Programming: Django, Python and Qt

• Introducing DjangoCon Africa

  Following the huge success of PyCon Africa, the Django community in Africa is ready to bring a new major software event to the continent - the very first DjangoCon Africa! The Django Software Foundation is excited to endorse and support this initiative. Plans are already in motion for a DjangoCon Africa to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in November 2020. Actual dates to be announced as soon as key details are in place. DjangoCon Africa will include 3 days of single-track talks, 1 day of workshops and sprints, and another day for touring for international visitors. The event will also include a Django Girls workshop to be held the weekend before DjangoCon Africa. To make the conference as inclusive as possible, the event will offer financial aid to members of under-represented communities in software to ensure they can also attend.

• Django 3.0 release candidate 1 released

  Django 3.0 release candidate 1 is the final opportunity for you to try out the raft of new features before Django 3.0 is released. The release candidate stage marks the string freeze and the call for translators to submit translations. Provided no major bugs are discovered that can't be solved in the next two weeks, Django 3.0 will be released on or around December 2. Any delays will be communicated on the django-developers mailing list thread.

• Cyber Discovery - What it is all about

  Cyber Discovery is made of 4 rounds. The first one being CyberStart Assess. It ran from the 3rd September to the 25th October 2019. There are 10 challenges starting easy, getting much harder. The aim for most of the challenges are to use 'Inspect Element' to get into the website and find the flag. I completed all of these challenges and was invited onto the next round: CyberStart Game. CyberStart Game is much more about finding things out yourself. A useful tip if you are stuck is to search for help on Google. CyberStart Game has 3 'Bases': Headquarters where you get to take part in lots of varied challenges, Moon Base where you learn the basics of Python and Internet Tools that can be run in python e.g. FTP... You also learn how to use python to Brute Force password protected ZIP files and other securities. The Forensics Base is, well you can guess: Forensics. It teaches you about Cryptography and other hiding methods.

• PyDev of the Week: Martin Uribe

  While taking some college courses I learned Java, but I didn’t like it much. I know enough of the following to get things done: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, SQL, and BASH. Python is my favorite; I use it pretty much every day even though my job doesn’t require me to code.

• You can now hone your testing / pytest skills on our platform

  Writing test code is an essential skill. As PyBites we believe writing code is the only solution to becoming a master (Ninja) at programming. The same applies to test code. For that reason we extended our regular exercises with Test Bites. In this article you will read about the feature showcasing it on our first ever Test Bite. We also share some details around implementation and a challenge we hit getting it to work. Enjoy and start honing your testing skills today!

• unu – Using Qt on embedded Linux

  Right from the start, unu wanted to add a stylish, first-class embedded high-res display to their second generation electric scooter. Like many top-class engineering companies, unu didn’t have in-house expertise for building a modern UI, so they decided to partner with KDAB to build a modern UI based on Qt. In this video you learn more about the development process in this project and why unu chose KDAB as a partner.

Google and fwupd sitting in a tree

I’ve been told by several sources (but not by Google directly, heh) that from Christmas onwards the “Designed for ChromeBook” sticker requires hardware vendors to use fwupd rather than random non-free binaries. This does make a lot of sense for Google, as all the firmware flash tools I’ve seen the source for are often decades old, contain layer-on-layers of abstractions, have dubious input sanitisation and are quite horrible to use. Many are setuid, which doesn’t make me sleep well at night, and I suspect the security team at Google also. Most vendor binaries are built for the specific ODM hardware device, and all of them but one doesn’t use any kind of source control or formal review process. The requirement from Google has caused mild panic among silicon suppliers and ODMs, as they’re having to actually interact with an open source upstream project and a slightly grumpy maintainer that wants to know lots of details about hardware that doesn’t implement one of the dozens of existing protocols that fwupd supports. These are companies that have never had to deal with working with “outside” people to develop software, and it probably comes as quite a shock to the system. To avoid repeating myself these are my basic rules when adding support for a device with a custom protocol in fwupd: I can give you advice on how to write the plugin if you give me the specifications without signing an NDA, and/or the existing code under a LGPLv2+ license. From experience, we’ll probably not end up using any of your old code in fwupd but the error defines and function names might be similar, and I don’t anyone to get “tainted” from looking at non-free code, so it’s safest all round if we have some reference code marked with the right license that actually compiles on Fedora 31. Yes, I know asking the legal team about releasing previously-nonfree code with a GPLish licence is difficult.

Cumulus Networks unveils updates to its Linux OS and NetQ

Cumulus Networks announced on Monday that it has released Cumulus Linux 4.0, which is its network operating system (OS), and version 2.4 of its NetQ network operations toolset. Cumulus Networks' Partho Mishra, president and chief product officer, said Cumulus Linux 4.0 and NetQ 2.4 are key elements in the company's ongoing efforts to enable its customers' automation efforts across data centers and campus networks. "From a solutions standpoint, our focus has been on developing automation and the capabilities that our customers are going after to make their data centers run like an AWS or Google," Mishra said. "The biggest thing they focus on is automation and they've made big strides working with us and using their own resources."