pleroma.debian.social

pleroma.debian.social

Jonathan Dowland | @jmtd@pleroma.debian.social

Principal Software Engineer on #OpenJDK #IBM. #Debian developer. PhD in Computing Science. Amateur historian (Computing Science and H/W, esp. Commodore Amiga). Guerilla archivist.

@slightlyoff and page numbers! (My pet peeve)

I learned that the artist behind the artwork for the game Elite was none other than Philip Castle, the designer of the posters for A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, among others.

He passed away on February 20, 2026, at the age of 83 🙏

The original artwork for the game Elite (1984) by Philip Castle.

Oh, today I fixed a mail bug on a host within an IPV4 only network. And the problem was IPV6.

It's been a weird day. I feel kinda unfulfilled. I've actually had some good progress on work stuff, and some side-projects, but I've failed to progress fixing my 3D printer, and that's vexing me I think

The recent RoboCop game is now macOS native

A Gradle play in two acts.

Act 1:

WARNING: The property android.dependency.excludeLibraryComponentsFromConstraints improves project import performance for very large projects. It should be enabled to improve performance.

Act 2:

WARNING: The option setting 'android.dependency.excludeLibraryComponentsFromConstraints=true' is deprecated.

When someone asks me what the , or is I'll use this illustration from UNIX Review, April 1985.

Illustration showing multiple beige desktop computers floating among clouds in an open sky, connected to each other by thin golden lines forming a network, with one large computer in the foreground emitting a burst of colorful rainbow light rays from its screen.

@metacosm I get it yeah! I deliberately avoided seventeen (and “destroy”) because I figured it’s likely people will have had exposure to them already. Apparently seventeen went viral on TikTok recently

@metacosm I picked five very different ones :)

New blog post: Ladytron
https://jmtd.net/log/ladytron/
I write about seeing Ladytron live in Newcastle last night and provide a 5-track playlist of their songs to sample.
#music

@vadim doesn’t have to be album tracks. I don’t think I know that cover, thanks, will listen!

And at least one Daniel singing song. New album good for that

The set has to have at least one mira song. Would “he took her to a movie” count? I’d include it for other reasons

Thinking: don’t over represent witching hour. Actually I think I’ve picked one track from velocifero that would “cover” witching hour

I’m going to try and do a five track playlist of ladytron for a friend. How the heck do I distill them to 5?

Ladytron were *awesome*

A full 18 years since they last played Newcastle, and the same venue (Digital night club)

that Nazi punk toot landed in my timeline right between people arguing about the age verification stuff in free software

Nazi punks fuck off

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, March 21, 2026

Fight racism, fascism and anti-Semitism every day, always, without compromise

Today, thanks to a former PhD student, I learned that LLMs are terrible at generating Whitespace code: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09678

Also today, I was invited (and I am accepting) to join a group on redesigning our undergraduate curriculum, which includes discussions on our choice of first programming language.

I am not saying that these things are related. I just happen to be mentioning them both at once because I saw them both today. You get a lot of characters in one toot after all.

What?

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