Programming

Intro 🚌 D-Bus is a message bus system and standard for inter-process communication, mostly used in Linux desktop applications. Both Qt and GLib have high-level abstractions for D-Bus communication, and many of the desktop services we rely on export D-Bus protocols. Also the omnipresent systemd can be only interfaced via D-Bus API. However, D-Bus has its shortcomings — namely a lack of documentation. In this article we’ll explore how to write our own D-Bus Service in Rust and connect it to our D-Bus client. ...

Intro Unit testing of Bash functions involves the process of systematically verifying the correctness and reliability of individual functions within a Bash script. While Bash is primarily used for scripting and automation, it’s important to ensure that the functions within your scripts work as expected, especially as scripts become more complex. Unit testing in Bash can help catch bugs and prevent unexpected behavior. Fixing bugs Working on a bugfix for an internal shell script, I wanted to add some unit tests to ensure correctness. After a quick search, I found this single-file “framework” (thanks, Ryan) that provides xUnit-style assertions. So we can use it as a starting point. ...

The problem When we write our programs or libraries, usually we ship to the end user a packaged binary. If a user wants to report a bug or ask for a feature, one of the most important information to have is “which version of the software are you using ?” Since as any good programmer you likely use a source code control system, you should not rely only on the numeric version, but it’s practical to include also the git commit hash of the software you are actually shipping. ...

Nostalgia time! Today I decided to play with Raylib and the Crystal Programming Language. Technically speaking, the “plasma” effect is just a two variables noise function. Some used Perlin Noise, others the Diamond-square algorithm. A more interesting pattern can be obtained with trigonometrical functions, as explained here. The interesting part here is the easyness of graphics programming in a Linux environment with a high level, yet performant and statically typed programming language. The code is straightforward and a simple port of the original ‘C’ source, I got surprised how the Crystal Language is easy to use and produces a quite fast native binary. If you want to check it out, you can find on my github account; in the meantime enjoy the mandatory video/screenshot :) ...