Recent Blog Posts

In a previous post, I suggested that people should escape from big company-based social networks and find refuge in the Fediverse. The reason for that is simply to avoid being constantly considered a profitable customer, being profiled, and continuously bombed from advertising campaigns or sponsored posts. In brief, the purpose is returning to the original spirit of the big network of peers of the 90s.

Recently, I participated in a brief thread on Mastodon about how to maintain relations with people that have been built around a social network, specifically through Facebook. This is not different for Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok or whatever you prefer.

One of the coding projects I currently maintain is Autodir, a not-so-known little daemon based on autofs that can be used to create automagically users or group directories at their first use. It is specifically helpful when some kind of shared accounts system is adopted for multiple hosts and the related home directories need to be created optionally and on demand. Well, I recently moved the old repository from SourceForge to GitHub, and that has also been the occasion for me to update the old Docbook howto document for Autodir initially written by the original Autodir developer, Venkata Ramana Enaganti. I mostly maintained the project as a Debian package in the last 20 years or so, with only little interest in feature improvements: it basically just works, and that's more than enough for my use cases.

In a recent lenghty post Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asian-Pacific Network Information Center, discussed the status of the IPv6 protocol migration and made some considerations of the future of that migration. An interesting reading that motivated this brief post.

I have long participated in the FOSS community. My first public contribution was the YardRadius project in 1995, a consolidation of the old Livingston Radius daemon and a series of add-ons written by Christian Gafton (RIP) and me. That was some years before the more significant FreeRadius project. At that time, I ran for a period an ISP just before the dotcom bubble exploded, but that's another story...

The planned obsolescence of computers and other IT electronic equipment is a well-known plague of our age. For years, I stopped buying new computers and prefer refurbished ones whenever possible. That includes all my personal ICT boxes, and even at work, I try to spin out the life cycle of the equipment in use under my direct management. Proprietary OSes often limit the lifespan of IT equipment, but in some cases, vendor-independent FOSS software can replace the original one at End of Life (EOL). This is beneficial because FOSS software is often more lightweight, customizable, and has a longer support life, thereby extending the usability of your equipment.

I lately wrote some silly benchmarking code inspired by a brief article of Halim Shams, just to perform some quite dumb performance tests with multiple languages. The whole set of test code snippets is available here and includes C, Rust, Guile, Java, Perl, Tcl, Python, R, Octave, and Ruby programming languages, as available on Debian 12 (bookworm) distribution.

It is specifically convenient using Guix-the-system within a foreign distribution, such as Debian, for development and tests. The package management system can be used on top of the system, but I find it quite interesting to explore the potential of the Guix distribution in the context of virtualized environments. For personal use, that is also the ideal way to avoid breaking your own daily boxes every couple of days with daredevil approaches to personal computing.

Let's give a second look at Guix-the-system the main GNU Project distribution I dealt with in a previous post. This post is not specifically limited to the distribution, it is also of interest when using Guix in a foreign distribution, even if some configuration details change.

In the last few days, I got familiar with Guix, which is both a modern package management system and the main GNU Project distribution for Linux and Hurd (the Guix system). As a package management system, it can be installed on most foreign distributions, including Debian and any other, as an alternative/additional packaging system.