Debian: Latest Raspberry Pi OS and Reproducible Builds

• Latest Raspberry Pi OS update – May 2020

• Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 145 released

  The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 145.

• Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 146 released

  The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 146.

Programming: Perl, Rust and More

• The [Perl] Weekly Challenge #062

  Once again, Neil Bowers, came up with another exciting task for all Team PWC members. Like always, it was fun task. Thanks to Ryan for providng sample data and expected result based on the definition of the task. Half the job done already. The only thing left for the us, is get on with the job. I noticed Raku needed slightly different approach then the Perl. It could be I am doing something very badly. I am happy to correct myself, if you find anything silly. More on this, later down below. However the second task of the week, N Queens, turned out to tough nut to crack for me. For the first, since I started contributing, I gave up on this. Technically speaking, I did attempt to solve it with the help of my 11 year old daughter, but it was only limited to 2D rather than 3D as expected in the task. Therefore I decided not to submit my solution. Having said that I didn’t want to loose my work, so just for record, I am sharing in this blog, just in case, if I want to re-visit the code.

• New Arel like SQL Manager

  Some months ago I started working in a system similar to ActiveRecord. But then it became pretty big so then I centered my attention in a SQL AST manager instead. So I made a library that is basically an Arel port. You can see the README with most of the basic info. After looking at implementations in CPAN I realized there are many of them already but all of them based on hash structures.

• In Rust, we lust: Security-focused super-C++ language still most loved among Stack Overflow denizens

  Rust for the fifth year in a row has held its position as the most-loved programming language in Stack Overflow's annual developer survey, even if it's not the primary language for most programmers and not many jobs require it. Rust, beloved by 86 per cent of respondents this year, recently celebrated five years since its 1.0 release. After years of appreciation for its memory safety features, speed, and other benefits, the language is making the move from an aspirational technology to a growing presence in savvy software organizations.

• Performant Containerized Go* Applications with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on Clear Linux* OS

  Major cloud software such as Docker*, etcd*, Istio*, Kubernetes*, Prometheus*, and Terraform* use the Go* programming language for core cloud infrastructure components. Why are they using Go? Compared with many other scripting languages, Go is fast! This article shows how to develop performant Go applications that leverage Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) and a Go container based on Clear Linux* OS to improve the performance potential of Go. [...] Go is an open source programming language with concurrency mechanisms that help developers make full use of multicore and networked machines. It is expressive, modular, and efficient. Go based data science and analytic applications typically leverage gonum, a set of libraries for matrices, statistics, and optimization. Libraries like gonum build on top of a lower-level BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) layer. Gonum / netlib creates wrapper packages that provide an interface to Netlib CBLAS implementations. Because netlib uses C and CBLAS, using gonum/netlib provides indirect use of an Intel processor’s Intel AVX-512 capability, if available on the running system. The gonum/netlib recommended BLAS layer for performance on Linux is OpenBLAS. OpenBLAS is an optimized open source BLAS library based on GotoBLAS2 1.13 BSD version, implemented in C. It provides a BLAS layer implementation with Intel AVX-512 acceleration that is adaptable to Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel® AVX2) or Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel® SSE) only platforms.

• Intel's Clear Linux Working On AVX-512 Optimized Golang Container

  One of the latest performance optimizations being pursued by Intel on the open-source Linux side is providing an AVX-512-optimized container for Golang usage. Intel's Clear Linux crew has assembled a new container providing AVX-512 tuned Go language support paired with AVX-512 optimized Glibc, OpenMP, and OpenBLAS libraries for operating on Intel's Xeon Scalable servers.

• Some notes on Corona

  In many ways, very little has changed in the way I work on Free Software projects. I get paid to do so – partly on Calamares, partly on other things – and there simply was no switch-to-remote work for me. Sitting at my desk, two monitors, FreeBSD underneath and Linux VMs in my face, with IRC for realtime communication: that’s been part-and-parcel of work for years now and nothing has changed there. Except that now there’s people in the house. One thing I notice is that when kid[1] is at the machine next to mine, it’s distracting. But how distracting, depends on what is on-screen. Java code only a little, until I feel the urge to ask what’s the issue – then I’m the cardboard cutout dog. Geometry Dash also only a little, since the rhythmic clicking of the mechanical keyboard mostly makes the same sound as my own keyboard when I’m doing something derpy like re-indenting chunks of CMakeLists.txt. Minecraft, on the other hand, drives me nuts. I just can’t work sitting next to that. The Slimbook sees a lot more work now, when I flee to the living room. But that’s where online lessons are happening, so I need to sneak around (sometimes out around the side of the house to cross to the other end of the room) because I don’t want to be broadcast accidentally to 20 students listening to middle-school explanations of quadratic equations. The equations are written on the blackboard painted onto one wall of the room. kid[0] had final exams cancelled out from under them, so they graduated from school with very little sound or fury. We wrote out a CV together and they now have a job (in “smart” lockdown times!) until the end of the summer and the start of university.

• This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

  Pascal, a descendant of ALGOL 60 and darling of computer science courses for decades, turns 50 this year. For engineers of a certain age, Pascal was hard to avoid in the latter part of the last century. Named for 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal, the language is attributed to Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth and was created in part due to Wirth's frustration with the process to improve the ALGOL 60 language. Involved in the ALGOL X effort, Wirth proposed ALGOL W, which, while not deemed a sufficient advance over ALGOL 60, became Pascal in 1970.

Python Programming

• How to handle bulk data insertion SQLite + python

  When it comes of handling huge amount of data, the most common things that developer always does is to store data in a single manner each SQL statement has a new transaction started for it. This is very expensive, since it requires reopening, writing to, and closing the journal file for each statement. Despite that fact that they can do it in a bulk transaction. Now how do we did this? I’ll show you. Let’s say you have 20,000 candidate records to be inserted in your database. It really makes sense to consider a bulk transaction right? Sure why not.

• Convert Bytearray to Bytes in Python

  Many different types of data objects are supported by Python. Two of them are the objects bytearray and bytes. The bytearray() function returns an array object of bytes. This object is changeable and supports the integer number from 0 to 255. The bytes() function returns bytes objects, is not changeable, and supports the integers from 0 to 255. This article will describe these functions and explain how bytearray objects can be converted into bytes objects.

• List Intersection in Python

  Many object variables exist in python to store a variety of data types. The list is one of these variables and can store different types of data for different needs. Sometimes, we need to find common, uncommon, or both common and uncommon data items from the multiple lists for programming purposes. Python contains several built-in functions and operators that can perform these types of tasks for Python sets. Finding common data from the multiple lists is called list intersection, but there is no operator or built-in function for lists like sets to find the common data items from multiple lists. This tutorial will show you how to intersect lists in Python.

• How to Execute Shell Commands in Python Using the Subprocess Run Method

  Subprocess is a built-in Python module that can be used to create new processes and interact with their input and output data streams. In simpler terms, you can use it to run shell commands and run executable binaries usually scattered in various “bin” folders across a Linux file system. You can also supply a full path to an executable binary and use any command-line switches associated with the binary. This article will explain how to use the subprocess module and its run method in Python apps. All code samples in the article are tested with Python 3.8.2 on Ubuntu 20.04.

• How to Use the Python Isalpha Function

  Sometimes, we need to check the content of data for programming purposes. There are many different types of built-in functions in Python for string data to check the content This content may include letters, numbers, or other special characters. The isalpha() function is one of the useful built-in functions of Python that can be used to find out whether or not the content of the data is alphabetic. This function searches the alphabet in the starting of the string value. If the starting value of the string is a letter, then this function returns true; otherwise, it returns false. This tutorial will show you how to can use the isalpha() function in Python.

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Blog #1

  Hello Everyone, this is Soham Biswas currently in 2nd year pursuing my Bachelor’s(B.Tech) degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Institute of Engineering & Management, Kolkata. I have been selected for GSoC' 20 at sub-org FURY under the umbrella organisation of Python Software Foundation. I will be working on building sci-fi-like 2D and 3D interfaces and provide physics engine integration under project titled "Create new UI widgets & Physics Engine Integration".

• PSF GSoC students blogs: First Blog GSoC 2020

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-in #1

• PSF GSoC students blogs: GSoC Blog : Week 1

  Since most of the places including my university are closed due to the pandemic outbreak, I decided to get a head start and start with the project early. During the community bonding period, I had video conference meetings with my mentors scheduled every week on Wednesday. During these meetings i interacted with the mentors to have a coherent understanding of how the project design and implementation will be managed over the course of the entire period. Since my project involves a lot of theoretical understanding of concepts such as ray marching, I spent the period going through the theory of each topic.This week also involved going through the documentation for shaders used in VTK.

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Community Bonding Check-in

  I had an onboarding meeting with my mentors where we got to know each other a bit better. They advised me to play around with uarray and unumpy without any goal in mind which I found to be a very good advice. I played a bit with special methods by implementing a simple Vector2D class and used the code in this notebook with some print statements to understand better the protocols and how they are called. I wanted to start earlier on my project so I took over a PR from one of my mentors which adds multimethods for the linalg module. What is coming up next? I'm going to continue the PR that I have been working on since it still isn't finished and I will also follow the proposed timeline and start adding multimethods for other routines like checking class equality in array elements. Some mathematical constants and their aliases are also missing so I will be adding these too and probably refactoring the existing ones into classes. This week marks the end of my college classes but I still have some assignments and exams coming up in the following weeks so there's a lot of work ahead of me to proper balance both university studies and GSoC but I wouldn't have it other way.

• Weekly Python StackOverflow Report: (ccxxx) stackoverflow python report

The Ongoing CPU Security Mitigation Impact On The Core i9 10900K Comet Lake

At least for the workloads tested this round, when booting the new Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor with the software-controlled CPU security mitigations disabled, the overall performance was elevated by about 6% depending upon the workload. Here is a look at the out-of-the-box security mitigations for this new Intel desktop CPU against foregoing the default CPU security mitigations and running an unprotected configuration to see what the pre-Spectre performance looks like.