The Advisory Boar

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

Moving to modern Neovim

; updated

I spent an uncharacteristic weekend playing with the latest Neovim features, and found it unexpectedly rewarding.

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Convos rocks!

Convos is a persistent IRC client that you can use from any browser. After twenty-odd years of running ircII, I've become a happy user of Convos for the past few years.

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Sourcetrail needs support

Sourcetrail is an open source visualisation tool that helps to understand complex code bases.

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Who invented the slicing-by-N CRC32 algorithm?

While searching for a paper by Berry and Kounavis describing their novel technique to calculate CRC32 checksums, I found a strange paper which heavily implies that its authors, from the TKM Institute of Technology in Kerala, invented this algorithm (which they certainly did not).

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heaping ICMP echo requests on unsuspecting hosts

A small program that can continually ping tens of thousands of hosts.

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Introducing Snippets

Snippets is a Jabber bot that periodically asks subscribers what they're doing, and shares the answers through a simple web interface to help development teams communicate better.

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Source code comments vs. unit tests

I've read many opinions about comments, from "comments are good, they help you understand code" to "comments are bad, they become obsolete and mislead you" and everything in between.

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Life with cpanminus is different

cpanm makes it so much easier to deal with CPAN module dependencies.

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Mirroring GMail mailboxes with IMAP

An IMAP downloader that handles various gmail-specific quirks.

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Introducing Loathsxome: minimalist weblog software

By the time I managed to set up Blosxom and some plugins to my liking, I ended up with a complete rewrite that I named Loathsxome.

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