nsnotifyd-2.1 released

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest has a newly revamped web site, and the Judges have announced the 28th contest, to coincide with its 40th anniversary. (Or 41st?) The Judges have also updated the archive of past winners so that as many of them as possible work on modern systems. Accordingly, I took a look at my 1998 winner to see how...

D’oh, I lost track of a bug report that should have been fixed in nsnotifyd-2.2. Thus, hot on the heels of [the previous release][prev], here’s nsnotifyd-2.3. Sorry for causing extra work to my uncountably many users! The nsnotifyd daemon monitors a set of DNS zones and runs a command when any of them change. It listens for DNS NOTIFY messages so...

I have made a new release of nsnotifyd, a tiny DNS server that just listens for NOTIFY messages and runs a script when one of your zones changes. This nsnotifyd-2.2 release includes a new feature: nsnotify can now send NOTIFY messages from a specific source address Thanks to Adam Augustine for the suggestion. I like receiving messages that say...

Recently the Spritely Institute published an introduction to Petnames, A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming. I have long been a fan of petnames, and graph naming systems in general. I first learned about them in the context of Mark Miller’s E programming language which was a distributed object capability system on the JVM. I gather...

The other day I learned about the Rust crate lexopt which describes itself as, A pathologically simple command line argument parser. Most argument parsers are declarative: you tell them what to parse, and they do it. This one provides you with a stream of options and values and lets you figure out the rest. For “pathologically simple” I still...