iliana’s blog
I’m evaluating the usability of GitHub merge queues under a set of conditions that makes merge queues hard: pull requests have a high probability of failing CI when merged together despite passing on their own. (Plus, GitHub’s implementation has like 11 different knobs, and the documentation is somewhat limited.) I could make a bunch of PRs on my own, but that’s boring, and I’m not good at finding…
Kurt Schlosser, GeekWire : Living Computers Museum + Labs, the Seattle institution created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a hands-on showcase for rare computing technology and interactive displays, will not reopen, more than four years after closing just ahead of the pandemic. […] The estate also announced Tuesday that some key pieces from Allen’s personal collection of computer…
SteamOS 3 (“Holo”) is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software’s portable PC gaming device. It’s a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive partition, then rebooting into that partition. But consumers can also run…
I’m working on a project that uses Buildroot to build an embedded Linux system for a relatively standard x86 server board. I’ve configured it to produce a single Linux kernel image with an embedded initramfs; Buildroot has special support (via BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_INITRAMFS ) to build the kernel a second time using Linux’s CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE option and embed the root filesystem into the kernel…
Our local libraries, The Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, issue pieces of plastic with barcodes printed on the back assigned to your borrower account. These cards are not strictly necessary in 2023; most everything at Seattle libraries is self-service, including circulation, and these self-service entrypoints usually have a way to type in a library barcode manually. But…
I created a web page for “Ceci n’est pas une licence” , an anti-license I wrote a few months ago.
A couple of months ago I blogged about how to stop Firefox pinned tabs from lighting up on title change . Today, I had to update that to use the following userChrome.css: .tab-stack > .tab-content [ pinned ][ titlechanged ] { background-image : none !important ; } instead of this now-broken userChrome.css: /* this doesn't work anymore :( */ :root { --lwt-tab-attention-icon-color : transparent ; }…
Updated June 13, 2023 : Firefox 114 broke my original fix; I’ve updated the solution below with the more tried-and-true approach. Webmail and chat clients often change the page title to tell you if you have unread messages and get your attention. If you pin these tabs in Firefox, the page title is hidden. To ensure pages can still get your attention, Firefox displays a little light under the…
Exploiting aCropalypse: Recovering Truncated PNGs (CVE-2023-21036): The bug lies in closed-source Google-proprietary code so it’s a bit hard to inspect, but after some patch-diffing I concluded that the root cause was due to this horrible bit of API ‘design’: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/180526528 . Google was passing w to a call to parseMode(), when they should’ve been passing wt (the t…
Step 1: Ask a corporate lawyer what they think. 1 Footnotes GitHub finally added a pronouns field to profiles today, with the following disclaimer devoid of meaning: “Your pronouns will be visible to fellow users across GitHub, including where local laws restrict using pronouns other than those assigned at birth.” It is rather unfortunate that GitHub chose to tarnish an otherwise good…
In actual supply chains, money is changing hands. A server manufacturer is paying for PCB fabrication, who is paying their suppliers for raw materials and equipment, and so on until the whole thing eventually loops back on itself when a mining company needs to buy a server. When you take on an additional dependency in a software project, often money does not change hands. npm install and cargo add…
My friend Artemis wrote about unlicensed code finding its way into Linux distributions . How did this happen? Let’s do a little bit of software archaeology 1 . The unlicensed code in question 2 is a Go library for parsing unified diffs. tea , “the official CLI for Gitea”, uses this library to allow users to review pull requests from the command line . The feature was merged into tea at the end of…
While working with friends on a handheld emulator playable from a cohost post, I found an interesting workaround for a usability issue .
I wrote about Oxide’s employee benefits , which include direct reimbursement for trans benefits because I asked, despite the insurance industry.
I’m not sure if they realize it yet, but Tailscale seems to work extremely well for polycules. Each user can have their own single-user Tailnet and explicitly share specific machines with other people. Both parties have to consent to sharing a device; either party can revoke this consent. The device owner can further restrict accessible ports through ACLs . Tailscale runs on pretty much anything…
I previously wrote about systems, such as the Amazon employee directory, that can be designed with identity fluidity in mind. I also wrote about the last name destroyer of worlds , one that I’m fond of, but has a number of non-trivial issues that make me think twice before making it my legal name. I’ve decided to “try on” a new name, again: iliana etaoin . I don’t think I’ve told the story of my…
Within the last couple of years I decided to ditch my 2U rackmount desktop (named g2-2xlarge , complete with a GPU on a PCIe riser card) in favor of taking up less space in my house with computers. I started looking at the mini PC market about four days before the new Mac mini was announced and it just blew me away. Four Thunderbolt 3 ports! Of course, getting Linux running on new Mac hardware is…
At Amazon, the company directory (“Phone Tool”) allows you to set your name to pretty much anything you please. I remember getting the company-wide email sent announcing this ability. A few of my coworkers wondered why anybody would need such a feature. For me, I read that email and realized that functionality was for people like me. At the time I was playing around with the idea that I might be…
(This is a follow-up to ” A tale of 132 e’s ”. Post updated to reflect permanent archive location.) I archived e30e/e98e , effectively making it read-only. This was a decision I made this morning after reading GitHub Support’s first response , regardless of how they continued to respond. I informed the other maintainers of my decision about two hours ago. I became incredibly disillusioned not just…
(Updates moved to follow-up post: ” the [E]nd of eeeee ”.) A few weeks ago my most popular repository on GitHub was crowbar , a Rust crate that I’m particularly proud of. It wasn’t necessarily good , but it did something interesting. It has 168 stars. It was overtaken by a repository named by the maximum number of e’s . It cannot be cloned. Cloning into…