Time

No, not that Pink Floyd song off Dark Side (although that's a great song). I'm planning to smack down some Unix and computer time knowledge in today's post. Let's keep it on the practical side of things and we'll try not to stray too far into the metaphysical. ...

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Rust criticism from a Rustacean

I've been using Rust for a little over three years now and I absolutely love it. Rust makes good on a lot of it's promises. Rust makes highly reliable software, makes concurrency and parrallel code much easier to reason about, and will make you a better programmer even on those occasions that you write some code in another language. I could continue heaping praise. But that's not the point of this post. No, this post is about taking an honest look at what I think are a few of Rust's shortcomings....

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Rust Build Systems

There was a recent post that was linked to in This Week in Rust that delves into some experiments with building Rust code via Meson rather than Cargo. Meson is, for those who don't know, the officially blessed build system for Gnome which is written and configured in Python. ...

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Jah Rule

Security is a multi-faceted subject in computing, and even amongst those who use Unix in one form or another there are disagreements about how best to handle various aspects of system administration. In today's blog post I'm going to be talking about the subject of controlled priviledge escalation, and in particular the presence of suid binaries on your system....

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Leveraging Rust's Trait Objects for reduced boilerplate

Making a multi-call binary is a neat way of sharing code between a number of small programs. Perhaps the most famous example is Busybox but there are others such as Dropbear (an ssh client and server) or BeastieBox. I once even wrote a multi-call shell script, which sourced a different file full of functions depending on the name it was called as. Today's project is inspired heavily by BusyBox but is written in Rust and has a somewhat more limited scope....

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