[ About my public-facing work ]

Starting now, I’m moving my monthly posts from Patreon to my own website here. Why?

  1. I prefer to own my data
  2. There are many ways (Patreon merely one among them) in which people can fund my public-facing work

My corporate work focuses on learning together, experientially. My public-facing work is similar: I’m creating learning experiences, Open Source code, and combinations thereof — at present, like so:

  • Packaging third-party software for a cross-platform Unix package manager
  • Developing an email server
  • Fixing bugs and adding features to a (mostly) static site generator
  • Facilitating ensemble/mob programming sessions
  • Streaming solo programming sessions
  • Organizing meetups about programming and Agile

For more, see crowdfunding. I’m grateful for your support.

Experiences

Held our final Legacy Open Source Fridays ensemble session of 2021. Started back up with streaming my solo programming sessions on Twitch, mostly pkgsrc-related so far. Improving my stream a bit each time.

For Jersey City Java, experimented with having a vendor present their product: a brief introduction to the tool, followed by programming together with Pejman Ghorbanzade. Glad we tried it. If we do another vendor session sometime, this’ll be how.

Building momentum with Southern Connecticut Agile, our second meetup was an extremely well liked conversation with Esther Derby and Matthew Carlson. We’ll skip December (too much holiday stuff), though JC-JUG’s session will be of interest. I’m excited for our January SoCTAgile speaker.

Build farm

VirtualBox 6.1.30 fixed the macOS Monterey troubles I encountered last month.

Upgrading Devuan 3.1 to 4.0 was straightforward, as was updating Ubuntu aarch64 to 21.10.

After much reading and trying stuff, bringing up a 2007 MacBook (64-bit system, 32-bit EFI) with Lubuntu 21.10 was ultimately uneventful. It’s no speed demon. I doubt I’ll keep it running. But the tricks I’ve just learned should apply to my original 2006 Mac Pro, boosted many years ago with SSD and lots of RAM and needing only an OS that can be kept current. In the meantime, a cursory build of my usual packages turned up a build failure in libspf2.

pkgsrc fixes

  • Doing cross-platform testing of an Ubuntu 21.10 fix for libspf2 (works nearly everywhere else, but needs more fixing on OpenBSD and Void)
  • Reviewed a fix needed in my cross-platform build environment, now awaiting commit by the author
  • lighttpd: upstream patch for use-after-free
  • libhighlight: bump required API version to fix runtime errors seen on wiki.netbsd.org
  • ikiwiki: provide pkgsrc-compatible default values for configurable paths to fix runtime errors seen on wiki.netbsd.org
  • Linux with non-executable glibc (such as Ubuntu/aarch64 21.10): fall back to detecting GLIBC_VERSION another way
  • qmail and djbdns: catch up to pkgsrc’s switch from RMD160 to BLAKE2s hashes
  • gdk-pixbuf2: fix macOS build
  • ucspi-tools: fix Linux build
  • bootstrap: note that Solaris 11 works

pkgsrc updates

  • mob to 2.1.0
  • texttest to 4.0.8
  • p5-App-Sqitch to 1.2.0
  • py-approvaltests to 3.1.0
  • getmail to 5.16

pkgsrc additions

  • ucspi-udp
  • tcpexec
  • fd-proxy
  • pikchr
  • AusweisApp2 (to pkgsrc-wip for further attention)
  • dstp (also to pkgsrc-wip)

notqmail

Legacy Open Source Fridays has produced a few pull requests which we’re still working through. I made some progress on getting Add tests for qmail-send:job_*() functions past the Solaris autobuilds.

Legacy Open Source Fridays has also produced a few people with motivation to continue programming notqmail. I had not imagined this possibility, and am gratified that it’s happened.

ikiwiki

My motivation for packaging pikchr was to be able to integrate it into ikiwiki. Ikiwiki already has a graphviz plugin which I’ve been using to generate somewhat explanatory diagrams of acceptutils — but I’m not thrilled with my diagrams, pikchr appears designed to run in precisely this kind of context, and maybe I’ll like it better. When I write the pikchr plugin for ikiwiki, it’ll be streamed (subscribe to my Twitch). In the meantime, you can watch me create the pikchr package.