Programming

Zip Files are Everywhere I grew up with PKZIP. It was a huge improvement over ARC files and other file formats that were supported on PCs in the 80’s and 90’s. Open source implementations of Zip have been available in Linux since the early days. In modern times, tools like 7-Zip provide a popular and friendly interface into the contents of these files. Hopefully this history is already familiar to you since I’m not going to focus on the usefulness of Zip to users, but how often developers have turned to it. ...

Introduction I really enjoyed reading The evolution of Lua, continued that I learned about thanks to this Hacker News thread. This is a great perspective on the long-term (15 year) evolution of the Lua programming language. While discussing language evolution is not completely unheard of, it is rather atypical of the discussion we usually have around programming languages. Most often you’re only concerned about the syntax or features of a particular language version, usually the latest one. Sometimes you might look at release notes to see when a feature was introduced or a bug was fixed. Our day to day needs don’t often benefit from a longer term perspective. ...

Is anyone in my network looking for work these days? One of our family members works at Vocal Media. They’ve been very happy with their role, so I hope this Senior Software Engineer role could be worth your time to check out. It sounds focused on the data warehouse from the job description. So you don’t have to worry about me competing with you. Feel free to comment on this post or DM me if you’re actively looking for something now.

Subject: New Complete Example: DNSControl → CoreDNS Container with Automated Testing Howdy DNSControl Community, I’m excited to share a comprehensive example repository that demonstrates the complete workflow from DNSControl JavaScript configurations to a production-ready containerized DNS server: 🔗 Repository: https://github.com/fini-net/fini-coredns-example fini-net/fini-coredns-example Public Coredns with dnscontrol example Go 2 1 github.com What This Provides This repository showcases a real-world implementation of: ...

Well, well, well. Here we are in 2025 and Python packaging has finally been fixed. Not by the Python community, mind you - they had their shot for about 20 years. No, it took the Rust folks to come in and show us how it’s done. The Long, Painful History Let me paint you a picture. Back when I was starting out, we had distutils. That was it. Then came setuptools, which was supposed to fix everything. Then pip showed up to handle installation. Then virtualenv because global package installs were a nightmare. Then pipenv to combine pip and virtualenv. Then poetry because pipenv wasn’t quite right. Then pip-tools for deterministic builds. Then conda for scientific computing. Then… ...

Eventually this blog post is going to work around to being a review of “Microservices Pros and Cons” by Curtis Poe. It is going to meander a bit before it gets to the review, but I haven’t found a way to leave out this “preamble”. In some sense it is beside the point, but in other senses it is the whole point. YMMV. Presumption of bias I would guess that most innocent bystanders reading a title like “Pros and Cons” would assume that the author intended to present a balanced view of the topic at hand. Having been in the computer business for the last thirty years I presume every author has some ax to grind. ...

My reaction to getting this posted I’m so happy and relieved to have my first technical video on youtube. There are a few things I wish I had included, particularly more on decorators like OS and groups. Yet the video is also longer than I was hoping for and there’s nothing I wish I had cut out. ...

Howdy friends! I’m happy to announce today that I am launching a rebuilt https://www.chicks.net/ . Hopefully you can already see the difference. It has been a long time This is the first redesign in a very long time. Most of the changes over the last decade have been minor. Going back further gets us before git to September 2004 in the wayback machine and we can see that the old design lasted for 20 years. ...

PHP, Java, and .NET are more prone to #security problems than JavaScript or the other major scripting languages. Can we ban them from the civilized Internet? Links #security Top Programming Languages That Generate Software Vulnerabilities Shared with: Public +1’d by: Melissa McDowell, Wing Wong

Have you ever been annoyed that +GitHub doesn’t put the right Content-type on raw files? Somebody else has solved this for you now. Links RawGit Shared with: Public, GitHub +1’d by: Wing Wong