The Mother Software
Not the Earth
I am writing this on earth day, but this isn’t about the earth. On way to work I was riding the bus. And as usual, I was catching up on my reading as I was glued to the phone. During a stop, as many of you
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The Cloud's Shadow on Grass Computing
Fortunately for all of us, in 15 years since the dot-com bubble collapse, there has been an increased effort from Free Software and other developers to create decentralized systems. Bittorrent, Tox, ZeroTier One, TeleHash, Media Goblin, Sandstorm, GNUNet, and countless others. This includes my own Fire★ project which I have
My Software is Infinitely Better than Skype
I wrote a little peer-to-peer application platform called Fire★. You can write graphical P2P applications using Lua.
Fire★ will keep track of your contacts and manage the hard parts of p2p programming like UDP hole punching and keeping connections going. There is also a built in application editor where you
The Master and the Slave, the Open and the Free
The Open Source movement has been at war with the Free Software movement for over 14 years and at the heart of this fight are their conceptions of freedom. I want to argue here that the Open Source movement’s idea of freedom is drenched in historical violence which bleeds
Using Entypo Pictographs as Icons in Your Qt Application
I wanted to replace buttons with fancier icons for Fire★ but…
1. I Wanted to use vector graphics instead of bitmaps.
2. Didn’t want to complicate my installation by using many resource files.
I came across a font that had pictographs that look really nice called Entypo. It is
Simplest Possible P2P Voice Chat Using Fire★
Fire★ is a platform for making writing peer-to-peer applications as simple as possible. I am going to show here how to write the simplest, most dumb and basic voice chat app using Fire★. I have recently added the ability to grab sound from the microphone and play sound through the
C++ and Climate Change
The project I work on is a C++ project that is computationally massive. We are processing many, many petabytes of data that run hot at 100 percent CPU load. The machines we use have dozens of cores and we have hundreds of them. Early in the project an architect came
P2P File Sharing with Fire★
I have been expanding the functionality of Fire★ based on use cases. The first was creating the building blocks for a chat App, the next was the basics for a distributed drawing App. I thought the next obvious use case was a file transfer app.
Demo
Primitives
At a minimum
Big Data and the Soviet Ghosts
In a 2009 CNBC, Maria Bartiromo asked Google’s Eric Schmidt if people should treat Google like their best friend. His reply reflects the ethos of the modern software world. He said that you shouldn’t do anything that you wouldn’t want to get on the internet. In other
The Inverse Web
I would like to propose a thought experiment about what the inverse of the Web would look like.
The Web conjures the idea that we are all interconnected. But somewhere at the end of the nineties the spiders grew bigger. In reality, all the services we use in day to