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Programming Leftovers

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Development

  • A Major Contribution to Learning R

    Prominent statistician Frank Harrell has come out with a radically new R tutorial, rflow. The name is short for “R workflow,” but I call it “R in a box” –everything one needs for beginning serious usage of R, starting from little or no background.

    By serious usage I mean real applications in which the user has a substantial computational need. This could be a grad student researcher, a person who needs to write data reports for her job, or simply a person who is doing personal analysis such as stock picking.

    Like other tutorials/books, rflow covers data manipulation, generation of tables and graphics, etc. But UNLIKE many others, rflow empowers the user to handle general issues as they inevitably pop up, as opposed to just teaching a few basic, largely ungeneralizable operations. I’ve criticized the tidyverse in particular for that latter problem, but really no tutorial, including my own, has this key “R in a box” quality.

  • The deep learning obesity crisis - Vincent Lequertier's blog

    Deep learning have made dramatic improvements over the last decades. Part of this is attributed to improved methods that allowed training wider and deeper neural networks. This can also be attributed to better hardware, as well as the development of techniques to use this hardware efficiently. All of this leads to neural networks that grow exponentially in size. But is continuing down this path the best avenue for success?

    Deep learning models have gotten bigger and bigger. The figure below shows the accuracy of convolutional neural networks (left) and the size and number of parameters used for the Imagenet competition (right). While the accuracy is increasing and reaching impressive levels, the models get both bigger and use more and more resources. In Schwartz et al., 2020, as a result of rewarding more accuracy than efficiency, it is stated that the amount of compute have increased 300k-fold in 6 years which implies environmental costs as well as increasing the barrier to entry in the field.

  • Mint: A New Programming Language for Building Single Page Apps (SPAs)

    Mint is a refreshing programming language for the front-end web development. It is developed and maintained by a large community of experienced developers.

  • Understanding Have I Been Pwned's Use of SHA-1 and k-Anonymity

    Four and a half years ago now, I rolled out version 2 of HIBP's Pwned Passwords that implemented a really cool k-anonymity model courtesy of the brains at Cloudflare. Later in 2018, I did the same thing with the email address search feature used by Mozilla, 1Password and a handful of other paying subscribers. It works beautifully; it's ridiculously fast, efficient and above all, anonymous.

More in Tux Machines

today's howtos

  • How to Change Comment Color in Vim – Fix Unreadable Blue Color

    Are you annoyed about the comment color in vim? The dark blue color of the comment is often hard to read. In this tutorial, we learn how to change the comment color in Vim. There are few methods we can use to look vim comment very readable.

  • How to Add Repository to Debian

    APT checks the health of all the packages, and dependencies of the package before installing it. APT fetches packages from one or more repositories. A repository (package source) is basically a network server. The term "package" refers to an individual file with a .deb extension that contains either all or part of an application. The normal installation comes with default repositories configured, but these contain only a few packages out of an ocean of free software available. In this tutorial, we learn how to add the package repository to Debian.

  • Making a Video of a Single Window

    I recently wanted to send someone a video of a program doing some interesting things in a single X11 window. Recording the whole desktop is easy (some readers may remember my post on Aeschylus which does just that) but it will include irrelevant (and possibly unwanted) parts of the screen, leading to unnecessarily large files. I couldn't immediately find a tool which did what I wanted on OpenBSD [1] but through a combination of xwininfo, FFmpeg, and hk I was able to put together exactly what I needed in short order. Even better, I was able to easily post-process the video to shrink its file size, speed it up, and contort it to the dimension requirements of various platforms. Here's a video straight out of the little script I put together: [...]

  • Things You Can And Can’t Do

    And it got me thinking about what you can and can’t do — what you do and don’t have control over.

  • allow-new-zones in BIND 9.16 on CentOS 8 Stream under SELinux

    We run these training systems with SELinux enabled (I wouldn’t, but my colleague likes it :-), and that’s the reason I aborted the lab: I couldn’t tell students how to solve the cause other than by disabling SELinux entirely, but there wasn’t enough time for that.

  • Will the IndieWeb Ever Become Mainstream?

    This is an interesting question, thanks for asking it, Jeremy. I do have some history with the IndieWeb, and some opinions, so let’s dive in.

    The short answer to the question is a resounding no, and it all boils down to the fact that the IndieWeb is really complicated to implement, so it will only ever appeal to developers.

  • How to Install CUPS Print Server on Ubuntu 22.04

    If your business has multiple personal computers in the network which need to print, then we need a device called a print server. Print server act intermediate between PC and printers which accept print jobs from PC and send them to respective printers. CUPS is the primary mechanism in the Unix-like operating system for printing and print services. It can allow a computer to act as a Print server. In this tutorial, we learn how to set up CUPS print server on Ubuntu 22.04.

Open Hardware: XON/XOFF and Raspberry Pi Pico

  • From XON/XOFF to Forward Incremental Search

    In the olden days of computing, software flow control with control codes XON and XOFF was a necessary feature that dumb terminals needed to support. When a terminal received more data than it could display, there needed to be a way for the terminal to tell the remote host to pause sending more data. The control code 19 was chosen for this. The control code 17 was chosen to tell the remote host to resume transmission of data.

  • Raspberry Pi Pico Used in Plug and Play System Monitor | Tom's Hardware

    Dmytro Panin is at it again, creating a teeny system monitor for his MacBook from scratch with help from our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico. This plug-and-play system monitor (opens in new tab) lets him keep a close eye on resource usage without having to close any windows or launch any third-party programs. The device is Pico-powered and plugs right into the MacBook to function. It has a display screen that showcases a custom GUI featuring four bar graphs that update in real-time to show the performance of different components, including the CPU, GPU, memory, and SSD usage. It makes it possible to see how hard your PC is running at a glance.

Security Leftovers

How to Apply Accent Colour in Ubuntu Desktop

A step-by-step tutorial on how to apply accent colour in Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) with tips for Kubuntu and others. Read more