Or: Why 2024 is my personal year of Linux on the desktop According to Doctorow, enshittification might be coming for absolutely everything . I’ve more and more felt this was for my own digital devices and means of digital production: Be that Apple’s just increasing love for walled gardens - especially since having the opaque app review processes (c.f. cpython’s --with-app-store-compliance), Microsoft’s (successful?)

This is a ultra-short post related to sending email via the command line on Linux/Rasperry Pi. On 30 May 2022, Google disabled the handy feature that allowed less secure sign in to Google accounts. This feature was a handy way to authenticate command-line routines that send email.

30 Jahre Freie Software in 30 Minuten Podcast: Der Bayerische Rundfunk spürt in einer hörenswerten Sendung den Ideen hinter Linux und Freier Software nach – und erläutert, wie sich die Bewegung für herstellerunabhängige Programme bis heute entwickelt hat. Still und leise im Hintergrund: So charakterisiert ein aktueller Podcast des Bayerischen Rundfunks die Funktionsweise von Linux.

Google’s amazing V8 JavaScript/WASM engine is probably one of the most sophisticated open-source software libraries available today. It is used to power the computation in Google Chrome, NodeJS, and also CloudFlare Workers, which make it possible to run code for your website inside the CDN edges. The R package V8 exposes this same engine in R, and has been on CRAN since 2014.

Wenn eine Schule ihr IT-System auf freie Software umstellen will, stellen sich viele Fragen. Frank Poetzsch-Heffter vom Katharineum in Lübeck beschreibt, wie das dortige Gymnasium den Umstieg durchgeführt hat und welche Vorteile und Probleme sich gezeigt haben. Wo wollen wir hin? Man steht am Bahnsteig. Links ein Hochgeschwindigkeitszug, viel beworben, mit exklusiver Ausstattung und adrettem Betreuungspersonal.

In Rochester können Studierende ab Herbst freie und Open-Source-Software studieren. Das Nebenfach-Studium beschäftigt sich nicht nur mit dem Programmieren von offener Software, sondern erfasst auch ethische und rechtliche Fragen.

The PC hosting linnaeus.zoology.gla.ac.uk and darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk has died, and this spells the end of my interest in (a) using generic PC hardware and (b) running Linux. The former keeps breaking down, the later is just harder than it needs to be (much as I like the idea). From now on, it's Macs only. No more geeky knapsacks for me. Because of this crash a lot of my experimental web sites are offline.

Desktop searching has become a hot topic (some earlier blogs ), now that years of data accumulated on ones hard disk: PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents, Latex manuscripts, old Java source code, digitized music, and a lot of chemical files. Well, on my hard disk that is. Unlike piles of paper, a computer could search this data, but due to the size an index is required. What’s KDE4 going to offer?

November last year, I reported my plans to develop a live CD with all our favorite chemo- and bioinformatics software. Bioclipse requires Java5 and sort of still depends on the Sun JVM (I will experiment with classpath-generics later), but is now distributable with operating systems.

This weekend I continued my work on getting the CDK and Jmol run with free, open source JVMs. Really, a lot works fine, as reported earlier in this blog: JChemPaint works and Jmol almost works (see the Classpath’s FreeSwingTestApps wiki page), and well over 95% of the CDK JUnit tests run without trouble too. So it comes down to identifying what does not run properly, and file bugs for this. For example, 26101 and 26108.