[Daniel's week] September 20, 2024

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello!

I kept busy this week as well. Who knew!

## curl

Just a week later, we shipped another curl release [1]. Version 8.10.1
contains a range of bugfixes, some of them addressing regressions in 8.10.0
that were a little too annoying to leave unattended for a whole release cycle.

Once again we did the release dance: merged everything, packaged, signed,
uploaded, did a release blog post, slides, live-streamed presentation etc.

There are some issues in 8.10.1 as well, still being discussed, but they do
not seem to be too critical so they will most likely get managed within the
normal release cycle.

We aim to ship again in early November.

Jim Fuller packaged and uploaded the container version of the latest curl
release and I took a look at the current usage stats. Right now, curl images
are pulled from quay.io at the rate of 5.5 million/day while the Docker rate
has slowed down to 1 million/day. It makes a total of 2.4 billion pulls/year.

## trurl

Like curl, I also shipped a trurl update [2] a week after the previous
release. Partly because of some regressions, but also because I like to
iterate quickly on this thing when we do changes.

This time I added (changed really) an option and landed a series of bugfixes.

Right now there is no pending feature to add and there is no issues filed to
deal with. Pretty good.

## top-40

Someone asked me a question on Mastodon about how much of the existing product
code base that *I* have written, and the result of that question is now a new
graph in the curl dashboard: top-40 remaining authors in production code [3].

It turned out git blame says I am the last author to have touched 39.4% of all
production code. Stefan Eissing has his name on 20.6%. This counter includes
all lines in src/, lib/ and include/; meaning comments and blank lines as
well.

This list of course emphasizes product code, neglecting tests, documentation
and other areas that are also terribly important for the curl project and
where the contributor distribution might look completely different.

Speaking about graphs: I learned me some more useful gnuplot maneuvers this
week, which resulted in me tweaking several graphs and how the labels are
placed. I suppose most people won't even notice.

## talks

The talks page [4] on my personal website now lists 130+ something
talks/presentations/appearances I have done during the last ten years or so.
Both public and invite-only events.

I wanted to figure out when I did one of the previous talks and then I
realized the information was not available so I had to searched around in some
private archives. I fixed that. I suppose it also works as a little show-off
to display that I do have quite some experience in public speaking.

## SEO by threat

I got this email claiming to be a "DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice" sent by
a seemingly legit US based legal firm (Citi Legal Services), signed by a name
that seems to be a real existing employee of that legal firm, where they say I
use an image on my blog that "belong to our client".

  "We require that you credit claudeai.wiki for this image. Please add a direct
  and clickable hyperlink either beneath the image or in the footer of the
  page. This must be completed within the next five business days."

Turns out that this is a common scam. By threatening people like me, they want
to scare us into putting a link to their site. SEO by threat so to speak.

Unfortunately I replaced the image before I fully understood the setup. The
original image I once obtained from pixabay and I credited the creator exactly
as pixabay asks me to.

The image was however not actually relevant to the content, it was just a
vague illustration and I can just as well use another (royalty free) image
there.

Sigh.

## panelist

I accepted to be part of the afternoon panel discussion "will the CRA really
make us more secure?" [5] on the Nordic Software Secure Summit conference on
Monday, representing Open Source. I'll tell them how it really is.

## Polhem Prize

Today Friday, I participated in a Polhem Prize council [8] meeting and this
year's award winner has been decided. To be announced on November 6.

## Coming up

- Saturday: the curl feature window opens for three weeks
- Monday-Tuesday: Nordic Software Secure Summit. Talk + panel.

## Links

[1] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/09/18/curl-8-10-1/
[2] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/09/19/trurl-0-16/
[3] = https://curl.se/dashboard1.html#top40
[4] = https://daniel.haxx.se/talks.html
[5] = https://nsss.se/y2024/agenda/monday/
[6] = https://quay.io/repository/curl/curl
[7] = https://hub.docker.com/r/curlimages/curl
[8] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/05/24/polhemsradet/

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se