I feel I have to write something about the demise of
free(code).
Others have written about it too,
and its been covered on lwn.net as
well.
It’s actually a rather depressing development. They claim it’s due to
the low traffic and decline in updates, but it’s evident that’s not
the whole truth. The owners recommend their other site, SourceForge,
but anyone having been in the loop for the last decade or two knows
that SourceForge has been in a slow decline for a long time, more so
than free(code) in my opinion. Also, SourceForge only lists its own
projects, and only the most active or “top” projects.
I never used free(code) to find the “top” projects or the most active
ones. That’s completely useless to me. I went there to dig for small
unknown projects, small gems that are usually unlisted on GitHub or
SourceForge. I went there to publicize my own small creations, learn
about other similar projects and get a quick feedback on recent
changes of new releases to projects I was interested in.
The last couple of weeks have both seen the birth of the fabulous uftpd and a reignited inadyn project! Yesterday v1.2 of uftpd was released and today Inadyn saw the first working HTTPS support being released as v1.99.8! This is likely the last release of Inadyn before the big 2.0, which will introduce the new .conf file format based on libConfuse. A .conf file feasibility study was presented earlier …
Looking for a Dynamic DNS, DDNS, client? Well you’re in luck, the FLOSS market space is flooded with dedicated clients and various wget scripts. So why bother with an old C implementation? Well, this is admittedly one of the old timers in the game and is likely packaged for your GNU/Linux distribution of choice already. It’s tried and tested with many DDNS service providers and even comes bundled in a few embedded router distributions as well.
So, I finally got fed up with all other FTP servers and wrote
my own. Why would someone in their right mind do
something like this 2014?
As a developer the answer to most such questions is usually; to
scratch an itch. For a very long time I’ve looked for a really simple
FTP server that just works, out of the box!
Just made it! Here’s the result of #Easterhack14 – Finit v1.9 :-)
Nothing fancy this time, just collecting some bug fixes, playing with cppcheck a bit and adding support for including .conf files. Quite useful if you want to partition your configuration, or if you share major pieces of configuration between different platforms.
Enjoy!
So, we finally got Google Music & Movies services in Sweden! The prices seem a bit on the steep side, apart from maybe the Music service, which is slightly cheaper than Spotify. Will try it out for a month or so to see which one I like better.
For some reason I chose Gravity as my first rental, at 39 Skr. I’ve heard so many bad reviews of it but for better or worse it’ll now be my introduction to Google Movies :-)
It was time. I had been putting it off for far too long – learning about JSON and deciding on a new .conf file format for Inadyn. So this weekend I sat myself down to read up on JSON and the multitude of parser libraries for both JSON and traditional .conf file parsers. I was looking for a human readable file format that a user could easily and reliably edit by themselves without it being too error prone or sensitive to mistyping.
Sometimes people ask me what I do for a living. Usually I tend to
pause and think, real hard, becuase the people asking me this aren’t
programmers. They use computers, but are mostly limited to a Windows
machine, writing in MS Word and browsing the Internet, mostly for
Facebook.
I often start off with: “It’s a bit complicated to explain … “, by
which time I’ve lost most of the people in the room listening to me.
Sometimes I say: “I’m a software architect.”, because people seem to
know what architects do for a living, they draw houses, design stuff
and drive SAAB’s. Much like dentists. The prefix “software” however
does confuse people.