I already understand how using a threshold map to perform dithering works and have even implemented dithering algorithms, and I still appreciated this amazing visual explainer
which helped put it in a light I’d never considered before. A highly-recommended read, and I’ve subscribed to Damar’s RSS feed so I
get to see Part 2 when it happens.
(I also enjoyed playing with the dithering experiment on his CodePen, because it turns out that the technology behind
this interactive demo is as interesting as the topic being described!)
HTTP/1 may appear simple because of several reasons: it is readable text, the most simple use case is not overly complicated and existing tools like curl and browsers help making
HTTP easy to play with.
The HTTP idea and concept can perhaps still be considered simple and even somewhat ingenious, but the actual machinery is not.
[goes on to describe several specific characteristics of HTTP that make it un-simple, under the headings:
newlines
whitespace
end of body
parsing numbers
folding headers
never-implemented
so many headers
not all methods are alike
not all headers are alike
spineless browsers
size of the specs
]
I discovered this post late, while catching up on posts in the comp.infosystems.gemini newsgroup,
but I’m glad I did because it’s excellent. Daniel Stenberg is, of course, the creator of cURL and so probably knows more about the intricacies of HTTP
than virtually anybody (including, most-likely, some of the earliest contributors to its standards), and in this post he does a fantastic job of dissecting the oft-made argument that
HTTP/1 is a “simple” protocol; based usually upon the argument that “if a human can speak it over telnet/netcat/etc., it’s simple”.
This argument, of course, glosses over the facts that (a) humans are not simple, and the things that we find “easy”… like reading a string of ASCII representations of digits and
converting it into a representation of a number… are not necessarily easy for computers, and (b) the ways in which a human might use HTTP 0.9 through 1.1 are rarely representative of
the complexities inherent in more-realistic “real world” use.
Obviously Daniel’s written about Gemini, too, and I agree with some of his points there (especially the fact that the
specification intermingles the transfer protocol and the recommended markup language; ick!). There’s a reasonable rebuttal here (although it has its faults too, like how it conflates the volume of data involved in the
encryption handshake with the processing overhead of repeated handshakes). But now we’re going way down the rabbithole and you didn’t come here to listen to me dissect
arguments and counter-arguments about the complexities of Internet specifications that you might never use, right? (Although maybe you should: you could have been reading this blog post via Gemini, for instance…)
But if you’ve ever telnet’ted into a HTTP server and been surprised at how “simple” it was, or just have an interest in the HTTP specifications, Daniel’s post is worth a read.
I’m writing up this information because Dreamwidth’s legal advocacy work has been largely underrecognized. I have not seen a scrap of mainstream news coverage out there that delves
into the unique role that Dreamwidth has played in the NetChoice lawsuits, and in a tech news landscape that inspires so much resignation and despair, I think people deserve to know
about how Dreamwidth is putting up a fight. Not only does Dreamwidth refuse to engage in intrusive tracking, it’s proactively participating in lawsuits against state governments
that try to force its hand. For all that many lawmakers are trying to make the web worse, Dreamwidth is leveraging itself as proof that a better web is possible.
…
If your mental model of Dreamwidth is “it’s like LiveJournal, but…” then you owe it to yourself to read Coyote’s excellent explanation of how
Dreamwidth is so much more: a beacon of privacy-centric and censorship-resistant blog hosting in a world that increasingly seems at-best uninterested and at-worst actively
hosting to such things.
That it’s not for me personally (I’m more a selfhost type) doesn’t mean it’s not a great choice for you: it’s got solid free and reasonably-priced premium tiers and all the kinds of
features you’d expect from a service live LiveJournal, or Tumblr, or Medium… but without all of the antifeatures that come with each of those.
And yeah, they’re on the side of the good guys:
I think there’s mileage in stealing repurposing this iconic line…
Coyote also wrote the excellent You Can Make A Website, if you’re looking for further reading from
the same author.
Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying “ethical non-monogamy”?
Nobody feels the need to say “ethical monogamy”; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.
I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word “ethical”
and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)
Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called “Half Life 2”. Are you sitting comfortably? Then
I shall begin.
…
What is meant to happen is a guard (spoiler alert – it’s actually Barney in disguise) bangs on a door, the door opens, he says “get in”, and then the game waits for you to enter
the room before the script proceeds.
But in this case the door sort of rattled, but didn’t open, and then locked shut again. So you can’t get in the room, and the gate closed behind you, so you can’t go do anything
else. The guard waits forever, pointing at the locked door, and you’re stuck.
…
If you watch the video, when the door unlocks and then opens, there’s a second guard standing inside the room to the left of the opening door. That guard is actually standing very
slightly too close – the very corner of his bounding box intersects the door’s path as it opens. So what’s happening is the door starts to open, slightly nudges into the guard’s
toe, bounces back, closes, and then automatically locks. And because there’s no script to deal with this and re-open the door, you’re stuck.
…
So this kicked off an even longer bug-hunt. The answer was (as with so many of my stories) good old floating point. Half Life 2 was originally shipped in 2004, and although the SSE
instruction set existed, it wasn’t yet ubiquitous, so most of HL2 was compiled to use the older 8087 or x87 maths instruction set. That has a wacky grab-bag of precisions – some
things are 32-bit, some are 64-bit, some are 80-bit, and exactly which precision you get in which bits of code is somewhat arcane.
…
Amazing thread from Tom Forsyth, reflecting on his time working at Valve. The tl;dr is that after their compiler was upgraded (to support the SSE instruction sets that had now become
common in processors), subsequent builds of Half-Life 2 became unwinnable. The reason was knock-on effects from a series of precision roundings, which meant that a Combine
security guard’s toe was in a slightly wrong place and the physics engine would bounce a door off him.
A proper 500-mile-email grade story, in terms of unusual bugs.
This weekend, I received my copy of DOCTYPE, and man: it feels like a step back to yesteryear to type in a computer program from a
magazine: I can’t have done that in at least thirty years.
So yeah, DOCTYPE is a dead-tree (only) medium magazine containing the source code to 10 Web pages which, when typed-in to your computer, each provide you with some kind of fun and
interactive plaything. Each of the programs is contributed by a different author, including several I follow and one or two whom I’m corresponded with at some point or another, and each
brings their own personality and imagination to their contribution.
I opted to start with Stuart Langridge‘s The Nine Pyramids, a puzzle game about trying to connect all nodes in a 3×3 grid in a
continuous line bridging adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) nodes without visiting the same node twice nor moving in the same direction twice in a row (that last provision is described
as “not visiting three in a straight line”, but I think my interpretation would have resulted in simpler code: I might demonstrate this, down the line!).
The puzzle actually made me stop to think about it for a bit, which was unexpected and pleasing!
Per tradition with this kind of programming, I made a couple of typos, the worst of which was missing an entire parameter in a CSS conic-gradient() which resulted in the
majority of the user interface being invisible: whoops! I found myself reminded of typing-in the code for Werewolves and
Wanderer from The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus, whose data section – the part most-liable to be affected by a typographic bug without introducing a syntax error – had
a helpful “checksum” to identify if a problem had occurred, and wishing that such a thing had been possible here!
But thankfully a tiny bit of poking in my browser’s inspector revealed the troublesome CSS and I was able to complete the code, and then the puzzle.
I’ve really been enjoying DOCTYPE, and you can still buy a copy if you’d like one of your own. It manages to simultaneously feel both fresh and nostalgic,
and that’s really cool.
Got to admit, this is really cool and something I can see myself using a lot. So I installed the prerequisites:
brew install asciinemanpm install -g svg-term-cli
Then I gave it a go. I needed to use asciinema rec -f asciicast-v2 myfile.cast to record my screen into Asciinema‘s version 2 format,
because the new version 3 format isn’t yet supported by svg-term-cli (but there is at least an asciinema
convert command if you record in the “wrong” one).
Then I ran cat myfile.cast | svg-term --out myfile.cast.svg to convert that terminal recording into an SVG: I happened to be in a directory containing the source code of FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, so recorded myself running an 11ty development server with npm serve:
Happy Polyamory Day y’all. (Plus max props to Petra without whom I’d have forgotten about it,
like most years.)
Closest thing I did to celebrating it was going out to the pub last night for beer and food with my metamour, while our partner-in-common took our kids to see a film. Polyfam life isn’t
always glamorous; but it is full of love.
But I’m pretty sure there are some people who’d rather receive updates to my blog via WhatsApp. And
now, they can. Here’s how I set up an RSS-to-WhatsApp gateway, in case you want to run one of your own2.
A Whapi account connected to your WhatsApp account3
– when you set up an account you’ll get a free trial; when it ends you need to find the link to say that you want to carry on with the free tier (or upgrade to the paid tier if you
expect to send more messages than the free tier’s limit)
A WhatsApp channel to which you want to push your RSS feed: I’d recommend that you make a newsletter (from the Updates tab in WhatsApp, press the kekab menu then
Create Channel) rather than a traditional group: groups are designed for multiple people to talk and discuss and everybody can see one another’s identity, but a newsletter
keeps everybody’s identity private and only allows the administrator(s) permission to post updates.
You probably want to use the kind of channel that’s for one-to-many ‘push’ communication, not a discussion group.
In Settings > Secrets and Variables > Actions, add two new Repository Secrets:
WHATSAPP_API_TOKEN: set to the token on your Whapi dashboard
WHATSAPP_CHANNEL: set to your newsletter ID (will look like 123456789012345678@newsletter) or group ID (will look
like 123456789012345678@g.us): you can get this from the Newsletters or Groups section of Whapi by executing a test GET /newsletters or GET /groups request4.
Do a test run: from the Actions tab select the “Process feeds” action and click “Run workflow”. If it finishes successfully (and you get the WhatsApp message), you’re done! If it
fails, click on the failed action and drill-in to the failed task to see the error message and correct accordingly.
By default, the processor will run on-demand and every 30 minutes, but you can modify that in.github/workflows/process-feeds.yml. It’s configured to send the single oldest
un-sent item in any of the RSS feeds it’s subscribed to, on each run (it tracks which ones it’s sent already by their guids, in a "seen": [...] array in
feeds.json): sending a single link per run ensures that WhatsApp’s link previews work as expected. At that rate, you could theoretically run it once every 10 minutes and
never hit the 150-messages-per-day limit of Whapi’s free tier5), but you’ll want to work out your own optimal rate based on the
anticipated update frequency of your feeds and the number of RSS-to-WhatsApp channels you’re running.
You can, of course, run it on your own infrastructure in a similar way. Just check out the repository to your local system with Ruby 3.2+ running, run bundle to install the
dependencies, then set up a cron job or some other automation to run ./process_feeds.rb. Doing this could be used to hook it up to your RSS feed updating pipeline, for
example, to check for new feed items right after a new post is published.
Footnotes
1 Their own incomprehensible, illogical, weird reasons.
2 I hope that the title gives it away, but you can do this completely for free.
So long as you keep your fork of the GitHub repository open-source then you can run GitHub Actions for free, and so long as you’re pushing out no more than 150 updates per day to no
more than 5 different channels in a month then you can do it within Whapi’s free tier: that’s probably fine for a personal blogger, and there’s a reasonable pricing structure (plus
some value-added extras) for companies that want to use this same workflow as part of a grander WhatsApp offering.
3 Setting this up requires giving Whapi access to your WhatsApp account. If you don’t like
the security implications of that, you could get a cheap eSIM, set that up with WhatsApp, and use that account: if you do this, just remember to “warm up” your new WhatsApp
account with some conversations with yourself so it doesn’t look so much like a spammer! Also note that the way Whapi works “uses up” one of the ~4 devices on which you can
simultaneously use WhatsApp Web/WhatsApp Desktop etc.
4 Prefer the command-line? So long as you’ve got curl and jq
then you can get a list of your newsletters (or groups) and their IDs with curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN' -H 'accept: application/json'
https://gate.whapi.cloud/newsletters?count=100 | jq '.newsletters[] | { id: .id, name: .name }' or curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN' -H 'accept:
application/json' https://gate.whapi.cloud/groups?count=100 | jq '.groups[] | { id: .id, name: .name }', respectively.
5 Going beyond the free tier would require sending one message, on average, every 9
minutes and 36 seconds.
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about setting up a PO Box and adding postal mail to the ways you can
contact me. I went for a “pay as you go” PO Box because I didn’t know if anybody would actually use it, but I’ve already received two delightful postcards and I couldn’t be more
thrilled.
The PO Box worked very well: I’m using UK Postbox principally because of their “pay as you go” rate (with a free tier in case you don’t receive
any mail at all, which I figured was a risk) but I was later pleased to discover they’re a nice company in other ways,
too. They scan the outside/one side of my mail as it arrives and I can optionally pay to scan the whole thing and/or to bundle and forward it on to me3.
I’ve started a new page to collect all the cards, including a (hopefully pretty-accessible) CSS-powered interactive “flipper” so you can turn them over, and
I’m hopeful that I might attract a few more as time goes on. Getting physical mail from “Internet friends” helps make the digital world feel a little bit smaller, and I
love it.
1 Florence’s RSS feed was missing a <![CDATA[ ... ]]> block around some
embedded HTML, which was causing the HTML to be evaluated “as if” it were XML, which – not being XHTML – it failed to do.
2 My suggestion was a variation of Derek Dingle’s Too Many Cards that I’ve been performing all over the place: it’s an immensely satisfying trick to perform, requiring a challenging but achievable set of sleights and
suitable to do without preparation and using a borrowed deck, which is pretty much the gold standard in card magic.
3 I’ve opted to have it forwarded: I’m wondering if I can combine all the postcards I get
into a single poster frame or something: maybe a double-sided one so the whole thing can be flipped to show the text, not just the fronts?
In the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a kid, smoking was everywhere. Restaurants, bars, and a little before my time, airplanes!
The idea that people would smoke was treated as inevitable, and the idea that you could get them to stop was viewed as wildly unrealistic.
Sound familiar? But in the early 2000’s, people did stop smoking!
…
But a few years ago, the trend started to reverse. You know why?
Vaping.
Vape pens were pushed as a “safer alternative to smoking,” just like Anil is suggesting with Firefox AI. And as a result, not only did people who would have smoked anyways start up
again, but people who previously wouldn’t have started.
…
I know it’s been a controversial and not-for-everyone change, but I’ve personally loved that Chris Ferdinandi has branched out from simply giving weekday JavaScript tips to also
providing thoughts and commentary on wider issues in tech, including political issues. I’m 100% behind it: Chris has a wealth of experience and an engaging writing style and even when I
don’t 100% agree with his opinions, I appreciate that he shares them.
And he’s certainly got a point here. Pushing “less-harmful” options (like vaping… possibly…) can help wean people off something “more-harmful”… but it can also normalise a harmful
behaviour that’s already on the way out by drawing newcomers to the “less-harmful” version.
My personal stance remains that GenAI may have value (though not for the vast majority of things that
people market it as having value for, where – indeed – it’s possibly doing more harm than good!), but it’s possible that we’ll never know because the entire discussion space is poisoned now by the hype. That means it’ll be years before proper, unbiased conversations can take place,
free of the hype, and it’s quite possible that the economy of AI will have collapsed by then. So maybe we’ll never
know.
Anyway: good post by Chris; just wanted to share that, and also to add a voice of support for the direction he’s taken his blog these last few years.
About twenty years ago, after a a tumultuouslife, Big.McLargeHuge – the shared server of several other Abnibbers and I – finally and fatally kicked the bucket. I spun up its replacement, New.McLargeHuge, on hosting company DreamHost, and this blog (and many other sites) moved over to it1.
Wow, I’d forgotten half of these websites existed.
I only stayed with DreamHost for a few years before switching to Bytemark, with whom I was a loyal customer right up until a few years
ago2, but in that time I took advantage of DreamHost’s “Refer & Earn” program, which
allowed me to create referral codes that, if redeemed by others who went on to become paying customers, would siphon off a fraction of the profits as a “kickback” against my server
bills. Neat!3
DreamHost’s referrals had a certain “pyramid scheme” feel in that you could get credit for the people referred by the people you referred.
A year or so after I switched to ByteMark, DreamHost decided I owed them money: probably because of a
“quirk” in their systems. I disagreed with their analysis, so I ignored their request. They “suspended” my account (which I wasn’t using anyway), and that was the end of it.
Right?
But the referral fees continued to trickle in. For the last seventeen years, I’ve received a monthly email advising me that my account had been credited, off the back of a
referral.
I have no explanation as to why the amount of the referral reward fluctuates, but I can only assume that it’s the result of different people on different payment schedules?
About once a year I log in and check the balance. I was quite excited to discover that, at current rates, they’d consider me “paid-up” for my (alleged) debt by around Spring 2026!
I had this whole plan that I’d write a blog post about it when the time came. It could’ve been funny!
But it’s not to be: DreamHost emailed me last night to tell me that they’re killing their “Refer & Earn” program; replacing it with something different-but-incompatible (social media’s
already having a grumble about this, I gather).
So I guess this is the only blog post you’ll get about “that time DreamHost decided I owed them money and I opted to pay them back in my referral fees over the course of eighteen
years”.
No big loss.
Footnotes
1 At about the same time I moved Three
Rings over from its previous host, Easily, to DreamHost too, in order to minimise the number of systems I had to keep an eye on. Oh, how different things are now, when I’ve
got servers and domain registrations and DNS providers all over the damn place!
2 Bytemark have rapidly gone downhill since their acquisition by Iomart a while back, IMHO.
3 Nowadays, this blog (and several of my other projects) is hosted by Linode, whose acquisition by Akamai seems not to have caused any problems with, so that’s fab.
This telegraph pole in the centre of Eynsham carries the scars of hosting countless community announcements, notices, and flyers over the last 30 years.
