Show Notes
FLOSS-860 Jonathan: Hey folks. This week Randall joins me. We talk with Jose Valli about Elixir. In fact, we get its origin story. What was the problem we were originally trying to solve, and why is Elixir so interesting for today's problems, whether it be concurrency, the web, or even ai, you don't wanna miss it. So stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly episode 860, recorded Tuesday, January the 13th. Elixir Origin Store. Hey folks, it is Time for a Floss Weekly. That's the show about Free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we are talking about Elixir and Ang and probably a lot of other things going on in that community. We haven't talked to him for a few, a couple of months, I think. And so it was, uh. It was time to bring him back. And really what happened is a listener pinged to me and said, Hey, this guy, you need to have this guy on. Alright, we will have that guy on. Uh, that guy is Jose Valine working on to bring on here in just a moment. But before we do that, we have a co-host. What was the thing we always used to say? A, a beautiful and talented co-host. Is that the way it went, Randall? Randal: I can't remember, but it's something I think, yeah, something about Beautiful. I remember that was sort of snuck in there as I introduced the very co that was part, part of spiel. Jonathan: 'cause I remember every time you would introduce me and I was co-hosting, I just sort of had a pause. It's like, I don't know how I feel about this, but it's good to be here. Welcome back, Randall. Randal: Hey, thanks for having me back. Jonathan: Yeah. Uh, we were, we were comparing notes before the show got started about, uh, well, a lot of different things. But what's, uh, is, is there anything new in your world that you wanna sort of, uh. Give a, a brief update on, we'll let you plug stuff at the very end, but what, what have you been up to recently? Randal: Uh, just basically, uh, taking care of, uh, dart and flutter things because that's sort of my primary bent at the, these days. I've been doing, I've been a flutter Google developer expert, uh, one of 10 in the US uh, for about, uh, six years now, six and a half years. And so that means I get to spend a lot of time online answering questions for people and doing virtual presentations at Google developer groups all over the world. Um, but that's mostly what I've been doing that and answering questions. I've, I've also been playing. With AI tools in particular, uh, anti-gravity and, uh, having a lot of fun working with that, uh, to develop software and, uh, update software and to review other people's software. Anti-Gravity has been, uh, fascinating. Uh, the approach there. And yeah, I can't believe it's free still. So that's the best part is free. Yeah, free Free is good. Free is free is good. Jonathan: I have, I've recently dipped my toes into those waters and, uh, just getting a, an LLM into VS code and letting it, you know, look at some things and I have been amazed back and it goes back and forth. I will either be amazed by how good it is and it predicts the thing that I want to do, and it gives me good code suggestions or it's terrible and has absolutely no idea what's going on. It seems like it, it can only do those two extreme opposites. Randal: Yeah, I long ago turned off autocomplete. I don't use it for autocomplete anymore. I basically use it as a, uh, command driven, right. Uh, code updater. So I'm basically giving instructions as a prompt and letting it change my code genically based on that. And that seems to be a lot more effective for me than auto complete. Right. Right. So I have, so I haven't actually, it's been weird because I, in the last six months, the amount of time I've spent actually coding, I think is completely different. Mm-hmm. I don't, I, I don't find myself codings as much as instructing agents to code for me. Yeah. Uh, using good software engineering practices like create a PRD first and then create
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2026-09-15 Jonathan: [00:00:00] time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open-source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're talking about, well, open-source, of course. We're talking open-source automation and some experts in that field. I've got Jan Altenberg with me, and he is, I discovered during the pre-show, a German engineer working on, well, a lot of different things, all the way from the pre-empt real-time kernels to being around computers since the 1980s. He started with a Commodore VC-20, the ever-present VIC-20, one of, I don't, I think the Commodore 64 actually holds the record, but the VIC-20 has to be one of the most popular computers ever sold. But yeah, we're talking open-source, we're talking automation, and let's bring the man himself on. Jan, welcome to the show. Jan: Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Great. Looking forward to talk about open source [00:01:00] today. As you mentioned, I've been working with computers for quite some years. Actually, I have to admit that I was not working with Commodore. This was my colleague I'm working with at OSADEL. But actually, for me, it's even more than, I would say, I've spent 35 years with computers. The drawback was that my first computer was running proprietary software, which was pretty sad, but I think I'm with open source since 30 years now. Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, that's a long time. Yeah, I see now that it was Alex, your colleague, that started with the Commodore VIC-20, but still, you've been around, you've been doing this for a while. We were talking before the show about how this interview came together, and I'm pretty sure that it's from where I was at Embedded World earlier in the year. And I took one of the days, and I went to the software wing, because they have like five different halls at Embedded World, because it's a huge show. And I went to the software wing, and I just walked around, and I looked for anything [00:02:00] that had "open source" in the title or that I knew was an open source project. I'm like, "Here's my business card. You should come be on the podcast." And so we finally made this one work, talking about the Open Source Automation Developer Lab. Now, what is open source automation in this context? Are we going to be a very AI-heavy episode again today? Is that the sort of automation that we're talking about? Jan: Oh, well. So, AI is everywhere these days, but maybe it's a bit different for us. So, what is the Open Source Automation Development Lab? As the name says, we do a lot of with open source and automation. So, we are around since a bit more than 20 years, actually. What is interesting for you to know is, I mean, as you mentioned at Embedded World, there's many different companies, right, doing software, doing open source. So, we actually, we do not have the legal form of a company, actually. [00:03:00] So, we are a registered German cooperative. Jonathan: Okay. Jan: So, that works a bit different. So, it's actually that we are owned by our members, So, we do not have a single owner, and we don't really primarily operate profit-oriented, so the thing what people do is, with a cooperative, they gather in a place and put some budget together to do something useful in common interest, right? So, in Central Europe, this is pretty common, for example, for small wine producers, so you might have everything to do the wine, but you do not, cannot maintain as a small company all the infrastructure to sell the wine and do all the production and the bottling and that stuff, and that's why wine producers gather in a cooperative, so they could finance that infrastructure together. And what happens at OSADL is that our members do the very same for open source in industrial products. So, our members [00:04:00] have the interest of using open source in industrial products, mainly in automation, but in other products as well, right? And the reason why we were founded roughly 20 years ago was
This week Jonathan chats with Jan Altenberg of the Open Source Automation Development Lab, a cooperative of nerds that care about Linux and Open Source! Jan and OSADL helped push Real Time Linux across the finish line, are looking at safety critical hardening, and general cooperating to make Open Source and Industry work better together. You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
FLOSS-881 Jonathan: [00:00:00] It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open-source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're updating. In fact, this is a topic that was not on my radar, but one of our listeners, thank you to everyone out there, said, "Hey, you guys really need to talk about Update CLI." And I said, "I don't know what that is, but we'll send the email." And so we emailed Olivier Vernon, who is our guest for today, and we said, "Hey, we would love to talk to you about this." And he said, "Sure." And so we've got him on the show. Olivier is the guy behind Update CLI, and unfortunately, I just got logged out of my email address that has his bio. Let's see if I can get back into that. We're doing it live, as they say. But let's go ahead and bring him on, and then I'll get back to the bio. Olivier, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Olivier: Thanks for having me on the show here. Yeah, I was really [00:01:00] glad to hear that you would contact me. So, I've been following what you did here for a few years, so that's really nice to hear. For the BIOS, quickly to talk about me, so I'm working, so I've been working on open source software for the past 10 years, both professionally and on the side as well. Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Olivier: I've been contributing to open source conferences and so on, so the biggest one is probably the FOSDEM for those people who know what FOSDEM is about. And so, the reason why I'm Jonathan: Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. Olivier: here today is because I was interested to talk about that side project that I've been maintaining for five years, which is all about updating your Git repositories, and so, yeah, that's why I'm here. I don't know if, yeah, the project is named Update CLI, so for people who are not familiar with this, it's kind of interesting because there is no, like, similar project, but it's a CLI. I mean, you can guess based on the name. That allows you to automatically update your Git repositories based on [00:02:00] manifest that tells you how to update those Git repositories. So the purpose is really to help you on the maintenance of your projects, and so you stop monitoring third information coming from the web. You just define, okay, you have a Git repository. What would be the latest information, URL, version, whatever? So, people usually, when they think about Update.cli, think about Renovate or Dependabot, which is kind of the closest, I would say, project for what it does, and otherwise, it's just bash scripts, Python scripts, and so on, so it's kind of a seed between the two worlds. Jonathan: It's amazing to me to see, like, how much of the world is run by nothing more than a pile of Bash scripts. Olivier: Yeah, exactly. And it's like, yeah, Bash is really awesome, until you reach some limitation. Jonathan: Oh yeah, absolutely. there are elements of it that drive me crazy um and in fact there is a uh several years ago we interviewed another project called amber that they were like [00:03:00] we love bash except for this set of things that's terrible about it so we made our own scripting language that compiles down to bash code it's like well that's cool um okay so what's what is this what does this problem look like like at what point does someone reach for update cli what where in like an open source project or just you know your your homebrew whatever it is you're doing what what does the problem look like Olivier: So, the problem was, back then, like five years ago, when I started working on a project, I was working at the time on the Jenkins project. We had a lot of Git repositories, Java libraries, and so on, and one of the projects which is still running today is the infrastructure where we run the Jenkins, where we test Jenkins, and so on, and so all that infrastructure is managed by infrastructure as code, like Puppet, Kubernetes, and so on, and one of the Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Olivier: problems I was facing back t
This week Jonathan chats with Olivier Vernin of Updatecli, the tool that helps you update everything! Need to roll out dependency updates intelligently? Or even automatically deploy to a server on changes? Updatecli can help! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
FLOSS-880 Jonathan: [00:00:00] Hey, folks. This week I talk with Benjamin Samuels of Trail of Bits and we're talking about Patch the Planet. That's the Trail of Bits initiative to help open source projects deal with the absolute tidal wave we're all seeing of pull requests, bug reports, and vulnerability disclosures. This is Floss Weekly, episode 880, recorded Tuesday, September the 1st. The two wolves It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're talking about something really cool. We've got Benjamin Samuels of Trail of Bits, and he does their boring blockchain thing that we may cover a little bit. But the other thing he's involved in is Patch the Planet, which is all about helping open source projects with security problems. And reading the notes ahead of time, I happen to know that, take a drink, we're gonna talk about AI. But not necessarily the [00:01:00] everybody should using it, but this is causing a problem for some open source projects. Like, how do we deal with that? We'll get into all of that. Let's go ahead and bring him on. Benjamin, hey. I'm super glad that you're here. Welcome to the show. Benjamin: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Jonathan: Yeah. So tell me... Let's see. Where do we start? You've got a background in electronics. You were telling me before the show started that was your college major. And you found Hackaday way back in the day- Yeah ... looking for I think like a lot of us did, looking for information about what's practical for me to try to tackle in the electronics world? Benjamin: Yeah. Back in the day, back in college, poor college kid it's really hard to figure out, what kind of electronics projects can you actually do on your own that you don't need a whole lot of equipment for? And it was way back before Arduino like you a- if you wanted a microcontroller, you had to buy a pick, and you had to buy a programmer, and just getting into stuff could be like, $500 to $1,000. And the real struggle was, like, looking for projects that, [00:02:00] I could actually tackle. 'Cause, you're learning electronics, you wanna actually do it. But it was a really high barrier for entry, and Hackaday was a s- a source of some of my earliest projects, just trying to reproduce what other people had built. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. I remember I've told them this story ahead, before the show started, w- when I was first trying to run some ethernet and trying to figure out how to terminate ethernet. I think I learned that from Hackaday, and that may have been one of my first exposures to this world that we now all live in. Jonathan: But one of the other really interesting things I did very early was toner transfer method for making PCBs- Yeah ... and that was surprisingly easy for a, I think, t- maybe teenager, either teenager or college student, myself at the time, to get into. It's like, 'cause you could get a magazine and print onto the magazine. S- if you had the right kind of printer that did waterproof toner, and then you could take, and you flip it upside down, and you put it on your PCB board, and you take an iron and iron it, and the toner would transfer. And you could caref- I think you had to use water because you wanted that, you wanted the paper itself to disintegrate and leave the toner [00:03:00] behind. And then you could dump that into a bath of what was it? Hydrochloric and muriatic acid, the mix? Something like that. Yeah. And it would etch the copper, but leave where the toner was. And so that was... I, man, I remember that. I have... I still somewhere around here, I have a device that I built that way. It was a- ... headphone preamp. My, my first foray into playing with tubes as well. Sup- super cool times, man. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. Thank you. Thank you, Hackaday. Benjamin: Thank you, Hackaday. Yes. Jonathan: So you kinda went from the hardware to the softwar