Minimal Software

Complexity is the business we are in, and complexity is what limits us. - The Mythical Man Month.

Log Entries

Portability is a very underrated quality.

Typically, we have a set of a few tools that help us get on with our life: maybe that is a GPS, a messaging platform, a design tool, etc. When the tool we use is only available on one platform, then we are coerced into using only that platform and ceding our agency to it. When we have software that is portable, however, we are free to leave a platform and choose another. It therefore empowers the user, giving us a voice (and a choice).

Portability and compatibility tend to be the lowest of priorities for a tech company, that is unless companies find themselves obliged to build software with these two qualities in mind.

One way to make modern toolmakers prioritise portability and compatibility is by setting regulation and standards. While some argue against these type of impositions on businesses, portability and compatibility standards would also benefit companies as they would also be able to make use of the diverse tools built around these standards. However, companies would need to relinquish control, the very same control that has been taken away from users. This generates an interesting phenomenon by which adding some restrictions to what we can do when we run businesses, allows us more choice and freedom in other ways.

Another force to provoke change is through consumer demand and the market. The dominance of Internet Explorer once made it so that developers accounted only for the specifications and needs to run on Internet Explorer, making access to the internet via other browsers more difficult, and at times impossible. Internet Explorer could also leverage its dominance to set standards that permitted it to perpetuate its monopoly and, in a way, force individuals to use it. However, the growth of alternative browsers eventually forced developers to account for more than one browser. It also forced Internet Explorer to start playing nice, as it could no longer solely influence the established standards.

It might be worth asking ourselves how portable a piece of software is when we choose to use it, as well as reflect on the degree to which depending on certain software can lock us into one way of doing things or into a closed ecosystem controlled by a single vendor. And not just the software itself, but also the data it generates.

- Marc

I have recently (ish) become interested in file formats. In particular, file formats that are human readable and human writable.

These formats have quite a few advantages:

• They are (obviously) modifiable by hand
• They are easy to backup
• They are easy to maintain
• They are (often) easy to build software for.

But they also come with challenges:

• Human-writable means that data integrity is not guaranteed
• They are inefficient

To me the biggest beauty of these file formats is that they can outlive the software that created them. Even if I am on a foreign computer, without internet, hit with amnesia, I can still make sense of and modify these formats.

Software in some way or another takes data and outputs data, that's what a computer is meant to do. I think it is worth thinking about how we can make sure that the data generated outlives the software that made it, inspired by Permacomputing.

I kicked off a thread on Mastodon to see what kinds of human-readable data formats people know of. I am excited to see what people share.

- Marc

Email combined with isync, makes it is possible to access email offline and have it synced on a regular interval.

I looked around for options for having a shared TODO list with Andrea and sometimes the most obvious solution is what is in front of you. All the local-solutions that I have used in the past made sharing difficult, and neither one of us wanted to sign-up for some third-party service nor download an app just for TODO items. Then I started thinking about how I have always shared links with myself in the past, which was through email.

Well, thanks to fastmail's web filters, I was able to set up a specific email-address that Andrea and I could use to share TODO items between each other. All email sent to that email address ends up in my TODO inbox. How do I share TODO items? Well, just add Andrea on CC and then it's done. No sign-up to a new service needed. When the item is complete, I just reply done and then my email rule will automatically drag it to my Done archive.

Similarly, I use this as my social bookmarking service. I have a special email-address and a email rule so that when that address receives links from the right people, those links end up automatically in my links archive.

These two solutions work cross-device as well. All my devices have email so sharing across BSD, iOS, and Android becomes trivial. All of them support email.

This could be further extended with interfaces that operate on the isync directory. You could then have TODO apps that use email as a backend, and what is nice is that people would not need to download an app to operate on it, so it would be a form of "progressive enhancement".

- Marc

I have began using recutils to build a database of what I have read, watched and also for references on how to do things.

The tool has a decent amount of utilities for querying data and its simple formatting means that even if recutils one day stops working, it would be trivial for me to build my own replacement.

The usage becomes simple. To find all FreeBSD specific information, I can simply run the recsel -q freebsd ~/refs.rec and I will find all my Freebsd related references. I made an alias of it so I just have to type refs freebsd.

- Marc