Well, I wrote another piece of Fire Emblem Awakening fanfiction. This one is not really readable for non-FEA fans.| Athena's blog
I wrote some Fire Emblem Awakening fanfiction. Check it out if girl accidentally turns into apocalypse dragon sounds cool, I guess.| Athena's blog
You know, it's not actually all that hard to write good code. You just have to put in the effort and not skip over the tedious bits. Where are we as an industry that we can't get people to consistently do that?| Athena's blog
Its advocates will often refer to FOSS, free and open-source, or free software without ever giving any explanation of the exact meanings of these terms. This can be easily confusing. To non-advocates: Did you know off the top of your head that free software can cost money, or that the source code to a piece of software can be available to everyone without it being open-source? You might not.| Athena's blog
I'm sorry for being a traitor fish supporters but I spent a long time with fish and I found myself writing /bin/sh scripts instead of fish functions whenever I wanted to automate something. So now I'm a zsh user.| Athena's blog
Boring is good. Exciting is bad. Clever is worse.| Athena's blog
Seirdy's latest article, MDN’s AI Help and lucid lies, does a pretty good job of explaining the problems you get into when you let a statistical language model stand in for a technical expert. (Please don't do this.) It also is willing to use the word lie, instead of using softer language like so much AI literature does.| Athena's blog
Test note, please ignore. :)| Athena's blog
The best ways to secure a system are usually based on restricting what can be done (what software can run, what files can be accessed, what ports can be connected to) to a specific list, with anything not explicitly allowed blocked by default. This is especially true in networking, and while it's easy to implement for ports, it's harder to implement for addresses. IP addresses are hard to evaluate at a glance, they sometimes change, and often multiple addresses are used for essentially the sa...| Athena's blog
I'm thinking I should figure out how to make a separate feed on my blog for shitposts that aren't included in the main feed so I don't have to put them on my fediverse account.| Athena's blog
Anton Zhiyanov's article about being a stupid programmer puts a point I've heard before in a less concise, and thus more deeply comprehensible, form. (Very meta.) The point is:| Athena's blog
Y'know, literacy is underrated. The power to take your thoughts, make them into a durable, easily sharable form, and then on top of that to get other people's thoughts even if they're far away in space or time, even if it's a big, complex idea, is really handy, isn't it? The accessibility of ideas has to be a good thing overall even if it also enables shitty behavior.| Athena's blog
Better performance usually goes hand-in-hand with lower energy usage. Even if your software isn't noticeably slow, it might still be able to be kinder to batteries.| Athena's blog
My newest story, Unity: Hello World, is up. I described it to a beta reader as a weird sci-fi isekai with a small shot of accidental eldritch horror which is a good enough description. I'm playing with typography in the stylesheet I used for this one; looks a bit more like a book, plus makes some diegetic documents stand out better.| Athena's blog
I don't have anything to say about this post by Seirdy about surviving software forge downtime except that I agree with it.| Athena's blog
This is a rubric for grading providers of hosted network services; for example, Web hosts, cloud database and storage services, etc. Here are the grades:| Athena's blog
Giving serious consideration to using HERO System, a generic table-top role-playing game… engine, I guess, as a writing tool for one of my ongoing stories. It's a very powerful toolkit for modeling characters' abilities, measuring relative power levels, and tracking combats, although I'll need to be careful not to be too strict with it. As you should playing a table-top RPG in general, really, but still, it's an easy pitfall.| Athena's blog
Why yes, I do review at least briefly every published RFC, and yes, I will continue to curate them. You can too: The RFC Editor has an RSS feed for all new RFCs.| Athena's blog
Recently published by the RFC Editor: Mark Nottingham's RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards, an Independent Submission-stream essay (not subject to the full IETF process) which does a good job of making many of the key points about centralization of Internet services, its avoidance, and the pitfalls of both, especially focusing on the social factors that render technical efforts alone insufficient. I feel that it summarizes a large part of the debate effectively...| Athena's blog
On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City were destroyed after two airplanes flew into them; these were quickly revealed to have been hijacked and flown into the towers deliberately. Some claim, as far as I can tell without any convincing basis, that the towers were actually demolished on purpose and the planes were merely there to convince the public the destruction was the result of an attack, presumably in order to justify the War on Terror. But my subconsc...| Athena's blog
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a relatively subtle language to use correctly. Many elements have the same appearance by default, but have different semantics. One of the best examples is the and elements, which have different meanings but are both represented by italics in most visual browsers' default stylesheets. Further, the lesser-known and are also represented by italics by default.| Athena's blog
In my main project at work, I recently had to kill a feature that wasn't panning out, but the topic branch for it included a lot of other valuable work I wanted to save. If I'd been smart, I would have spread this work out onto multiple subtopic branches, but I didn't do that, so now I have to dismantle the One Giant Branch for the feature and split it into those subtopics I should have had all along so I can get them merged back into the trunk without the bad parts of the topic.| Athena's blog
Seirdy's proposal for an HTML spoiler element seems to me like a good idea, but there are some caveats. I commented on a few things when offered a draft to review, several of which were addressed, but some of my points remain, as they're more debatable. So:| Athena's blog
Draft 1 of Edition 1.0 of the Enhanced XML Hypertext Language specification is now public. This draft makes a number of changes; most notably, bibliographies and other lists of references can now be represented, and the standard stylesheet lays out the document less annoyingly wide (parallel with my recent changes to the stylesheet of this site). Here is a diff between rfcr-3 and the new draft, ed1.0-draft-1, and the tag message with more changes listed.| Athena's blog
I've made several significant changes in the styling of this site, several of which were based on advice in the book Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick. While I haven't adopted every applicable recommendation (most notably, I am still using the user's default sans serif font), I believe the result makes the site moderately more readable.| Athena's blog
I can confirm that Seirdy's page formatting and Webmention sending are fully interoperable with my Webmention receiving and processing (with no manual fixups required). I can't confirm for certain that the reverse is true, as I know Seirdy manually imports replies so it's possible the one I'm thinking of was done by hand.| Athena's blog
Fundamentally, most software really only has use for a relatively small number of general-purpose data formats. Sure, there's media (audio, video, images), but for most applications there's a library that does that and all you really have to care about is moving around the blobs of bytes. For general-purpose formats, I'd say you could get away with just SQLite and XML, but you probably want to add JSON to the mix for reduced pain and you almost certainly want a wire protocol for IPC and netwo...| Athena's blog
I'm starting on EXHL draft 1, so any suggestions or comments that could implicate a major design change would be best made soon.| Athena's blog
EXHL RfCR 3 is published. As always it's available at its canonical location. Here is a diff between rfcr-2 and rfcr-3, and the tag message for rfcr-3, which lists the changes at a high level.| Athena's blog
Everyone who works on networks, and especially on network standards, should read RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users. And, really, everyone who works on any technical subject.| Athena's blog
The Verge is talking about POSSE now. They even linked to the IndieWeb wiki page. I've seen a couple of articles like this recently; hopefully it means owning your own content might be on the rise.| Athena's blog
Home network upgraded with all Cat6, speeds improved somewhat.| Athena's blog
Request for Comments Revision 2 of the Enhanced XML Hypertext Language specification is public. This revision makes mostly minor changes on top of the revision published yesterday, mainly motivated by comments received. Further comments will be appreciated. If you feel like sending patches, they will be considered. I haven't yet reached the stage of major drafts, so many things are still deliberately omitted; I expect there are a number of entire modules still to be added, and many elements t...| Athena's blog
My latest project to randomly pop up and receive nearly all of my time for days and days is Enhanced XML Hypertext Language (EXHL), an XML-based hypertext format based closely on XHTML, the XML form of the Web's standard Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). EXHL is in a very minimal state at the moment; the current specification is just barely enough to self-host, the schema is both loose and probably doesn't allow things it should, and a lot of things need more thought, but I've decided to publ...| Athena's blog
Should Webmention senders respect robots.txt? I implemented it, but then I found at least one place I've Webmentioned blocks all bots yet has Webmention discovery. Is this a problem on their side or mine?| Athena's blog
I read the title of Fediverse defederation considerations as Fediverse defenestration considerations and that still works actually.| Athena's blog
Is it dystatic if it's a dynamic program incrementally updating a conventional on-disk document root served by a dedicated Web server?| Athena's blog
Shout out to Seirdy for updating my outdated knowledge about Fedora. Knowing when I'm wrong is good and I appreciate people correcting me in the long term, although unfortunately my brain will sometimes not let me enjoy learning a new thing in the moment.| Athena's blog
The lifecycle of the technically inclined Linux user:| Athena's blog
Replying to Johanna| Athena's blog
After reading Artemis Everfree's article about the scrollbar situation, I decided to fiddle with the Firefox (on Linux) settings for scrollbars myself, and here's the about:config settings I came up with:| Athena's blog
This thought occurred to me and I decided I should make it exist in some capacity.| Athena's blog
I'm sure you're not surprised that I've written another gay story. It's a lot of what I do on this site to be honest. This one at least isn't for adults only. The Girl and Her Fisher is about a girl meeting a mermaid.| Athena's blog
Results of power usage study on my desktop spock (i.e. plugging it into a wattmeter and running through things): Difference between S5 and S3, about a watt, maybe less. Difference between S0 idle and S3, about 45 watts! Effect of power-save settings, about 5 watts. Difference between S0 running and S0 idle, 15-25 watts. With the power-save settings on, resuming from S0 idle doesn't work. In conclusion: Use S3 as often as possible.| Athena's blog
Is there a standard format for an XML patch? I.e., a set of changes to an XML document, itself in the form of an XML document. There doesn't need to be a good implementation as long as the format isn't absurdly complex or tricky to implement.| Athena's blog