Open Source

Crap that’s happening in the open source world.

Do you remember the first time someone told you about fork()/exec() for Linux? Do you remember beeing completely confused? I do, and it’s an ongoing pain in the ass for me – every time I want to call something simple without blocking and without worrying about pipes or the structure of exec()/execl()/execlp() parameters, or the …

Continue reading CreateProcess for Linux

Check this out: andrew@littlesvr:~$ uptime 00:20:16 up 730 days, 15:13,  1 user,  load average: 0.57, 0.22, 0.11 At 4AM this morning it was 730 days, that’s exactly two years! The server would have been up for about 6 years if I didn’t decide once to upgrade the hardware, once to upgrade Slackware, and once to …

Continue reading Two years of uptime

just finished my master’s so I’m allowed to quote Wikipedia again :) In 2008 WorldDMB adopted APNG as a backward compatible extension to enable animation as part of the MOT SlideShow user application for Digital Radio. “APNG 1.0 Specification – Animated Portable Network Graphics” is included as normative Annex A in the ETSI standard TS …

Continue reading What’s digital broadcasting got to do with animated images?

APNG has very slowly (but steadily) gaining popularity. One of the recent things I was told about is the current list of most popular ideas Ubuntu Brainstorm: APNG Support. I’ll put a screenshot here for posterity: That’s pretty cool. The thing that makes me feel best is the overwhelming positive votes. Looking at the rest …

Continue reading The people want APNG!

Suspend and hibernate have been a sad story on Linux for a very long time. Typically the hardware makers are blamed, saying “oh they all do it differently none of it’s documented”. That may be true but it’s a bunch of horseshit anyway – hardly any of the hardware that works at all or perfectly …

Continue reading Suspend and hibernate in Linux

At some point in the distant past I’ve set up my own email server, running Sendmail for SMTP and the UWO imapd server for IMAP. Part of the setup process is creating certificates – so that you can have a secure tunnel for free, using self-signed certs. Like a good boy I followed the instructions …

Continue reading Certificate expiry

I’ve been running my more-or-less regular backup of littlesvr.ca, and found that yet again the online APNG assembler data directory is the one taking most of the time. Turns out that even though I cleared it a few months ago there is over 4GB of PNG files in there (half of that – 5800 APNG …

Continue reading APNG is still alive

Here’s a stupid post, it’s been a while. I’ve upgraded Slackware from 12.2 to 13.0 and now it is messing with me. Believe it or not the stupid thing knows when I’m annoyed and pisses me off even more. Here’s how it works: Sometimes my pointer starts jumping all around the screen, for no good …

Continue reading Slackware 13 knows how I feel