Recent Blog Posts

I recently read with interest the post where Hector Martin resigned as Asahi Linux leader. As possibly well-known, Asahi Linux is the very first Fedora-based distribution where all the hard work to support the Apple ARM M* chip series in the Linux world found its way.

Some time ago, I eventually listened on YouTube to a year-old interview by Guido Penta with Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez) about the art of development in the current age. I agree with some points, specifically that in many cases, multiple developers work for their whole work life on boring/marginal activities. One of them, IMHO, is the entire front-end effort in developing web-based applications, a development task that nowadays could be broadly and proficiently managed mainly via AI to reduce human intervention to minimal parts and architectures.

Being an ancient mariner in the virtual ocean of the Big Network, I started using emails at the very beginning of the Internet era (at least here in Italy) on a SunOS pizza box, which I used at the time as my primary workstation. That was a giant step ahead for me because my first serious use of email in 1991 was on a Digital VT220 terminal under VMS OS and its MAIL client (who remembers the old times of DCL?). At that time, I started using Elm as my Mail User Agent, a software that stopped being developed in the first few years of this millennium.

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.