today's leftovers

• Want Social Justice? The Free Software Movement Fights For Everyone!

  Everyone wants freedom but most people have no idea just how enslaved they have become to their computing devices and the proprietary software that controls those devices. The Free Software Movement aims to spread awareness of this issue and to advocate for the use of freedom-respecting software ("free software").

• Participate in Hacktoberfest, Help Develop Contributions

  The month-long, virtual-festival event that celebrates open source contributions, Hacktoberfest, is coming soon and members of the openSUSE community can make a difference. The event that is in its seventh year and run by Digital Ocean and DEV encourages people to make their first contributions to open source projects. The event is for developers, designers who contribute artwork, people who can contribute to documentation,and more. As the event brings more awareness to open-source projects and encourages contributions that benefit communities, having developers and community members available to help people who want to contribute can be beneficial to the project.

• Are universities spending enough on cybersecurity? [iophk: Windows TCO]

  Such attacks “will absolutely continue”, said Mark Ford, who leads higher education risk and financial advisory services for the audit firm Deloitte. As higher education becomes known as an “easy target”, this increasingly “attracts the bad guys”, he explained.

  The threat comes not just from criminals seeking money. Universities now house arguably the most valuable secrets on earth – plans for a coronavirus vaccine – putting them in the sights of state-backed [cr]ackers. In July, UK, US and Canadian intelligence services warned that Russian groups were attempting to target Covid-19 vaccine research and development.

  This raises the question: are universities doing enough to defend themselves against [cr]acking?

• vScaler Integrates SLURM with GigaIO FabreX for Elastic HPC Cloud Device Scaling

• vScaler Announces SLURM integration with GigaIO FabreX

  The additional integration of the SLURM workload manager, an open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels, means that vScaler Cloud users can request traditional resources like memory and compute cores to be available for jobs.

• Profiling slow-running queries in Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)

  Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. You can use the same MongoDB 3.6 application code, drivers, and tools to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. As a document database, Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy to store, query, and index JSON data. AWS built Amazon DocumentDB to uniquely solve your challenges around availability, performance, reliability, durability, scalability, backup, and more. In doing so, we built several tools, like the profiler, to help you run analyze your workload on Amazon DocumentDB. The profiler gives you the ability to log the time and details of slow-running operations on your cluster. In this post, we show you how to use the profiler in Amazon DocumentDB to analyze slow-running queries to identify bottlenecks and improve individual query performance and overall cluster performance.

Programming Leftovers

• Self-publishing and the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps

  Five years, 834 commits, and 24 major revisions later, I've just published the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps, a book which has now sold over 60,000 copies and spawned a popular free Ansible 101 video series on YouTube.

• Open Standards Are Simple

  If you want to create a truly open standard, you _need_ to make it simple.

  There are no exceptions to this rule. When a standard becomes harder to fully implement than what your average motivated programmer can do in two months (max!), it _shouldn't_ be considered "open" anymore.

  Why?

• In Which COVID-19 Misinformation Leads To A Bunch of Graphs Made With Rust

  A funny — and by funny, I mean sad — thing has happened. Recently the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) has been analyzing data from the patchwork implementation of mask requirements in Kansas. They came to a conclusion that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone: masks help. They published a chart showing this. A right-wing propaganda publication got ahold of this, and claimed the numbers were “doctored” because there were two-different Y-axes. I set about to analyze the data myself from public sources, and produced graphs of various kinds using a single Y-axis and supporting the idea that the graphs were not, in fact, doctored. Here’s one graph that’s showing that: In order to do that, I had imported COVID-19 data from various public sources. Many states in the US are large enough to have significant variation in COVID-19 conditions, and many of the source people look at don’t show county-level data over time. I wanted to do that.

• Basics of Working with the SQLite Database in Python

  A database is one of the most useful and popular files for storing data; they can be used to store any kind of data, including text, numbers, images, binary data, files, etc. SQLite is a relational database management system based on the SQL language. It is a C library, and it provides an API to work with other programming languages, including Python. It does not require a separate server process to be run as needed in large database engines like MySQL and Postgresql. It is swift and lightweight, and the entire database is stored in a single disk file, which makes it portable like CSV or other data storage files. Many applications use SQLite for internal data storage, mainly in environments like mobile devices or small applications.

• Perl 7 By Default

  Perl 7 has been announced as the next direction of Perl development. My previous blog post explored at a high level the risks and benefits of the announced direction, as well as those of a more incremental proposal. The primary and critical difference between these two approaches is the decision to change interpreter defaults in an incompatible manner. I would like to explore each of the arguments presented for this design choice.

• CY's Recent Submission for PWC(068-073)

  Skipped blogging on Perl Weekly Challenge(PWC) for a few weeks!

• SSH vs. kubectl exec

  There’s a lot of similarities between SSH and kubectl, and both have their strengths and weaknesses. While SSH is architecturally set in stone, higher-level software can learn a thing or two from Kubernetes about centralized configuration when managing a fleet of machines. See Teleport for an example of how this can be done. SSH could also borrow the credential management approach from kubeconfigs (i.e. “put all my client creds and server info into one file that I can copy around”).

  kubectl could improve on its non-shell features like port forwarding and file transfer. It’s raw data throughput is also lacking, which precludes it from becoming a transport-layer protocol like SSH. In practice, these tools are complementary and get used for different tasks, it’s not “one or the other”. I hope this post helped you learn something new about both!

• Can we do better than our C compiler?

  Today, I wanted to become a C compiler. I added a hand-compiled assembly version of echo from our previous coding exercise and added a new make target, make asm, that will assemble it. Let's look at our hand-compiled assembly and compare it to our C compiler and ask whether or not it was worth it.

• Benign Data Races Considered Harmful

  The series of posts about so called benign data races stirred a lot of controversy and led to numerous discussions at the startup I was working at called Corensic. Two bastions formed, one claiming that no data race was benign, and the other claiming that data races were essential for performance. Then it turned out that we couldn’t even agree on the definition of a data race. In particular, the C++11 definition seemed to deviate from the established notions.

• Micronaut 2.0 Full-Stack Java Framework Released

  The Micronaut framework uses Java's annotation processors, which work with any JVM language that supports them, as well as an HTTP server and client built on the Netty non-blocking I/O client server framework. To provide a programming model similar to Spring and Grails, these annotation processors pre-compile the required metadata to perform DI, define AOP proxies, and configure applications to run in a low-memory environment, the company says. Many of the APIs in Micronaut were "heavily inspired" by Spring and Grails," which was by design and aids in bringing developers up to speed quickly," the company says.

• Understanding computer vision and AI, part 1

  An active area in the field of computer vision is object detection, where the goal is to not only localize objects of interest within an image but also assign a label to each of these objects of interest. Considerable recent successes in the area of object detection stem from modern advances in deep learning, particularly leveraging deep convolutional neural networks. Much of the initial focus was on improving accuracy, leading to increasingly more complex object detection networks such as SSD, R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, and other extended variants of these networks. While such networks demonstrated state-of-the-art object detection performance, they were very challenging, if not impossible, to deploy on edge and mobile devices due to computational and memory constraints. This greatly limits the widespread adoption for a wide range of applications such as robotics, video surveillance, autonomous driving where local embedded processing is required. [...] Model Evaluation is an integral part of the model development process. It helps to find the best model that represents our data and how well the chosen model performs on unseen data. To improve the model we tune the hyper-parameters; parameter that determines the network structure (number of neurons in the network, network activation functions) or training parameter (gradient descent learning rate, adding parameters like momentum in the weight update rule). Tuning those parameters is an inevitable and important step to obtain better performance. Methods like GridSearch and RandomizedSearch can be used to navigate through the different parameters.

• Qt Design Studio 1.6 Beta released

  We are happy to announce the beta release of Qt Design Studio 1.6 Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and develop complex UIs. Both designers and developers use Qt Design Studio and this makes collaboration between the two a lot simpler and more streamlined. To get an impression, you should watch this video.

Raspberry Pi Projects and News

• Mini Raspberry Pi Boston Dynamics–inspired robot

• Portable Raspberry Pi Thermal Camera Can Read Your Temperature at a Distance

  Best of all, the final build is completely portable. It features a Raspberry Pi, a Pimoroni MLX90640 thermal camera, battery bank and a touchscreen display housed inside a single, custom case.

• Building a Raspberry Pi Thermal Imaging Camera – MLX90640 guide

  The MLX90640 features a 32×24 array of thermal sensors, can operate from -40 degrees Celsius to 300 degrees Celsius, and is accurate to within 1 degree. It’s also very compact, which ties into my other objective.

  Making something portable, I wanted to be able to take this around and use it without being tied down to finding a power plug. This whole unit actually runs from a portable battery bank. In my (limited!) testing, I was able to get around 2 hours of use from a 10000Mah battery bank with the camera running.