Damian’s notes

Naming authors, and processing people names in general, is a tricky subject. Here is a note on just some of the variability an internationalized application that handles names must take in to account.

Justine Tunney’s Cosmopolitan Libc ‘makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable.’

Python 3.9 adds IANA time zone support. Its tzinfo implementations behave slightly differently from the pytz package used in Django when it comes to calculations crossing daylight-savings-time boundaries, so there is going to be a gradual process of replacement and deprecation in future versions.

Overview of the Open-Source landscape for Apple-Sillicon-based Macs from the Register.

Homebrew is the package manager used to install open-source software on Macs. The new MacBooks and Mac Minis based on Apple Sillicon will entail a lot of updates, summarized on this massive GitHub issue.

‘As the primary net effect of software is to facilitate bureaucratic complexity it is therefore essential that software projects fail if society is to function effectively.’

I guess the null hypothesis here is, would the complexity of the tax code have grown at the same rate if automatic tax calculations were not permitted?

Might be of interest to my yarn-oriented friends: a new app for keeping track of your knitting or crocheting projects and which row you are on with each of them … and also (she adds nonchalantly) catalogue your yarn collection.

Quirks of the GIF file format

Write code that is easy to throw away, rather than complicating it in the hopes of being future-proof and reusable