It was a surprise and a great honour to be called to the stage at #ELC Europe 2025 to receive a community contribution award from the hands of Tim Bird.

Thank you Tim, the program committee and all the people who have worked behind the scenes to organize ELC Europe 2025. You are too numerous to be listed individually here, but all of you deserve acknowledgment.

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of me trying to tell the world that doing curl --L with -X is most often *wrong*:

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/09/11…

Kind of a fun timing too since curl 8.16.0 features the new --follow option that works fine with -X!

Unnecessary use of curl -X

I've grown a bit tired of the web filling up with curl command line examples showing use of superfluous -X's. I'm putting code where my mouth is. Starting with curl 7.45.

^{daniel.haxx.se}

1/3 "V pléne v stredu [Tomáš Zdechovský] hovoril, že miliardy z eurofondov miznú v projektoch, ktoré neslúžia slovenským ľuďom, ale nezodpovedným politikom a ich kamošom. „Kontrolné orgány, ktoré majú stáť na strate poctivých, sú paralyzované. Tam kde kedysi padali stovky žalôb, dnes padajú sotva dve ročne,“ dodal."

🔒dennikn.sk/4842340/nemozeme-po…

#SKpolitika #EUpolitics #eurofondy #korupcia

Nemôžeme posielať peniaze do čiernej diery. Europarlament debatoval o zneužívaní eurofondov na Slovensku

V rovnaký deň, keď bolo v Štrasburgu najviac novinárov kvôli Správe o stave únie, sa poslanci Európskeho parlamentu zaoberali zneužívaním európskych peňazí aj stavom právneho štátu na Slovensku.

^{Soňa Weissová (Denník N)}

Is your website missing out on one of #HTML’s easiest yet most powerful tools? The lang attribute takes just seconds to add, but it makes a massive difference for #accessibility, SEO, and how your content displays. @webi18n

In this video, @xfq, who leads @w3c's #Internationalization activity, breaks down exactly what the language attribute does and demonstrate why skipping it can have real consequences. @webi18n

🎬 youtu.be/G3OwTPJo_Kw

As it happens, we still use CVS in our operating system project (there are reasons for doing this, but migration to git would indeed make sense).

While working on our project, we occasionally have to do a full checkout of the whole codebase, which is several gigabytes. Over time, this operation has gotten very, very, very slow - I mean "2+ hours to perform a checkout" slow.

This was getting quite ridiculous. Even though it's CVS, it shouldn't crawl like this. A quick build of CVS with debug symbols and sampling the "cvs server" process with Linux perf showed something peculiar: The code was spending the majority of the time inside one function.

So what is this get_memnode() function? Turns out this is a support function from Gnulib that enables page-aligned memory allocations. (NOTE: I have no clue why CVS thinks doing page-aligned allocations is beneficial here - but here we are.)

The code in question has support for three different backend allocators:
1. mmap
2. posix_memalign
3. malloc

Sounds nice, except that both 1 and 3 use a linked list to track the allocations. The get_memnode() function is called when deallocating memory to find out the original pointer to pass to the backend deallocation function: The node search code appears as:

for (c = *p_next; c != NULL; p_next = &c->next, c = c->next)
if (c->aligned_ptr == aligned_ptr)
break;

The get_memnode() function is called from pagealign_free():

#if HAVE_MMAP
if (munmap (aligned_ptr, get_memnode (aligned_ptr)) < 0)
error (EXIT_FAILURE, errno, "Failed to unmap memory");
#elif HAVE_POSIX_MEMALIGN
free (aligned_ptr);
#else
free (get_memnode (aligned_ptr));
#endif

This is an O(n) operation. CVS must be allocating a huge number of small allocations, which will result in it spending most of the CPU time in get_memnode() trying to find the node to remove from the list.

Why should we care? This is "just CVS" after all. Well, Gnulib is used in a lot of projects, not just CVS. While pagealign_alloc() is likely not the most used functionality, it can still end up hurting performance in many places.

The obvious easy fix is to prefer the posix_memalign method over the other options (I quickly made this happen for my personal CVS build by adding tactical #undef HAVE_MMAP). Even better, the list code should be replaced with something more sensible. In fact, there is no need to store the original pointer in a list; a better solution is to allocate enough memory and store the pointer before the calculated aligned pointer. This way, the original pointer can be fetched from the negative offset of the pointer passed to pagealign_free(). This way, it will be O(1).

I tried to report this to the Gnulib project, but I have trouble reaching gnu.org services currently. I'll be sure to do that once things recover.

#opensource #development #bugstories

Took a tumble on the road today, swerving to avoid an ebike delivery guy that cut me off. I'm fine - scraped an elbow, and I think I'm going to have a pretty good bruise on my tailbone, but I successfully avoided the guy.

I know a bunch of people who think delivery e-bikers are some sort of menace, but the truth of it is that Toronto's bike lanes are terrible. Far too narrow, people parking in them and blocking them all the time. Half a lane wide, in place where there's four lanes for cars.

I can't get the Z-Wave ZWA-2 device to pass through to a bhyve VM where I'm running Home Assistant because it only allows full PCI pass through of a device or USB controller. It does get exposed as a serial device which I can sorta pass through to byhyve, but it doesn't really work.

I was able to get a console on the HASS VM and figure out which serial device was matching com2 that I was connecting into it and I could connect from the host and pass through some ascii chars back and forth, but when HASS tried to talk to the device it kept saying there were errors talking to it. Very odd. Lights were blinking on the device though confirming communication of some sort was happening. I looked at the Z-Wave-JS code and saw it was using 115200,8n,0 essentially so that's what I used... no dice.

Someone on the FreeBSD forums suggested using a virtual null modem device inbetween and then using socat to connect to the other end of the virtual null modem cable, but that didn't work either.

However, I can configure HASS to talk to zwave-js-server running in a FreeBSD Jail as you can custom configure the websocket connection to point to anywhere instead of localhost. That did seem to work! It found the device and even did a firmware update on it. So it "works".

I need to clean up this setup because I'm literally running it as root at the moment and I'm using a git clone of their master branch 🥲

Now I just need to figure out how to ensure I can have a consistent serial device name in /dev so this doesn't break in the future.

Once that's sorted I'll have to write a blog post about it

github.com/zwave-js/zwave-js-s…

GitHub - zwave-js/zwave-js-server: Small server wrapper around Z-Wave JS to access it via a WebSocket

Small server wrapper around Z-Wave JS to access it via a WebSocket - zwave-js/zwave-js-server

^GitHub

On Mastodon you can search just your own posts by including the phrase "from:me" in your search.

There are lots of these special phrases (called "operators") which let you customise your Mastodon search, so that you get a very specific set of search results.

You can see a complete list of Mastodon search operators in this guide:

➡️ fedi.tips/how-do-i-search-for-…

You can combine several operators in one search, or use a minus sign - before an operator to exclude it from the search.

#FediTips

How do I search for stuff on Mastodon? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

^fedi.tips

We interrupt this broadcast about a well known person being shot for a report of more regular school kids being shot.

When will Republicans come to the table about gun violence?

At least 3 students injured in shooting at Colorado high school: Officials - ABC News
abcnews.go.com/US/shooting-rep…

At least 4 students, including shooter, injured in shooting at Colorado high school: Officials

The suspect is believed to be among the injured, police said.

^{Megan Forrester (ABC News)}

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

There is no bottom for the current US administration.

"Citing concerns about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), the U.S. Department of Education has halted funding for programs that support students with combined hearing and vision loss in eight states."

propublica.org/article/trump-d…

Education Dept. Halts Funds to Programs for Deafblind Students Over DEI Concerns

Citing concerns about DEI, the U.S. Department of Education has halted funding for programs that support students with combined hearing and vision loss in eight states. “How low can you go?” one advocate asked. “How can you do this to children?”

^ProPublica

Championing inclusive language

"Language reflects culture. It shapes how people perceive themselves and one another..."

#inclusive #a11y

tetralogical.com/blog/2025/09/…

Championing inclusive language - TetraLogical

Language reflects culture. It shapes how people perceive themselves and one another; whether they belong, whether they’re valued, and whether the space is designed with them in mind. Inclusive language isn’t just polite; it’s powerful.

^TetraLogical

NEW: Programs for #Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Harmed by Trump’s Anti-Diversity Push
==

Federal funding for organizations that help students with hearing and vision loss across eight states will stop at the end of the month, according to letters sent by a top #Education Dept. official and obtained by ProPublica.

#news #kids #trump #government #DEI

propublica.org/article/trump-d…

Education Dept. Halts Funds to Programs for Deafblind Students Over DEI Concerns

Citing concerns about DEI, the U.S. Department of Education has halted funding for programs that support students with combined hearing and vision loss in eight states. “How low can you go?” one advocate asked. “How can you do this to children?”

^ProPublica

Anyone running #FreeBSD on one of Oracle's free tier?

I tried once, gave up. I don't recall the block.