News from the Planet

Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I…

A step-by-step tutorial on installing the NASA OPERA QGIS plugin, searching and visualizing DSWx surface water products, and using an integrated AI agent to analyze flood events with natural language and voice commands.

Guix will be featured at the annual conference of the French Reproducible Research Network, 19–21 May 2026, Bordeaux, France.

Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! A little while ago I added some locally hosted, privacy first stats to my blog. Using an offline GeoIP service I can get a very rough idea of where visitors are from. It doesn't deal with people using a VPN, or their mobile roaming…

A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write vanilla CSS instead. But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette (here as CSS). If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like it maybe try blue-200 or blue-50. I’m not very…

SRFI 271 is now in draft status.This SRFI proposes a pattern of libraries for binary input ports that produce random bytes. Libraries are divided into “randomized” and “determinized” categories to address different uses of random data. The design leaves the details of random number…

I have a PHP function which uses Roman Numerals. It looks like this: $romanNumerals = [ "Ⅿ" => 1000, "ⅭⅯ" => 900, "Ⅾ" => 500, "ⅭⅮ" => 400, "Ⅽ" => 100, "ⅩC" => 90, "Ⅼ" => 50, "ⅩⅬ" => 40, "Ⅹ" => 10, "Ⅸ" => 9, "Ⅷ" => 8, "Ⅶ" => 7,…

Introducing OpenGeoAgent, an open-source multimodal AI agent that automates geospatial analysis and visualization in QGIS through natural language and voice commands.

Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it…

SRFI 270 is now in draft status. Floating-point numbers are usually stored in radix 2, but are written by users in radix 10. This SRFI introduces Scheme syntax for hexadecimal floating point constants based on C99's syntax, that use radix 16 for writing the integer and fractional part, and a…

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C. I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026, the Single Board Cluster Competition…

The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Ministers on why it was…

Support for remote controlling Windows PCs may be added to Raspberry Pi Connect, Raspberry Pi's free remote access service. When they announced Pi Connect in 2024, I speculated the service was launched in response to RealVNC's sluggish adoption of Wayland, leading to Pi users lacking a solid…

Dipankar Mazumdar is the Director of Developer Relations at Cloudera, leading global developer initiatives across lakehouse architecture and AI. He previously held advocacy and engineering roles at Dremio, Onehouse, and Qlik, contributing to open source projects including Apache Iceberg, Apache…

As part of my quest to try new things I decided to dig for treasure in my local park. The wonderful folks at DigVentures allow members of the public to assist with archaeology projects in their local area. We arrived on a sunny Thursday to find a couple of areas of Lesnes Abbey cordoned off, with…

There is a persistent tension in software engineering between the beautiful, mathematically pure ideal of a program, and the messy, pragmatic reality of just getting things done. Over my career, I’ve explored the depths of both extremes in an attempt to find my personal sweet spot for hacking. …

Mon 27 Apr 2026 scheme I'm building a new web site in Scheme for BALISP, the Bay Area Lisp and Scheme Users Group. (The site isn't launched yet, but will replace the current Meetup.com redirect at balisp.org sometime before our next meeting.) The BALISP site needs to…

Anaïs Mitchell has created something magical. I felt like giving a standing ovation after every song. Just pure theatrical joy delivered by a cast who know how to squeeze every drop of emotion from an audience. Perhaps it was sitting right at the front of the stalls, but the opening of Hadestown…

SRFI 267 is now in final status. Raw strings are a lexical syntax for strings that do not interpret escapes inside of them and are useful in cases where the string data has a lot of characters such as \ or " that would otherwise have to be escaped. This SRFI proposes a raw string…

On the internet, anyone can make a request to your web service. Especially in this time of abusive web crawling linked to AI/LLM companies, it's essential to program in a defensive style and stay in control, even when faced with a volume of requests that can't be handled.

The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee. But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn't there a simpler way? Yes! You can use PHP's…

For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to…

Much Sturm und Drang in the world of Open Source with the announcement that the "Mythos" AI is now the ultimate hacker and is poised to unleash havoc on every code base. So should you close all your Open Source projects to make them safe? No. Firstly, all your Open Source code has already been…

By: Jinwoo Hwang, Lead Developer, Project Lead, and Release Manager, Apache Geode 2.0 What Apache Software Deployers Need to Know Before May 2026 Effective May 2026, major public Certificate Authorities (CAs) will stop including the Client Authentication Extended Key Usage (EKU) in public TLS…

A step-by-step tutorial on building a developer blog with the MyST Markdown template, deploying it to GitHub Pages, and enabling GitHub Discussions-backed comments with Giscus.