News from the Planet

Guadec happened. It was a extremely well organized event, with plenty of good talk, people that I was longing to see again, and new faces to put a name on. My experience was however very much soured by interactions with other people within the community, against myself and other members of the…

SRFI 282 is now in draft status. Types and entities deserve predicates so that their user can meaningfully understand what they are dealing with, and usefully dispatch on them in their code. However, some R7RS “types” have no respective predicates. This SRFI defines them.

Dear Reader, We are back from FOSS4G 2026 in Hiroshima, Japan, and we want to share what we presented and what we brought home. With up to 14 parallel tracks, this year's global edition was dense: two days of workshops, three days of talks, and plenty of conversations at the booth. GeoSolutions…

Andreas Gabriel Berbescu has reported several root privilege escalation vulnerabilities in various NetworkManager VPN plugins. If the VPN plugin is installed, then an unprivileged user can escalate to root by loading a malicious VPN configuration file: (CVE-2026-91837) network-manager-iodine:…

You're part of the Groovy Gang because you're a member of RSS Club! These posts are only available on my RSS and Atom feed. This post is not available in the shops, on the web, via FTP, or anywhere else. So, yeah, sorry! My last post apparently broke some people's RSS readers. I had a code sample…

I’ve been testing Codeberg for over a year now, with Trajectools being the largest repo that has already moved its headquarters from Github to Codeberg. I have been very happy with the experience so far and – at the same time – I couldn’t help but notice the further decline of Github…

As an open source software leader, GeoCat staff are part of the global response to the present wave of AI-assisted security vulnerability reports. We wish to reassure our customers that their systems ...

The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there's an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history - but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary. If you're…

Do riders in autonomous vehicles think that they are in a private space? Here's a fascinating story from California where an robotaxi was redirected from its intended destination and, instead, delivered its misbehaving passengers to the police. The 15-year-old passengers were riding in a driverless…

5 months ago, I laid down the plans for what was going to happen going forward with my various open source projects. But after that post, it has been nothing but ... silence! If you were to look at my GitHub contribution graph, there was also a noticeable drop-off there too.So what happened?What…

Let's suppose you've updated the description of your ActivityPub account from "World's Number 1 Taylor Swift Fan" to "This account is now a Nickleback Truther". How do you let the rest of the Fediverse know that you've changed your allegiance? By default, most Mastodon instances won't periodically…

If you're reading this, you're part of RSS Club! A top secret society of cool people who subscribe to my feed. This post is not available on the web or via email. I've been playing about with Rogue Scholar. It's an open-access publication which allows blogs to get a persistent Digital Object…

Here’s a couple of things hanging around in my pre-SRFIs repo which I think are particularly interesting but which, owing to recent events, I’m unlikely to take any further within the context of Scheme. They might form part of a future programming language adventure, but in the meanwhile I’d like to…

FOSS4G is the annual global event of free and open source geographic technologies and open geospatial data hosted by OSGeo. In 2026 it took place in Hiroshima, Japan.

On September 7, 2026, I gave a keynote at State of the Map Asia 2026 in Osaka. The title was: What if the Map itself became the Web? The talk looks back at the thirty-year journey of Hyper-Layering Architecture (HLA), from its origins in 1995 to its current implementation as Layers as Web…

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for…

Number sixteen was my peak volume week. My biggest training week in three years (not counting the Bear races of 2023 and 2025). 17 hours, 27 minutes all training 52.2 miles hiking and running 14,938 ft D+ hiking and running I went out on steep mountain trails five times to prepare for the big…

Weeks twelve through fifteen had a little better air quality and I increased my training volume steadily, transitioning to more uphill outings and more power hiking. 56 hours, 15 minutes all training 125.8 miles running and hiking 26,420 ft D+ running and hiking In week fifteen, I logged 10,000…

Week eight began in Glacier National Park and week eleven finished in Steamboat Springs. 51 hours, 47 minutes all training 116 miles running and hiking 16,903 ft D+ running and hiking Hiking with my oldest kid in Glacier and Grand Teton Nation Parks was one of the highlights of this year. Arabelle…

UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly. To do both of those things well, you need a smart…

Here's a problem that I've found with ActivityBot - my little ActivityPub server. Sometimes it receives messages which were originally sent months ago. Why does that happen and is it risky to accept and process them? My tl;dr is that it probably isn't worth worrying about. But I'd love someone to…

We are excited to announce the first release of Guix-Science channel: v20260907.

SRFI 277 is now in final status. Cyclic ports are like infinite string and bytevector input ports: they produce the elements of a given sequence repeatedly, forever. While their intended use is as reusable seeds for SRFI 271 random ports, they are also useful whenever a…

I imagine everyone here has received an unsolicited message telling them that their tax is overdue and that they urgently need to visit Genuine-Tax-Payment-Website.fart or that a parcel is delayed at customs and you can pay a small sum for its release at Almost-The-Right-Acronym.ak You know it is a…

This is a gorgeous set of short stories - and a good deal more accessible than some of the heavyweight prose Liu has previously been involved with. Some of the stories contain sentences which are complex jewels to be savoured. What I particularly like is the way he moves between almost-prosaic…