Programming: Mutter & GNOME Shell Hackfest, PyCon Africa 2019 (Recap) and More Python

• Mutter & GNOME Shell Hackfest

  A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the Mutter & GNOME Shell hackfest in Leidschendam.

• Real Python: PyCon Africa 2019 (Recap)

  PyCon Africa was a wonderful, inspiring, and technically enlightening conference that took place in Accra, Ghana from August 6 to 10, 2019 at the University of Ghana. This conference was the very first pan-African conference for Python developers and was attended by 323 Pythonistas from 26 different countries. Most of the attendees traveled from countries around Africa, and a number of speakers came from the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and Italy. Python is becoming more and more adopted all across the globe. In Africa, Python is earning a special place for itself, where it’s used extensively for web development and data science. African businesses are looking for developers with Python skills in these areas, and having a PyCon in Africa provides a foundation to help support African programmers. [...] The day after the main conference was dedicated to sprints! This is where people group up to work on various open source Python projects. I was part of a team that worked on Cookie Cutter and other related projects. I submitted a PR that got merged into the project and I also helped mentor other team members. I highly recommend anyone who has not attended a sprint before to do so! It’s a great way to practice your skills, contribute to an open source project, and meet the developers involved with the project.

• Tutorial: How to Read Stata Files in Python with Pandas

  We are soon going to practically answer how to open a Stata file in Python? In Python, there are two useful packages called Pyreadstat, and Pandas that enable us to open .dta files. If we are working with Pandas, the read_stata method will help us import a .dta into a Pandas dataframe. Furthermore, the package Pyreadstat, which is dependent on Pandas, will also create a Pandas dataframe from a .dta file.

• Python Software Foundation: Seeking Developers for Paid Contract Improving pip

  The Python Software Foundation Packaging Working Group is receiving funding to work on the design, implementation, and rollout of pip's next-generation dependency resolver. (We'll be able to publicly name the funders later this month and in early December.) pip is the official package installer for Python. pip aims to make it easy for the millions of people who use Python to download and install Python libraries and applications (open source and closed source, source and binary, globally and within isolated virtual environments). It's a foundational component of the Python ecosystem and broader computer software and technology landscape. This project aims to complete the design, implementation, and rollout of pip's next-generation dependency resolver. This will lower the barriers to installing Python software, empowering users to get a version of a package that works. It will also lower the barriers to distributing Python software, empowering developers to make their work available in an easily reusable form. Because of the size of the project, funding has been allocated to secure two contractors, a senior developer and an intermediate developer, to work on development, testing and building test infrastructure, code review, bug triage, and assisting in the rollout of necessary features.

• Rename all files in a directory to the md5 hash

Database of 200+ smartphones that can run Linux (unofficially)

The vast majority of smartphones in the world ship with some version of Google’s Android operating system. And most of them are only supported by their manufacturers for a few years. Have a phone that’s 3-4 years old? Then you’re probably not getting any Android updates anymore. No more security patches. No new features. Of course, some folks can run custom ROMs such as LineageOS, which lets you install updates indefinitely… but want to break out of Android altogether? There are a handful of other GNU/Linux-based operating systems including Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, and Maemo Leste that are designed to, among other things, help give your phone a longer lifespan. One tricky thing can be figuring out which phones are supported. That’s where a new Can My Phone Run Linux database from TuxPhones comes in.

Linux driver patches indicate AMD is readying integer scaling

Both Intel and Nvidia have released graphics driver updates to enable integer scaling options this year. Intel made a big song and dance out of the development process with Tweets and blog updates trailing the graphics driver feature. Then integer scaling became available for Intel Gen11 graphics users after a September driver update. Nvidia actually pipped Intel to the post by implementing integer scaling (for Turing GPUs) in its Gamescom driver release in August - it snuck in the update without much fanfare as it simultaneously boosted a number of AAA games performance and added some new image sharpening features.

Red Hat and SUSE Servers: Boston Children’s Hospital, IBM and SUSE in High-Performance Computing (HPC)

• How Boston Children’s Hospital Augments Doctors Cognition with Red Hat OpenShift

  Software can be an enabler for healers. At Red Hat, we’ve seen this first hand from customers like Boston Children’s Hospital. That venerable infirmary is using Red Hat OpenShift and Linux containers to enhance their medical capabilities, and to augment their doctors cognitive capacity.

• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Red Hat Linux

  In last week’s issue, we did a competitive analysis of the entry, single-socket Power S914 machines running IBM i against Dell PowerEdge servers using various Intel Xeon processors as well as an AMD Epyc chip running a Windows Server and SQL Server stack from Microsoft. This week, and particularly in the wake of IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat, we are looking at how entry IBM i platforms rate in terms of cost and performance against X86 machines running a Linux stack and an appropriate open source relational database that has enterprise support. Just as a recap from last week’s story, the IBM i matchup against Windows Server systems were encouraging in that very small configurations of the Power Systems machine running IBM i were less expensive per unit of online transaction processing performance as well as per user. However, on slightly larger configurations of single socket machines, thanks mostly to the very high cost per core of the IBM i operating system and its integrated middleware and database as you move from the P05 to P10 software tiers on the Power S914, the capital outlay can get very large at list price for the Power iron, and the software gets very pricey, too. The only thing that keeps the IBM i platform in the running is the substantially higher performance per core that the Power9 chip offers on machines with four, six, or eight cores. Such processors are fairly modest by 2019 standards, by the way, when a high-end chip has 24, 28, 32, or now 64 cores, and even mainstream ones have 12, 16, or 18 cores. If you want to see the rationale of the hardware configurations that we ginned up for the comparisons, we suggest that you review the story from last week. Suffice it to say, we tried to get machines with roughly the same core counts and configuration across the Power and X86 machines, and generally, the X86 cores for these classes of single socket servers do a lot less work.

• Rise of the Chameleon – SUSE at SC19

  The impact of High-Performance Computing (HPC) goes beyond traditional research boundaries to enhance our daily lives.  SC19 is the international conference for High Performance Computing, networking, storage and analysis taking place in Denver November 17-22.  SUSE will once again have a strong presence at SC19 – and if you are attending we would love to talk to you!  Our SUSE booth (#1917) will include our popular Partner Theater as well as a VR light saber game with a Star Wars themed backdrop.  We will showcase SUSE’s HPC core solutions (OS, tools and Services) as well as AI/ML, Storage and Cloud open source products.  Plus, during the gala opening reception we will premier our new mini-movie “Sam the IT Manager in The Way of the Chameleon: The Quest for HPC” which you don’t want to miss (we’ll provide the popcorn)!