@profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

profoundlynerdy

@profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social

My retro computing niche is source code archaeology: the art of reconstructing maintainable source code from disassembly and reverse engineering. It's harder than it sounds but also fascinating and rewarding. I also enjoy working with unpopular or niche programming languages. I very much follow the beat of a different drum.

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carcosa, to usenet
@carcosa@emacs.ch avatar

deleted_by_author

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    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @carcosa Well, you'd have to federate the back end storage and provide an incentive for people to hold onto content. So, maybe leverage a crypto currency?

    You'd also need federated indexers to handle queries. I'm not sure how you'd prevent evil nodes at this level.

    You'd also want to make the content deniable to the hosting nodes, via encryption, mainly to protect people in oppressive regimes from eating a bullet for free speech.

    You'd need reputation scores, like Reddit karma.

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ahnlak @carcosa I wonder if an NNTP gateway to Activity Pub could be built.

    mgorny, to opensource

    There are projects that remove old methods without a prior warnings.

    Then, there are projects that warn you that they will deprecate something in a future release.

    https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing/releases/tag/3.1.0

    #OpenSource #Python #Gentoo

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @mgorny There are also projects that warn you they will deprecate something... And then not do it for 5 or plus years.

    chrisisgr8, to random

    chris: my backup app is now ready for my practical use case!

    the narrator: this is the 4th time their backup app has been ready for their practical use case

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @scott @chrisisgr8 #Perl gets used when it's the right tool for the job. That's far more frequently than a lot of people realize and far less frequently than the Perl zealots want to admit.

    Personally, I'm a fan of the language as I find it exceptionally expressive. I like #Rakulang too, for much the same reason. Programming languages rarely die off completely and more than a few have lost market share only to later experience a renascence.

    profoundlynerdy, to ipv6
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    Serious question: my #ISP lacks #IPv6 support. Other than "call and complain" which would be fruitless -- their call center staff are not actually technical and have no idea what IPv6 is -- what reasonable steps could be taken by the ISP's users to push for adoption? Anything?

    seldo, to random

    The democrats should propose a bill that nobody convicted of a felony can run for president and watch the GOP squirm as to why a felon should be unable to vote but eligible to run for president.

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @seldo What you propose would be problematic for two reasons:

    1. It would almost certainly require a Constitutional Amendment.
    2. There isn't an American alive who, between state, local, and Federal law, hasn't committed a felony unwittingly. The Supreme Court admits as much.

    Thus, any political contest would turn into a battle of who can find dirt to be provided, not to the court of public opinion, but the favored jurisdiction of the party in power against the incumbent party.

    NexusM, to random German

    From time to time i like to go through https://www.perlmonks.org as it reminds me from the time i used #Perl as my main scripting language for sys admin. Makes me sad that the language and site is mostly dead.

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @NexusM @mjgardner #Perl fan here. There are some good frameworks, Rex which has a similar niche to #Ansible but is less top-heavy. There is also Mojolicious which is sort of like Python's Flask.

    Yes, the market share of Perl has contracted a lot. It still gets used as small scale glue more than big projects. If #Cor (objects that don't suck for Perl) gains traction you could see the language stabilize.

    I think the #functionalprogramming is warming to #Rakulang. Both are #Bash on steroids.

    Houl, to random
    @Houl@ilyamikcoder.com avatar
    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @Houl The 6502 did not have a reasonably orthogonal instruction set which means it isn't RISC. Some people would add the lack of a flat memory model, but that just makes it a poor C target.

    I love the 6502, but I personally wish zero page could be moved around -- something WDC variants call direct page -- and the stack could similarly be relocated. The first change would increase performance a lot and the second would make real multitasking possible.

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ted_dunning @Houl Can you explain what this means? All I know about #SPARC is that #Oracle bought #Sun and lied their asses off about future development of the platform, bailed, and promptly screwed EVERYONE with a stake in the platform. That's it. Oh, and #Gentoo can boot it. But since Gentoo is the #NetBSD of the Linux world so that's not a surprise. "Of course it runs Gentoo!"

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ted_dunning @Houl That was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know. I'm an #assemblylanguage geek. Thanks! I've cough spent more time looking at #motorola #M6809 documents today than I should have. Damned ADHD. :-P

    Do you think the arch will live on in some way? Even #Fujitsu bailed on it.

    profoundlynerdy, to random
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    Besides #retrocompiting and the occasional #firmware update for a #networking or #iot device, where do you see old school #ftp still being used? Not TFTP, #FTPS, or SCP but true FTP?

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @jpm @overeducatedredneck @brouhaha What is H.323?

    mgorny, to rust

    Rewriting everything in #RustLang improves quality, right?

    I suppose that's why I've spent the whole morning figuring out cryptography regressions, just to discover they are due to random function being rewritten from #Python to Rust:

    https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/9010#issuecomment-1573441239

    #Gentoo

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @mgorny There are those who say #Rust is just a badly watered down #Ada wannabe. I'm not sure I agree. I also don't think Rust is going to truly usurp #C anytime soon. I think there is a lot of Rust #koolaid drinking in some circles though.

    ferki, (edited ) to opensource
    @ferki@fosstodon.org avatar

    I started to review the blog post requests, drafts, and ideas accumulated over time. Most topics revolve around , , , , , , , and — with some overlap.

    Help me decide: which topic shall I focus on first?

    p.s.: comment to add more!

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ferki More #perl content is always welcome but CLI productivity is probably a great idea.

    profoundlynerdy, to linux
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    Does anyone here actually use the sc-im spreadsheet? If so, why?

    For the uninitiated, sc-im is a -like spreadsheet program for the on and . There may be a windows binary but I wouldn't know.

    ferki, to gentoo
    @ferki@fosstodon.org avatar

    vale-2.24.3 is fixing a crash bug, and available for fellow users in my overlay:

    https://github.com/ferki/gentoo-overlay/tree/1d12663d8c458af636d4bdd3745e1e3872eec219/app-text/vale

    is a command-line tool that brings code-like to . It's fast, cross-platform, and highly customizable.

    Happy !

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ferki Why not move the Vale ebuild from your overlay to #Gentoo GURU?

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ferki All I can say is I'm a likely user at some near term point.

    I'm going to be doing some technical writing for one of the ham radio groups I'm a part of. One of the things I've struggled with is to find a tool that will enforce keeping the language simple. If I understand correctly, this can help with a lot of that.

    Otherwise, the closest I came was the obscure app-text/diction but it does flesch-kincaid readability analysis and little else.

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ferki It would also make a great addition to the https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Terminal_productivity_software wiki page. There are a few GURU items in there.

    profoundlynerdy, to webhosting
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    Can anyone here recommend a good #webhosting company for my #hamradio club?

    I'd like something that's reasonably priced but has cpanel and Let's Encrypt support. Any takers?

    Next, I need to migrate them away from a static site that feels like it was written by a teenager in the mid 90's targeting Netscape 2.0 and towards something modern. I think I'll go with #wordpress against my better judgment, because it's reasonably old-person friendly.

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ai6yr No, which is why I said "against my better judgement." I'd rather have a static site written in Markdown. But, I don't trust octogenarians to get the concept.

    profoundlynerdy,
    @profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social avatar

    @ai6yr I wish there was a way to make Hugo senior citizen friendly.

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