An ag(e)ing hacker - posts tagged as "myself" -- Luca Saiu's blog

Languages and complexity, Part I: why I love Anki — 2024-01-02 19:47
Updated: 2024-01-28 10:13

Lately I have not been as active in GNU (https://www.gnu.org) as I would have liked—which I plan to change. Apart from work I was busy with happy family life next to E.; and, I guess, with contemplating the dismal state of the West as it descends further and further into tyranny amid the general indifference. Maybe in part seeking solace from the news I focused with renewed intensity on my hobby, studying the Russian language for no reason much more practical than my love for Nineteenth-Century novels. I have heard more than one Russian teacher vocally disapproving of literature as [...] Read more

Tags: anki, bash, e, emacs, english, free-software, gnu, gnu-linux, hacking, keyboard, myself, natural-language, privacy, russian-language, software, tutorial

p≡p-mail-tool: easy privacy for email with existing Mail User Agents (p≡p is working with Gnus!) — 2023-08-07 03:05
Updated: 2024-01-11 12:15

During the last month and a half I have unfortunately mostly disappeared from GNU, having been busy and focused writing p≡p-mail-tool (https://codeberg.org/pEp/pEp-mail-tool), a new work project I have let overflow into my personal time as a beautiful little hack in which I believe. p≡p-mail-tool is of course free software. Motivation Freedom of speech and privacy are more and more threatened by governments and hostile corporations working against the public interest. In this season of death of liberty the minimum we can do to respond is making surveillance more difficult, by providing the general public with easy tools to use for [...] Read more

Tags: aiosmtpd, bash, command-line, dovecot, emacs, english, free-software, gnu, gnu-linux, gnus, hacking, imap, lisp, minimalism, myself, parentheses, pop, p≡p, privacy, python, script, smtp, software, surveillance, thunderbird, unix

Announcing make-gallery, a simple web image gallery generator — 2022-11-21 01:33
Updated: 2022-11-21 23:53

I wrote a script generating an image gallery suitable to be included in web pages. Since it can be generally useful I cleaned it up and published it, of course as free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html); you are welcome to download a copy of ‘make-gallery’ from <https://git.ageinghacker.net/make-gallery>. The software is released under the GNU General Public Licence (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html) version 3 or later; the generated code is in the public domain. I hate the web I have never made a mystery of my personal dislike for the web with its gratuitous ever-growing complexity, inefficiency, lack of expressivity, hostility to the developer and to [...] Read more

Tags: angle-brackets, apl, autopatente, bash, code-generation, command-line, css, english, free-software, gallery, gnu, gnu-linux, graphics, hacking, html, imagemagick, images, javascript, keyboard, make-gallery, minimalism, myself, nausea, p≡p, russian, script, software, thumbnail, unix

SMTP, OrangeWebsite and using your own computing resources — 2022-10-24 00:35
Updated: 2024-01-04 19:55

I have had a personal server with the domain ‘ageinghacker.net’ since 2010. At the beginning I was sharing hosting costs with two or three other people, each of us running a virtual machine inside a Virtual Private Server. By 2016 my requirements had grown, I wanted stability and so decided to rent a VPS by myself. Around that time I had also decided to run a Tor exit node for the benefit of the global community, and more in general wanted my server to be in a country that allowed some freedom of speech; since I did not, then like [...] Read more

Tags: 1984-hosting, email, english, flokinet, freedom, free-software, gnu, hosting, iceland, myself, orangewebsite, port-25, p≡p, server, smtp, surveillance, swisscom, switzerland, vps

Hackers getting married — 2022-05-16 22:00

On May 14th E. and I got married, here in Zürich. I do not normally share very personal information here; but people who knew me before January 2021 will remember me before and since that time. How she changed me for the better. E. is my joy. [Hugging photo] E. and I hugging under the cloister next to the Stadthaus. Photo by Gloria Bressan (http://www.byphotoz.com). For the occasion we invited our friends and relatives, most of whom live as émigrés in one country or another, like us. We had several of our old-time friends from the GNU Project, and some [...] Read more

Tags: e, english, gnu, myself, switzerland, wedding, zürich

GNU Jitter and GCC: the fun of playing with fire — 2022-03-10 21:32

A few days ago on March 6 I participated in the Binary T00ls Summit online event (<https://binary-tools.net/>) organised by José Marchesi (<https://jemarch.net>); a video recording is now available. My presentation had the ridiculous title GNU Jitter and the illusion of simplicity or Copying, patching and combining compiler-generated code in executable memory or The Anarchist’s guide to GCC or The fun of playing with fire — or, in shortened form, GNU Jitter and GCC: the fun of playing with fire. This is the official abstract: GNU Jitter is a generator of portable and efficient language virtual machines; a Jittery VM lies [...] Read more

Tags: binary-t00ls-summit, free-software, gnu, hacking, jitter, myself

Opernhaus Zürich does not deserve you — 2022-02-19 15:00
Updated: 2022-05-16 21:55

Yesterday evening, February 18, E. and I went to the Zürich opera to see Mozart’s Don Giovanni produced by Sebastian Baumgarten(1): <https://www.opernhaus.ch/en/spielplan/calendar/dongiovanni/2021-2022/>. We were looking forward to a well-deserved happy night out to celebrate how Switzerland had started to look less like a police state. “Freedom day” was supposed to begin at midnight on the 17th—Except, we discovered, at Opernhaus Zürich: there the gratuitous obtuse oppression continues and the house requires you to keep wearing the stupid face masks if you attend. This surprise ruined my mood and completely destroyed the experience for me. Opernhaus Zürich is a venue I [...] Read more

Tags: don-giovanni, e, english, freedom, freedom-day, myself, opera, opernhaus-zürich, politics, review, sebastian-baumgarten, switzerland, zürich

Global variable initialisation in C++ — 2021-11-18 22:00
Updated: 2022-11-26 18:37

Today Volker Birk (https://fdik.org/) and I were speaking over lunch about object initialisation in C++ and about how weakly defined a program entry point is, because of objects with static storage duration. Volker wrote a short program whose output changes after reversing the order of two variable definitions, both out of a ‘main’ function whose entire body was ‘return 0;’. He discussed it in German (https://blog.fdik.org/2021-11/s1637238415), on his blog (https://blog.fdik.org). I was more annoyed by the fact that initialisation order is not guaranteed to respect functional dependency across compilation units. Here is my test case, where GCC and the GNU [...] Read more

Tags: c++, english, free-software, gcc, gnu, myself, p≡p

About Erdős numbers and not wanting what you have — 2011-09-22 19:41
Updated: 2015-09-15 15:54

Today at lunch with colleagues(1) we were having a very nice, relaxed conversation. At some point somebody mentioned he knew somebody who knew Erdős (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PaulErd%C5%91s>); so I asked him what his Erdős number (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91snumber>) was, and he said it. Then —I think for the first time— the thought crossed my mind that I also could already have a finite Erdős number. I’ve just found that in fact that’s the case, and has been for several years now. My Erdős number is(2) at most 6. For example: • Paul Erdős (0) • Vilmos Komornik (1) • Marco Pedicini (2) • Patrick [...] Read more

Tags: english, identity, myself, research, university

How I learned procedural abstraction and the wonder of science — 2011-09-19 05:06
Updated: 2022-12-04 22:28

Inspired by a happy “discovery” I made today, I’ve written this instead of finishing the post about identity. The abandoned tape This story began on a summer evening of the late Eighties when I was 10, maybe 11. I was at some small country fair near home with my brother, five years younger than me — quite a big difference back then. My brother found an audio cassette discarded on the ground, and wanted to take it home; it looked dirty and I remember that I didn’t want to pick it up at first, but I guess I wasn’t too [...] Read more

Tags: commodore-64, english, hacking, my-masters, myself, nostalgia, science

Writing every day — 2011-09-09 01:50
Updated: 2011-09-12 08:00

I’ve been remembering the Latin phrase Nulla dies sine linea (no day [shall pass] without [writing] a line) for years now. Until a couple of minutes ago I was sure it was a motto by Gabriele d’Annunzio(1) (1863-1938), who despite the sheer beauty of some of his prose and poetry was quite revolting as a person — the kind of artist that you cannot quite declare you admire without adding all sorts of qualifiers and disclaimers. Annoying but necessary. You know, it’s about your reputation, and here I’m not kidding: that guy was a lot worse than just a histrionic [...] Read more

Tags: d-annunzio, english, latin, meta, myself, very-bad-literature

About this blog — 2011-09-08 08:44
Updated: 2011-09-20 04:24

I have rough ideas about what I’d want to write about, but I don’t really know with what frequency I will touch each topic. I’m mostly interested in free software, (computer) languages and Computer Science in general, art, literature and politics; but I make no promise of staying on-topic. I will also not be necessarily “balanced”, soft or cautious when expressing my opinions. This is my site (by the way I pay hosting costs myself, with my money) and as such it is the appropriate place for holding my opinions. If you want to engage in discussion with me, there’s [...] Read more

Tags: angle-brackets, english, meta, myself