PDFs are a fixed-size document format, which means that they made more sense in the days when PCs all had about the same video resolutions and screen geometries. But even then, they were never perfect for displaying them on a screen because most are in portrait mode and monitors rarely were. Nowadays, displays especially in mobile devices come in all shapes and sizes, so fixed-size formats are even more obsolete.

The option to allow anyone to register to your WordPress blog is basically useless and should be removed. The reason why I am saying this is that once the automated spambots find your blog, they start registering users in the hopes of using your blog as a spam distribution platform.

You can use CAPTCHAs as a gatekeeper to your registration dialogs. But the fact alone that this is necessary angers me. Just because a bunch of rightfully underpaid software engineering dropouts thinks it is a good idea to support the spam industry, the rest of us have a harder and harder time using the Internet for something useful.

Considering the fact that I just set up this blog today I am impressed (but not in a good way) how fast the spambots found it. First comment we got was — what else should it be — spam.

Sometimes I collect material for a blog post in a file but then forget to publish it. Thankfully WordPress lets you backdate posts.

I found three old blog posts that I wrote for the static blog which I never published. Since they fit nicely with the topics here I published them under the date when I originally wrote them.

While we already published releases on JCenter, we are now in the process of getting OpenFastTrace published on Maven Central. The goal is of course to make using OFT as convenient as possible for everyone.

I am happy to see that the people from Maven Central take security seriously and do not just let anyone publish modules under any package name. They asked us to prove that we own the domain “itsallcode.org”, so that gave me the necessary kick in the butt to speed up my plan to set up a web presence for OFT outside of Github on our domain. This blog is the first part.