Automated updates: 2024-04-08

2024-04-07-grab-bag.md

@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ spell: XZ Maloney Revoy Nigh-ish frowny transubstantiate Yuga cosmism
 proofed: true
 ---
 
-This post will probably come out a bit disjointed, because this week had a few events that I wanted to talk about, at least a bit, and I wanted to get posts out while it still made sense for me to mention them.  Since "while they made sense" happens to coincide, I had the not-so-bright idea of juggling the topics in one post, which you have before you.  This presumably means that no topic will get the attention that it needs, but it felt like it made more sense during the week to do everything at once instead of dribbling out posts long after people have forgotten the motivation for bringing anything up.
+This post will probably come out a bit disjointed, because this week brought a few events that I wanted to talk about, at least a bit, and I wanted to get posts out while it still made sense for me to mention them.  Since "while they made sense" happens to coincide, I had the not-so-bright idea of juggling the topics in one post, which you have before you.  This presumably means that no topic will get the attention that it needs, but it felt like it made more sense during the week to do everything at once instead of dribbling out posts long after people have forgotten the motivation for bringing anything up.
 
 ![The characters Pepper and Carrot standing at an eight-way intersection of paths, trying to decide which way to go](/blog/assets/p-c-crossroads.png "Not only does it come from one of the items mentioned below, but the scene makes a great metaphor for the meandering post, here...")
 
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ Despite my relatively cheery view, here, we do still need to fix a core problem.
 
 Free Software lives on the backs of hobbyists, who never intended that their weekend hack or "no responsibility left behind" project would become constant unpaid labor for large and huge corporations.  Companies download code and build massive projects with it, and *maybe* the community can shame them into throwing a few thousand dollars as compensation.
 
-I don't love boiling everything down to money, but with companies relying on a supply of hobbyist labor to underpay or avoid paying, then everybody has better things to do than maintain software for them, such as earning enough money to keep roofs over their heads.  People still burn out and make huge mistakes when you pay them, as I suggest above in referring to how many companies validate their employees and handle security issues, but given a million-dollar annual budget instead of "beer money," many developers can leave their day-jobs to share the load on an important project.
+I don't love boiling everything down to money, but with companies relying on a supply of hobbyist labor to underpay or avoid paying, everybody has better things to do than maintain software for them, such as earning enough money to keep roofs over their heads.  People still burn out and make huge mistakes when you pay them, as I suggest above in referring to how many companies validate their employees and handle security issues, but given a million-dollar annual budget instead of "beer money," many developers can leave their day-jobs to share the load on an important project.
 
 And yes, some projects ask for donations.  But that doesn't really count, because they ask *us* for donations.  My five dollar donation to a project goes far further in making *me* feel good about myself than it goes to decreasing the stress and vulnerability felt by people working on the project.  I don't know how to fix that, as you can probably figure out.  If I did, I'd start with funding myself as an experiment, to the point where I can work on whatever projects catch my eye.
 
@@ -71,7 +71,7 @@ Without taxes, companies can capture regulators and exploit both workers and cus
 
 You can't operate donations to Free Software projects in the same way, because many projects cross national boundaries, making it difficult to figure out how to collect and distribute those funds.  But the intellectual model of "paying maintenance, so that the things that you need don't fall apart" makes a lot more sense than "if everybody who used this donated a dollar..." styles of framing.
 
-Although, on that topic, if anybody wants to [donate to get *my* projects to get them out faster](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jcolag), I wouldn't say no...
+Although, on that topic, if anybody wants to [donate to get *my* projects out faster](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jcolag), I wouldn't say no...
 
 ## Craig Maloney, RIP
 
@@ -81,7 +81,7 @@ Over the last couple of years, I have subscribed to [his blog](https://decafbad.
 
 If you check through his blog, you can see him realize and document his decline starting in early March, and updates become less frequent until stopping on the twenty-fifth, so his death probably didn't come as a huge surprise.  However, it hurts when *anybody* dies, and especially so with someone who built the kind of legacy that Maloney did, affecting so many people's lives for the better, both directly as evidenced by the many people on Mastodon expressing grief, and indirectly like myself.
 
-Anyway, I had the pleasure of reading Craig's [**The Mediocre Programmer**](https://themediocreprogrammer.com/), recently, and strongly recommend that you do, too, if you have any kind of white-collar career...at least the first few chapters.  It gets into the myth that only the best of the best do (or should do) our work, why we come up sort of our own expectations, and what we can do to manage that gap.  You've seen me talk about the same sorts of things on this blog, on occasion, and if I had known his work at the time, I surely would have quoted liberally from the book or directed readers there.
+Anyway, I had the pleasure of reading Craig's [**The Mediocre Programmer**](https://themediocreprogrammer.com/), recently, and strongly recommend that you do, too, if you have any kind of white-collar career...at least the first few chapters.  It gets into the myth that only the best of the best do (or should do) our work, why we come up short of our own expectations, and what we can do to manage that gap.  You've seen me talk about the same sorts of things on this blog, on occasion, and if I had known his work at the time, I surely would have quoted liberally from the book or directed readers there.
 
 You'll also find [Craig's games](https://decafbad.net/games/games-ive-written/), almost(?) all Free Culture, and I might try to slip in some of his work in an upcoming [Free Culture Book Club](/blog/tag/bookclub) post.
 
@@ -123,7 +123,7 @@ I don't know if I have anywhere to go with this, but the strange idea of fast-fo
 
 Well, like I said at the top:  Don't bet on this post coming together into a coherent whole.  Yes, many of the bits that I wanted to talk about relate to Free Software/Culture.  Yes, many of them relate to endings.  All of them relate to storytelling and who controls those stories.  But mostly, that sounds like after-the-fact justification, rather than anything resembling a plan, and I apologize for trying to cram four blog posts into one, here.  That said, I think this would have seemed stranger if I used four Sunday posts to talk about these items, especially when you start wondering why I'd waste time on earthquakes and eclipses in May...
 
-Plus, back when I went to college, we used to joke that you know that you had a good class coming up when the professor walked in, sat on the edge of the desk, and let out a sigh.  Once you set the stage like that, you knew that you'd get a wide-ranging discussion that only really incidentally touched on the intended topic, but would probably prove as educational about similar topics, overall.  Blogging needs far more of that energy. {% emoji winking face %}
+Plus, back when I went to college, we used to joke that you knew that you had a good class coming up when the professor walked in, sat on the edge of the desk, and let out a sigh.  Once you set the stage like that, you knew that you'd get a wide-ranging discussion that only really incidentally touched on the intended topic, but would probably prove as educational about similar topics, overall.  Blogging needs far more of that energy. {% emoji winking face %}
 
 * * *
 

2024-04-08-romani.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: Developer Diary, International Romani Day
+date: 2024-04-08 07:17:05-0400
+categories:
+tags: [programming, project, devjournal]
+summary: Progress on assorted projects
+thumbnail: /blog/assets/Flag-of-the-Romani-people.svg
+offset: -15%
+teaser: This week's projects include the blog and Webmention-detecting Earburn.
+spell: Romani Webmention Earburn Doma Webmentions jekyll-compose Notoboto AdiJapan Gheorghe Lăzăreanu-Lăzurică
+proofed: true
+---
+
+Today marks [International Romani Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Romani_Day), a day to celebrate Romani culture and raise awareness of the issues facing Romani people.  Given the evidence from language and DNA, the [Romani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people) seem to have originated in India, probably among the [Doma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_%28caste%29).  They appear to have left India around fifteen centuries ago, and managed to make it to the Balkans, and spread from there into Europe.
+
+You probably already know about their historical plight in Europe, from slavery in the east, blamed for Ottoman expansion in the west, forced to assimilate, and subject to genocide during World War II.  People still associate their subculture with crime, one of the reasons that you don't find me using the more common term for the group, with overt discrimination, forced sterilization, and ethnic cleansing occurring far more recently and in far more reputable countries than you probably want to think about.
+
+![The flag of the Romani people](/blog/assets/Flag-of-the-Romani-people.svg "I don't love the clashing colors, but the flower/wheel design actually impresses me")
+
+Anyway, on to the week's projects.
+
+## Entropy Arbitrage
+
+{% github jcolag/entropy-arbitrage-code %}
+
+Primarily, probably to nobody's surprise, I added styles for any inbound reply Webmentions.  Despite having an example reply to look at, the styles for them apparently never rolled out.  Along the way, I updated the `h-card`s, since I noticed that everything jammed up into the `a` link, even though a `span` wraps it.
+
+However, I also added the [`jekyll-compose` plugin](https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-compose) on the development side.  This gives me a consistent process for creating and managing draft posts, in particular.  For the last few years, I've created drafts through a combination of writing them in my notes and manually exporting them and creating them as posts and hoping that I finish the post before the artificial deadline that I dropped in the front-matter.
+
+Oh, and I updated a few more emoji names for clarity.  Most required my adding a multi-word name instead of one with underscores, such as thumbs-up {% emoji thumbs up %} and the like, but I also noticed that the star {% emoji pentacle %} and radio {% emoji boombox %} emoji don't have unique names at all, so I now refer to them in posts as "pentacle" and "boombox," for lack of a cleaner-and-unused term on either.
+
+## Earburn
+
+{% github jcolag/earburn %}
+
+You might remember that I mentioned the changes to my `h-card` representations, a couple of paragraphs back.  This came up because **Earburn** now shows the first `h-card` on the current webpage, when you click the icon, so I finally got a good look at how mine looks.
+
+I have not pushed these changes out to Mozilla, yet.
+
+## Next
+
+I don't know if I'll get to it, but I want to start at least looking into how to "upgrade" **Earburn** to the Manifest version 3 API, or however they try to phrase that.
+
+As mentioned last week, library updates and changes to **Notoboto** have also built up, and I'll need to start dribbling them out at some point.
+
+* * *
+
+**Credits**:  The header image is [Flag of the Romani people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Romani_people.svg) by [AdiJapan](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AdiJapan), based on the design (allegedly) by [Gheorghe A. Lăzăreanu-Lăzurică](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_A._L%C4%83z%C4%83reanu-L%C4%83zuric%C4%83), and released into the public domain.