Moritz Poldrack

Ramblings on dependency management

18 Jun 25 00:00:00 +0000

By now most languages come with their own dependency manager which is either provided directly by the language toolchain (Rust’s crates) or is provided by 3rd parties but have become so embedded in the community that they can rightfully call themselves the standard (Apache Maven for Java and npm for JavaScript).

The dependency management is, depending on the language, one of the most-used tools after the compiler/interpreter and as such, its importance should not be underestimated. I have tried loving Haskell a few times now, but it’s dependency management – my personal hell – turned it into an immediate pass. I will only subject myself to this if you pay me for it, not in my free-time.

Psycho-Pass: Utopia or Dystopia?

15 Mar 25 00:00:00 +0000

The basic premise of Psycho-Pass isn’t that hard: Japanese society has progressed to the point where a mental health evaluation is possible within fractions of a second. This has lead to it reaching a point where these evaluations are not just used in dating to show how “stable” one is, but also in law-enforcement. I recommend the show, and if you plan on watching it, please do so before continuing to read.

The 2024 Donations

11 Dec 24 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I made a pledge: going forward I would donate to Open-Source projects and developers more regularly, the donations this year were a bit lower than last year thanks to me losing my job. (*cough* looking for employment *cough*)

Ajay Ramachandran for their work on SponsorBlock and DeArrow
David Burke for GlitchTip
Fosstodon for a great platform for outage updates (Sourcehut and it’s status page were recently DDoS’d)
Jguer for his work on yay
LiberaPay for the better donation site.
Syncthing for their work at keeping my passwords in sync on all my devices
The KeePassXC Team
The OpenSCAD Team for making a CAD, even a dumbass like me can use
The Unicode Consortium for Unicode. I am now the official sponsor of the letter ＠. Going forward, I intend to build my influence to remove Emojis from existence!
Wikileaks because they helped open a lot of eyes to privacy violations.
deSEC for a decent DNS offering
ivaniskandar for his work on Mihon

Who I didn’t sponsor[^1]:

Makefiles for the Makefile-Lazy Go developer

06 Feb 24 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend was FOSDEM and despite not being there in presence, I feel like a train hit me¹. And it took little more than half of the first day until I saw the need to write a blog post. Denis Germain presented GoReleaser and how it can be used to replace Makefiles.

Of issue domains and purpose

Don’t get me wrong, I quite enjoyed Denis’ presentation. But at the same time, I disagree with the premise.

Welcome to email hell

29 Jan 24 00:00:00 +0000

I like emails. I know, shocker. The guy working on an email client¹ likes emails. Worse than that, I have formed some habits that I would call “best practice”, rather than a habit. Among these are the use of plaintext email, using maildir to always have a backup, and signing outgoing mails.

I even went so far as to call myself an “expert” in an article on how to make email less painful (article in German). Depending on one’s definition of the word “expert”, I probably don’t even remotely qualify for that label, but I certainly know more than the average Joe. Or at least I’d like to tell myself that I do.

How to: OpenGraph previews with Hugo

18 Jan 24 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s face it. The social preview of my website looks like absolute ass. I guess that makes it consistent with what you can expect when you click a link, but it makes it less motivating to actually share something. For example this is what it looks like on Discord:

Yikes. I mean, sure, I like my logo, but this is basically screaming “you know, I never cared enough”. Let’s go and change that!

Your system is not stable, it's outdated

17 Jan 24 00:00:00 +0000

One thing that I as an Arch user¹ have heard more often than I can count is that Archlinux is unstable, as opposed to Debian and Ubuntian². And to this day, I have made a mental journey from the classic “no, my system isn’t unstable, you are, you damn sid³ user!” to a (hopefully) more nuanced viewpoint.

This notion of stability™ that is touted by many as one of, if not the most important aspect of a Distro has nothing to do with what we IT-folk usually mean when we speak of stability, that is: uninterrupted service. Instead it is – at least in my humble opinion – a reason to do a worse job at maintaining a system. But I’ll expand on that later.

Not financial advice

11 Dec 23 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, a close friend of mine, hurt my feelings by insulting a project of mine. So now, I am using this to become a better person. This is not an Isekai title, it’s a TL;DR of what lead to this post.

This lead to me to a financially unwise decision that (thanks to the tism) I will not go back on: I will be handing out money to those that don’t ask, but give anyway. I don’t have any illusions of creating a trend here, though by all means feel free to copy me, I am doing it in the hope of keeping the FLOSS-community alive and well, in the big and the small things.

How to get rid of your advertising revenue by advertising

09 Dec 23 00:00:00 +0000

Are you running an ad blocker? Sure you are. I don’t care. I’m not running ads anyways. But many providers seem to compensate in exactly the wrong direction.

Case Study: Tarnkappe.info – Selling your screen space

I’m writing for the online magazine Tarnkappe.info on the side. This way I can spread the good news about FLOSS, while also making a quick buck. At the same time, I get that the servers of this outlet are not financed by goodwill and love, but advertisements. There is only a small issue with how advertising is done at the moment: It’s ineffective and annoying. Sure, I’ll buy your stuff if you just shove it in my face hard enough. Of course, please inform me about your newest offer acoustically, I just love when my browser suddenly starts making noises. Please, reload the ads every few seconds.

Managers should stay out of IT

11 Aug 23 00:00:00 +0000

I now had the pleasure to enjoy working in teams of various sizes. From literally 5-people-startups to thousands-of-employees-corporations I dare say I have seen quite a bit of variance for someone my age. One unfortunate constant that has been the source of headaches in all of them, were managers.

Managers have one simple task and one more complex: make sure we turn a profit and make sure that everything works. Unfortunately, these goals a diametrically opposed to one another. Making sure that everything works, while generating the money in the first place¹, also costs money and that’s where priorities come in.

A little rant about time

27 Mar 22 00:00:00 +0000

If you were to ask me what I think is the most annoying thing, my answer would be highly dependent on the current time, day, and what I have been exposed to recently. I am looking at my clocks right now, which show 01:30:52 AM. Yes, I should go to bed, but something is keeping me awake: today we shift to summertime again.

History

Here in germany, we are plagued with this idiocy since 1916… wait wasn’t there a world war at that time? Was that really necessary? Yes, there was. No, it wasn’t. Benjamin Franklin explained the concept in 1784, and 132 years later some genius thought “hey, you know what’s a great idea? messing with the time” because time always followed what us pitiful humans thought up¹.

You should add a security.txt

26 Mar 22 00:00:00 +0000

I just want to make everyone aware of the great concept of the security.txt file, which is very useful for receiving vulnerability reports for services you’re using or providing. I have received two reports already and am quite happy to report that both have been resolved (on was solved by just taking down the service as was planned beforehand).

The policy itself is pretty straightforward, and can be understood by everyone. Here is mine, and as you will see it’s quite self-explanatory:

How to: Caddy Fileserver

25 Mar 22 00:00:00 +0000

Scope

This tutorial covers how to setup a fileserver for downloading. It does not cover how to upload files, setup WebDAV, or anything else. After following these steps you should have an HTTPS enabled webserver, serving one directory and it’s children.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial a Linux server is recommended. For trying it out any platform that can run Docker containers should be fine though. (Sorry, M1 users)

Steps

Get Docker & docker-compose

First off, let’s install Docker and docker-compose. Since a lot of distributions do not ship Docker in their repositories, this may require some additional steps, which you can find on the Docker website (see the sidebar for the various distributions, or click in the table)

Don't call it Free Software

20 Aug 21 00:00:00 +0000

Now stick with me, I will get to what I mean with this (admittedly clickbaity) title¹ soon. I think it is important for us to define our terms before we get to it.

Unless in Quotes, these definitions are used:

Freeware: Software, made available without financial compensation
Open Source Software: Software of which the sourcecode is publically available
Free Software/Libre Software: Free Software as defined by GNU²

Why write this text?

I think Libre Software is important to our society as a whole, as respect for personal freedoms has been in decline for quite a while. Whether private companies spy on you for some ad money or the government does in the name of terror prevention matters little to me, and I think most other privacy-conscious people. As such it is of great importance to have an understanding of what it means to have software that is “free”. And here we have the exact issue: it’s the word free. Free can obviously stand for freedom, your rights, no restrictions. But it can also mean gratis or free of charge. Don’t get me wrong. This also fits, but it also fits the more general term Freeware and therefore a way broader field of software.

That time I set up a donation page

20 Aug 21 00:00:00 +0000

If you wonder why, the reason is pretty simple:

I am a needy boy

The more detailed answer is that I plan on launching a rather large project that is intended to help creators of art/educational materials with distribution of their data. I will post about it here if it finally leaves the alpha stage.

Technology

I am using fosspay to achieve maximum transparency as it aggregates all platforms where I accept donations¹. Namely: fosspay itself, LiberaPay, and Patreon² ³

Indent with tabs

23 Jun 21 00:00:00 +0000

Some days ago a heated discussion broke out in a tech group I’m in. It was the old debate of tabs vs. spaces. I thought this debate was over, but apparently I was wrong…

I will answer what I found to be the most common arguments within the next paragraphs.

For a short summary from a Rust user click here

It screws up the formatting

No, it doesn’t. We are talking about indentation, not alignment. Take the following examples with a tabwidth of 2, 5, and 8. Why 5? to show that it works even with unconventiuonal values. The formatting does not change if you follow these simple rules:

A small experiment

08 Jun 21 00:00:00 +0000

While helping some guy in in #archlinux:archlinux.org figuring out sway, I came about the answer to all my prayers: a way to just unassign caps-lock.¹ While wondering whether an alternative keybind would be useful, I found grp:shifts_toggle and grp_led:caps. Allowing you to switch keyboard layouts by hitting both shift keys at the same time.

So basically, I started this entire thing to try out xkb-options.

First off I decided on what flavour of DVORAK to use. There are a lot. After some consideration I went with programmer-DVORAK which is said to be faster. I don’t care to be honest, to me it just sounded useful to have a layout specifically created for programmers.

Be careful how you choose your tools

27 Mar 21 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows this situation: you are tasked – or want – to do something and need to decide on the how.

What is a how

Your “how” can be pretty much everything. An approach, a tool, a method, an algorithm, a mindset, a way. If you do a task – I’d argue any task you need to select some of these; let’s call them “tools”.

Your choice of tools matters greatly. It will affect how long you take, what the final result looks like, how usable it is, and most importantly: if you have fun you working on a project.

The open-source mindset

26 Feb 21 00:00:00 +0000

I think – and this is nothing but my personal opinion – that being a dick is not helpful. Those who know me may burst into laughter because I can be a real asshole too. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary. What I found worrisome was a discussion¹ I’ve read (and participated in) on GitHub – or some of the opinions that were voiced there to be more precise.

Interesting Links

11 Feb 21 00:00:00 +0000

What exactly is this?

This page can be seen as somewhat of a public notebook where I keep links that interest me. I try to keep them sorted but no guarantees there.

Setup