WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog
Through work, I have paid license to windsurf (recently renamed to "devin"), an application for LLM-based (aka, "Agentic") development. I hadn't been using it that much, but in an effort to more clearly understand how this whole AI development thing works, I decided to give it a closer look recently. My conclusions: In its current form, this whole LLM wave is problematic for multiple reasons. But…
When the Free Software movement started in the 1980s, most of the world had just made a transition from free university-written software to non-free, proprietary, company-written software. Because of that, the initial ethical standpoint of the Free Software foundation was that it's fine to run a non-free operating system, as long as all the software you run on that operating system is free.…
Dear lazyweb, At work, we are trying to rotate the GPG signing keys for the Linux packages of the eID middleware We created new keys, and they will be installed on all Linux machines that have the eid-archive package installed soon (they were already supposed to be, but we made a mistake ). Running some tests, however, I have a bit of a problem: [wouter@rhel rpm-gpg]$ sudo rpm --import…
At work, I've been maintaining a perl script that needs to run a number of steps as part of a release workflow. Initially, that script was very simple, but over time it has grown to do a number of things. And then some of those things did not need to be run all the time. And then we wanted to do this one exceptional thing for this one case. And so on; eventually the script became a big mess of…
The NBD protocol has grown a number of new features over the years. Unfortunately, some of those features are not (yet?) supported by the Linux kernel. I suggested a few times over the years that the maintainer of the NBD driver in the kernel, Josef Bacik, take a look at these features, but he hasn't done so; presumably he has other priorities. As with anything in the open source world, if you…
Getting the Belgian eID to work on Linux systems should be fairly easy, although some people do struggle with it. For that reason, there is a lot of third-party documentation out there in the form of blog posts, wiki pages, and other kinds of things. Unfortunately, some of this documentation is simply wrong . Written by people who played around with things until it kind of worked, sometimes you…
A while ago, I saw Stefano 's portable monitor, and thought it was very useful. Personally, I rent a desk at an office space where I have a 27" Dell monitor; but I do sometimes use my laptop away from that desk, and then I do sometimes miss the external monitor. So a few weeks before DebConf, I bought me one myself. The one I got is about a mid-range model; there are models that are less than half…
I've been maintaining a number of Perl software packages recently. There's SReview , my video review and transcoding system of which I split off Media::Convert a while back; and as of about a year ago, I've also added PtLink , an RSS aggregator (with future plans for more than just that). All these come with extensive test suites which can help me ensure that things continue to work properly when…
The DebConf video team has been sprinting in preparation for DebConf 23 which will happen in Kochi, India, in September of this year. Present were Nicolas "olasd" Dandrimont, Stefano "tumbleweed" Rivera, and yours truly. Additionally, Louis-Philippe "pollo" Véronneau and Carl "CarlFK" Karsten joined the sprint remotely from across the pond. Thank you to the DPL for agreeing to fund flights,…
Since before I got involved in the eID back in 2014 , we have provided official packages of the eID for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since RHEL itself requires a license, we did this, first, by using buildbot and mock on a Fedora VM to set up a CentOS chroot in which to build the RPM package. Later this was migrated to using GitLab CI and to using docker rather than VMs, in an effort to save some…