jmtd → Jonathan Dowland's Weblog
Below are the five most recent posts in my weblog.
- Lanzarote, posted on
- FOSDEM 2026 talk recording available, posted on
- FOSDEM 2026, posted on
- Honest Jon's lightly-used Starships, posted on
- Ye Gods, posted on
You can also see a reverse-chronological list of all posts, dating back to 1999.
I want to get back into the habit of blogging, but I've struggled. I've had several ideas of topics to try and write about, but I've not managed to put aside the time to do it. I thought I'd try and bash out a one-take, stream-of-conciousness-style post now, to get back into the swing.
I'm writing from the lounge of my hotel room in Lanzarote, where my family have gone for the School break. The weather at home has been pretty awful this year, and this week is traditionally quite miserable at the best of times. It's been dry with highs of around 25℃ .
It's been an unusual holiday in one respect: one of my kids is struggling with Autistic Burnout. We were really unsure whether taking her was a good idea: and certainly towards the beginning of the holiday felt we may have made a mistake. Writing now, at the end, I'm not so sure. But we're very unlikely to have anything resembling a traditional summer holiday for the foreseeable.
Managing Autistic Burnout and the UK ways the UK healthcare and education systems manage it (or fail to) has been a huge part of my recent life. Perhaps I should write more about that. This coming week the government are likely to publish plans for reforming Special Needs support in Education. Like many other parents, we wait in hope and fear to see what they plan.
In anticipation of spending a lot of time in the hotel room with my preoccupied daughter I (unusually) packed a laptop and set myself a nerd-task: writing a Pandoc parser ("reader") for the MoinMoin Wiki markup language. There's some unfinished prior art from around 2011 by Simon Michael (of hledger) to work from.
The motivation was our plan to migrate the Debian Wiki away from MoinMoin. We've since decided to approach that differently but I might finish the Reader anyway, it's been an interesting project (and a nice excuse to write Haskell) and it will be useful for others.
Unusually (for me) I've not been reading fiction on this trip: I took with me Human Compatible by Prof Stuart Russell: discussing how to solve the problem of controlling a future Artificial Intelligence. I've largely avoided the LLM hype cycle we're suffering through at the moment, and I have several big concerns about it (moral, legal, etc.), and felt it was time to try and make my concerns more well-formed and test them. This book has been a big help in doing so, although it doesn't touch on the issue of copyright, which is something I am particularly interested in at the moment.
FOSDEM 2026 was great! I hope to blog a proper postmortem in due course. But for now, The video of my talk is up, as are my slides with speaker notes and links.
I'm going to FOSDEM 2026!
I'm presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it's scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I'm the warm-up act!
The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), but sadly there's no Java devroom this year. There's a story about that, but it's not mine to tell.
Please recommend to me any interesting talks! Here's a few that caught my eye:
Debian/related:
- Package managers à la carte: A Formal Model of Dependency Resolution
- 32 years of Debian: how a do-ocracy keeps evolving
- Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source?
Containers:
Research:
- Data science from the command line: a look back at 2 years of using xan
- Research software engineering: a movement and its instantiation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Other:
No man’s Sky (or as it’s known in our house, "spaceship game") is a space exploration/sandbox game that was originally released 10 years ago. Back then I tried it on my brother‘s PS4 but I couldn’t get into it. In 2022 it launched for the Nintendo Switch1 and the game finally clicked for me.
I play it very casually. I mostly don’t play at all, except sometimes when there are time-limited “expeditions” running, which I find refreshing, and usually have some exclusives as a reward for play.
One of the many things you can do in the game is collect star ships. I started keeping a list of notable ones I’ve found, and I’ve decided to occasionally blog about them.
The Horizon Vector NX is a small sporty ship that players on Nintendo Switch could claim within the first month or so after it launched. The colour scheme resembles the original “neon” switch controllers. Although the ship type occurs naturally in the game in other configurations, I think differently-painted wings are unique to this ship.
For most of the last 4 years, my copy of this ship was confined to the Switch, until November 2024, when they added cross-save capability to the game. I was then able to access the ship when playing on Linux (or Mac).
- The game runs very well natively on Mac, flawlessly on Steam for Linux, but struggles on the origins switch. It’s a marvel it runs there at all.↩
Via (I think) @mcc on the Fediverse, I learned of GetMusic: a sort-of "clearing house" for Free Bandcamp codes. I think the way it works is, some artists release a limited set of download codes for their albums in order to promote them, and GetMusic help them to keep track of that, and helps listeners to discover them.
GetMusic mail me occasionally, and once they highlighted an album The Arcane & Paranormal Earth which they described as "Post-Industrial in the vein of Coil and Nurse With Wound with shades of Aphex Twin, Autechre and assorted film music."
Well that description hooked me immediately but I missed out on the code. However, I sampled the album on Bandcamp directly a few times as well as a few of his others (Ye Gods is a side-project of Antoni Maiovvi, which itself is a pen-name) and liked them very much. I picked up the full collection of Ye Gods albums in one go for 30% off.
Here's a stand-out track:
So I guess this service works! Although I didn't actually get a free code in this instance, it promoted the artist, introduced me to something I really liked and drove a sale.
Older posts are available on the all posts page.