Gonçalo Valério

Tag: Open Source

  • Preparing for Hacktoberfest

    It already starts tomorrow… the next edition of “Hacktoberfest”. For those who don’t know, it basically is an initiative that incentivizes participants to contribute to open-source software.

    During the month of October, those who do 4 contributions or more, can either receive a t-shirt or opt for a tree to be planted in their name.

    While the last editions seem to have been plagued with spam problems (as in “low-value contributions”), I still think it is an important initiate. Perhaps raising the bar for participation or completion would prevent these issues, but that is not the point of this post.

    Having already participated twice in the past, this year I will try to do it again (as you might have guessed from the post’s title).

    With this in mind, I spent a “few minutes” looking at my currently active/maintained repositories to see which ones could make use of a few extra contributions (the others will probably be archived).

    Here are the ones I ended up enabling for the “event”:

    • hawkpost – This old project that is still used, allows you to receive content in a secure end-to-end way from people without any encryption knowledge. Nowadays, there are better alternatives, but in some use cases it still is useful. The project has been unmaintained for a while and the idea for the next month is to upgrade its dependencies, fix the CI, improve the documentation and bring it to shape by making a new release.
    • inlinehashes – is a small CLI tool that takes an HTML document and produces the hashes of all inline elements that would need to be whitelisted in the Content-Security-Policy. Currently, the project only looks for styles and some places where JavaScript can be used. In the next month it would be good to extend the project’s coverage such as other inline JS possibilities, objects, etc.
    • worker-planet – Is a “Cloudflare Worker” that generates a single web page/feed with content from multiple sources. It is useful for communities where each member publishes content using his own blog/website. During the next month, it would be useful to include a few extra themes (and better ones).
    • worker-ddns – An elementary DDNS solution built on top of Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare DNS. This project is very stable and could be considered complete, so I’m not expecting any significant changes. However, documentation could be improved, and we could also address systems that don’t support an agent written in python.

    Of course there are other improvements that could be made to all them, but these are my “priorities”.

    If you are participating on Hacktoberfest and still don’t know where to start, please give the above project’s a shot.

  • EU-Free and Open Source Software Auditing project

    Today I stumbled on this blog post about a poll for the EU-FOSSA. I’m not familiarized with all aspects of this pilot project, however by the information I could gather, it seems to be a really great idea.

    Most of us regularly use, up to a certain degree, several pieces of free (as in freedom) software on a daily basis. Many of these projects are essential to assure the security of our communications, documents and work. European institutions and countries make use of these tools as well, so why not spend a little time and money to assure they meet certain quality goals and are free of major bugs that can undermine the safety of its users?

    This will also raise the public’s trust on these tools, so they can become standards over their proprietary counterparts, which we are unable to review and modify according to our needs, leading to many security questions.

    One of its components is a sample review of one open-source project and until the 8th day of July you can give your opinion on which one. Go there it only takes 1 minute and it will help them understand that this is an important issue. Here is the link

  • 0 A.D: a pleasant surprise

    0 A.D: a pleasant surprise

    When I was younger, I remember being a great fan of real-time strategy games, specially those based of history. One of the main reasons I was really happy when I’ve got my first computer, was that from that moment i would be able to play the first “Age of Empires” game, which my dad bought together with the computer. During months I saved 100% of my allowance, just to be able to buy the first expansion pack the “Rise of Rome”. In the years that followed, I’d also bought the second version of the game and its expansion pack, spending countless hours playing them.

    More than a decade after, which I went through without playing games (or at least on a regular basis), I’ve decided to find some RTS of this genre to play. Since the Age of Empires series do not run on Linux based operating systems, I had to start looking for similar alternatives. I didn’t took long to find the first contender, which is called 0 A.D., the game is open source and from the contents shown on the website it looked just what I was looking for.

    In the game you can choose between 8 factions/civilizations from the ancient times (the website says that on the final release there will be 12), each of them with special characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The Idea is that these civilizations should have had their peak between the 500 B.C. and 500 A.C., leaving many more contenders in the waiting list to be added to the possible choices.

    The game is in 3D, where you have control over the camera and you can adjust it to the best angle on any given situation. The graphics look pretty good turning the game into a nice experience. Other aspect that I really liked is that even tough there are specialized units, many of them can assume roles on both worlds (the military and the civilian) which opens a whole range of possibilities.

    According to the development team the game is still on “alpha”, or in other words it’s “far from completion”, however it already is playable both on single and multi-player (during the few hours I’ve spent playing it I didn’t found any annoying issue).

    So if you like this kind of games give it a try, the official page of the game, where you can download the last version, is play0ad.com. On Debian (testing) you can use apt since the repositories are up to date.

  • On buying new hardware

    When I was buying my laptop some years ago, I wished I knew of a website with a database of hardware that works well with free software. Specially with any operating system based on Linux, so I wouldn’t get into too much trouble to get everything working. Instead I ended up purchasing a machine that came with Windows and a bunch of hardware that depended on proprietary drivers to work well. It took ages to get every feature to work as it should on my chosen distribution.

    Recently I discovered h-node, a website created by the free software foundation (FSF) together with Debain GNU/Linux which tries to:

    … aim at the construction of a hardware database in order to identify what devices work with a fully free operating system.

    Since not everyone uses Windows or Mac OSX, I hope this might be helpful to those reading this blog. As for me, next time I need to buy something I already know where to start my research.