Confession time: once I *almost* added a terminal version of Tetris as an Easter egg in htop.

I managed to implement a real crude but working version of it code golfing to make it as short as possible and got it pretty tiny, then added it to the help screen so it would activate by typing h, t, o, p (since h would take you to the help screen and the other keys would be nops in that screen).

Then there’s the question of how to hide an Easter egg in a FOSS codebase… The best I could think of was to make it into a long one-liner starting at column 200 so that most people looking at the code without word-wrapping editors would miss it. But after everything was coded, I decided that trying to “sneak code in”, even in my own codebase, was a bad practice and the good intention of innocent fun wasn’t worth it.

My fascination with Tetris goes way back. I first implemented it when I was in high school, and it getting it done really gave me pause: that was a real program, something that people paid real money for in Nintendo cartridges. It was the first time I thought I could really call myself a programmer for real. At the same time, it was my first contact with the ethics of software. I had never heard of FOSS then, and yet I asked myself: “what if my friends ask for the source code? what should I do?”

Years later, when we did the first CD version for our GoboLinux distro, I took an existing ncurses version of Tetris and hacked it into our installer, adding a progress bar that showed the status of files copying from CD to disk, while the user played the game (distro installers took forever back then!). Everyone loved it–except for the fact that it was supposed to auto-quit when the installation was finished but we changed the list of packages last minute so it got the count wrong.

A lot of people just kept playing for a long time without realizing the installation was done! (But it wasn’t too bad, they could just press Esc or something to quit and finish the install.)

Our early Gobo releases were full of little fun tweaks like that. In one release we included an emulator and legend has it that some hidden folder contains a ROM (not Tetris!), but not even I remember where that is, and that ISO probably isn’t even online anymore. (We really should have preserved our old stuff better!)

The memory of the Tetris installer in Gobo having a last-minute bug was another thing that dispelled me from the idea of the Tetris Easter egg in htop: while having bugs is just normal, I couldn’t bear the thought of htop having some serious bug caused by code added for silly reasons…

htop has its fair share of “unnecessary code”, such as the “big-digit LCD” meter and the themes, which are more artsy than utilitarian and I stand by them. If anything, I think software in general should be more artsy.

But “hidden Tetris in htop causes buffer overflow” would be terrible PR for the project (and my reputation by extension, I guess). That along with the bad taste in the mouth of the idea of hiding code in FOSS left made me drop the Easter egg idea.

I wish I still had that code, though! If only to keep it to myself as an autobiographical side-note.

Come to think of it, after writing all of this I realize I probably _should_ have included that code… as a comment!! Maybe that’s the way to do Easter eggs in FOSS? Add a fun/silly feature but leave it commented out, so that someone tinkering with the code finds it, enables it and has fun with it for a bit. I know that *I* would have enjoyed finding something like that in a codebase.

Oh well, maybe someday I’ll pull this off in some project.

DreamHost finally bugged me to upgrade FlatPress from my super-old version running PHP 7 to the latest one running PHP 8.1. Making a tiny blog post just to test it — hope this works!

You know how there are these little annoyances that are just mild enough so that you do nothing about it?

In the world of open source there’s always this notion of “if you want something to be different, the code is there, you can change it”, but most often this is not practical: I would never go about carrying a patched version of Git with me to every machine I work on just because of the annoying `a/` and `b/` prefixes that show up on Git diffs.

But those tiny prefixes always made me unable to select and paste a filename with a double-click and a middle-click on the terminal.

Today, after who knows how many years, I decided to make a search about it — “I can’t be the only one annoyed by this, right?” — and lo and behold: someone did ask about this on StackOverflow, and there is a global configuration to disable those prefixes:

git config --global diff.noprefix true

And just like that, this annoyance is gone!

Writing this review in English due to the international appeal of this book, even though it was printed in Portuguese.

This book collects a series of interviews of French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari conducted by Japanese artist and researcher Tetsuo Kogawa.

“Tetsuo is a really very influential figure in underground radio art and media-art theory, with over 30 years of collaboration and connection with some of the most influential artists and thinkers of that period, worldwide (He’s published over 30 books, had a series of interviews with Felix Guttari, has known and collaborated with pioneers of experimental music in Japan from the 50’s on (big guns like Yasanao Tone and Takehisa Kosugi and so on…)).

He’s perhaps best known internationally as the founding father of the micro-fm boom in Japan in the 80’s. Inspired by the Marxist ‘Autonomia’ movement and their pirate radio stations in 1970’s Italy, Kogawa set up Radio Home Run as a resistance to the commodification of subculture; theorising, practically enabeling and kick starting a Japanese boom which saw thousands of tiny radio stations set up and run, by and for communities across the country. They became a space for polymorphous chaos, a kind of chaos found through difference and ‘order through fluctuations’.”

– Arika on Tetsuo Kogawa

This book collects those interviews and add texts by Guattari, Kogawa, and the Brazilian organizers, who were in direct contact with Kogawa while working on this collection.

I found the discussion of the various movements of free/pirate radio in the late 70s and early 80s especially interesting: Autonomia in Italy, free radio in France and mini-FMs in Japan. The parallels with the rise of the free software movements were apparent to me, and in fact, the timelines match (the GNU Manifesto dates from 1983) and in more recent writings Kogawa and the organizers do allude to free software. It was a stark realization to me to finally notice how the lore of the free software movement was (and to the extent that it still exists, still is) propagated entirely in a vacuum, without any real context of the surrounding free culture movements of the time. Seeing Guattari and Kogawa discuss the free radio movements, and their similarities and differences in each country, it is clear to me now how the free software movement was a product of its time — both its genesis in the US in the early 80s and its later boom in Latin America in the early 2000s, with the main event, FISL, happening in Porto Alegre, the same city that hosted the first editions of the World Social Forum featuring the likes of Noam Chomsky, Lula and José Saramago.

Another interesting observation comes from Guattari discussing how the free radio movement in France was a way for the various regions (and their languages!) to break away from “parisian imperialism” — having lived in different parts of Brazil, I have personally observed these phenomena of domestic cultural imperialism for a long time, and how they present themselves, by design, as being mostly invisible.

Kogawa’s more recent discussion of “social autism” relating to media is also insightful: he discussed the collective catharsis of the mini-FM movement as a therapeutic way to break away from the social autism of mass media by scaling it down, and how the ultra downscaling to the individual scale of personal smartphones has led to another kind of social autism, more lethargic and legitimized on a global scale.

Finally, it was impressive to see Guattari discuss back in 1980 how micropolitics — in the form of what we today understand as identity politics, for example — had the potential to produce large-scale political change. Time and again I marvel at how philosophers look at the world with a clarity that makes it seem like they’re reading the future decades in advance. I got the same feeling from reading Bauman.

The Linux program with most contrived argument handling logic ever has got to be gcc.

Everything in it has a reason, of course, but the end result is that you get a weird mix where the order matters for some args and not for others PLUS there are imperative arguments:

Say you want to link a static library into your program (I’m going to use […] to skip other flags)

gcc -o myprogram [...] myprogram.c libmylibrary.a [...]

This works, but now you want to add plugins to your program. So you add some runtime dynamic linking logic and add -ldl.

Oops, you realize your plugins can’t find some symbols from the static library, only those already used by the main program. The compiler threw away everything from libmylibrary.a that was “unused”.

-Wl,–whole-archive to the rescue!

Wait, what’s that? Two flags joined by a comma?

Turns out gcc is a main driver command which launches other programs, and passes arguments along to them. -Wl,–something means that it will pass the flag –something to the linker. You can add after -Wl, anything that is understood by ld, the GNU Linker.)

But you have other libraries you’re linking as well, and now you start getting duplicated symbol errors when compiling, because it is linking too much stuff! The solution? Wait for it…

gcc [...stuff...] -Wl,--whole-archive libfoo.a -Wl,--no-whole-archive [...other libs...]

The arguments in gcc when dealing with linker options are not only positional, they are imperative!

And I mean that in a quite literal sense. They interpreted like a sequence with side-effects: you set a flag, the next libraries is affected by it, you unset the flag, the following libraries aren’t affected anymore.

I thought find was a strong contender for Unix command with the weirdest argument handling, but I guess gcc takes the cake. 🍰