An ag(e)ing hacker

Languages and complexity, Part I: why I love Anki — 2024-01-02 19:47 Updated: 2024-08-21 12:01

August 2024 update: lack of endorsement This article used to endorse the services of a certain Russian language teacher and mention her by name, with permission. That person has now expressed the intention of making her course recordings “expire” trough some time limit which will make them unusable after a set date; the stated intent is motivating procrastinating students who hesitate too long before starting their study in earnest. Independently from the technical nature of their implementation and from whether the restrictions are possible to circumvent, anti-features are unacceptable and insulting. The teacher in question, now referred to here as [...] Read more

p≡p-mail-tool: easy privacy for email with existing Mail User Agents (p≡p is working with Gnus!) — 2023-08-07 03:05 Updated: 2024-01-11 12:15

During the last month and a half I have unfortunately mostly disappeared from GNU, having been busy and focused writing p≡p-mail-tool (https://codeberg.org/pEp/pEp-mail-tool), a new work project I have let overflow into my personal time as a beautiful little hack in which I believe. p≡p-mail-tool is of course free software. Motivation Freedom of speech and privacy are more and more threatened by governments and hostile corporations working against the public interest. In this season of death of liberty the minimum we can do to respond is making surveillance more difficult, by providing the general public with easy tools to use for [...] Read more

Announcing make-gallery, a simple web image gallery generator — 2022-11-21 01:33 Updated: 2022-11-21 23:53

I wrote a script generating an image gallery suitable to be included in web pages. Since it can be generally useful I cleaned it up and published it, of course as free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html); you are welcome to download a copy of ‘make-gallery’ from <https://git.ageinghacker.net/make-gallery>. The software is released under the GNU General Public Licence (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html) version 3 or later; the generated code is in the public domain. I hate the web I have never made a mystery of my personal dislike for the web with its gratuitous ever-growing complexity, inefficiency, lack of expressivity, hostility to the developer and to [...] Read more

SMTP, OrangeWebsite and using your own computing resources — 2022-10-24 00:35 Updated: 2024-01-04 19:55

I have had a personal server with the domain ‘ageinghacker.net’ since 2010. At the beginning I was sharing hosting costs with two or three other people, each of us running a virtual machine inside a Virtual Private Server. By 2016 my requirements had grown, I wanted stability and so decided to rent a VPS by myself. Around that time I had also decided to run a Tor exit node for the benefit of the global community, and more in general wanted my server to be in a country that allowed some freedom of speech; since I did not, then like [...] Read more

A personal reflection on the GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022 — 2022-10-11 00:30 Updated: 2024-01-04 19:41

According to the definition on the web site (https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022/) “The GNU Hackers’ Meetings or ‘GHMs’ are a venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU and free software”. And GHMs are in fact events structured as conferences with talks and presentation slides and all; very technical indeed, the way we like them and the way they should be. But if we take the time for attending every year since 2007 or so, and organising, it is mostly for the fun of spending time with our GNU friends in a relaxed environment. After many years in which most GNU Hackers’ Meetings [...] Read more

GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022: Call for presentations, even remote — 2022-09-12 18:05

The GNU Hackers’ Meetings or or “GHMs” are a friendly and informal venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU (https://www.gnu.org) and free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html); anybody is welcome to register and attend. The GNU Hackers’ Meeting 2022 will take place on October 1st and October 2st in İzmir, Turkey; see the event home page at <https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022/>. We decided to help students who wish to attend by contributing 50€ out of their 60€ attendance fee (required by the hotel for use of the conference room, coffee and snacks) so that students will need to only pay 10€, upon presenting proof of [...] Read more

The GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022 is less than one month away — 2022-09-04 20:21 Updated: 2022-09-05 12:15

The GNU Hackers’ Meetings are a venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU and free software. GNU Hackers’ Meetings have been taking place since 2007: you may want to look at the pages documenting most past editions (https://www.gnu.org/ghm/previous.html) which in many cases also include presentation slides and video recordings. The event atmosphere is always friendly and informal. Anybody is welcome to register and attend, including newcomers. The next GNU Hackers’ Meeting will take place in İzmir, Turkey on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd October 2022. We updated the GHM 2022 web page (https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022) with information about the venue, accommodation [...] Read more

GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022 proposal: İzmir, Turkey — 2022-06-10 01:55

The GNU Hackers Meetings (https://www.gnu.org/ghm) are a friendly and informal venue to discuss technical issues concerning GNU (https://www.gnu.org) and free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). The time we proposed for GHM 2022 is approaching but unfortunately we only received three replies expressing interest. If we are to hold the event then we need more participants; at this stage a simple informal expression of interest is enough. The event is planned for an extended weekend (with talks from Friday to Saturday) in October 2022 in İzmir, Turkey. For the time being all the infamous entry barriers or restrictions are lifted in Turkey, with the [...] Read more

Hackers getting married — 2022-05-16 22:00

On May 14th E. and I got married, here in Zürich. I do not normally share very personal information here; but people who knew me before January 2021 will remember me before and since that time. How she changed me for the better. E. is my joy. [Hugging photo] E. and I hugging under the cloister next to the Stadthaus. Photo by Gloria Bressan (http://www.byphotoz.com). For the occasion we invited our friends and relatives, most of whom live as émigrés in one country or another, like us. We had several of our old-time friends from the GNU Project, and some [...] Read more

GNU Jitter and GCC: the fun of playing with fire — 2022-03-10 21:32

A few days ago on March 6 I participated in the Binary T00ls Summit online event (<https://binary-tools.net/>) organised by José Marchesi (<https://jemarch.net>); a video recording is now available. My presentation had the ridiculous title GNU Jitter and the illusion of simplicity or Copying, patching and combining compiler-generated code in executable memory or The Anarchist’s guide to GCC or The fun of playing with fire — or, in shortened form, GNU Jitter and GCC: the fun of playing with fire. This is the official abstract: GNU Jitter is a generator of portable and efficient language virtual machines; a Jittery VM lies [...] Read more

Opernhaus Zürich does not deserve you — 2022-02-19 15:00 Updated: 2022-05-16 21:55

Yesterday evening, February 18, E. and I went to the Zürich opera to see Mozart’s Don Giovanni produced by Sebastian Baumgarten(1): <https://www.opernhaus.ch/en/spielplan/calendar/dongiovanni/2021-2022/>. We were looking forward to a well-deserved happy night out to celebrate how Switzerland had started to look less like a police state. “Freedom day” was supposed to begin at midnight on the 17th—Except, we discovered, at Opernhaus Zürich: there the gratuitous obtuse oppression continues and the house requires you to keep wearing the stupid face masks if you attend. This surprise ruined my mood and completely destroyed the experience for me. Opernhaus Zürich is a venue I [...] Read more

There is no freedom day if freedom is conceded from above — 2022-02-17 01:00

On February 17th 2022 Switzerland celebrated its supposed “freedom day”. This is not nearly enough and I cannot be happy. The fact that Switzerland has not behaved as shamefully as the worst countries does not count as an excuse and the climate of fear mongering, systematic persecution and discrimination is in fact not excusable: every political party supporting the police-state measures in the name of which we had to relinquish the most elementary rights shall forever remain my enemy. Any new political entity joined by persons with any responsibility in these crimes is tainted. Only among the organisations and people [...] Read more

Jitter is now GNU Jitter — 2021-12-19 19:52

I am happy to announce that my project Jitter has been officially accepted as part of the GNU Project (https://www.gnu.org). The new Jitter home page is <https://www.gnu.org/software/jitter> . The git repository is still at <http://git.ageinghacker.net/jitter> . — Luca Saiu, 2021-12-19 19:52 [...] Read more

Global variable initialisation in C++ — 2021-11-18 22:00 Updated: 2022-11-26 18:37

Today Volker Birk (https://fdik.org/) and I were speaking over lunch about object initialisation in C++ and about how weakly defined a program entry point is, because of objects with static storage duration. Volker wrote a short program whose output changes after reversing the order of two variable definitions, both out of a ‘main’ function whose entire body was ‘return 0;’. He discussed it in German (https://blog.fdik.org/2021-11/s1637238415), on his blog (https://blog.fdik.org). I was more annoyed by the fact that initialisation order is not guaranteed to respect functional dependency across compilation units. Here is my test case, where GCC and the GNU [...] Read more

Thanks for fighting against the European copyright directive — 2018-09-11 21:50 Updated: 2021-11-18 17:48

As I am writing this, the European Parliament is debating the disastrously liberticide copyright Directive. After out previous mailing campaign (The European Parliament has voted against the copyright directive, for now (<https://blog.ageinghacker.net/posts/20>)) organized along with a group of GNU friends, we again contacted the Members of the European Parliament before the forthcoming vote. I wish to name all the people who helped by translating the text into several languages and improve it, working tirelessly and with very little time: Christopher Dimech, Yavor Doganov, Rafael Fontenelle, Alexandre Garreau, Bruno Haible, José Marchesi, Tom Uijldert. Thank you all, friends. Update: we failed. [...] Read more

The European Parliament has voted against the copyright directive, for now — 2018-07-06 00:47 Updated: 2022-10-29 02:03

The EU copyright directive in its present form has deep and wide implications reaching far beyond copyright, and erodes into core human rights and values. For more information I recommend Julia Reda’s analysis at <https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/>, which is accessible to the casual reader but also contains pointers to the text of the law. Today on June 5, following a few weeks of very intense debate, campaigning and lobbying including deliberate attempts to mislead politicians (<https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180703/16343340172/>), the European Parliament voted in plenary session to reject the directive in its current form endorsed by the JURI committee, and instead reopen the debate. It [...] Read more

Introducing Jitter, an efficient language Virtual Machine generator — 2017-08-31 04:18 Updated: 2017-09-03 14:05

During the last few months of this long silence I’ve been busy working on a new project. Of course it is free software, and I plan to propose it soon as an official GNU project. I’m now releasing Jitter to the public, after presenting it for the first time at the 2017 GNU Hackers’ Meeting (<http://www.gnu.org/ghm>) in Germany last weekend. The meeting, by the way, was awesome — thanks to the organizers John Darrington and Alex Sassmannshausen and to everybody who attended. I was good to see the old friends, and make some new ones as well. The Jitter presentation [...] Read more

Happy pi Approximation Day 2014 — 2014-07-22 00:10 Updated: 2015-01-23 22:59

It’s 22/7 again. Last year on pi Approximation Day I published a simple Forth program based on an intuitive geometrical idea: see Happy pi approximation day 2013 (<https://blog.ageinghacker.net/posts/13>). I’ve been thinking about what to do in 2014 for some time, without finding anything as nice from the programming point of view. Sure, you can find series and continued fractions converging to pi, even rapidly; these methods work, but the corresponding programs are trivial to code and don’t provide any insight. So I chose another route: a practical experiment to approximate pi by cutting and weighing metal. The result turned out [...] Read more

A practical GNU epsilon tutorial — 2013-08-23 12:54 Updated: 2023-09-29 17:57

A practical GNU epsilon tutorial Audience Lexical conventions Rationale and introduction My PhD thesis Implementation, and the relation beteen epsilon0 and epsilon1 The bootstrap problem Setup Writing more comfortably, from ‘guile+whatever’ and Emacs Basics of epsilon1 The stuff values are made of: fixnums, pointers, buffers Error situations in epsilon1 Slightly higher-level data structures: vectors, strings, boxes, tuples, records Equality and boxedness tags Lists, and simple programming examples Digression: a look at epsilon0 Practical programming in epsilon1 Sums A programming example: structural equality with boxedness tags A look at reflective data structures ‘e1:define’ is just a macro! S-expressions What’s the point [...] Read more

Hello from the GHM — 2013-08-22 16:13 Updated: 2013-08-31 21:15

Posting during a quiet time at the GHM pre-meeting, before most people arrive. We have something new to show: [ghm-t-shirt] I went to get the t-shirt at the shop this morning, with José; they did a nice job in the end. This post is just for bragging a little, and to make the people who aren’t here envious. — Luca Saiu, 2013-08-22 16:13 (last update: 2013-08-31 21:15) [...] Read more

Playing with graphics — 2013-08-12 02:40 Updated: 2015-01-26 19:43

I’m not good at graphics. Or rather, don’t think I have particularly good taste. Now that I’m thinking of it, in the remote past as part of my first big job I was actually paid to do photo touch-ups. It was my driving school job. Old graphic hacks The screenshot below belongs to that project; what we would call now an e-learning system, to be used locally on the driving school computers. [a simple touch up I did] The driving school owner went around taking photos of the roads in the neighborhood, so that his customers could recognize familiar places, [...] Read more

Privacy 2013: Why. When. How --- a talk by Werner Koch — 2013-08-05 23:05 Updated: 2013-08-26 12:16

A couple days ago Sylvain (<http://www.beuc.net>) asked me to proofread his transcription of the latest talk by Werner Koch (<http://werner.eifelkommune.de/>). That was an occasion for listening carefully to what Werner has to say about electronic communication privacy in the global police state. Following his speech while paying attention to the text was instructive for me and, I think, a good use of my time. Werner is very competent on the subject: he’s a security expert and, as you probably know, the main author of GPG (<http://gnupg.org>). [Werner Koch speaking] Werner speaking: a frame from the video, CC-BY-SA <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/>. I’ve known [...] Read more

Happy pi approximation day 2013 — 2013-07-21 12:34 Updated: 2014-07-21 21:14

The fraction 22/7 has been known since antiquity as a simple rational approximation of pi. The fraction decimal expansion is 3.(142857); since pi is about 3.141592653589793, the approximation has three correct digits. Of course nowadays we can compute much better approximations with computers, and billions of digits are known: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximationsofπ> is a nice review also explaining some efficient computation methods. For example if you want to obtain a lot of pi digits in a short time you may like the series by Ramanujan, yielding very good approximations even with a small number of terms; but that’s not the point now. [...] Read more

GNU Hackers Meeting 2013 in Paris, France — 2013-05-17 20:39 Updated: 2013-10-10 21:36

Thanks to a kind offer by Sylvestre Ledru (<http://sylvestre.ledru.info/>) from IRILL (<http://www.irill.org>) we have a venue for this year’s GNU Hackers Meeting: we will be in Paris, France, for the second time at IRILL after the very successful 2011 edition. Since I live near Paris and I also happen to work at IRILL once or twice a week I’ve decided to do something to help organize the event, along with Sylvestre and Dodji Seketeli (<http://dodji.seketeli.com/>) who graciously volunteered as well. The meeting will take place in late August 2013: right now we’re deciding whether to have talks on Friday 23 [...] Read more

European unitary patent amendments — 2012-12-10 13:17 Updated: 2012-12-11 19:40

Please call the Members of the European Parliament right now, asking them to support amendments 74 and 76 on the Unitary Patent directive. <http://call.unitary-patent.eu/campaign/call2/unitary-patent-plenary-12-2012?setlang=en> • Amendment 74 restates that software is not patentable, as already expressed by the European Parliament in 2003 and 2005; • amendment 76 makes explicit the legislator’s control, in particular the European Parliament’s. Without this amendment the European Patent Office would not be accountable to enforce any limit on patentability, thus opening the door to unlimited US-style patenting of abstract ideas including pure software. All amendments, including 74 and 76: <http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+AMD+A7-2012-0001+071-078+DOC+PDF+V0//EN> The plenary vote will take [...] Read more

Meta-update and GNU epsilon news — 2012-08-29 23:33 Updated: 2012-09-16 13:38

This little diary of mine needed some love. A good excuse to motivate myself to write more often comes from the idea of syndication in the GNU Planet (<http://planet.gnu.org>); to make that possible without adding off-topic stuff to the GNU site I’ve recently improved trivalblog to also support per-tag RSS and Atom feeds — the idea being, of course, to have only posts explicitly tagged as “gnu” linked from the planet. My little blog system is described in The trivialblog software (<https://blog.ageinghacker.net/posts/2>). It’s just a quick unpolished hack with no documentation built upon bash and Texinfo, but I find it [...] Read more

ACTA as a test for democracy in Europe — 2012-02-11 02:01 Updated: 2019-10-06 02:40

The conflict couldn’t be more clear. On one side you have the copyright and patent lobbies pushing for even more draconian measures against private behavior, more limitations to freedom of expression, and more power for them on top of what they already have in this war of the rich against the poor. On the other side, of course, there is the public interest. Seeing what the European Parliament does on this occasion will be a test of its worth: will another European institution bend to the pressure of rich lobbies, or will it respect its democratic mandate? Will it prove [...] Read more

I will remember John McCarthy — 2011-10-25 23:55 Updated: 2014-07-26 14:57

I’ve just learned that Professor John McCarthy (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JohnMcCarthy(computerscientist)>) died two days ago on October 23, at the age of 84. He was the father of Lisp, Artificial Intelligence, Non-Monotonic Logics and Situation Calculus; and garbage collection, and time-sharing. An amusingly absent-minded brilliant mathematician and thinker with philosophical inclinations, and a technological optimist. I’ve loved reading his lightly sketched deep thoughts in his plain unassuming style(1), so different from the pretentious generations of big-egoed Lispers who came after him, myself included. And who even cares now if I agree with what he said one hundred percent, or not; I’ve never met [...] Read more

About Erdős numbers and not wanting what you have — 2011-09-22 19:41 Updated: 2015-09-15 15:54

Today at lunch with colleagues(1) we were having a very nice, relaxed conversation. At some point somebody mentioned he knew somebody who knew Erdős (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PaulErd%C5%91s>); so I asked him what his Erdős number (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91snumber>) was, and he said it. Then —I think for the first time— the thought crossed my mind that I also could already have a finite Erdős number. I’ve just found that in fact that’s the case, and has been for several years now. My Erdős number is(2) at most 6. For example: • Paul Erdős (0) • Vilmos Komornik (1) • Marco Pedicini (2) • Patrick [...] Read more

How I learned procedural abstraction and the wonder of science — 2011-09-19 05:06 Updated: 2022-12-04 22:28

Inspired by a happy “discovery” I made today, I’ve written this instead of finishing the post about identity. The abandoned tape This story began on a summer evening of the late Eighties when I was 10, maybe 11. I was at some small country fair near home with my brother, five years younger than me — quite a big difference back then. My brother found an audio cassette discarded on the ground, and wanted to take it home; it looked dirty and I remember that I didn’t want to pick it up at first, but I guess I wasn’t too [...] Read more

Things to come — 2011-09-16 15:03 Updated: 2011-11-02 04:41

I’ve seen from the server log that some people are looking for updates (thanks!). Since the post I’m writing now is not over yet, let me give you just an idea of what I think I will add soon: • Against identity — about the conflict between identity and culture, if you will. This will touch nationalism, sports fans, politics and religion. • The World-Wide Web and the fun of programming — Since its writing I softened a little the language of the first post: there I attacked the web, in the first version quite violently; but before using strong [...] Read more

Writing every day — 2011-09-09 01:50 Updated: 2011-09-12 08:00

I’ve been remembering the Latin phrase Nulla dies sine linea (no day [shall pass] without [writing] a line) for years now. Until a couple of minutes ago I was sure it was a motto by Gabriele d’Annunzio(1) (1863-1938), who despite the sheer beauty of some of his prose and poetry was quite revolting as a person — the kind of artist that you cannot quite declare you admire without adding all sorts of qualifiers and disclaimers. Annoying but necessary. You know, it’s about your reputation, and here I’m not kidding: that guy was a lot worse than just a histrionic [...] Read more

The trivialblog software — 2011-09-08 08:45 Updated: 2011-09-08 14:44

I’ve written the software running this blog myself, in Bash; in fact it’s mostly a simple combination of GNU command-line utilities, producing completely static HTML. Texinfo renders the post source text into HTML; my scripts generate indices, links and other minor things. I will probably add a PDF export feature later. I’ve put together the software very quickly, for myself; the source is crude and there’s no documentation, but since I guess somebody might want a copy anyway I’m publicly releasing it. trivialblog is free software, released under the GNU GPL version 3 or later. Most icons were not drawn [...] Read more

About this blog — 2011-09-08 08:44 Updated: 2011-09-20 04:24

I have rough ideas about what I’d want to write about, but I don’t really know with what frequency I will touch each topic. I’m mostly interested in free software, (computer) languages and Computer Science in general, art, literature and politics; but I make no promise of staying on-topic. I will also not be necessarily “balanced”, soft or cautious when expressing my opinions. This is my site (by the way I pay hosting costs myself, with my money) and as such it is the appropriate place for holding my opinions. If you want to engage in discussion with me, there’s [...] Read more