News from the Planet

Here’s a couple of things hanging around in my pre-SRFIs repo which I think are particularly interesting but which, owing to recent events, I’m unlikely to take any further within the context of Scheme. They might form part of a future programming language adventure, but in the meanwhile I’d like to…

Welcome to the August 2026 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap about what problem our project intends to solve, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free…

It has been quite a long time since my last post with release news for GVfs. I haven’t had much time for upstream development recently. Furthermore, I was out for health reasons for almost the entire last year, so development has been mostly focused on bug fixes. Still, there are some changes in…

A security vulnerability (#875) in the gvfsd-admin daemon that allows local privilege escalation was recently discovered and is tracked as CVE-2026-88924. What is the issue? The problem relates to how the daemon creates a private D-Bus socket. Previously, the socket was created with root privileges,…

FOSS4G is the annual global event of free and open source geographic technologies and open geospatial data hosted by OSGeo. In 2026 it took place in Hiroshima, Japan.

On September 7, 2026, I gave a keynote at State of the Map Asia 2026 in Osaka. The title was: What if the Map itself became the Web? The talk looks back at the thirty-year journey of Hyper-Layering Architecture (HLA), from its origins in 1995 to its current implementation as Layers as Web…

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for…

Number sixteen was my peak volume week. My biggest training week in three years (not counting the Bear races of 2023 and 2025). 17 hours, 27 minutes all training 52.2 miles hiking and running 14,938 ft D+ hiking and running I went out on steep mountain trails five times to prepare for the big…

Weeks twelve through fifteen had a little better air quality and I increased my training volume steadily, transitioning to more uphill outings and more power hiking. 56 hours, 15 minutes all training 125.8 miles running and hiking 26,420 ft D+ running and hiking In week fifteen, I logged 10,000…

Week eight began in Glacier National Park and week eleven finished in Steamboat Springs. 51 hours, 47 minutes all training 116 miles running and hiking 16,903 ft D+ running and hiking Hiking with my oldest kid in Glacier and Grand Teton Nation Parks was one of the highlights of this year. Arabelle…

I recently posted about the build of my “A Pint Near Me” app. When I had finished the build I asked Claude “Can you give me a few interesting stats from the pubs data?” The most 5 common names? How many single name pubs (ie not repeated)? Any regional patterns in naming? Anything…

UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly. To do both of those things well, you need a smart…

Here's a problem that I've found with ActivityBot - my little ActivityPub server. Sometimes it receives messages which were originally sent months ago. Why does that happen and is it risky to accept and process them? My tl;dr is that it probably isn't worth worrying about. But I'd love someone to…

We are excited to announce the first release of Guix-Science channel: v20260907.

SRFI 277 is now in final status. Cyclic ports are like infinite string and bytevector input ports: they produce the elements of a given sequence repeatedly, forever. While their intended use is as reusable seeds for SRFI 271 random ports, they are also useful whenever a…

I imagine everyone here has received an unsolicited message telling them that their tax is overdue and that they urgently need to visit Genuine-Tax-Payment-Website.fart or that a parcel is delayed at customs and you can pay a small sum for its release at Almost-The-Right-Acronym.ak You know it is a…

This is a gorgeous set of short stories - and a good deal more accessible than some of the heavyweight prose Liu has previously been involved with. Some of the stories contain sentences which are complex jewels to be savoured. What I particularly like is the way he moves between almost-prosaic…

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server, so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the…

Do come in and sit down. Pour yourself a cup of tea – I’ve just made a fresh pot. It’s been quite a ride since we last met to talk about these things. I became Scheme chair, but I’m not any more. Indeed, I’ve had to quit Scheme entirely. Let me tell you how this happened. Obviously, I’m a lot more…

By ASF Tooling and ASF Security During a three-day window in August 2026, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) ran full security scans across 230 of the foundation’s repositories. The work was done by the ASF Security and ASF Tooling teams, within the Foundation’s Responsible AI Initiative (RAI),…

If you're reading this, you've probably been hitting your head against a brick wall trying to parse and decipher the new HTTP Signatures sent by Mastodon and other Fediverse servers. This is a basic and somewhat incomplete guide to accepting these signatures. I'm sure there are various gotchas, but…

SRFI 281 is now in draft status. This SRFI implements a modified version of the R6RS’s (rnrs bytevectors (6)) library, which has procedures for the serialization and deserialization of numbers into bytevectors, and conversion to/from Unicode. It also includes some procedures from SRFI 207 …

**To receive Plus One directly to your inbox, sign up via the subscribe box below.**  Community News The ASF has announced the keynote speakers for Community Over Code Glasgow, taking place October 11–14, 2026 in Glasgow, Scotland. The lineup features Adjunct Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University…

Of what use is software freedom to someone who doesn't know how to program a computer? If I have the right to change the software that controls my devices, but lack the skill, knowledge, time, or money to do so, do I really have software freedom? This dilemma has worried me for a long time. I think…

Open source leaders in software engineering education, sustainability, and the games industry to headline ASF’s flagship conference, October 11–14 in Glasgow, Scotland Wilmington, DE – September 1, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home of open source software the world relies…