Specification vs. implementation
There are a lot of times when the specification says one thing but common implementations do another. Here are some especially common examples to watch out for.
busybee: Code
Hopefully-useful tidbits of code and information.
Latest posts
Why I dislike .well-known
.well-known considered harmful
On LLM-based programming
Lately there’s been a brewing culture war in the software community regarding the usage of LLM-based coding tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.), and I’m seeing a lot of hardline discourse on both sides, but especially from the anti-AI side of things.
rss2discord
For a while I’ve been using monitoRSS to broadcast a bunch of RSS feeds to various Discord channels. However, they’ve cut back on the free tier’s capabilities, and the paid tiers are rather expensive. So, this pushed me into finally creating rss2discord , a self-hosted RSS posting bot which you can run from anywhere that you can run Python scripts.
A simple anti-AI measure for Flask
After figuring out a basic anti-bot measure for Publ , I decided to try building a simple experiment for Flask in general.
Preventing bot scraping on Publ and Flask
This morning I was once again thinking about how to put some proper antibot behavior onto my websites, without relying on Cloudflare. There are plenty of fronting proxies like Anubis and Go Away which put a simple proof-of-work task in front of a website. This is pretty effective, but it adds more of an admin tax (and is often quite difficult to configure for servers that host multiple websites,…
Random verb selection on a MUCK
On SpinDizzy MUCK there are a bunch of “hug” verbs which are a bit whimsical and a bit nonsensical, and for reasons that are too silly to get into, I have been locked in an eternal battle with Austin in which I am constantly creating more.
macOS Dequarantine
Tired of dealing with the annoying processes necessary to run an unsigned application on macOS?
Falsehoods programmers believe about email
In the spirit of falsehoods programmers believe about names and time , here’s some falsehoods about email which are all too common.
Radix sort revisited
Around a year and a half ago I wrote an article on the perils of relying on big-O notation , and in it I focused on a comparison between comparison-based sorting (via std::sort ) and radix sort , based on the common bucketing approach.
The danger of big-O notation
A common pitfall I see programmers run into is putting way too much stock into Big O notation and using it as a rough analog for overall performance. It’s important to understand what the Big O represents, and what it doesn’t, before deciding to optimize an algorithm based purely on the runtime complexity.
How not to shuffle a list
A frequent thing that people want to do in making games or interactive applications is to shuffle a list. One common and intuitive approach that people take is to simply sort the list, but use a random number generator as the comparison operation. (For example, this is what’s recommended in Fuzzball’s MPI documentation , and it is a common answer that comes up on programming forums as…
Making a hash of data
When I was replacing peewee with PonyORM , I was evaluating a few options, including moving away from an ORM entirely and simply storing the metadata in indexed tables in memory. This would have also helped to solve a couple of minor annoying design issues (such as improper encapsulation of the actual content state into the application instance), but I ended up not doing this.
Pushl
Pushl : A tool for generating WebMention , Pingback , and WebSub notifications from arbitrary websites regardless of their underlying publishing system.
The Trouble with PHP
This article was originally written for the Publ blog . I have reproduced a slightly modified version here so that it hopefully finds a wider audience.
Publ
Publ : Like a static site generator, only dynamic.
#pragma once vs. #ifndef/#define
After getting in an extended discussion about the supposed performance tradeoff between #pragma once and #ifndef guards vs. the argument of correctness or not (I was taking the side of #pragma once based on some relatively recent indoctrination to that end), I decided to finally test the theory that #pragma once is faster because the compiler doesn’t have to try to re- #include a file that…
Feed Glommer
Sometimes you want to quickly produce a new RSS feed out of a bunch of existing RSS and Atom feeds. This is one way to do it.
Embedding binary resources with CMake and C++11
Let’s say you want to make a single-binary application that has embedded resources (images, GLSL shaders, etc.). Let’s say you want to automatically wrap your resources in a storage container to make it easier to deal with stuff. Let’s also say that you might even be using CMake as your build system.
The problem with select() vs. poll()
The UNIX select() API should have been deprecated years ago. While unsafe operations like sscanf() , sprintf() , gets() , and so forth all provide compile-time deprecation warnings, select() is also incredibly dangerous and has a more modern, safer replacement ( poll() ), but yet people continue to use it.