/dev/dump

  (Note: I'm resurrecting this dormant blog after a long  period of inactivity.  But this thing bothered me so much that I felt I needed to write a blog about it.) TLDR: The macOS Terminal.app is still buggy and not recommended. Instead consider switching to a 3rd party emulator.  The rest of this post describes the faults in far more detail. One of the more lauded features in macOS 26 is the updated Terminal.app . As some of you may know, I'm the author of a very popular library for interacting with terminals and terminal emulators, at least within the Go ecosystem. I was excited to hear about the new Terminal.app. Finally, we would get support for 24-bit color, years after everyone else has had it. (Even Microsoft beat Apple to the punch here, leading by something like half a decade.) So yes, the good news is that macOS Terminal.app in does  support 24-bit color. But in nearly every other interesting case it is far inferior. The rest of this is probably only...

The backstory here is that mostly I love the Go programming language. But I've been very dismayed by certain statements from some of the core Go team members about topics that have significant ramification for my concurrent application design.  Specifically, bold statements to the effect that " channels " are the way to write concurrent programs, and deemphasizing condition variables.  (In one case, there is even a proposal to remove condition variables entirely from Go2!) The Go Position Essentially, the Go team believes very strongly in a design principle that can be stated thusly: " Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating." This design principle underlies the design of channels, which behave very much like UNIX pipes, although there are some very surprising semantics associated with channels, which I have found limiting over the years.  More on that below. Certainly, if you can avoid having shared memory st...

Folks who follow me may know that Go is one of my favorite programming languages.  The ethos of Go has historically been closer to that of C, but seems mostly to try to improve on the things that make C less than ideal for lots of projects. One of the challenges that Go has always had is it's very weak support for versioning, dependency management, and vendoring.  The Go team's historic promise and premise (called the Go1 Promise ) was that the latest version in any repo should always be preferred. This has a few ramifications: No breaking changes permitted in a library, or package, ever. The package should be "bug-free" at master.  (I.e. regression free.) The package should live forever. For small projects, these are noble goals, but over time it's been well demonstrated that this doesn't work. APIs just too often need to evolve (perhaps to correct earlier mistakes) in incompatible ways. Sometimes its easier to discard an older API than to up...

(Congressman Duncan Hunter is my Representative in the House.  Today I sent the letter below to him through the congressional email posting service (which verifies that I'm his constituent).  A copy is here for others to read.  I encourage everyone, especially those in districts with Republican congressional representation to write a similar letter and send it to their congressman via the site at house.gov -- you can look up your own representative on the same site.) Congressman Hunter, I have read your "position" statement with respect to the administrations "Zero Tolerance" treatment towards immigration, and the separation of families seeking asylum, and I am *most* dismayed by the position you have taken. I would encourage you to start by reading the full text of the following court order, which describes the reprehensible actions taken by the administration: https://t.co/adhGO6BDJR This is not hearsay, but legal findings by a US Court. Your claim t...

Over the past several weeks I've learned far more than I ever wanted to about the self publishing process.  I'm posting some of my findings here in the hopes that they may help others.  TLDR; If you're going with eBooks, and you should, consider using an author website to sell it "early", and once your book is finished publish it with Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords.  Keep the author website / store up even after, so you can maximize returns.  Price your eBook between $2.99 and $9.99. If you're going to go with Print, start with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing first, unless you're only needing a small run of books printed only in the USA (in which case TheBookPatch.com looks good).  Once you're book is really done, and you're ready to branch out to see it available internationally and from other bookstores, publish it with Ingram Spark. Get and use your own ISBNs (From MyIdentifiers.com -- buy 10 at a time), and make sure you opt o...

(No, this is not about GitHub or Microsoft... lol.) Back in March (just a few months ago), I signed up on Leanpub to publish the NNG Reference Manual .  I was completely in the dark about how to go about self-publishing a book, and a community member pointed me at Leanpub. Leanpub charged $99 to set up, back in March, and offered a 90% (minus 50 cents) royalty rate.  On top of it they let me choose a price from free, or $0.99 to $99.  Buyers could choose within that range.  This looked great, although I was a bit hesitant to spend the $99 since there was no way to try their platform out. Note that at this time I was not interested (and am still not interested) in their authoring tools based on Markua.  I had excellent tooling already in Asciidoctor , plus a bunch of home-grown tools (that I've since further expanded upon) to markup and layout the book, plus previewing, etc. Everything was great, and I made sales ranging from $0.99 to $20.  Not a lo...

The developer crowds are swarming off of GitHub in the wake of today's announcement that Microsoft has agreed to purchase GH for $7.5B. I've already written why I think this acquisition is good for neither GitHub nor Microsoft.  I don't think it's good for anyone else either... but maybe at least it alerts us all to the dangers of having all our eggs in the same basket. At the moment my repositories will not  be moving.  The reason for this is quite simple -- while the masses race off of GitHub, desperate for another safe harbor, the panic that this has created is overwhelming alternative providers.  GitLab reported a 10X growth.  While this might be good for GitLab, its not good for people already on GitLab, as there was already quite a well understand performance concern around GitLab.com. At least in the short term, GitHub's load will decrease (at least once all the code repo exports are done), I think.  The other thing is that Microsoft h...

So apparently Microsoft wants to buy GitHub . This is a huge mistake for both companies, and would be tragic for pretty much everyone involved. GitHub has become the open source hosting site for code, and for a number of companies, it also hosts private repositories.  It's the place to be if you want your code to be found and used by other developers, and frankly, its so much of a de facto  standard for this purpose that many tools and services work better with GitHub. GitHub was founded on the back of Git, which was invented by Linus Torvalds to solve source code management woes for the Linux kernel. (Previously the kernel used an excellent tool called BitKeeper for this job, but some missteps by the owners of BitKeeper drove the Linux team away from it.  It looks like GitHub is making similar, albeit different, commercial missteps.) Microsoft already has their own product, Visual Studio Team Services , which competes with GitHub, but which frankly appeals most...

There seems to have been some pretty misleading data out on the Internet, indicating that " nanomsg is dead".  The main culprit here is a " postmortem " by Drew Crawford.  Unfortunately comments are apparently not working on that post according to Drew himself. The thing is this (apologies to Samuel Clemens):  "reports of the death of nanomsg have been greatly exaggerated". So it's time to set the record straight. I've been working hard on nanomsg, and the Scalability Protocols that are intrinsic to nanomsg for quite some time.  It has been generally occupied my full time paid job for approximately the past year.  I've been working on this stuff part time for longer than that. The main focus during this time has been a complete rewrite of the core library, known as  NNG .  NNG, or nanomsg-next-gen, aims to be a far superior version of nanomsg, with significant new capabilities, greatly improved reliability, scalability, extensibility, ...

Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere, you probably have heard about the crypto currency called "Bitcoin".  Lately its skyrocketed in "value", and a number of other currencies based on similar mathematics have also arisen.  Collectively, these are termed cryptocurrencies. The idea behind them is fairly ingenious, and based upon the idea that by solving "hard" problems (in terms of mathematics), the currency can limit how many "coins" are introduced into the economy.  Both the math and the social experiment behind them is something that on paper looks really interesting. The problem is that the explosion of value has created a number of problems, and as a result I won't be accepting any of these forms of currencies for the foreseeable future. First, the market for each of these currencies is controlled by a relatively small number of individuals who own a majority of the outstanding "coins".  The problem with thi...

I'm so disappointed with the online accounting software options available to me; and I've spent far fa r too much time in the past couple of days looking for an accounting solution for my new business. The current state of affairs makes me wonder if just using a spreadsheet might be as easy. I am posting my experiences here for two reasons. To inform others who might have similar needs, and To inform the hopefully smart people at these companies, so maybe they will improve their products. Let me start with a brief summary of my needs: Track time (esp. billable hours) Tracked time should include date, and project/client, and some description of work performed. Multiple currency support. I have international clients that I need to bill in their preferred currency. Invoicing and payment tracking for above. Payroll -- preferably integrated with someone like Gusto . Support for two employees with plans to grow.  Double-entry accounting (including bank reconciliatio...

Close-Notify Idiocy? TLS (and presumably SSL) require that implementations send a special disconnect message, "close-notify", when closing a connection.  The precise language (from TLS v1.2) reads: The client and the server must share knowledge that the connection is ending in order to avoid a truncation attack. Either party may initiate the exchange of closing messages.  close_notify  This message notifies the recipient that the sender will not send any more messages on this connection. Note that as of TLS 1.1, failure to properly close a connection no longer requires that a session not be resumed. This is a change from TLS 1.0 to conform with widespread implementation practice.  Either party may initiate a close by sending a close_notify alert. Any data received after a closure alert is ignored.  Unless some other fatal alert has been transmitted, each party is required to send a close_notify alert before closing the write side of t...

First off, I'm a developer of open source application libraries, some of which are fairly popular. TLDR: Library developers should not  use ExternalProject_Add, but instead rely on FindPackage, demanding that their downstream developers pre-install their dependencies. I recently decided to try to add TLS v1.2 support to one of my messaging libraries, which is written in C and configured via CMake. The best way for me to do this -- so I thought -- would be to add a dependency in my project using a sub project, bringing in a 3rd party (also open source) library -- Mbed TLS . Now the Mbed TLS project is also configured by CMake, so you'd think this would be relatively straight-forward to include their work in my own.  You'd be mistaken. CMake includes a capability for configuring external projects, even downloading their source code (or checking out the stuff via git) called ExternalProjects . This looks super handy -- and it almost  is.  (And for folks...

Let me start by saying this... I hate the GPL.  Oh yeah, and a heads up, I am just a software engineer, and not a lawyer.  Having said that.... I've released software under the GPL, but I never will again.  Don't get me wrong, I love open source, but GPL's license terms are unaccountably toxic, creating an island that I am pretty sure that original GPL authors never intended. My Problem.... So I started by wanting to contemplate a licensing change for a new library I'm working on, to move from the very loose and liberal MIT license, to something with a few characteristics I like -- namely patent protection and a "builtin" contributor agreement.   I'm speaking of course of the well-respected and well-regarded Apache License 2.0. The problem is, I ran into a complete and utter roadblock. I want my software to be maximally usable by as many folks as possible. There is a large installed base of software released under the GPLv2 .  (Often witho...