jmtd → Jonathan Dowland's Weblog

FOSDEM 2026 was great! I hope to blog a proper postmortem in due course. But for now, The video of my talk is up, as are my slides with speaker notes and links.

Tags: containers java

I'm going to FOSDEM 2026!

I'm presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it's scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I'm the warm-up act!

The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), but sadly there's no Java devroom this year. There's a story about that, but it's not mine to tell.

Please recommend to me any interesting talks! Here's a few that caught my eye:

Debian/related:

• Package managers à la carte: A Formal Model of Dependency Resolution
• 32 years of Debian: how a do-ocracy keeps evolving
• Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source?

Containers:

• Who’s reproducing the reproducible images?

Research:

• Data science from the command line: a look back at 2 years of using xan
• Research software engineering: a movement and its instantiation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Other:

• Window Managers after Xorg (Mir)
• Charming Gray Buttons of the XX century: how widget toolkits evolved with computer architectures
• PAW, a programmable DAW

Tags: containers debian java

No man’s Sky (or as it’s known in our house, "spaceship game") is a space exploration/sandbox game that was originally released 10 years ago. Back then I tried it on my brother‘s PS4 but I couldn’t get into it. In 2022 it launched for the Nintendo Switch¹ and the game finally clicked for me.

I play it very casually. I mostly don’t play at all, except sometimes when there are time-limited “expeditions” running, which I find refreshing, and usually have some exclusives as a reward for play.

One of the many things you can do in the game is collect star ships. I started keeping a list of notable ones I’ve found, and I’ve decided to occasionally blog about them.

The Horizon Vector NX is a small sporty ship that players on Nintendo Switch could claim within the first month or so after it launched. The colour scheme resembles the original “neon” switch controllers. Although the ship type occurs naturally in the game in other configurations, I think differently-painted wings are unique to this ship.

For most of the last 4 years, my copy of this ship was confined to the Switch, until November 2024, when they added cross-save capability to the game. I was then able to access the ship when playing on Linux (or Mac).

Tags: games

Via (I think) @mcc on the Fediverse, I learned of GetMusic: a sort-of "clearing house" for Free Bandcamp codes. I think the way it works is, some artists release a limited set of download codes for their albums in order to promote them, and GetMusic help them to keep track of that, and helps listeners to discover them.

GetMusic mail me occasionally, and once they highlighted an album The Arcane & Paranormal Earth which they described as "Post-Industrial in the vein of Coil and Nurse With Wound with shades of Aphex Twin, Autechre and assorted film music."

Well that description hooked me immediately but I missed out on the code. However, I sampled the album on Bandcamp directly a few times as well as a few of his others (Ye Gods is a side-project of Antoni Maiovvi, which itself is a pen-name) and liked them very much. I picked up the full collection of Ye Gods albums in one go for 30% off.

Here's a stand-out track:

So I guess this service works! Although I didn't actually get a free code in this instance, it promoted the artist, introduced me to something I really liked and drove a sale.

Tags: music

We’re currently thinking of renovating our study/home office. I’ll likely write more about that project. Embarking on it reminded me that I’d taken a photo of the state of it nearly a year ago and forgot to post it, so here it is.

When I took that pic last January, it had been three years since the last one, and the major difference was a reduction in clutter. I've added a lava lamp (charity shop find) and Rob Sheridan print. We got rid of the POÄNG chair (originally bought for breast feeding) so we currently have no alternate seating besides the desk chair.

As much as I love my vintage mahogany writing desk, our current thinking is it’s likely to go. I’m exploring whether we could fit in two smaller desks: one main one for the computer, and another “workbench” for play: the synthesiser, Amiga, crafting and 3d printing projects, etc.