Programming Leftovers
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Cracking the Spotify Code
Spotify offers a little picture that, when scanned, opens almost anything searchable with Spotify. Several lines are centered on the Spotify logo with eight different heights, storing information in octal. Many visual encoding schemes encode some URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that provides a unique identifier for that specific song, album, or artist when decoded. Since many URIs on Spotify are pretty long (one example being spotify :show:3NRV0mhZa8xeRT0EyLPaIp which clocks in at 218 bits), some mechanism is needed to compress the URIs down to something more manageable. Enter the media reference, a short sequence encoding a specific URI, generally under 40 bits. The reference is just a lookup in a database that Spotify maintains, so it requires a network connection to resolve. The actual encoding scheme from media reference to the values in the bars is quite complex involving CRC, convolution, and puncturing. The CRC allows the program to check for correct decoding, and the convolution enables the program to have a small number of read errors while still having an accurate result. Puncturing is just removing bits to reduce the numbers encoded, relying on convolution to fill in the holes.
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Day 7: Neural Nets in Raku (Part 1) – Raku Advent Calendar
Thinky the Elf was sitting in his office, it had been a closet but he’d been given it as his office after the great baked beans incident. It wasn’t his fault. He was right that feeding the reindeer beans would give them a jet boost but Santa had not been all that happy about it. And his tendency to stare of into space while suddenly having a thought wasn’t great while working on the shop floor meant it was safer to put him out of the way to do some thinking.
Recently he’d been thinking about how to sort children into naughty or nice. This was Santa’s big job all year and Thinky thought that there must be a way to simplify it, he’d spent some time watching videos on YouTube and there was one that gave a brilliant description of Neural Networks (jump to 20 minutes for that bit but it’s an interesting video). As Thinky watched this he couldn’t help thinking about Raku and how the connections between nodes felt like Supplies.
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Rblpapi 0.3.12: Fixes and Updates
The Rblp team is happy to announce a new version 0.3.12 of Rblpapi which just arrived at CRAN. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required).
This is the twelveth release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. Changes are detailed below and include both extensions to functionality, actual bug fixes and changes to the package setup. Special thanks goes to Michael Kerber, Yihui Xie and Kai Lin for contributing pull requests!
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LLVM Now Has "Official" Support For Targeting NEC's Vector Engine (VE) - Phoronix
The LLVM compiler infrastructure supports not only a growing number of CPU architectures but continues to lead when it comes to its support for different accelerators. Back in 2019 NEC was working to upstream their SX-Aurora VE "Vector Engine" Accelerator and now as of this week that target is considered officially supported upstream.
NEC originally launched the SX-Aurora Vector Engine (VE) back in 2018 as a PCI Express accelerator card and supporting up to eight vector processors per server. The NEC SX-Aurora has its own architecture for the "VE" and is backed by HBM2 memory. The current VE processor is rated for 1.53 TB/s of memory bandwidth and a double precision peak performance of 3.07 TFLOPS or 4.91 single precision TFLOPS.
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5 Excellent Free Books to Learn CSS - LinuxLinks
Web pages are built with HTML, which specifies the content of a page. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a separate language which specifies a page’s appearance.
CSS code is made of static rules. Each rule takes one or more selectors and gives specific values to a number of visual properties. Those properties are then applied to the page elements indicated by the selectors.
Here’s our recommended books to learn CSS.
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digiKam 7.7.0 is releasedAfter three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. |
Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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