Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

This post was originally written in response to The Linux Experiment’s “Redis ditches FOSS” item, where Nick, the presenter, was critical of the recent Redis license change where they moved from the original BSD license to MongoDB’s SSPL, a change that was portrayed (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) as “the company taking the code the open source volunteers have given them and closing it in order to monetize the volunteers’ work”.

TL;DR – the fact that OSI labels SSPL as “not open source” is nothing more than FUD by the major cloud providers, as the only meaningful difference between that and the GPL is section 13 that makes life harder for cloud providers.

The 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey results are in, and here’s my (likely controversial) take:

Rust developers are the most self-centered, with Go developers close seconds.

Here are screenshots of the very nice “Worked with vs. want to work with” graphics for programming languages, with Rust and Go highlighted:

This – this is the reason:

Unlike other software packages (which includes, I believe, Flatpak) Snap packages will not update if the application is already running. Instead you get this annoying popup “Oh boy, you have 13 days to close your app otherwise nasty things will happen!” Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea in and by itself, except that if you close the application – it doesn’t update. Even the notification doesn’t go away.

Trying to register for the Twitter API (for personal use and mucking around), and this is how the “accepts our terms of service” page looks:

Mind you, the “I accept” and “Submit” buttons still work very well, you just have no idea what you’re signing up for… 🤦

I’ve ranted before about Client-Side Decorations (CSD), here and elsewhere, and here’s another one – mostly as a reminder to myself about how to disable CSD on Google Chrome web application windows.

The gist is – CSDs are horrible – they make your desktop look like a mishmash of different operating systems on the same screen, where it is often not clear how to interact with the application windows. The worst case is of course the MS-Windows XP RTL reflected UI, where you had some windows with normal operation buttons (close, maximize, etc) on the right side of the title bar and some windows were in “RTL” mode, so their buttons were on the left side 🤯.

I’m starting a new thing on this (otherwise quite dead) blog, mostly as a service to myself: “Imported Rants”. Its going to be basically copies (sometimes maybe better edited) of rants I posted as comments in other places (mostly YouTube), that have grown long enough to almost be an article in and of themselves.

Today, in response to Brodie Robertson’s question – Should Linux Users Hate Apple As Much As Microsoft? here’s the rant from my comments:

Well, at least until the entire world uses high DPI screens. Lets see an example:

Pulsing button (video)

This is a “call to action” effect on a button – it pulses slightly to get attention. This has proven to be really effective at improving “conversion” (web term to “getting you to do that thing I want you to do”). But even if you are not a designer at heart its easy to see that the text in the button is pulsing at different speeds and this creates a really jarring effect.

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למי שלא שם לב (בטח כולכם), האקדמיה הישראלית לקולנוע וטלוויזיה¹ חילקה ביום שישי האחרון את פרס האקדמיה לטלוויזיה (שמוגדר באתר האקדמיה כ-“המקבילה הישראלית לפרסי האמי האמריקאים”, אבל בניגוד לפרס אופיר לקולנוע ולפרס האמריקאי המצוין לעיל, אין לו שם).

בטח לא שמעתם על זה, כי טקס חלוקת הפרס ליצירה טלוויזיונית ישראלי מקורית, בו חולקו פרסים לסדרות בהפקת ערוצי טלוויזיה ישראלים, לא שודר באף ערוץ טלוויזיה ישראלי,  אפילו לא אלו שקיבלו את הפרס.

אני ספרתי שלושה דברים מטופשים.

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1. למה את המילה הזאת לא עיברתו? [↩]

Powershell is a great command line shell, if you all you know is cmd and batch. There are so many things it is missing when trying to compete with current Unix shells such as Bash, and while some of them have semi-working workarounds, many are sorely missing.

My pet peeves are:

• A decent pager. “more” is basically at the same stage it was when I started working in MS-DOS 3.30, and it is nowhere near the functionality of “less”¹.
• Persistent history. I’ve seen some workarounds but couldn’t get any of them to work properly.

Both of these features have been available to me since I started working with Linux in 1995, and it is really difficult living without them in MS-world. A decent terminal emulator will be nice too – the Powershell box has advantage over the cmd.exe box in that it is blue – other then that they are both in the same sorry state that the “dos box” of Windows 3 fame was at. I’m using “Console 2” to get some useful work done, but it too leaves much to be desired.

Also, startup is so.. fscking.. slow.. Starting Powershell on a brand new machine (with no per-session user scripts) can take as much as 3 seconds. Those are minutes of my life everyday that I would never get back.

1. and I’m not talking about the built-in editor, just being able to “page up” would have been nice [↩]

It includes some breakthrough technologies such as “Video Conferencing”, so say Wired in their feature post Apple Unveils High-Resolution, Videoconferencing [sic] iPhone 4.

It again boggles the mind, how Apple takes on a well known feature of existing products, tacks a bastardized version of it on a new revision of their product, and everyone hails at how innovative they are…

Here’s the Wired quote:

iPhone 4 includes a front-facing camera and support for videoconferencing with other iPhone 4 users, via a feature called FaceTime.

Here’s what I can do today with my 3 years old Ericsson P1i, my Nokia E-whatever or my fiance’s $20 Nokia (as well as about half of Nokia phones released in the last 8 years or so), and many other phones from other manufacturers:

• Above mentioned phones include a front-facing camera and support video conferencing with any other phone that supports standard 3G video calls, on any 3G network.

Also, apple announced their own video conferencing protocol (the so called “FaceTime”), as discussed in ReadWriteWeb:

That’s what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

There is only one problem with that statement: there is already a standard protocol for video calls – as mandated by the cellular industry’s leading standard body, 3GPP: the 3G-324M protocol, was developed jointly with ITU (the telecom industry governing body for standardization) and is implemented in virtually all video call capable cellular telecom devices.

Now here’s a video:
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