Episode 765 Transcript

[00:00:00] Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 765, recorded Tuesday, January 9th. That ship sailed, and sank. Hey, I'm Jonathan Bennett. This week, Aaron Newcomb joins me, and we talk with the OG himself. Randal Schwartz joins us. We talk about Dart, we talk about Flutter, we talk about what Randal's been up to since leaving Floss Weekly years ago.

[00:00:22] Jonathan: It's a great show, you don't want to miss it. good morning. It is, it's Tuesday, not Wednesday, but that's okay. It's time for Floss Weekly. It's a show about free, libre, open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, but hey, it is not just me. we've also got Aaron Newcomb,the wonderful, the great Aaron Newcomb of, boy, of a lot of things, of Floss Weekly for the longest time, one of our co hosts.

[00:00:46] Jonathan: He hasn't been here for a while, but we're going to ask him about that. Also, the Retro Hack Shack and some other things going on. Darren, it's good to have you

[00:00:52] Aaron: back. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here in the new

[00:00:56] digs,

[00:00:56] Jonathan: so to speak. Yes. the new studio, the central studio. You haven't been here for a while.

[00:01:03] Jonathan: What's the deal?

[00:01:05] Aaron: Yeah, so I actually, for folks that don't know I work for a startup and so that keeps my life pretty busy and Wednesday was just not a good day for me. So I actually Took a break basically. I don't know what that was four months ago five months ago something like that I said look guys, I feel really bad keep saying no, I can't co host this week.

[00:01:26] Aaron: So Look, let's just Until we can find a different day or until my schedule frees up, let's just not have the stress of me feeling guilty about not being able to come on. so yeah, that worked out, but hey, today's Tuesday, and Ironically, this is the only time slot in my calendar that I had available, but it worked out perfectly, so that's

[00:01:46] Jonathan: great.

[00:01:46] Jonathan: Yes, Aaron is now our designated, when we don't record on Wednesdays. Guy, he's the one I'm going to call first, try to get him into the rotation. so we've got a, we've got a super special guest today. I'm super excited to have Randal Schwartz back. the man, the myth, the legend, goodness.

[00:02:03] Jonathan: He also, so Randal is all the things I know him of a Perl guy, the Perl guy, maybe wrote, literally wrote the book on Perl is now the dart flutter guy. he has been a computer security martyr. Literally throughout the years. Hopefully we can chat about that real quick. he was the floss weekly guy for the longest time.

[00:02:27] Jonathan: we'll talk about that too. Super glad to have him back. Randal Schwartz, welcome back to the show.

[00:02:35] Randal: Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me back on floss weekly. I think the only other time I've been on floss weekly as a guest was floss weekly number nine, which is my interview back. I think it's 20 years ago or something close to

[00:02:51] Jonathan: that.

[00:02:52] Jonathan: It's been a long time. I remember there was one other episode. I think a guest flaked out on us and we were trying to scramble. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? And we ended up interviewing you as the show that would have been that would have been somewhere around the corner. Four or five hundred in there.

[00:03:06] Jonathan: I didn't take time to go back and look it up.

[00:03:08] Randal: Yeah, that would be probably like three 50, 400, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Somewhere back. I don't remember. And it, after so many shows, it just got to the point where people would ask me, have you ever had X on? And I said, I don't know. Let me Google and find out because it was just a long blur of.

[00:03:26] Randal: really wonderful people on this show, and I'm so happy, Jonathan, that you've taken on the task of continuing it on and maintaining the legacy, because that's actually, special to me that you've done that, because,this show has had such an amazing legacy, and I've got to say, just tooting my own horn a little bit, that it also had an impact on the industry in that there were projects that were fledgling projects that we brought onto the show over the years that became mainstream as a result of having publicity from this show.

[00:04:01] Randal: Oh sure. And so I'm glad you're continuing that tradition, by having the show continue on because there's always going to be, especially if you mention AI at all, there's going to be a huge number of new things going on continually in the open source arena that are going to need a platform to be able to get a little more exposure, perhaps, and I'm sure you're Doing all the appropriate research to try to find all those out.

[00:04:25] Randal: And, or hopefully you get the word out there enough. Some people can just come find you, which is how that's the longest sentence I've said in a while. So I'll just stop there.

[00:04:33] Aaron: Hi,

[00:04:38] Randal: thanks for having me on the show.

[00:04:40] Jonathan: Yes. Yeah. it has been, oh, it's been a long time since I've talked to you personally too and, so Randal, Randal reached out to me when the news broke that Twit was unable to, to keep hosting Floss Weekly, Randal reached out to me and said, Hey, what can we do to try to save this?

[00:04:55] Jonathan: I said, man, I'm way ahead of you. I'm already talking with Hackaday. Who is our new, our new sponsor, our new home. And,I think we had just made that deal happen when you reached out to me. but I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to have Randal back. Have some, get some OG cred with the OG Floss Weekly man.

[00:05:12] Jonathan: what have you been up to for the past few years? Most of our listeners, I imagine, haven't heard much from you. Not to say that you haven't been doing things. What's been keeping you busy?

[00:05:21] Randal: first off, I, leaving Floss was a good thing for me. I was starting to get a little burned out, but not willing to admit it.

[00:05:29] Randal: And some of the shows were suffering in quality as a result, and I appreciate that I got to leave on really great terms. Oh, absolutely. Because I got five hours a week back. Most people don't realize how much time you put into a show like this, even though we're only on the air for an hour. And it was extensive, and I'm glad I got that time back because I had just also started transitioning to a new career.

[00:05:55] Randal: as you said, I'm the Perl guy. I'm going to put myself just at number two. Obviously Larry Wall is number one, but, but I wrote more books and had more bylines and more publications about Perl than anybody else did. I had ran the number one training company during the dot com boom. Stonehenge was everywhere.

[00:06:14] Randal: and I miss those days in a lot of ways, but I also don't miss the hectic pacing of it. From, mid nineties to the, when COVID hit, I was on the road 40 weeks a year. Wow. it was quite a lot of time away from home, focusing entirely on my career, but getting to meet some of the most wonderful people all around the world.

[00:06:36] Randal: the 688 sea days on cruises as part of my job. I got to do some really wonderful things during that period, but I wanted a transition. I said, now that I'm bored with Perl and nothing's really happening new with Perl, I've mastered it. I can do it in my sleep. What next? And it just happened that Dart had come along three or four years earlier.

[00:06:58] Randal: I really enjoyed Dart because it reminded me of my Smalltalk days. And in fact, there's no secret to that, that was partially because some of the early design team for Dart were actually people that were working on Smalltalk back in the day. And so Dart felt like a successful small talk all of a sudden, and I wanted to start doing some more with that and maybe do the same with that I had done with Perl, essentially put Perl on the map and become one of its biggest cheerleaders.

[00:07:21] Randal: So I wanted to do the same for Dart and then, but then Flutter came along and I went, Oh, this is even better because I can write mobile apps. The day I discovered Flutter, I went home. And I installed Flutter. And, I had an icon on the front of my phone that wasn't there, earlier and didn't come from the store.

[00:07:39] Randal: And I thought, this is amazing. I never really considered doing mobile development, but all of a sudden now I did that. I then went from there to becoming a Google developer expert, which requires a careful vetting. there are, just to give you an idea, there's only 10 Dart and Flutter Google developer experts in the U.

[00:07:58] Randal: S., 13 in North America, about, 75 around the world, maybe 90 somewhere in there. Around the world. So I'm part of an elite team and we're essentially unpaid dev rel. So we sit between Google and the world and try to help people get things to happen. So it's, that's been a lot of fun. So I've been doing a lot of that and that involves.

[00:08:20] Randal: going to physical conferences when I can, although there's a story about that, that I'll get to in a minute. yeah, I go to physical conferences, even appearing locally in my Portland chapter of the Google Developer Group. which I'm going to be doing actually in March coming up, I'm going to be giving a Perl, or a dart and flutter lecture there, but I've mostly been doing virtual stuff.

[00:08:41] Randal: So I've been, I've been all over the world, literally at Google developer groups around the world doing virtual presentations. Like just a few weeks ago, I did one in Estonia. So it's this is really cool. They worked out the time of day so that I wouldn't be, have to get up in the middle of my night to present there.

[00:08:58] Randal: And that's what I've been doing as a, and as a Google developer expert, I spend a lot of time on the discord and the slack and reddit and stack overflow answering questions for people, which I really enjoy doing. It's what I was doing for Perl for decades. So I really enjoy doing that. And I'm fitting in the.

[00:09:17] Randal: The stretch of it, and I'm getting work from time to time. I'm not as much as I really want, but at least I'm paying some of the bills with my, dart and flutter income. I think people think I'm too expensive because I am highly credentialed. Here's a 45 year veteran of the industry and he's one of the.

[00:09:36] Randal: Top 10 people in the U. S. He's probably going to charge 300 bucks an hour. No, it's not that much. Oh, wow. I am affordable.

[00:09:45] Randal: just ask. You wouldn't believe how affordable I am right now.

[00:09:48] Aaron: I definitely want to ask, in a minute, I want to ask a few more questions about Floss Weekly, but I want to stick with this topic for now. So I'm just curious, Just generally, since I don't know as much about Flutter and specifically, you outlined it a little bit, but what do you find in these modern days?

[00:10:04] Aaron: what kind of problems are people solving? what, why would I go to Dart or Flutter? what kind of problem would I trying to be solved that I wouldn't be able to solve with another language? Because I've never quite understood why people are gravitating besides personal preference.

[00:10:18] Randal: Sure.

[00:10:19] Randal: So the key thing here is that Flutter is pretty much driving Dart. Flutter is the, a UI toolkit that originally was targeted for iOS and Android, but now has gone to every platform that has bits on it. So for example, the current Ubuntu installer is written in Flutter. So they're migrating from GTK and there are other things And all that stuff they're migrating from that to flutter now.

[00:10:48] Randal: So it's becoming it's so think of a good analogy in the, from the Linux world, yeah. GTK was like the universal way to put bits on screen. This, Flutter is a universal way to put bits on screen in orchestrated patterns. And so that's what it's at its core. And because of that it runs on iOS, Android, web,all the desktops, Linux, Mac, and Windows, it'll run on a Raspberry Pi, it'll run everywhere.

[00:11:16] Randal: And so you end up with this sort of universal solution for write once, run everywhere, similar to the GTK promise, but, but instead of using.

[00:11:27] Aaron: Promise.

[00:11:30] Randal: this one actually pretty much delivers, except for platform specific dependencies. Pretty much the core code at the graphics level stays exactly the same for all those.

[00:11:39] Randal: But it's written in a language that Google had also been developing in parallel to be a replacement for JavaScript. And it's called Dart. And Dart started out very simply just being a slightly smarter JavaScript. Now this was before TypeScript. So this has been in plan for about 11 years now.

[00:11:57] Randal: Been in process for 11 years. And as they grew up with it, and then Flutter came along and said, We want to use Dart because we want to be able to target and have that. They chose Dart because Google was developing both Flutter and Dart and that they could tell the Dart people what we need is both for it to be easy to update while we're debugging it, so have a JIT kind of compiler, but also when we push a button and want to drop it onto a mobile device, we want it to be highly efficient ARM code.

[00:12:34] Randal: And so there is the compiler is one of the interesting ones that has both a JIT mode and an AOT advanced ahead of time compiler for Dart. And it also targets JavaScript. So that meant that you from one. Dart program that was using the Flutter framework or not, you can target pretty much every platform and do it either in a JIT mode for doing debugging or just quick running of a script, for example, or you can do it AOT mode, where it's actually compiling to an XE.

[00:13:08] Randal: for example, I can, I can say, Dart compile foo. dart XE, and I get a binary that's standalone, similar to how you would do Go. Where go doesn't have any libraries. This Dart application does not have any libraries as everything baked into it. So you can drop it on anything. It's a similar architecture across.

[00:13:28] Randal: So there's a lot of advantages to Dart. There's a lot of advantages to Flutter. also Dart has been getting modern features added to it. Very strong typing generics, deferred, loading for web, just added. Pattern matching and records. So you've got tuples, you've got, the pattern matching from Scala and stuff.

[00:13:48] Randal: So it's been, it's been quite extensive as it's been moving forward, but slow enough that they're not just throwing in the kitchen sink. Every new feature is being very carefully specified, weighed out. By an incredible team of people and dart and flutter was, although it's originally a Google product, has now been seeing 40 to 50 percent of its commits in every release come from non Googlers.

[00:14:16] Randal: So this is a community effort already. That's

[00:14:19] Aaron: great. That's great. That's always a big challenge for any open source project is yeah, you know You start out a group of people getting together, you know Maybe one person and then they bring on a couple people but then you know really getting the community involved You know,is the struggle and that's what you want.

[00:14:36] Aaron: In fact, organizations like, Linux foundation and CNCF, which are open source project is a part of, there's requirements there. Like they're not even going to advance your project until they see that it's not just one company trying to. put together a project and run it on their own.

[00:14:51] Aaron: They want to see community involvement. And it's so hard. 50 percent is really

[00:14:56] Randal: good. really, it's huge. And it's funny because people still ask me, Google's abandoned things before, aren't you worried about this? And I go, when 50 percent of the people or commits are coming from outside the house, It's pretty sure that if Google decided to abandon it, it would be taken over by a foundation of some kind.

[00:15:15] Randal: And Google's fully up front about that. in fact, they already did it with a part of this. There was a project called Angular Dart, which is similar to Angular TS, which they also run, but they were trying to do the same thing with Dart. And it was. cool, and I actually started playing with it, started developing websites with it and stuff.

[00:15:34] Randal: And in fact, that's what got me into actually looking at Dart and looking at writing books about Dart was, in fact, the AngularDart project. But then Google announced, Yes, we're using it intensely internally, but we don't want to have external support anymore. We don't want to support it for issues that are coming in that aren't from internal.

[00:15:50] Randal: We want to prioritize internal. So what they did is they let the project be forked. So there now is a community version of AngularDart. That has, forked and is now straying from the internal version. But the fact that Google just said, yeah, go ahead. We'll let you own all the thing up to here and still own the name angular dart and move forward with it.

[00:16:12] Randal: So I believe the same thing would happen if anybody, if Google. ever decided to say, I don't, we don't want to do Dart and Flutter anymore. Now to do that, of course, we'll be cutting their own throat because there is a lot of people working on Dart and Flutter internally, there are huge projects inside Google that are using Dart and Flutter extensively.

[00:16:33] Randal: For example, the, AdSense and AdWords, that's where Google makes their money. That is all managed by. AngularDart, internal Google AngularDart apps now. And so there's no way this is going away internally. I know from talking too many team members and stuff. There it's incredibly invested.

[00:16:51] Yeah,

[00:16:52] Aaron: it's interesting because, I think I'm going to put out a supposition and you guys can agree or disagree. but I think, Google has canceled so much stuff over the years. But my feeling is that's more on the commercial side. My feeling is that. their ethos is, Hey, let's throw something out there on the commercial side, see if it makes money, right?

[00:17:11] Aaron: And if it doesn't, Google Plus, we're going to get rid of it, right? So we'll give it a few years. If it doesn't make money, we're going to get, we're going to ban it and get rid of it because that's part of the business model. But on the open source side, I feel like they have a really good track record looking back at things like,you could name a ton of them, right?

[00:17:26] Aaron: But Kubernetes is the one that comes to mind. Kubernetes was started at Google. Now you don't stand up a cloud ecosystem without Kubernetes. that would be ridiculous if you have more than one host or more than one application you got to run. I think they have actually a really good, I understand the trepidation, but I think they have a really good track record with, open source projects.

[00:17:45] Randal: yeah. And as we look at the, any of the trending things like, TIOBE and other places, and TIOBE is not a great place to look, but,stack overflow queries, things like that,Flutter. By, passed up React Native, about a year or two ago. And that was really interesting when you started seeing numbers tilt in that behavior, because prior to that, of course, everybody said, React Native's already got the entire iron roads, but, Flutter is I'm better product I've got to say

[00:18:14] Jonathan: so I'm curious and this is a little bit of a troll question But if somebody loved the idea of flutter, but held their nose at dart could you do something like write in c and make flutter calls?

[00:18:26] Randal: There is a Closure based Dart, if you want to go way wacky functional programming as your core. So yes, it's possible.

[00:18:37] Jonathan: Very cool. That's fun. Closure based Flutter, did I

[00:18:41] Randal: say that

[00:18:41] Jonathan: right? Closure Flutter. Closure Flutter, okay, I wondered. Yeah. Alright, so we could talk about Flutter and Dart, but I'm curious about, what else you've been up to, Randal.

[00:18:49] Jonathan: Now there's a, there's a little birdie that has told me that you're actually getting around with a walker. Right now and hoping to transition to a cane or crutches, and I'm just over here. It's there. We believe it doesn't go

[00:19:04] Randal: far because I can't go far without it. What's so about two?

[00:19:07] Randal: Yeah, how about two years ago? I had an apartment in Tijuana for eight years. Actually, I did many episodes for the Tijuana kitchen, right? Yes. Okay. just to show that yes, in fact, I lived there for eight years. And so I had been there on my 50th birthday and on my 55th birthday. And although I no longer have the apartment there, thanks to COVID, I basically killed my lease.

[00:19:29] Randal: And so that's it. I'm going to just visit and stay in hotels when I go there. for my 60th birthday, my friend still was in the other half of that apartment. And, I came down to see him and to celebrate with all my friends for my 60th birthday. And I'm old enough that when I slip and fall in the shower, I break my hip.

[00:19:51] Randal: So I was in Tijuana. I got rushed to a Tijuana emergency room. I spent the evening of my 60th birthday in a Tijuana hospital in pain. luckily with a fair amount of drugs, so I don't remember much of this, they put a device in a few days, I think the next day or maybe two days later, I think it was next day.

[00:20:12] Randal: And, the device, apparently it was worse than the, x rays proved it to be. And when they got in there, they said they took them a lot of extra work and, to skip forward two years after that. the, device they put in had four screws into one of the bones and three of the four screws had broken.

[00:20:34] Randal: Oof. So I was in chronic pain for the last six months walking with a cane just to be able to walk through the room and it would take me about 20 seconds to stand up and start walking every time. Thankfully, I finally got on the Oregon Health plan. And so they looked at it, they did cat scan. They said, that has to come out, that's got to come out.

[00:20:54] Randal: And I said, but I'm part Mexican now. They go,no. You're going to have to lose that part of your nationality at this point. And so they, they did a complete hit replacement. this happened, about, about three weeks ago, happened three weeks ago, just a little over three weeks ago. And, I'm, walking around with a walker. I'm probably going to do that for another couple months or maybe a walker for the next month or so and then transition to a cane. But hopefully this is a good enough repair that I'll be walking just normally in about six months or so. And I look forward to that because this is funny because just as we came off COVID.

[00:21:32] Randal: All of a sudden, I'm being invited to attend, Google events all over the world. South Africa, Europe, everywhere. But I can't stand longer than a minute or longer than five minutes or walk more than a block. And y'all know conferences can't be done if you can't do those. And, at least in the airport, I could get wheelchair to get directly to my plane and back.

[00:21:57] Randal: But that's not the whole conference. That's not the way the conference would work. And I've basically been only be able to do virtual conferences for the last amount of time and,in my peak of being at GDE. So it's I want to go, I want to go present, I want to go be places.

[00:22:13] Randal: And I'm going to give it about another six months, but if I can start just walking a block without any kind of aid, I'm definitely going to be hitting the road. Probably not 40 weeks a year, but maybe, five or six events a year, which would be nice. It'd be nice to get back out

[00:22:27] Jonathan: on the road again.

[00:22:28] Jonathan: Yeah, that'll be neat. Although, I have to say, it's amazing that we can do virtual conferences and virtual appearances. That is, Yeah. That's really a godsend for, especially folks that are in a situation like that where you can't get out to them. Yeah, I'm

[00:22:41] Randal: glad I, that's, I am glad this happened in the middle of COVID instead of being,like the last couple of years of me doing all the Perl work that I was doing.

[00:22:48] Randal: So yeah, or the cruising work. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not, I haven't been on a cruise in five years. Cause I don't want to go back on the giant Petri dishes now. I'm going to avoid that for a while, even though I have 688 days and I'm a fifth star Mariner and I've had 112 cruises under my belt.

[00:23:04] Randal: I think I'm done with those. So that I may do one for my birthday coming up in the future. We'll see.

[00:23:08] Jonathan: There you go. I'm curious. Do you do any Perl work anymore?

[00:23:12] Randal: very little. And in fact, when I come in and I see some Perl program that's been used as a utility as part of my ongoing education, I've been rewriting those in Dart, so I'm turning all my Perl programs into compiled Dart scripts.

[00:23:28] Randal: And, so much nicer, actually, there's a Dart. until you have to process a string, Dart inherited Java's need to have a regex object that you spell out regex, and it's oh, going forward. from Perl to that. I can't, I just ate slash food slash. Come on. No, you can't do that. So there's this incredibly awkward.

[00:23:51] Randal: So I've occasionally typed deft R equals regions.

[00:23:58] Randal: This thing

[00:23:59] Jonathan: there, you were. Yeah, so I, real, real quick. There was this kind of, mythological post from back in, in yesteryear where someone was saying, oh, you, you can't just assume that Perl is gonna be on every system. And,sure you can. now, yeah, now you can. that was probably 30 years ago, or 20 years ago.

[00:24:17] Jonathan: Yeah. somebody wrote that. Now he, people look back on it and go, if only he had known,is, I think that was me that

[00:24:22] Aaron: wrote that . Wow. No, it wasn't. But seriously, I used to work. early in my career, 20 plus years ago, right? I worked for a very large company and it was, the enterprise applications were all Unix running on Unix systems.

[00:24:35] Aaron: And, I just assumed that pro would be there, but what I didn't assume is that some of these. systems would have different versions of Perl. so Perl 4 instead of Perl 5 at that time. And I was like, Oh, why isn't my script failing? And we were pushing the script out to thousands and thousands of hosts in the data center and it was failing.

[00:24:53] Aaron: Randal, when you were talking about the ease of being able to compile binaries for different types of systems, I used to have to use, I can't remember the application it was, but there was a Perl thing that would take your Perl script and encapsulate everything and turn it into a binary. I can't remember what the name of it

[00:25:08] Randal: was.

[00:25:08] Randal: Yeah, I know what you're talking about, and I don't remember it either. not bundling. What the hell was that

[00:25:14] Aaron: thing? I can't remember, but anyway, that's what I would do. So I resorted to that, and I would send out a binary to all of these hosts, just so that it would run correctly. And now here we are, 20 plus years later, and we finally have, a language and an ecosystem that makes it easy to do that.

[00:25:27] Aaron: And it's oh yeah, that makes total sense. Why didn't we think of that

[00:25:30] Jonathan: before? That's the direction I was going to go. is there a problem with Dart, with it being available on, older systems? Is somebody still running CentOS 7 or even, God help us, 6? can you still deploy Dart on it?

[00:25:41] Jonathan: is it there? Is it everywhere?

[00:25:43] Randal: I'm pretty sure it's pretty compatible with, I don't know what the minimum Linux version is at this point, but I'm pretty sure it's still available all the way back. there's still supporting. Android like four generations back. it's, and in fact, it's funny because when it first came out, material design, was not in Android quite yet, but you could build an app with Flutter a bit later, which understood material design and have it run looking like material design on a system that didn't have that in the library yet.

[00:26:17] Randal: Really amazing stuff, because again, once it went, one of the ways Flutter makes it easy to move from platform to platform is that it's essentially,it owns every pixel, so it's painting the entire screen. So when you see, an Apple widget or a material,drop button, those have been written in Dart so that they're portable.

[00:26:39] Randal: So you could have an app on the desktop look like it's running on Windows 95 because somebody came up with a Windows 95 design kit for it, Just for grins, I've made a phone app that was Windows 95 dropdowns

[00:26:55] Jonathan: and stuff. Oh, that's great.

[00:26:57] Randal: Or Ubuntu now, because there's an Ubuntu design kit, there's a Windows design, Windows, modern design kit, there's also the Windows 95 one that somebody did as a joke.

[00:27:05] Randal: But yeah, you can basically, since you're controlling every pixel, it's, it's easy to do. Yeah, just painting things.

[00:27:11] Jonathan: Yeah. So I do want to cover real quick. what is it that you've got on Wednesdays? Why are we here on a Tuesday and what's going on with that?

[00:27:19] Randal: I guess I missed doing a show on Wednesdays, for about six months before I got involved.

[00:27:27] Randal: a group of people,Simon, Lightfoot based out of the UK and, Scott Stoll based in, Midwest somewhere, had been doing a Wednesday hump day Q and a open session on their zoom channel. And so they would invite people to come over and just hang out with them and get questions answered and stuff.

[00:27:48] Randal: And they decided to turn that a bit and make it a formal YouTube channel. this net show has now been running for a couple of years now. I got involved. When they decided to take a brand new Flutter book called Flutter Apprentice and serialize it a bit and actually make it a show. So that was done in cooperation with the publisher of the book and with Google.

[00:28:11] Randal: Google was paying for this as well to help sponsor to get more people doing Flutter. This is two years ago. And I got involved being in every week's show as the backstage coordinator and answering questions as people are asking questions and stuff. And they just said, let's just keep going on Wednesdays in this public slot.

[00:28:31] Randal: And, do you want to hang out and, help manage the show? And I said, sure. So I've been doing that ongoing for. I think about two years now, and that show gets about a thousand downloads. So it's nice. Yeah. it gets me a little,a little bit of visibility. And because of our connections, because of my connection to GDE and Simon's just been inside the rim so long.

[00:28:51] Randal: Yeah. That he just has lots of people on the team that he knows and stuff. We've had often had Googlers on the show, to be special guests because they can answer questions directly, especially as things migrate quickly in the Dart and Flutter world. I like to say that, any book or,YouTube video on Dart or Flutter that is older than a year is already out of date.

[00:29:13] Randal: Sure. Because Dart and Flutter have been moving so rapidly forward that, and, Dart, I like to call it a 45 degree course change. So not really like a hard left or a hard right, but there's things like when they added null safety, when they added strong typing, when they added patterns and got rid of backwards compatibility, there are some key moments where the code you're writing now actually is not.

[00:29:39] Randal: In any moment, backward compatible at this point. And, Flutter has done the same things. There have been breaking changes over the years in good directions, of course. But every time you do a breaking change, you're going to upset some people. And it has happened. And and so it's the same thing.

[00:29:57] Randal: We get people on to talk about something. And then a year later we get them on to say, no, it's different. It's different now.

[00:30:04] Jonathan: Oh yeah. I just rewrote some code because one of the, one of the Linux core libraries, the GPIO handling, they went to a version two and I didn't hear anything about it. And I'm, looking at their new API going, Oh, it was so much easier the way that it was written.

[00:30:20] Aaron: No, it's, I had to update a bunch of Python scripts. I was still running Python 2 to

[00:30:24] Randal: 3.

[00:30:26] Aaron: Finally, something forced me. I'm like, ah, but I want to do this thing, but they retired that library. I can't make it work. So I went ahead and updated, spent an afternoon updating a bunch of Python 2 scripts to Python 3.

[00:30:37] Aaron: Yeah. a pain, but, and I know there's automatic things you can do, but it's just, it's interesting at the different, and you've seen this Randal, right? The different, the life cycle of a language, right? Because I'm sure you remember what a big deal it was with Perl,going from four to five and five to six and

[00:30:53] Randal: whatever it was.

[00:30:54] Randal: But you don't go from five to six. that's the thing. That ship sailed empty.

[00:30:59] Aaron: Yeah. But remember that was just a huge deal, right? and. No, now we're

[00:31:04] Randal: talking about ships sailed and sank.

[00:31:09] Jonathan: There is no Perl. Didn't even get out of the

[00:31:11] Randal: port, right? There is no Perl six. Yeah. Oh, Perl six is still being used by, but it's only at the academic level.

[00:31:19] Randal: I'm going to get yelled at. Dozens of

[00:31:22] Jonathan: people are working with Perl six,

[00:31:24] Randal: hundreds of people are playing with Perl six. Yes. It's

[00:31:28] Aaron: a different thing, right? back, considered what was going on back then. And then you're talking about, Oh yeah. Breaking changes every couple of months or so, it's it's just a different

[00:31:38] Randal: world.

[00:31:38] Randal: Here's the thing I like about dart. It is. Almost everything I would have wanted in Perl 6, in terms of streams and asynchronous and, generics and,just complex data structures. I'm doing functional programming by just adding a layer on top of A dart. . that's, this is all the stuff I would've wanted in Perl six, and I can build a binary today.

[00:32:02] Randal: Yeah. , it's done. Yeah, exactly. And it works and it's well specified. Specification can put you to sleep. It's about, 500 pages long, but there is a spec for Dart and it's there and it's complete. I really,

[00:32:14] Jonathan: I imagine that ability to build binaries takes out most of the pain of all of those breaking changes in the language, doesn't it?

[00:32:21] Randal: I imagine it would. Yeah. But,any project though, has the ability to lock down versions so you can pin. And in fact, the basic design is that in your pubspec. yaml, which is the file that's controlling, which versions and what, libraries you're using, recommends that you use, Upro syntax, like upro 1.

[00:32:42] Randal: 4, and that says 1. 4 or anything. It's not a breaking change forward from there. So all the way up to 1. 999, then 2. 0 would mean, I would yell at me if I tried to compile it again. Sure. theory that works, or you can lock it down a specific version too. and, as you build that, there's a pubspec.

[00:32:59] Randal: lock that you can check into to, get that says, this is exactly the ones I built it with. And you can use just that without doing an upgrade and see if it still gets the same, you should get the same exact behavior. Because the pub is also set up in such a way, the pub is like the CPAN for Perl. So the pub is set up in such a way that you cannot delete versions from there.

[00:33:20] Randal: So if you put up 1. 2. 3, it's there forever. So if somebody over here builds with 1. 2. 3, they can always build it two years from now, three years from now, with that exact sequence of bytes.

[00:33:31] Jonathan: Has the Flutter community seen any, any malicious packages getting added to that? if it's like CPAN, if it's some of these other Online library distros we've seen over the past few years, typo squatting and all sorts of stuff.

[00:33:48] Randal: Not to my direct knowledge. I have had discussions with sort of the administrators of the pub and the general housekeepers there. And, I remember with the CPAN, we did have, one, senior Perl person who uploaded for fun. A package that said, now you ran this install as root and it could have contained RM dash RF slash, and you didn't look.

[00:34:21] Randal: And but he did that sort of as part of the awareness. There was somebody else I, there was another one. Whose name again, I won't mention just because it's long passed and who cares. . But somebody who uploaded a, phone home in their install script because they wanted statistics of how many people were installing it, which is not something you could generally provide for CPAN in general because it's all distributed.

[00:34:45] Randal: And we didn't have to collect statistics and bring them to a central place. It would've been a real mess. Yeah. And but he put this phone home thing in. He's the only one that has ever received the CPAN ban hammer. We shut him off until he fixed his scripts. And he said, what's the problem with it?

[00:35:01] Randal: Oh, not only did he phone home, he phoned home to grab a text string from a get. And run that eval! He put it in our eval! And he did it because he wanted to have code in that eval that said if you're not running version 1. 2, please upgrade.

[00:35:22] Jonathan: yeah, the banhammer was appropriate for that.

[00:35:25] Randal: We had multiple banhammers coming from multiple directions. And he just, he could not see the worry of his ways. He could not see just how troublesome that was, but that's the only one I recall of the entire C PAN's history that was malicious in that way. and I don't think there's been any examples that at least were made public, or even to inner circles about anything that's similar in the pub.

[00:35:51] Randal: There's been some people that have. Uploaded packages that are pretty darn stupid, but, that's part of the game. if anybody can upload something stupid, people upload things too. it happens. Yeah.

[00:36:02] Jonathan: I boy, just looking at what's happening with the Python community and the node JS community, I can't help, but think that it's coming.

[00:36:09] Jonathan: keep that thought in the back of your mind. It's coming. It's gotta be. there will come a day when, you get that critical mass of the wrong people who realize, Oh, there's this repository of libraries out there. We can go upload crap to it.

[00:36:23] Randal: Ugh. the advantage though is that they,once you've claimed the namespace, other people can't upload to the same library name.

[00:36:32] Randal: So there is an ownership immediately for any given name. there's also the advantage that to download this and use it in your app, you're basically compiling as non root, always. Oh, now that is helpful. And at least you could get to the point where, you could stare at all the source code and go, Okay, this looks not malicious, I get it,

[00:36:54] Randal: and like I said, there are ways, there are administrators for the

[00:36:57] Jonathan: pub. do things added to the pub get reviewed before they're made public? Because what, particularly in,in the node JS repository, what people were doing was, there would be something that would have color in the name and that color would be spelled either with or without a U and they would go grab the same package name.

[00:37:15] Jonathan: But. the inverse. And somebody went to search for this popular package with color in the name and they would spell it the wrong way, here it is not notice that it's only got 100 downloads when your package you're looking for should have a million. So it were there.

[00:37:31] Randal: There, there is a voting system available.

[00:37:34] Randal: There's also a, a score based on, up to 140 point pub points based on, what it has. it does have documentation. Does it have tests? Does it pass the current release? does it have, read me files? Does it have a license file? Things like that. so you can sort by pub. points, you can sort by recency, you can sort by that.

[00:37:56] Randal: So there is some queryable things there that can drive you towards useful

[00:38:01] Jonathan: things. Yeah. Now, one of the, one of the other things that really fascinates me, getting back to your Wednesday podcast, you have Googlers on there. And I recently had this experience where there was a bug that I found was actually in the Raspberry Pi kernel and I was able to go and submit a bug report.

[00:38:18] Jonathan: to the Raspberry Pi guys. And within just a couple of hours, somebody that obviously knew their kernel very well was like, Oh, yeah, I see what the problem is. And you know how to fix out like 45 minutes later. It was amazing. Yes, you see sometimes these projects where the developers are so removed from the people that are using it that it's almost impossible to get that feedback.

[00:38:41] Jonathan: And it sounds like with Dart and with Flutter. Maybe, specifically through you, there's a really good feedback path, and, boy, that's

[00:38:48] Randal: important. No, it's actually much more direct and more obvious once you think about it. They have people that are specifically assigned to at least eight hour shifts of, screening all the incoming issues.

[00:39:03] Randal: And immediately start tagging those, every issue you post to either the dart or the flutter, repos, gets tagged within one business day. Oh, nice. And so that immediately puts it in people's queues and people's and stuff. it's really gets visibility quickly. I remember leading up to the flutter 3.

[00:39:22] Randal: 0 release. I happened to notice, and this is trivial, but I happened to notice. that there was a parameter that was misspelled. It was misspelled consistently. It was spelled wrong both in the parameter name and in its only use down inside the code. You can call both of those X and the whole thing would still work.

[00:39:40] Randal: So that was the point. But the point was it was misspelled. And I went, okay, OCD kicks in. I file an issue on that. And, because I figure, at least I'll record that it If somebody's in there, they might as well fix it. it got tagged good first commit as well as yes, this needs fixing. Somebody came along the next day, a brand new person who'd never committed before.

[00:40:03] Randal: He answered the 10 questions for, can I be a contributor to the dark project? And answer those correctly. And I said, no, this doesn't need any tests. It's just, the tests are already there. It's just, I'm changing the paper parameter. And within two more days, it was in master and it made the cut for dark or for flutter three.

[00:40:23] Randal: So within a week it went from me having the idea. to already being published by a brand new committer outside of Google. That's awesome. Just because the process worked so quickly all the way through the steps.

[00:40:36] Jonathan: Yeah, that's really neat. I, I don't know that I want to name names, but there is another bug report that I filed several weeks ago in an official API.

[00:40:45] Jonathan: And,the only response is, can you show me a code snippet where this is broken? Show the code snippet. Continue to wait for someone to fix it. Large, huge company bought a huge open source tool and we're broken waiting for things to get fixed. good on Google and FlutterDark for working really hard.

[00:41:07] Randal: And that's why I think it's important to understand how much Google has committed to Dart and Flutter internally. And that's part of why I'm happy to be on the external team for that. it does remind me so much of my Perl days. Because, Larry was the source of all this wonderful code coming out.

[00:41:23] Randal: But he,good or bad, he wasn't A, an extremely strong salesman. I had the sales touch to be able to go in and say, let's match this to your task. Oh, let's, oh, that task. Yeah. That would actually be good for Perl too. Let me see. Figure out how to make that work. . And so I was able to explain complex things simply and get, be in the right place at the right time to talk to it about, to, about it to people so that more people could use it.

[00:41:50] Randal: And people have given me that kind of compliment about. what I'm doing for Dart and Flutter. I'm basically being, a cheerleader for Flutter. And I'm happy to be doing that because it benefits me. It helps me to know that at the end of the day, I've solved, helped somebody solve one more problem with Dart and Flutter than we started the day with.

[00:42:08] Randal: it's really nice for that.

[00:42:09] Jonathan: Yeah. there is something, we're getting close to the end of the show, towards the end of the hour. There's something, last time I interviewed you on Floss Weekly years ago, I wanted to ask you about and didn't get a chance to. I, I alluded to it at the beginning of this show, you are a security martyr, aren't you?

[00:42:27] Jonathan: let's real quick touch on this because it's a fascinating story and I've never gotten to ask you about it. what was the deal? why were you convicted for doing a security audit? We don't have much time, that's a long story, I'm sure. First

[00:42:40] Randal: off, the short version is, I've been convicted of three felonies for doing my job with too much enthusiasm, and then ten years later it was expunged, which means legally I can say it's never happened.

[00:42:56] Randal: However, practically speaking, it's on my Wikipedia page. So how am I supposed to deny it? And I've been written up in 20 computer crime books and stuff. And so it's been interesting, over the years. I, how do, how will you do this in a few minutes? But basically I ran crack against a password file.

[00:43:16] Randal: And I did it, I was working for the company at the time, but just not that group. So part of it is group politics. And a bunch of other things, So let me,

[00:43:25] Jonathan: to put a point on it, let me ask you this question. I think maybe it'll give us some direction. what words of wisdom do you have for burgeoning security people to say, here's your, your guiding principle to stay out of trouble?

[00:43:39] Randal: There isn't any blanket one, and that's the problem. Anybody can after the fact go, but we didn't tell him he could do that. And as when you investigate a bug, sometimes you go off on a tangent because some other part's not quite working. But that wasn't on the original issue ticket. But you're over there because it's revealing something.

[00:44:00] Randal: That's where I was. I was seeing a problem and wondering how deep it was. And first off, that wasn't directly in my charter. And so that was already a problem. So the first thing is, yes, make sure your charter is clear when you're doing security, make sure your boss and you know exactly what you're doing all the time.

[00:44:21] Randal: and as much as attractive as it might be to go off on a corner, stop yourself and go, okay, I go, I need to go get some extra proofs over here to make the, do that. I don't know that it's going to solve it for you though, because we live in an age now where anybody can come back and make anything look like anything later.

[00:44:40] Randal: And that's part of the problem. And also there are some very bad laws. In most states in the U. S., that make it a felony for altering a computer without authorization with neither, with the computer being as broadly defined as it possibly can be, things with electronics, authorized vaguely defined, if at all, and, and altered also vaguely defined.

[00:45:09] Randal: One reading of this rule. is that if you visit a website in Oregon, but you didn't have explicit permission from the owner of that website. Yep. Then you have made a log entry in their weblog that they didn't authorize. That's altering a computer without authorization, class C felony, 100, 000, five years in jail.

[00:45:31] Randal: Yeah. And some,

[00:45:32] Jonathan: some laws go even further or even more onerous and they will say accessing.

[00:45:36] Randal: Yes. Yeah. That was, that's a misdemeanor in Oregon and I got nailed on one of those too. So yeah. Goodness. Yeah. All right. yeah. Be careful. The laws are not on our side. Yes. They are not written well because they're written by people who don't care.

[00:45:50] Jonathan: Don't care or don't understand. And not everyone that is in the position of authority. That's right. are particularly, on your side. So anyway, we could do a whole episode on that. Maybe we will, Maybe. I would love to get some security,Randal is a security person, obviously, but, Yeah.

[00:46:06] Jonathan: There's some other security folks that I would love to get on the show and probably dive deeper into that in the future.

[00:46:11] Aaron: and yet, Someone from the EFF

[00:46:12] Randal: or something. and yet my luggage is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. yeah. Keep that in mind.

[00:46:19] Jonathan: All right. I know Aaron has one more question he wants to get in.

[00:46:22] Jonathan: He put it in the back chat. So go ahead and ask that. Okay. Yeah.

[00:46:25] Aaron: I just want to, it's been fun talking about what's going on now, but I do want to go back since we're here and we have a minute, Randal with you. we've talked about this before, but there's so many floss weekly episodes, right?

[00:46:34] Aaron: Yeah. Any that stick out like top three. I know what mine would be, but I'm curious what your top three Floss Weekly episodes might be. I

[00:46:44] Randal: still chuckle, only because I came up with a joke right at the last second. When we interviewed the guy Who is solely responsible for NTP, which is one of the most critical services that run on the net that nobody talks about except sysadmins.

[00:47:01] Randal: And it's so important to everyday life, but just sysadmins are the ones that talk about it. I remember the whole point of NTP is basically my machine asks your machine what time it has and then puts timestamps on both ends so that it can do the round trip and figure out from the round trip where the offsets are and stuff like that.

[00:47:18] Randal: So it's basically I ask you, you tell me back. At the end of the show, I asked, oh, he's going to kill me for not remembering his name. I asked the guy, what time is it? And he told me, and I went, Oh, okay, I guess we're in sync,

[00:47:37] Randal: effectively the human version of NTP.

[00:47:42] Jonathan: Let's see, that was my

[00:47:43] Randal: favorite episode, I think just in terms of joke value. But of course we did some amazingly pivotal ones for salt. We put salt on the map, you, the only reason we still even talk about salt today is because they were on our show.

[00:47:55] Randal: and, we did a couple of other projects that were just like that. I actually want to go back over and if I ever had a ton of spare time, which I never will. I want to go back and actually like at least read the transcripts of all the old shows and see how many times we accurately predicted where they were going to go.

[00:48:15] Randal: And how many times we got that so terribly wrong or they themselves got that so terribly wrong because it would be a useful lesson to be able to tell fledgling, new floss projects. here's the advice of the sages from 20 years. This is what you really ought to pay attention to, and this is what you really don't need to care about.

[00:48:38] Randal: that would be, because there's a wealth of information there that's all locked up. Maybe I can get transcripts of all the shows and feed it into some AI, thump something, and it can just summarize that stuff for me. There you go. Possibly. I don't know. We're getting close to being able to do

[00:48:50] Jonathan: that. Yeah, I think, there may be transcripts already for a lot of them.

[00:48:53] Jonathan: yeah.

[00:48:54] Aaron: Somebody was archiving 'em, right? I think so.

[00:48:57] Jonathan: I think so. I've, when things happened and we went to Hackaday, one of the first things I did is I went to twit and, wrote a tiny bit of bash code and downloaded all of the, all of the audio from the show. So we at least have that. Oh, nice.

[00:49:08] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:49:09] Aaron: yeah, the two that come to my mind immediately are, when we interviewed the Mars Rover team.

[00:49:14] Randal: Oh yeah. Mars Rover. Of course. How did I forget that?

[00:49:17] Aaron: that was, I just like, how am I here? participating in this conversation? This is so awesome. And it was like, it was crazy. They were telling us all sorts of stuff, telling us how it worked and Perl, mission

[00:49:27] Randal: critical Perl.

[00:49:28] Randal: I remember that. Every. Instructions sent to a Rover is passed through a giant Perl script. Every single instruction. That was so

[00:49:37] Aaron: cool. It was crazy. And then the other one I remember was Kubernetes. And I, at the time I was like, Kuber, what he's like, I don't know what it is. I didn't know what it was.

[00:49:45] Aaron: Cause it was so early on. It had been around for a few years, but they were talking about, changing the world with Kubernetes. what are you talking about? This isn't good. And then, now it's, I've worked with Kubernetes. professionally,as part of the companies I've worked for the past eight years or something.

[00:50:00] Aaron: And it's taken over, like I said, how we do cloud native and application infrastructure and all that kind of stuff. that definitely, I think about that one often is boy, if I only knew how big that one was going to become back in the day, when we talked to them,Maybe I would have paid more attention during the interview.

[00:50:14] Aaron: One of

[00:50:16] Randal: my favorites. It's still amazing, it's still amazing also that, that we did a show on VirtualBox and, Oracle still hadn't figured out they own it. Yes. So that's good. Yes. They still kept their mitts off it except put their name on it, so that's good. I'm glad VirtualBox still exists.

[00:50:30] Jonathan: Yeah. Yep. I remember interviewing the guy behind Bash and, at the end of the show, going to ask him what his favorite scripting language was and telling me, I'm not sure that Bash counts for that. And the horrified look of, yes it does.

[00:50:40] Jonathan: all right, Randal, so we are at the end of the show and you know what the two questions are. What, your favorite scripting language, has it changed? And what's your favorite text editor?

[00:50:50] Randal: Dart. Oh, it has changed. definitely changed. I still have Perl scripts that are running, but I'm not creating any new ones.

[00:50:57] Randal: and,my, favorite, my IDE now is VS code. Okay. And, I, I painfully shifted because VS code provided a full IDE environment for Dart and Flutter. And I. Start of, I actually stopped invoking Emacs probably about a year ago. but I would still have an Emacs running to answer my mail and VS code running in another window.

[00:51:26] Randal: And it was like, they're just, no, I just, I'm pretty much 100 percent on VS code. Now what I will fire Vmax for though, is that VS code can do remote file editing. but it only works on Linux systems because it downloads some package that only runs on Linux, whereas, Emacs can do remote file editing by actually tunneling an SSH connection and doing everything inside this SSH connection, it's really cool, Emacs is smart.

[00:51:54] Randal: Yes. yeah. Yeah. And there's still a little bit of me in every copy of Emacs, there's not a copy, a bit of me in every copy of VS Code yet,

[00:52:00] Jonathan: I'm working on that. Yet, yet, you gotta make it happen. It

[00:52:04] Randal: happens. It

[00:52:04] Jonathan: happens every time. Yeah. Alright, Randal, amazing to have you back. Thank you so much for being here.

[00:52:10] Jonathan: Let's, let's do it again. Let's not wait quite as many years as it's been. Let's,let's have you back in, a few months, a year. I don't know when it'll be, but let's make sure and have you back. Thank you, sir, for

[00:52:18] Randal: being here. Oh, thank you for having me on. It's just been a pleasurable, wonderful.

[00:52:22] Randal: Thank you. Absolutely. Good to see you, Randal.

[00:52:24] Jonathan: Yeah. Absolutely. Alright, Aaron, what do you think?

[00:52:28] Aaron: it's so great to talk to Randal. I mean, come on. we spent, I don't know how many years of our lives together. not every Wednesday for me, every Wednesday for him, but,it's just a, when I look back fondly at my days, Doing those shows and stuff like that.

[00:52:41] Aaron: it's a standout, right? It's Oh, yeah, we all knew what was how it was going to work and how it was going to go down. And Randal was a big part of making that happen. He did work. I know how much he worked behind the scenes for so many years on that show. Yes. it was really a credit to him that the show, Continued, right?

[00:52:59] Aaron: Especially in the early days after whoever was John O'Bacon came in, I think for a little bit or something. I can't remember who was before Randal. I think that was it. he came in for a couple of shows or something. And then there were some other people, Chris DiBona, maybe, if I remember correctly.

[00:53:11] Aaron: And, know, then Randal came in and it was like, whoosh. Okay, it was the Randal show. Now it's off and running, And so anyway, I, I, I owe a great deal of gratitude to Randal and just, it's just, nice to chat again. It's like an old friend that you don't, haven't talked to in a while.

[00:53:23] Aaron: So

[00:53:24] Jonathan: great. Absolutely. And,if he ever suddenly gets his Wednesdays free, we'll have to bring him in, maybe as one of the rotating co hosts. I don't know. We'll see if anything like that ever happens. but that would be a lot of fun.

[00:53:34] Aaron: Alright. that's two good reasons to move to Tuesday.

[00:53:36] Aaron: There you go. Cause you get Randal and me as co hosts, maybe. yeah. we,

[00:53:42] Jonathan: that is actually an intriguing thought. We'll, we will stick that on the, on the idea bin and think about that for a while, because Tuesdays would be easier for me too. So we will see what happens. Aaron, it was great to have you back.

[00:53:52] Jonathan: Hopefully it will not be another four months before we can have you back as well. Do you have anything you want to plug?

[00:53:57] Aaron: yeah, of course. I've got two YouTube channels now, that you can go check out. So there's retro hack shack and there's retro hack shack after hours. Yeah. Ooh. that's where I do some of my e waste Wednesday stuff and stuff that, isn't as popular with the larger YouTube community, but still really popular with my core audience.

[00:54:14] Aaron: I put that stuff there. In fact, I'm working on, I don't know, can I share my screen on this? Am I allowed to do

[00:54:20] Jonathan: that? it won't go out live as part of the podcast. So maybe let's do that after the podcast recording ends, then we can fiddle around with that. Yeah,

[00:54:27] Aaron: sounds good.

[00:54:28] Aaron: I will put up a, I'll show you a picture, of what I'm working on for this week, and people can guess, what old system this is, if they know. Oh, cool. so I'll definitely put up a picture. In fact, what I'll do is I'll put it on my YouTube channel as well, in the, community.

[00:54:41] Aaron: community section. I'll say, Hey, what system is this? We'll make it a little bit of a puzzle. Sure. And people can guess, but it's a really cool one. And it led to, one of the major PC architectures, that developed over the years. This was the first in, in the line, if you will, that really led to this particular PC architecture, that's still in use today.

[00:55:02] Aaron: So yeah, really cool board that I discovered on one of my,

[00:55:05] Jonathan: Neat. All right. we, we, so this is Tuesday. Next week we'll be back on Wednesday. And next week we are talking with Sean Dubois about WebRTC and all sorts of web media stuff. That's going to be a lot of fun. Make sure to be here for that.

[00:55:22] Jonathan: And if you want to listen live, we are live in the Hackaday Discord. Come join and, Wednesdays at showtime. That's nine to 30 Pacific time, 1130. My time here in central time zones, jump on board and join us live. if you want to see a project on the show, get ahold of the project lead or one of their engineers and have them email us, it's floss at hackaday.

[00:55:45] Jonathan: com. Have them send an email to us there and we will get them scheduled. and then the other thing, the one thing that. I want to plug is I also have another podcast. It's the untitled Linux show that's over on twit as part of club twit. We'd love to see you there. We do that live in the twit discord as well.

[00:56:03] Jonathan: I think that's it for this week, man. Thank you everybody. We had a few folks live in our live audience on discord. Thanks for joining us here and thank you to everyone that listens on the download and Hey, we will see you next time on floss weekly.