today's leftovers

• Distro Hopping Doesn't Make Sense Too Me - YouTube

  I've been using Arch Linux since I first started with Linux and the idea of distro hopping jas just never appealed to me, not to say that I'll never leave Arch it's just that swapping for the sake of swapping seems kind of weird.

• Quick Unboxing of my new Thelio Major

  I decided to show off the unboxing my my new desktop - I purchased a new Thelio Major desktop from System76. This particular unboxing was very awkward, the box was very tall and hard to position with my tripod. So please excuse the overall clumsiness of this entire video.

• Run an Edge AI K3s Cluster on NVIDIA Jetson Nano Boards

  For several years I have worked with customers who wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI) in their products (mostly embedded hardware) but ended up relying on the cloud. With the advances of embedded platforms in recent years, this dependency is gradually disappearing, giving rise to the so-called Edge AI.

• Traditional doesn’t mean staid: how banks should be innovating today

  When looking into a fiduciary for your assets, a bank with a long-standing history may seem like a stable, trustworthy choice. However, that very legacy may be one of the reasons large banks lose out to the competition in an age where customers are expecting open, quick, and real-time banking. Not unique to banks, big companies have a challenge of navigating legacies. These legacies do not just pertain to mainframes with monoliths on them, but also how they work. Along with their associates, senior managers should also show a desire to change. It’s harder to move fast if you are huge, but embracing an open culture from the top down can be a good starting point. I’ve seen huge amounts of talent, smart people, and big budgets hindered by a staid way of working. The strategy still needs to come from the top, but everyone should be enabled—and perhaps more importantly, empowered—to contribute. Regulations have forced banks to be more siloed, and now they continue to operate like that because it is easier, and traceable. IT in a bank was merely a cost center, a service provider until about 10 years ago. Technology was never an enabler, but seen as a cost-sink. We’re still struggling with this mindset today, even though we have continuously seen how technology can be a competitive differentiator. Large banks often don’t know where to start with some of their legacy, often the product of mergers and acquisitions. Then, you throw in a pandemic, during which the world of banking had to transform at a rapid pace to expand digital banking and chatbot services, and it ends up being a lot to take on all at once for large institutions. It can feel easier to keep legacy systems in place to stay afloat. Traditional banks still need help with faster transaction times, integrating artificial intelligence to improve the customer experience, and implementing agile ways of working for their IT teams. The hurdle lies in figuring out a way to get started. As a customer, I saw this innovation from Red Hat.

• Quick-publishing of poudriere packages

  An essential tool in the FreeBSD porter’s arsenal (“porters” are the people who package third-party software, software like KDE Plasma, Haskell, ..) is poudriere, which is an evolution of the old tinderbox. It leverages ZFS and FreeBSD jails to do clean, consistent builds even on an otherwise occupied workstation, and can build for OS versions and architectures you’re not even running. Using the packages you’ve built can be slightly harder, so here’s some notes. Poudriere has a chapter in the porter’s handbook. There are straightfoward guides to setting it up, also on DigitalOcean. Most of those guides describe setting up nginx to serve the lovely and detailed build progress and results. I tend to follow the build progress in konsole, so I’m not interested in that part. What I do need to do is serve the resulting packages to other machines on my local network (e.g. my laptop) so that everything can enjoy the latest packages. That is doubly useful when trying out things like KDE Plasma on Wayland on FreeBSD, which needs plenty of testing and doesn’t work on all my hardware. tl;dr Install lighttpd, write 2-line configuration file, run lighttpd; on client, configure pkg to use what lighttpd serves.

• Intel Already Started Working On Linux Driver Code For Lunar Lake - Phoronix

  While Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop processors are launching this month, Intel's open-source Linux driver developers known for their punctual support are already preparing early code around their 14th Gen "Lunar Lake" platform. Intel's punctual open-source/Linux support across desktop, mobile, and server platforms is one of the strong selling points for those preferring to use something on their PC besides Windows (Intel normally also does more for BSD/FreeBSD than other vendors as well). A year ago Intel began upstreaming their Rocket Lake Linux enablement code and that was quickly followed by Alder Lake, which we'll hopefully see launch before the end of the calendar year. Towards the end of 2020 Intel open-source developers were already working on the initial support around Meteor Lake while now as we end Q1'2021, there are patches beginning to surface for Lunar Lake, the successor to Meteor Lake and what will be Intel's 14th Gen client processors.

Free Software Leftovers

• The Brave Browser Will Launch Its Own Search Engine

  Google is so synonymous with searching the Internet that it’s become a verb. There are other companies and some browsers that have developed their own search engines, but none of them have really been able to compete. The company behind the Brave browser intends to change that. It’s launching the Brave search engine. [...] Eich says Brave Search already has a waitlist for its launch in the first half of 2021 and vows not to track or profile users. “Brave already has a default anonymous user model with no data collection at all,” boasts the Brave founder. The search engine will do the same – IP addresses will not be collected. His company is exploring how to have both a paid no-ads search engine and a free one supported by ads.

• Trying Brave Browser. Will it win me over?

  So many people have suggested that I try Brave instead of Firefox. So here's my trying it out. Will it earn my undying affection as it has so many others?

• MIT/GNU Scheme version 11.2 is released

  This includes a bunch of bug fixes to 11.1, but is otherwise the same. Download from the usual place.

• LibreOffice QA/Dev Report: February 2021

• NGI POINTER offers funding for internet/web architects

  The NGI POINTER organization, which is funded by the European Commission, has put out its second open call for providing development/research funding; the first open call was in April 2020. This time around, the organization is looking for individuals or projects that are working on "changing the Internet and Web with European Values at its core". The goal is to "support promising bottom-up projects that are able to build, on top of state-of-the-art research, scalable protocols and tools to assist in the practical transition or migration to new or updated technologies, whilst keeping European Values at the core". Those interested may want to look at some of the previously funded projects; more information can also be found in the Work Programme [PDF].

• How Open Source Makes SAP More Manageable [Ed: SUSE now doing shameless openwashing of proprietary software of SAP]

  SAP continues to help drive the digital transformation of tens of thousands of companies of all sizes and sectors. In fact, SAP software touches nearly every aspect of how modern businesses are run. And with continued improvements to the platform, SAP is helping businesses to constantly move forward, to make them more capable, powerful, and agile.

Programming Leftovers

• Fedora Magazine: How to use Poetry to manage your Python projects on Fedora

  Python developers often create a new virtual environment to separate project dependencies and then manage them with tools such as pip, pipenv, etc. Poetry is a tool for simplifying dependency management and packaging in Python. This post will show you how to use Poetry to manage your Python projects on Fedora. Unlike other tools, Poetry uses only a single configuration file for dependency management, packaging, and publishing. This eliminates the need for different files such as Pipfile, MANIFEST.in, setup.py, etc. It is also faster than using multiple tools. Detailed below is a brief overview of commands used when getting started with Poetry.

• Rakudo Weekly News: 2021.10 Automated Star

  Patrick Spek has announced the release of the Rakudo Star 2021.02.1 package (based on the 2021.02.1 Rakudo Compiler release). This is the first time this has happened using a Github Action workflow. Binary releases are not yet available: like everything in the Raku Programming Language, it is the work of volunteers. To create MacOS and Windows installable packages, a volunteer is needed to create the Github Actions workflow for MacOS and/or Windows! The advantage being that this way, you would only need to do this once instead of for each release! So please, stand up if you have the know-how and time to do it!

• Git Reset to Remote Head – How to Reset a Remote Branch to Origin

  Branching is a core concept in Git. It can help you set up a distributed workflow for team collaboration and makes your development process more efficient. When you're using version control and you're distributing features across branches, there's a lot of communication between your local computer and your online repository on GitHub. During this process, you might need to reset back to the project's original copy. If resetting a branch scares you, then don't worry – this article will introduce you to remote branches, remote head, and how you can easily reset a remote branch to remote head.

• Sparse Arrays vs Dense Arrays in JavaScript — Explained with Examples

  I had a really interesting bug recently that, at first glance, completely stumped me.

• Ravgeet Dhillon: Turn a Google Sheet into a REST API

  What if we can use our Google Sheets as a CMS? What if we want the data in our Google Sheet to be publicly available. This can be done easily using Google Sheets and Google Apps Script. In this blog, we will take a look at how we can convert a Google Sheet into a REST API and access it publicly from any app we want. [...] Let us send a GET request to our published Web App using Postman. The path for the GET request would be our Web App’s URL and query parameter path set to our Google Sheet’s name.

• Use Scheme functional programming language with LambdaChip Alonzo STM32 board

  Most MCU-based embedded systems come with firmware programmed with assembler, C, and/or C++. But as referenced in a paper published in 2000 entitled ” Point of view: Lisp as an alternative to Java“, functional programming languages like Lisp or Scheme may lead to shorter development times compared to C/C++ or Java. That’s with this idea in mind that LambdaChip was created. It is a lightweight, open-source virtual machine designed to run on embedded systems with limited resources, for instance, an 80MHz microcontroller with 50KB RAM, and programmable with Scheme multi-paradigm programming language, a dialect of Lisp widely used for functional programming research and teaching. The company behind the project, also called LambdaChip, has just created its own hardware with LambdaChip Alonzo, an STM32 Cortex-M4 development board with 512KB flash, 128KB RAM, and that also comes with Bluetooth LE connectivity.

• What’s coming in Java 16

  Java 16 is scheduled to be released on March 16. Here is a look at what changes you can expect in the release. JEP 338: Vector API (Incubator) This Java Enhancement Proposal (JEP) will provide an initial iteration of an incubator module that can express vector calculations that are compiled at runtime. This module will be clear and concise, platform agnostic, have reliable runtime compilation and performance on x64 and AArch64 architectures, and offer graceful degradation when a vector computation cannot be fully expressed, the OpenJDK team explained.

• 10 questions for modernizing your old Java applications

  I recently open sourced an application modernization sample, which demonstrates how to modernize an old (2010) Java EE application to become a modern (2021) cloud-native application.