have fun while doing it.

Digital Ocean, the cloud services company, runs a marketing campaign every October where they give out T-shirts to people who have opened a certain small number of pull requests on GitHub for any open source projects.

I'm sometimes cruel to my tools to learn how they behave in unusual circumstances.

For our book club this time, Daniel, Mark and I were joined by Vince to discuss an article about using machine-learning to test Firefox more efficiently by Andrew Halberstadt and Marco Castelluccio.

I was curious about how fast I can transfer data in various contexts.

We had our third book club meeting yesterday.

I don't like the "infinite scroll" or "never-ending stream" type of communication application.

I am tired of the existing Internet email system, both as a sender of email, as a recipient, and as an operator of an email server.

Three friends sat down and discussed a book, er, blog post that they'd read: Daniel, Mark, and myself.

TL;DR: I wrote a little program to build and test software in a pair of nested virtual machines, to reduce the risk of bugs or malware in dependencies doing bad things.

Mike Godwin in an essay on slate.com: That’s the biggest thing I learned at the Wikimedia Foundation: When ordinary people are empowered to come together and work on a common, humanity-benefiting project like Wikipedia, unexpectedly great and positive thi…

I asked a couple of weeks ago what people like or hate about email.

A friend expressed interest in how I keep my journal, so I set up a demo site.

I wrote an alternative Debian installer as a toy, called v-i.

A continuous integration engine (CI) takes the source code for a software project and ensures it works.

Would you be willing to try Subplot for acceptance testing for one of your real projects, and give us feedback?

I retired from Debian as a developer a year ago.

I made a poll on the fediverse yesterday.

I want to develop free software with people who lift up each other, and aren't arseholes.

Measuring test coverage by measuring which parts of the code are executed tests is not useless, but it usually misses the point.

Some irrelevant personal history follows, skip to the next heading if uninterested.

The reMarkable tablet is a 10" e-paper tablet on which you can read PDF and ePub files, and write on with the stylus that comes with the device.

Recently I announced a tool for acceptance testing.

Lars Wirzenius and Daniel Silverstone announce the Fable project. given all stakeholders need to understand acceptance criteria when Fable is used to document them then all stakeholders understand them and they can be automatically tested Fable is a tool…

Debian uses PGP keys of its uploading members to authenticate package uploads.

Edsger Dijkstra was one of the most influential computer scientists, in the early days of the field.