ducktype

So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand...

If you, like me, resent every dollar spent on commercial PDF tools, you might want to know how to change the text content of a PDF without having to pay for Adobe Acrobat or another PDF tool. I didn't see an obvious open-source tool that lets you dig into PDF internals, but I did discover a few useful facts about how PDFs are structured that I think may prove useful to others (or myself) in the future. They are recorded here. They are surely not universally applicable --
the PDF standard is truly Byzantine -- but they worked for my case.

Learn Go in ~5mins

This is inspired by A half-hour to learn Rust and Zig in 30 minutes.

Basics

Your first Go program as a classical "Hello World" is pretty simple:

First we create a workspace for our project:

This project is a tiny compiler for a very simple language consisting of boolean expression.

The language has two constants: 1 for true and 0 for false, and 4 logic gates: ! (not), & (and), | (or), and ^ (xor).

It can also use parentheses to manage priorities.

Here is its grammar in BNF format:

expr ::= "0" | "1"

Because cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

I want Microsoft to do better, want Windows to be a decent development platform-and yet, I constantly see Microsoft playing the open source game: advertising how open-source and developer friendly they are - only to crush developers under the heel of the corporate behemoth's boot.

The people who work at Microsoft are amazing, kind, talented individuals. This is aimed at the company's leadership, who I feel has on many occassions crushed myself and other developers under. It's a plea for help.

The source of truth for the 'open source' C#, C++, Rust, and other Windows SDKs is proprietary

You probably haven't heard of it before, but if you've ever used win32 API bindings in C#, C++, Rust, or other languages, odds are they were generated from a repository called microsoft/win32metadata.

FAQ on the xz-utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094)

This is a living document. Everything in this document is made in good faith of being accurate, but like I just said; we don't yet know everything about what's going on.

Update: I've disabled comments as of 2025-01-26 to avoid everyone having notifications for something a year on if someone wants to suggest a correction. Folks are free to email to suggest corrections still, of course.

	package main

	import (
	"flag"
	"fmt"
	"log"
	"os"
	"os/signal"
	"syscall"
	)

	I was drawn to programming, science, technology and science fiction
	ever since I was a little kid. I can't say it's because I wanted to
	make the world a better place. Not really. I was simply drawn to it
	because I was drawn to it. Writing programs was fun. Figuring out how
	nature works was fascinating. Science fiction felt like a grand
	adventure.

	Then I started a software company and poured every ounce of energy
	into it. It failed. That hurt, but that part is ok. I made a lot of
	mistakes and learned from them. This experience made me much, much

	#!/bin/sh

	# non-interactive kde installer for alpine

	# apk add curl && curl -L https://cutt.ly/alpine_kde \| sh

	echo "I will make Alpine Linux a Desktop Linux.. ."

	## Desktop user

	local obs = obslua
	local ffi = require 'ffi'
	local obsffi
	if ffi.os == "OSX" then
	obsffi = ffi.load("obs.0.dylib")
	else
	obsffi = ffi.load("obs")
	end

	ffi.cdef[[

	<?php
	/**
	* Plugin Name: Block — Hi Test
	* Description: The shortest possible example PHP-rendered WordPress block.
	* Author: Paul Clark
	* Author URI: https://pdclark.com
	*
	* @package hi
	*/