today's leftovers

• Protect your privacy and the environment while upgrading your gear

  ...Ubuntu Linux may be one method.

• Frictional Games' Amnesia: The Dark Descent , A Machine for Pigs are now open source

• What would a global open organization look like? [Ed: Openwashing corporations under the guise of "collaboration"]

  We all have identities formed in part by the groups in which we participate—sports teams, religious groups, regions, and nationalities. We tend to promote and support those that we identify with. So how might we develop an identity for a new, global organization that welcomes open participation in solving global issues?

• What Apple’s Fortnite Fee Battle Is Really About

  The Supreme Court last year allowed to proceed a consumer-driven class-action lawsuit charging that Apple violates antitrust laws with its App Store commissions, thus inflating app prices. European officials have opened an antitrust investigation into Apple over its App Store operations. Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, along with other tech titans, was hauled before Congress over the summer to talk primarily about the App Store as part of a panel on antitrust.

• Inside eBay’s Cockroach Cult: The Ghastly Story of a Stalking Scandal

  “People are basically good” was eBay’s founding principle. But in the deranged summer of 2019, prosecutors say, a campaign to terrorize a blogger crawled out of a dark place in the corporate soul.

Programming Leftovers

• Joachim Breitner: Learn Haskell on CodeWorld writing Sokoban

  Two years ago, I held the CIS194 minicourse on Haskell at the University of Pennsylvania. In that installment of the course, I changed the first four weeks to teach the basics of Haskell using the online Haskell environment CodeWorld, and lead the students towards implementing the game Sokoban. As it is customary for CIS194, I put my lecture notes and exercises online, and this has been used as a learning resources by people from all over the world. But since I have left the University of Pennsylvania, I lost the ability to update the text, and as the CodeWorld API has evolved, some of the examples and exercises no longer work.

• SiFive Begins Adding RISC-V "Bullet" Microarchitecture Code To LLVM

  On Friday night patches began to appear for "RISC-V Bullet" in the LLVM compiler code-base. The initial work is on the scheduler being added for the RISC-V Bullet. The initial scheduler is in place for the RISC-V Bullet microarchitecture and bullet-rv32 / bullet-rv64 naming.

• Pho 1.0, Belated Release

  I was doing some disk housekeeping and noticed that my venerable image viewer, Pho, was at version 1.0pre1, and had been since 2017. It's had only very minimal changes since that time. I guess maybe it's been long enough that it's time to remove that -pre1 moniker, huh?

• GammaRay 2.11.2

  We have released version 2.11.2 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay, bringing support for Qt 5.15 and improved Qt Quick item picking. GammaRay is a software introspection tool for Qt applications developed by KDAB. Leveraging the QObject introspection mechanism it allows you to observe and manipulate your application at runtime. This works both locally on your workstation and remotely on an embedded target.

• A meta issue for modules: bug tracking

  I was reading a module on meta::cpan when I spied a small issue. I went up to the Issues link, clicked, and was sent to rt.cpan. I know that many module authors now have their modules on sites like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. Before I posted the issue on rt.cpan, I checked the author's profile for a linked account to one of the other sites. I found the module on GitHub and read the CONTRIBUTING.md to find the author does want issues reported there and not rt.cpan. I did not report my original issue, I reported the link issue instead as it seemed more important. Today is not the first time I noticed this issue with a module's bug tracking. Before continuing, I have not released a module to CPAN and am still learning all that goes into releasing one. Please be gentle if I am wrong or stating an obvious well known fact.

• Gisle Aas's CPAN distributions are available for adoption

  Gisle Aas (GAAS on CPAN) is a well-known CPAN author, who made his first releases back in 1995. Over the years he has developed and maintained a number of keystone modules that most of us have relied on, whether we realised it or not. Gisle has informed the PAUSE admins that he will no longer be maintaining his CPAN distributions, and is open to responsible adoption. In this blog post we'll summarise what distributions are available, and our interpretation of responsible adoption. If you're interested, please read this post, and if you still would like to adopt a distribution, contact the PAUSE admins (modules at perl dot org) and not Gisle.

• Firefox Nightly Flips On New JIT "Warp" Code For Greater JavaScript Performance

  Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine team have been working on a big update to their just-in-time compiler code. This big update called "Warp" is now enabled in the latest Firefox Nightly builds for offering big speed-ups. Warp aims to improve the Firefox JavaScript performance by reducing the amount of internal type information that is tracked along with other optimizations. Warp can lead to greater responsiveness and faster page load speed. Numbers cited by Warm developers are normally in the 5~15% range.

Hardware: Linux on Snapdragon and Raspberry Pi 4

• Lantronix Open-Q 865XR SoM Brings Snapdragon XR2 Processor Beyond Virtual Reality

  Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 (SXR2130P) is the latest and most powerful virtual & extended reality processor from the company and Facebook recently announced it would be found in their Oculus Quest 2 standalone VR headset.

• Independent Developers Tackling Snapdragon 630/660 SoC Support For The Upstream Linux Kernel

  Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 is approaching four years old and the Snapdragon 630 a bit younger than that, but these mobile phone SoCs may soon find renewed life on the upstream Linux kernel thanks to the work of community developers. SoMainline developers that work to upstream Sony Xperia device support for Linux sent out a large set of patches this weekend in hopes of upstreaming the SDM630 and SDM660 SoC support. In turn this would allow more mid-range mobile phone devices based on these Qualcomm SoCs to potentially see renewed life on the mainline Linux kernel.

• Argon One M.2 Case for Raspberry Pi 4 Adds SATA Support, Full-Sized HDMI Ports

  Yesterday, we noted that DeskPi Pro Raspberry Pi 4 case offered an interesting alternative to Argon One enclosure thanks to support for 2.5-inch SATA SSD/HDD, full-sized HDMI ports, and a PWM fan.