fidzu : software

We just shipped a mobile-friendly version of Oh Dear . It touched 226 files, added over 5,000 lines, and modified 160+ Blade templates. The PR took three weeks from first commit to merge.

09 Mar 2026 5:36am GMT

You may have noticed that MySQL Workbench has not been actively developed for a long time… You can see the number of open bugs. And the number of commits illustrates this too: In fact, Workbench has been put out of maintenance mode to add the MySQL HeatWave Migration Assistant to OCI. Not less, no more. […]

09 Mar 2026 5:36am GMT

Ik volg de literaire mode niet zo, maar ik lees graag en het mag van mij wel Echte Literatuur (mijn vrouw gruwelt als ze dit leest) zijn. "Het achtste leven (voor Brilka)" is ondertussen 10 jaar uit in de Nederlandse vertaling en ik zag op Goodreads dat het boek daar een whopping beoordeling van 4,54 had. Het stond dus al een tijdje op mijn verlanglijstje en ik kreeg het in December voor mijn…

Source

09 Mar 2026 5:36am GMT

A new maintenance release 0.4.26 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("ProtoBuf") data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. The new release is also already as a binary via r2u.

This release brings an update to aid in an ongoing Rcpp transitions from Rf_error to Rcpp::stop, and includes a few more minor cleanups including one contributed by Michael.

The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has full details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.26 (2026-03-06)

• Minor cleanup in DESCRIPTION depends and imports

• Remove obsolete check for utils::.DollarNames (Michael Chirico in #111)

• Replace Rf_error with Rcpp::stop, turn remaining one into (Rf_error) (Dirk in #112)

• Update configure test to check for RProtoBuf 3.3.0 or later

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the 'quick' overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

07 Mar 2026 12:25pm GMT

There's a logic puzzle that goes like this: A king has a thousand bottles of wine, where he knows that one is poisoned. He also has ten disposable servants that could taste the wine, but for whatever reason (the usual explanation is that the poison is slow-working and the feast is nearing), they can only take one sip each, possibly mixed from multiple bottles. How can he identify the bad bottle?

The solution is well-known and not difficult; you give each bottle a number 0..999 and write it out in binary, and use the ones to assign wines to servants. (So there's one servant that drinks a mix of all the odd-numbered wines, and that tells you if the poisoned bottle's number is odd or even. Another servant drinks a mix of bottles 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, etc., and that tells you the second-lowest bit. And so on.) This works because ten servants allow you to test 2^10 = 1024 bottles.

It is also easy to extend this to "at most one bottle is poisoned"; give the wines numbers from 1..1000 instead, follow the same pattern, and if no servant dies, you know the answer is zero. (This allows you to test at most 1023 bottles.)

Now, let's tweak the puzzle: What if there's zero, one or two poisoned bottles? How many bottles can the king test with his ten servants? (If you're looking for a more real-world application of this, replace "poisoned bottles" with "COVID tests" and maybe it starts to sound less arbitrary.) If course, the king can easily test ten bottles by having each servant test exactly one bottle each, but it turns out you can get to 13 by being a bit more clever, for instance:

   0123456789 ← Servant number

 0 0000000111
 1 0000011001
 2 0000101010
 3 0000110100
 4 0001001100
 5 0010010010
 6 0011000001
 7 0100100001
 8 0101000010
 9 0110000100
10 1001010000
11 1010100000
12 1100001000

 ↑ Bottle number

It can be shown (simply by brute force) that no two rows here are a subset of another row, so if you e.g. the "servant death" vector is 0110101110 (servants 1, 2, 4, 6, 7 and 8 die), the only way this could be is if bottle 2 and 9 are poisoned (and none else). Of course, the solution is nonunique, since you could switch around the number of servants or wines and it would stil work. But if you don't allow that kind of permutation, there are only five different solutions for 10 servants and 13 wines.

The maximum number of possible wines to test is recorded in OEIS A286874, and the number of different solutions in A303977. So for A286874, a(10) = 13 and for A303977, a(10) = 5.

We'd like to know what these values for higher values, in particular A286874 (A303977 is a bit more of a curiosity, and also a convenient place to write down all the solutions). I've written before about how we can create fairly good solutions using error-correcting codes (there are also other possible constructions), but optimal turns out to be hard. The only way we know of is some form of brute force. (I used a SAT solver to confirm a(10) and a(11), but it seemed to get entirely stuck on a(12).)

I've also written about my brute-force search of a(12) and a(13), so I'm not going to repeat that, but it turned out that with a bunch of extra optimizations and 210 calendar days of near-continuous calculation, I could confirm that:

• A286874 a(14) = 28
• A303977 a(14) = 788 (!!)

The latter result is very surprising to me, so it was an interesting find. I would have assumed that with this many solutions, we'd find a(14) = 29.

I don't have enough CPU power to test a(15) or a(16) (do contact me if you have a couple thousand cores to lend out for some months or more), but I'm going to do a search in a given subset of the search space (5-uniform solutions), which is much faster; it won't allow us to fix more elements of either of the sequences, but it's possible that we'll find some new records and thus lower bounds for A286874. Like I already posted, we know that a(15) >= 42. (Someone should also probably go find some bounds for a(17), a(18), etc.-when the sequence was written, the posted known bounds were far ahead of the sequence itself, but my verification has caught up and my approach is not as good in creating solutions heuristically out of thin air.)

07 Mar 2026 9:54am GMT

FSet v2.3.0 added transients! These make it faster to populate new collections with data, especially as the collections get large. I shamelessly stole the idea from Clojure.

They are currently implemented only for the CHAMP types ch-set, ch-map, ch-2-relation, ch-replay-set, and ch-replay-map.

The term "transient" contrasts with "persistent". I'm using the term "persistent" in its functional-data-structure sense, as Clojure does: a data structure is persistent if multiple states of it can coexist in memory efficiently. (The probably more familiar use of the term is in the database sense, where it refers to nonvolatile storage of data.) FSet collections have, up to now, all been persistent in this sense; a point modification to one, such as by with or less, takes only O(log n) space and time to return a new state of the collection, without disturbing the previous state.

A transient encapsulates the internal tree of a collection so as to guarantee that it holds the only pointer to the tree; this allows modifications to tree nodes to be made in-place, so long as the node has sufficient allocated space. Once the collection is built, the tree is in the same format that existing FSet code expects, and can be accessed and functionally updated as usual.

Some quick micro-benchmarking suggests that speedups, for constructing a set from scratch, range from 1.6x at size 64 to as much as 2.4x at size 4096.

You don't necessarily even have to use transients explicitly in order to benefit from them. Some FSet builtins such as filter and image use them now. The GMap result types ch-set etc. also use them.

For details, see the GitLab MR.

07 Mar 2026 8:04am GMT

Debian LTS/ELTS

This was my hundred-fortieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

• [DLA 4474-1] rlottie security update to fix three CVEs related to boundary checks.
• [DLA 4477-1] munge security update to fix one CVE related to a buffer overflow.
• [DLA 4483-1] gimp security update to fix four CVEs related to arbitrary code execution.
• [DLA 4487-1] gegl security update to fix two CVEs related to heap-based buffer overflow.
• [DLA 4489-1] libvpx security update to fix one CVE related to a buffer overflow.
• [ELA-1649-1] gimp security update to fix three CVEs in Buster and Stretch related to arbitrary code execution.
• [ELA-1650-1] gegl security update to fix two CVEs in Buster and Stretch related to heap-based buffer overflow.

Some CVEs could be marked as not-affected for one or all LTS/ELTS-releases. I also worked on package evolution-data-server and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded a new upstream versions:

• … ipp-usb to unstable.
• … brlaser to unstable.
• … gutenprint to unstable.

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Lomiri

This month I continued to worked on unifying packaging on Debian and Ubuntu. This makes it easier to work on those packages independent of the used platform.

This work is generously funded by Fre(i)e Software GmbH!

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• … c-munipack to unstable. This package now contains a version without GTK support. Upstream is working on a port to GTK3 but seems to need some more time to finish this.
• … libasi to unstable.
• … libdfu-ahp to unstable.
• … libfishcamp to unstable.
• … libinovasdk to unstable.
• … libmicam to unstable.
• … siril to unstable (sponsored upload).

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• … pyicloud to unstable.

Unfortunately development of openoverlayrouter finally stopped, so I had to remove this package from the archive.

Debian Mobcom

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• … libsmpp34 to unstable.

misc

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• … nuspell to unstable.

I also sponsored the upload of some Matomo dependencies. Thanks a lot to William for preparing the packages

06 Mar 2026 6:27pm GMT

Insphex adds the Hexdump item to the File Browser menu to view the hex dump of the selected files. The initial implementation called the public API for adding commands at the top level of the menu.

To later move the item to the See sumbenu that groups various file viewing commands I resorted to list surgery, as the API doesn't support submenus. The problem is internal system details can and do change, which happened to the File Browser menu and led to an Insphex load error.

I fixed the issue by reverting the public API call and now the item is back at the top level of the menu.

Insphex is a hex dump tool similar to the Linux command hexdump. I wrote it in Common Lisp on Medley Interlisp.

#insphex #CommonLisp #Interlisp #Lisp

Discuss... Email | Reply @amoroso@oldbytes.space

01 Mar 2026 9:16am GMT

Contents

• Part 1 (Hello World)
• Part 2 (Basic Templates)
• Part 3 (Introduction to middleware and Static File management)
• Part 4 (Forms)
• Part 5 (Environmental Variables)
• Part 6 (Database Connections)
• Part 7 (Envy Configuation Switching)
• Part 8 (Mounting Middleware)
• Part 9 (Authentication System)
• Part 10 (Email)
• Part 11 (Posting Tweets & Advanced Database Queries)
• Part 12 (Clean Up & Bug Fix)
• Part 13 (Adding Comments)
• Part 14 (Pagination, Part 1)
• Part 15 (Pagination, Part 2)

Introduction

Welcome back! We will be revisiting the pagination from last time, however we are going to try and make this easier on ourselves, I built a package for pagination mito-pager, the idea is that much of what we looked at in the last lesson was very boiler plate and repetitive so we should look at removing this.

I will say, my mito-pager can do a little more than just what I show here, it has two modes, you can use paginate-dao (named this way so that it is familiar to mito) to paginate over simple models, however, if you need to perform complex queries there is a macro with-pager that you can use to paginate. It is this second form we will use in this tutorial.

There is one thing to bear in mind, when using mito-pager, you must implement your data retrieval functions in such a way to return a values object, as mito-pager relies on this to work.

I encourge you to try the library out in other use-cases and, of course, if you have ideas, please let me know.

Changes

Most of our changes are quite limited in scope, really it's just our controllers and models that need most of the edits.

ningle-tutorial-project.asd

We need to add the mito-pager package to our project asd file.

- :ningle-auth)
+ :ningle-auth
+ :mito-pager)

src/controllers.lisp

Here is the real payoff! I almost dreaded writing the sheer volume of the change but then realised it's so simple, we only need to change our index function, and it may be better to delete it all and write our new simplified version.

(defun index (params)
  (let* ((user (gethash :user ningle:*session*))
         (req-page (or (parse-integer (or (ingle:get-param "page" params) "1") :junk-allowed t) 1))
         (req-limit (or (parse-integer (or (ingle:get-param "limit" params) "50") :junk-allowed t) 50)))
    (flet ((get-posts (limit offset) (ningle-tutorial-project/models:posts user :offset offset :limit limit)))
      (mito-pager:with-pager ((posts pager #'get-posts :page req-page :limit req-limit))
        (djula:render-template* "main/index.html" nil :title "Home" :user user :posts posts :pager pager)))))

This is much nicer, and in my opinion, the controller should be this simple.

src/main.lisp

We need to ensure we include the templates from mito-pager, this is a simple one line change.

 (defun start (&key (server :woo) (address "127.0.0.1") (port 8000))
    (djula:add-template-directory (asdf:system-relative-pathname :ningle-tutorial-project "src/templates/"))
+   (djula:add-template-directory (asdf:system-relative-pathname :mito-pager "src/templates/"))

src/models.lisp

As mentioned at the top of this tutorial, we have to implement our data retrieval functions in a certain way. While there are some changes here, we ultimately end up with less code.

We can start by removing the count parameter, we wont be needing it in this implementation, and since we don't need the count parameter anymore, the :around method can go too!

- (defgeneric posts (user &key offset limit count)
+ (defgeneric posts (user &key offset limit)
-
- (defmethod posts :around (user &key (offset 0) (limit 50) &allow-other-keys)
-   (let ((count (mito:count-dao 'post))
-         (offset (max 0 offset))
-         (limit (max 1 limit)))
-     (if (and (> count 0) (>= offset count))
-       (let* ((page-count (max 1 (ceiling count limit)))
-              (corrected-offset (* (1- page-count) limit)))
-         (posts user :offset corrected-offset :limit limit))
-       (call-next-method user :offset offset :limit limit :count count))))

There's two methods to look at, the first is when the type of user is user:

-
- (defmethod posts ((user user) &key offset limit count)
+ (defmethod posts ((user user) &key offset limit)
...
      (values
-         (mito:retrieve-by-sql sql :binds params)
-         count
-         offset)))
+         (mito:retrieve-by-sql sql :binds params)
+         (mito:count-dao 'post))))

The second is when the type of user is null:

-
- (defmethod posts ((user null) &key offset limit count)
+ (defmethod posts ((user null) &key offset limit)
...
    (values
-       (mito:retrieve-by-sql sql)
-       count
-       offset)))
+       (mito:retrieve-by-sql sql)
+       (mito:count-dao 'post))))

As you can see, all we are really doing is relying on mito to do the lions share of the work, right down to the count.

src/templates/main/index.html

The change here is quite simple, all we need to do is to change the path to the partial, we need to simply point to the partial provided by mito-pager.

- {% include "partials/pager.html" with url="/" title="Posts" %}
+ {% include "mito-pager/partials/pager.html" with url="/" title="Posts" %}

src/templates/partials/pagination.html

This one is easy, we can delete it! mito-pager provides its own template, and while you can override it (if you so wish), in this tutorial we do not need it anymore.

Conclusion

I hope you will agree that this time, using a prebuilt package takes a lot of the pain out of pagination. I don't like to dictate what developers should, or shouldn't use, so that's why last time you were given the same information I had, so if you wish to build your own library, you can, or if you want to focus on getting things done, you are more than welcome to use mine, and of course, if you find issues please do let me know!

Learning Outcomes

Github

• The link for the custom pagination part of the tutorials code is available here.

Common Lisp HyperSpec

28 Feb 2026 8:00am GMT

Are you ready for another challenge? We're excited to host the second yearly edition of our treasure hunt at FOSDEM! Participants must solve five sequential challenges to uncover the final answer. Update: the treasure hunt has been successfully solved by multiple participants, and the main prizes have now been claimed. But the fun doesn't stop here. If you still manage to find the correct final answer and go to Infodesk K, you will receive a small consolation prize as a reward for your effort. If you're still looking for a challenge, the 2025 treasure hunt is still unsolved, so舰

29 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

If your non-geek partner and/or kids are joining you to FOSDEM, they may be interested in spending some time exploring Brussels while you attend the conference. Like previous years, FOSDEM is organising sightseeing tours.

26 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

With FOSDEM just a few days away, it is time for us to enlist your help. Every year, an enthusiastic band of volunteers make FOSDEM happen and make it a fun and safe place for all our attendees. We could not do this without you. This year we again need as many hands as possible, especially for heralding during the conference, during the buildup (starting Friday at noon) and teardown (Sunday evening). No need to worry about missing lunch at the weekend, food will be provided. Would you like to be part of the team that makes FOSDEM tick?舰

26 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT