Recent Blog Posts

I just finished reading the delightful book by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, titled This is for Everyone, published this year. It is a trip, long, almost 400 pages, about the origin and evolution of the World Wide Web, seen by those who conceived and pushed it from the start. The entire first part of the book is dedicated to the history of the web, the W3C, and the Web Foundation's operations as we have known them in the first 30 years of its development, from 1989 onwards.

I lately dedicated some time to setting up my own substitute server for Guix on a foreign distribution. This post is about that experience, after verifying that such a process is currently quite underdocumented. A substitute server is clearly a required step in order to cultivate a personal or unofficial/alternative channel for Guix, at least if one has more than one box (and possibly one physical location) to manage.

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture for the Spatial Ecology course to introduce a handful of junior and not-so-junior researchers from various domains to the not-so-nice world of scientific computing environments.

I recently read a post by Jack Poller about the end of FOSS optimism in creating software in recent years. His thesis is that the myth that the more eyes that look at a piece of software, the higher its quality, is indeed a myth, and that nowadays it is also a dangerous illusion when we concentrate the analysis on security. Commercial software, on the other hand, has processes and resources dedicated to managing security, which in these times of active AI use could make the difference.

A few days before today, 21 years ago, I sent this message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list to solicit helpers in packaging and to oversee the geospatial software stack included in the main Debian archive. After so many years, still there.

I recently bought a basic NAS for home use. The NAS is a nice Terramaster F2-425, which is a very basic RAID1-only NAS with a decent CPU and 2.5Gb network. Terramaster allows users to either use its custom Linux-based TOS or install any other operating system supported by the x86_64-based platform. Note that this model does not mount any NVME unit for the OS, as for the F2-424.

Minimalism in development is a forgotten virtue of our time that should gain more attention. A straightforward summary of some minimalism principles is available here. Briefly, the principles of minimalism in Software Engineering can be summarized as follows, based on the manifesto for minimalism.

Please, forgive the silly joke in the title of this semi-serious post, but lately I have been thinking about the strange fate of an area of general computing that I have spent more and more time in recently, as in the near and far past. For my job, I have utilized a series of scientific HPC clusters worldwide to solve multiple computing problems most efficiently by distributing computation across numerous nodes. Over the last thirty years, all such platforms have consistently shared the same common characteristics, which invariably pose a problem in their use for the average scientist (often a young/junior dedicated to a short-term project) in any application domain.

In the last few months, I have installed and upgraded my second preferred GNU/Linux system, GNU Guix, on multiple boxes. Regarding that system, I have already written a few introductory posts in the recent past. This is an update about my experiences as a user and developer. I still think Guix is a giant step forward in packaging and management, in comparison with Debian and other distributions, for elegance and inner coherence.

I recently re-read the seminal book by Fred Brooks about software engineering, entitled "The Mythical Man-Month" or MM-M for brevity. Specifically, I read the paper version of the 20th anniversary, which was revised and reprinted in 1995, after the first edition of 1975. I did that on purpose, firstly because it is always a fantastic read, and secondly to understand how much of its contents is still valid today, exactly thirty years later since its last revision.