Sharing and Free Software Leftovers
-
You want Photoshop-like features without the Photoshop-like price tag, and, for that, there’s Gimp. Free, open-source, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, this powerful tool can be used by graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators alike.
-
Dear all,
I am happy to announce the availability of Gnuastro 0.14. For the full
list of added and changed/improved features, see the excerpt of the
NEWS file for this release in [1] below.
Gnuastro is an official GNU package, consisting of various
command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and
analysis of (astronomical) data. All the programs share the same basic
command-line user interface (modeled on GNU Coreutils). For the full
list of Gnuastro's library, programs, and a comprehensive general
tutorial (recommended place to start using Gnuastro), please see the
links below respectively:
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html
The most prominent new feature may be the new Query program (called
with 'astquery'). It allows you to directly query many large
astronomical data centers (currently VizieR, NED, ESA and ASTRON) and
only download your selected columns/rows. For example with the command
below you can download the RA, Dec and Parallax of all stars in the
Gaia eDR3 dataset (from VizieR) that overlap with your
'image.fits'. You just have to change '--dataset' to access any of the
+20,000 datasets within VizieR for example! You can also search in the
dataset metadata from the command-line, and much more.
astquery vizier --dataset=gaiaedr3 --overlapwith=image.fits \
--column=RAJ2000,DEJ2000,Plx
See the new "Query" section in the Gnuastro book for more:
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Query.html
Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for this
release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the validity
of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature (*.sig) see [3]:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz (3.6MB)
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz (5.6MB)
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz.sig (833B)
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz.sig (833B)
Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:
30d77e2ad1c03d4946d06e4062252969 gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz
f3ddbc4b5763ec2742f9080d42b69ed3 gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz
cfbcd4b9ae1c5c648c5dc266d638659f0117c816 gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz
4e4c6b678095d2838f77b2faae584ea51df2d33c gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz
I am very grateful to (in alphabetic order) Pedram Ashofteh Ardakani,
Thérèse Godefroy, Raúl Infante-Sainz, Sachin Kumar Singh, Samane Raji
and Zahra Sharbaf for directly contributing to the source of Gnuastro
since the last alpha-release. It is great that in this release we have
an equal gender balance in the contributors. I sincerely hope this can
continue in the next release :-).
I am also very grateful to (in alphabetic order) Antonio Diaz Diaz,
Paul Eggert, Andrés García-Serra Romero, Thérèse Godefroy, Bruno
Haible, Martin Kuemmel, Javier Licandro, Alireza Molaeinezhad, Javier
Moldon, Sebastian Luna Valero, Samane Raji, Alberto Madrigal, Carlos
Morales Socorro, Francois Ochsenbein, Joanna Sakowska, Zahra Sharbaf,
Sachin Kumar Singh, Ignacio Trujillo and Xiuqin Wu for their very
useful comments, suggestions and bug fixes that have now been
implemented in Gnuastro since the last alpha-release.
If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment
guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can
be different for different programs, so run it for all the programs
you use). Citations _and_ acknowledgments are vital for the continued
work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget to support us by doing so.
This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note
that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these
are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only
mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
Texinfo 6.7
Autoconf 2.70
Automake 1.16.2
Help2man 1.47.17
ImageMagick 7.0.10-59
Gnulib v0.1-4396-g3b732e789
Autoconf archives v2019.01.06-98-gefa6f20
The dependencies to build Gnuastro from this tarball on your system
are described here:
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html
Best wishes,
Mohammad
-
In the future, I would like to start contributing more with others teams, and with TDF in order to help increase LibreOffice’s success. In my opinion, LibreOffice needs to be better known – we have a great free office solution that attends the majority of the requirements of the general public, but, at least in Brazil, many people are not aware of this!
-
Awards of up to EUR 5000 are available for finding security vulnerabilities in Element, Moodle and Zimbra, open source solutions used by public services across the European Union. There is a 20% bonus for providing a code fix for the bugs they discover.
-
Amazon states that their forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases, version 7.10. “We will publish new GitHub repositories in the next few weeks. In time, both will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic. We’re in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices—including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors,” the announcement says.
-
In a play to convert users of their open source projects into paying customers, today Elastic announced that they are changing the license of both Elasticsearch and Kibana from the open source Apache v2 license to Server Side Public License (SSPL). If your organisation uses the open source versions of either Elasticsearch or Kibana in its products or projects, it is now at risk of being forced to release its intellectual property under terms dictated by another.
-
If there is a modern equivalent to Encyclopédie for cultural impact, scale of content, and controversy, it’s surely Wikipedia, the free open-source online encyclopedia run by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Started by entrepreneurs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15th, 2001, it has since grown to become one of the world’s top 15 websites with a vast database of 55 million articles in 317 languages, as well as a family of related projects covering everything from travel guides to recipes. Beloved of geeks, friend to lazy students and journalists alike, and bane to procrastinators, it celebrates its 20th birthday this month.
It’s hard to overstate just how much information is on Wikipedia. You can instantly find the average July temperature in Lisbon, the difference between an ale and a lager, the historical background to the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, or the full list of 10 ways a batsman can be out in cricket. The illustrated article on aguaxima includes far more information than Diderot’s effort, and readers can find a far more accurate article on religion in Sweden. These articles all link to their sources, so a reader can do their own fact-checking.
There is one more crucial difference between Encyclopédie and Wikipedia, though. Encyclopédie’s subscribers needed to pay 280 livres for it, far beyond the wages of an ordinary person. But anyone who can afford a device with an Internet connection can access Wikipedia wherever they go. This accessibility was game-changing.
| Programming Leftovers
-
The Borne Again Shell (BASH) has a lot of great features that it borrows from other shells and even from some programming languages. It was created in the late 1980s in a response to a lacking in the current available shells on Berkley Distributions (BSD), and the predecessor to Linux, GNU. BASH features numerous in-built features such as in-line scripting capabilities like brace expansion, which we are going to examine today.
-
Perl uses a simple form of garbage collection (GC) called reference counting. Every variable created by a Perl program has a refcnt associated with it. If the program creates a reference to the variable, Perl increments its refcnt. Whenever Perl exits a block it reclaims any variables that belong to the block scope. If any are references, their referenced values’ refcnt are either decremented or they’re reclaimed as well if no other references to them remain.
-
URL encoding is a pretty simple thing, and has been around forever. Yet, it is associated with a significant fraction of bugs in web frameworks, libraries, and applications. Why is that? Is there a larger lesson here?
-
.gitlab-ci.yml supports 'image' to allow selecting in which environment the script gets run. The documentation says "Used to specify a Docker image to use for the job", but it's clearly a bug in the documentation, because we can do it with nspawn-runner, too.
It turns out that most of the environment variables available to CI runs are also available to custom runner scripts. In this case, the value passed as image can be found as $CUSTOM_ENV_CI_JOB_IMAGE in the custom runner scripts environment.
-
The communication and data transfer between the front end and backend of any application occurs through APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are many different types of APIs used to communicate between the front and back-end applications like RESTful API, SOAP API, GraphQL API, etc. The GraphQL API is a relatively new technology, and it is much faster than other types of APIs available. Fetching data from the database using GraphQL api is much faster than the REST API. While using GraphQL API, the client has control to fetch only the required data instead of getting all the details; that is why GraphQL API works faster than REST API.
-
Today, I had installed PHP 7.3 and phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system. I am using MariaDB as database server running on the same instance. When I tried to access data in tables using phpMyAdmin got the following error message on screen.
-
In C++, a class is a set of variables and functions that have been configured to work together. When the variables of the class are given values, an object is obtained. An object has the same variables and functions as a class, but this time, the variables have values. Many objects can be created from one class. One object differs from another object according to the different set of values assigned to the variables of the other object. Creating an object from a class is said to be instantiating the object. Even if two different objects have the same values for their variables, these objects are different entities, identified by different names in the program. The variables for an object and its corresponding class are called data members. The functions of an object and its corresponding class are called member functions. Data members and member functions are called members.
The word access means to read or change the value of a variable, and it also means to use a function. C++ access specifiers are the words, “private,” “protected,” and “public.” They decide whether a member can access other members of its class, or if a function or operator outside the class and not belonging to the class can access any member of the class. They also decide whether a member of a derived (child) class can access a member of a parent class.
Basic knowledge of C++ is required to understand this article and to test the code provided.
-
Whoever you ask how to build software properly will come up with Make as one of the answers. On GNU/Linux systems, GNU Make [1] is the Open-Source version of the original Make that was released more than 40 years ago — in 1976. Make works with a Makefile — a structured plain text file with that name that can be best described as the construction manual for the software building process. The Makefile contains a number of labels (called targets) and the specific instructions needed to be executed to build each target.
Simply speaking, Make is a build tool. It follows the recipe of tasks from the Makefile. It allows you to repeat the steps in an automated fashion rather than typing them in a terminal (and probably making mistakes while typing).
Listing 1 shows an example Makefile with the two targets “e1” and “e2” as well as the two special targets “all” and “clean.” Running “make e1” executes the instructions for target “e1” and creates the empty file one. Running “make e2” does the same for target “e2” and creates the empty file two. The call of “make all” executes the instructions for target e1 first and e2 next. To remove the previously created files one and two, simply execute the call “make clean.”
-
Zeal is billed as a simple offline documentation browser. It offers easy access to a huge database of documentation, API manuals, and code snippets.
The main purpose of the software is to enable you to have reference documentation at your fingertips. Let’s see how it fares.
|
Isn't that Google's Summer of Code?
I don't know the details, whether accepted applicants are paid or not, but isn't that along the lines of Google's "Summer of Code" project each year?
Or, I think you are suggesting a challenge such as "make a program that does X" and have a pot of money for the first person to build one (and meets specifications and usability)?
What will happen regarding support afterward? It's easier to build a program that does something, but to build a program that does something AND can be maintained without re-writing each time is slightly different.
I like the idea, though! Might even be able to get the big-boys to pitch in money (no strings attached of course).
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
Linux means Freedom, problem is most users don't know what it is, or how to use it.
summer of code
is a time limited session for development.
This is a year round thing that will be open to anyone who wants to code.
As for what happens afterward, well, if it's a solid apps and it works well in a niche that people respond well to, then I can see it being picked up by a big boy or a project of people coming to support it as many others have done in the past.
re: Bounty
Bounties never work. Mainly because the bounties never add up to more then pocket change - therefore you're always getting the equivalent to the lowest bidder working on the cheapest solution.
I agree, that does happen alot.
But, I have seen things come together when no one expected them to also.
I just think it's worth a shot with a well organized group and a coordinated effort.
re: Optimists
Optimists - they're like the guy who keeps trying to pound in the finishing nail with a 20 lb sledge (cause ya know, it will just take a "tap" that way) - it will never happen - but boy does it feel so good when they finally stop.
So good luck on the bounty project - I'm sure it's just a case of 5,392,843rd times the charm.
optimism - idealism
it's what OpenSource and Linux are partly about.
Doing things the way they 'could' be, 'should' be done.
It's about setting goals and looking for the best in others.
Sure, there are a lot of pessimistic people who have had life kick them in the rear one too many times to be comfortable with looking on the bright side of things, but that doesn't mean people should stop trying to do better.
it just means we have to accept that there are some folks who who too self absorbed to be concerned about the group as a whole and people like that will have to be accounted for in the whole works.
and, really, thanks for the good wish, now all we need are the good people who believe it can happen if they put their minds to it.