How To Connect Boatswain to OBS StudioI’ve recently got myself an Elgato Stream Deck, and although it doesn’t natively support Linux, there’s a nice app called Boatswain that does the trick (not to be confused with the OCI container monitoring app of the same name).
Conway in NASMAnd here we go again with vibe coding: this time with Claude, I translated the Turbo Pascal version of Conway into Netwide Assembler or NASM for Linux 64-bit.
Conway in Borland DelphiYet another version of my Polyglot Conway project, this time in good old Borland Delphi 1.0 (which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary!) from 1995, running on Windows 3.1, and as usual you can find the source code on my GitLab account.
Conway in ScalaAnother week, another version of my Polyglot Conway project, this time in Scala, a version bootstrapped with the help of ChatGPT.
Conway in BashI’ve added a new version to my venerable Polyglot Conway project, this time as a good old Bash script, a version bootstrapped with the help of ChatGPT.
Conway in C89Another year, another version of my Polyglot Conway project, this time for C89, also known as “ANSI C”, targeting quite a few compilers of the early 1990s, and some others from our more recent times.
Opening Microsoft Access Databases on LinuxIn the past few months I’ve been writing about my software archeology experiments, including how to convert old HTML code from 1999 to run in today’s browsers, how to run Macromedia Flash movies with Ruffle, or even how to run Java applets now that they aren’t supported anymore.
Conway in Rexx, Cobol, and FortranHere’s more dabbling in programming languages to re-create my venerable interpretation of Conway’s Game of Life, this time using three stereotypical languages of the IBM galaxy: the Rexx scripting language, good old COBOL, and Fortran 95.
Conway in Minimal BASICLast Monday I released the 59th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, my dear monthly magazine about code, developers, and society, and this month I talked about BASIC in all of its flavors. As part of the preparation of this issue, I dived into the world of Minimal BASIC code, the one with source code line numbers, the one that would start immediately after powering up your computer, and the one that brings endless nostalgia.
Conway with the Zig Programming LanguageAs suggested in a previous article, this year’s candidate of my lifetime programming language learning activity is Zig, and I decided to reimplement Conway with it.
GaMMADigging in my archives I found a backup of my personal home page from 2000 to 2003, and through a little work of archeology and restoration, I made it work in our modern world of 2023.
Exporting Hugo to PDFHugo is fantastic but it misses one key functionality: the generation of PDF files. This article provides a possible solution for it using Podman, Pandoc, and a custom tool built in Rust.
Hugo in DevOps ModeAs I explained last week I have been updating this website in various ways; I removed the downloadable PDFs, then added privacy-friendly analytics, and finally, I set up a scheduled pipeline in GitLab to automatically build and deploy this website every Friday morning.
Crystal is a SurpriseI blogged about Dart a few weeks ago, and I said it was refreshingly boring. I am probably late to the party, but I discovered Crystal recently, and it is not only boring but also surprising in many delicious ways.
Dart is BoringLately, I’ve been playing with Dart, the programming language powering the cross-platform Flutter UI framework. I’ve added a Dart implementation to my collection of (now 21) programming languages in the Conway project, and another to the collection of sample Fortune web APIs.
Live-StreamingLately, I’ve started to stream some live events on YouTube on behalf of VSHN. I was an absolute live-streaming beginner, so I had to learn a few tricks.
Fortune AppsAs part of my work in VSHN, I lately prepared a set of demo applications ready to be containerized and deployed in our new product APPUiO Cloud.
Cross Platform Node.js AppsNode.js projects are very much cross-platform, allowing your team to use any operating system they want to work on them. Well, yes, to a large degree they are; but as always, there are some caveats that can bring some headaches if you have Windows developers in your team.
A Linker for JoelIn January 2004 Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post titled “Please Sir May I Have a Linker?, where he described his tribulations trying to install a small .NET app in computers not bundled with the original .NET framework.
GiteaGitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab; they are not the only solutions available to share Git repos with your friends and colleagues. I’ve been playing with Gitea recently, and it’s a really cool alternative, written in Go. Here’s a quick way to test it.
Elixir and Phoenix FrameworkI’ve been learning a bit about the Elixir programming language lately, and for that I created a small app using the Phoenix Framework.
Polyglot ConwayMy personal project during the pandemic was Conway, a project providing implementations of Conway’s Game of Life in as many programming languages as possible.
Lots of VSCode ExtensionsThe recent release by Microsoft of vscode.dev, the online version of Visual Studio Code, made me think of all the different things I do with VSCode, including this blog. And of course, being productive in VSCode means, to a large extent, finding gems across a seemingly infinite number of extensions.
Vagrant, k3s and VirtualBoxLast weekend I decided to learn Vagrant to build a simple k3s Kubernetes cluster on top of a set of VirtualBox virtual machines.
Amazon EKS AnywhereI’ve been playing lately with Amazon EKS Anywhere, the Kubernetes distribution used by EKS that you can install in your own premises. It works pretty well and makes for a very decent alternative to Minikube, K3s and other similar “Kubernetes-in-your-laptop” packages.
Alpine Linux in VirtualBoxI’ve been playing with Alpine Linux on VirtualBox, and here are some notes I took during the process.
Password Hashing in DjangoThis technique can be useful when migrating applications from Django to ASP.NET or PHP, keeping usernames and passwords intact.
Testing LDAPTesting applications that use LDAP for user authentication can be complicated. You just cannot use the production LDAP in your testing, because… reasons, so it can be difficult to make sure your application works properly before putting it in production.
First Web App in RustMy exploration of Rust continues; this week, I rewrote a Python Flask application I use for demos at work.
Specialized Generic Methods in RustI have not been so interested in a language in years as I am right now with Rust. Readers of De Programmatica Ipsum have probably sensed this last Monday when we published “The Great Rewriting in Rust”, which has been a hit article this week.
ImageMagickImageMagick is a cool toolkit; not only it's a complete set of command-line applications, ported to Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting hundreds of different image formats, it's also a C++ library that you can use in your own applications!
Playing With HTTP LibrariesIt’s fun to find out how to tackle the same task in different programming languages; in this case, it’s all about doing HTTP requests over a network: fortunately, there are networking libraries in virtually all major programming languages. In my current project, I’m generating wrappers easing the access to the core of the project itself, a RESTful API. This way, developers interested in using the API can just take a wrapper, include it in their projects, and start coding right away. No need to know this (relatively low-level) stuff; just use the API. The wrappers themselves are auto-generated from the API definition itself, but that’s another story ;)
My First Django ProjectSo here it is, my first Django project: the gazillionth blog engine on the planet!. As if there weren’t enough, right? :) Actually it was a practical and easy way to learn the Django project, and the result is pretty neat. Feel free to download it, play with it, and give me your feedback. Here’s a sample screenshot in Safari:
Thin as a WEBrickEstuve probando un nuevo lenguaje de programacion que no conocia: Ruby. Interesante pero medio criptico a veces; es un derivado de Perl (de ahi viene el nombre, de “perla” a “rubí”) y de la familia del Algol (como todos los lenguajes “clasicos”: C, C++, Java, PHP, etc).