today's leftovers

• KDE Connect Website SoK 2020 Week 2

  Today marks the end of my second week of Season of KDE. This week had been great for me, I came in contact with many teams in KDE and got to work with many new people who are quite helpful and encouraging. Variety of changes came on the website which are linked above with links to commits. The Website can be viewed here. You can check out my proposal here. The repository that has the KDE Jekyll themed site is here. This week started off by discussion on the Web Telegram chat on how the website behaved weird on devices with large screen and how some users and even my mentor Carl Schwan felt it a bit weird. So I went onto make the website more important. I decided to try the website out on all types of screen provided by the developer tools in Firefox and Chrome and also checked for Portrait and Landscape modes of all those devices. I can assure you that the website looks as it is intended on all these devices. So it should work fine on relatable devices. All this work was done with CSS. Below are images of the website on large screen and the developer tools.

• GhostBSD 20.01 overview | A simple, elegant desktop BSD Operating System.

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of GhostBSD 20.01 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Freexian's report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2019

  Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

• Arduino Education Unveils Four New STEAM Kits for Pupils and Students

• Intel and Softbank Beware. Open Source Is Coming to the Chip Business

  After revolutionizing software, the open-source movement is threatening to do same to the chip industry. Big technology companies have begun dabbling with RISC-V, which replaces proprietary know-how in a key part of the chip design process with a free standard that anyone can use. While it’s early days, this could create a new crop of processors that compete with Intel Corp. products and whittle away at the licensing business of Arm Holdings Plc. In December, about 2,000 people packed into a Silicon Valley conference to learn about RISC-V, a new set of instructions that control how software communicates with semiconductors. In just a few years, RISC-V has grown from a college teaching tool into an open-source standard being explored by industry giants including Google, Samsung Electronics Co., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Qualcomm Inc. and Nvidia Corp. “Most of the major companies are putting substantial efforts into RISC-V,” said Krste Asanovic, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was part of the team that developed the standard. He’s co-founder of SiFive Inc., a startup that sells chip designs based on RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”).

• The App Store is down

  Midday on Friday it appeared that Apple’s App Store, a critical piece of the digital and mobile economies, struggled with uptime issues. Apple’s own status page indicated that the application vendor was having an “ongoing” issue that affected “some users.”

• Apple pushes back against EU common charger, warns of innovation risks

  iPhone maker Apple on Thursday pushed back against EU lawmakers’ call for a common charger, warning the move could hamper innovation, create a mountain of electronic waste and irk consumers.

• The Debogonisation of 2a10::/12

  We are getting ready to start allocating from 2a10::/12, a new block of IPv6 addresses. In this process we did a couple of 'pre-flight' checks to check the usability of address space in this /12 block.

• Microsoft previews Visual Studio update with added Linux love, many new features [Ed: Microsoft Tim perpetuates the myth that Microsoft has Linux "love" by pushing proprietary software/malware into it]

• Telegram Update Adds New Poll Options, Message Scheduling

  Telegram 1.9.7 for Windows, macOS and Linux builds on the changes introduced in the previous stable release by adding a crop of interesting new options to its interactive ‘polls’ feature. Didn’t know you could create polls in Telegram? Well, yup, you can — but only in groups and channels (which makes sense: a poll with only recipient isn’t really a poll). With the latest Telegram desktop release three new kinds of polls are available: Visible votes (as the name might tell you) now lets users see who voted for which option in a given poll. Previously, all Telegram polls were anonymous (and that option is, apparently, still available).

Server: Caddy, Jekyll, Containers and Kubernetes

• How I moved from Nginx to Caddy

  Let me show you how complex an Nginx configuration can get for something as simple as serving two static websites with sane TLS configuration. If we have a look on the tls.conf, there are many things I would expect from a webserver to be default in the year 2020. First there are the ssl_protocols, second there are the ssl_ciphers and ssl_ecdh_curve, third there is ssl_stapling. I expect all of these to be enabled on default and neither Nginx nor Apache do this with standard settings.

• Tempus Fugit, or moving from hubpress to Jekyll

  When I opened my blog, I realised I hadn’t updated the underlying hubpress code in quite a while. A long while. So long, in fact, that I couldn’t update hubpress anymore, because, much to my distress, the hubpress project had been archived by its author in the meantime. It had been archived months ago, and because I had not written a blog in over a year, I hadn’t even noticed. I think it’s safe to say I do not have a lucky hand in picking new open source projects to build my own stuff upon. But that’s part of the risk of running new tech sometimes, right?

• Navigating Docker for Windows versions

  Windows though has a couple of gotchas, the behavior of docker on windows can vastly vary depending on which binary and/or configuration you use. Containers on windows are dependent on the server version of the Host. For example, your server 2016 (1607) containers can only be executed on a server 2016 host. Currently there are 2 popular base versions that docker supports, Server 2016, and 2019. Gitlab-runner only supports server 2019, so we will go with that.

• Here’s How To Tackle K8’s Security Challenge…

• Two New Open Source Projects for Kubernetes Security by Octarine

• Octarine Adds 2 Open Source Projects to Secure Kubernetes

  Octarine announced today it has launched two open source projects intended to enhance Kubernetes security. The first project is kube-scan, a workload and assessment tool that scans Kubernetes configurations and settings to identify and rank potential vulnerabilities in applications in minutes. The second project is a Kubernetes Common Configuration Scoring System (KCCSS), a framework for rating security risks involving misconfigurations. Julian Sobrier, head of product for Octarine, said the projects are extensions of the namesake cybersecurity framework the company created based on a service mesh for Kubernetes clusters. The Octarine service mesh not only segments network and application traffic all the way up through Layer 7 running on Kubernetes clusters, but it also acts as an inspection engine that employs machine learning algorithms to identify anomalous traffic, Sobrier says.

• Octarine Open Sources New Security Scanning Tools

  To enhance Kubernetes security, Octarine has released two new open source security scanning tools. The first tool is called Kubernetes Common Configuration Scoring System (KCCSS). It is said to be a new framework for rating security risks associated with misconfigurations. Kube-scan, the second open-sourced tool, is a workload and assessment tool to scan Kubernetes configurations and settings to identify and rank potential vulnerabilities in applications within minutes.

Programming Leftovers

• Remi Collet: PHP version 7.2.27, 7.3.14 and 7.4.2

  RPMs of PHP version 7.4.2 are available in remi-php74 repository for Fedora ≥ 29 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 7 (RHEL, CentOS). RPMs of PHP version 7.3.14 are available in remi repository for Fedora 30-31 and remi-php73 repository for Fedora 29 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS). RPMs of PHP version 7.2.27 are available in remi repository for Fedora 29 and remi-php72 repository for Enterprise Linux ≥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).

• Remi Collet: PHP version 7.2 required

  So, now, some noarch packages in the remi repository require 7.2 as the minimal required version. foo requires php(language) >= 7.2 Despite the remi repository still provides the PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1, and even if I still plan to maintain these versions for some time (backporting some security patches, when some other repositories just planned to drop them), this doesn't suite the main goal of my repository: provide the latest versions of PHP and promote their adoption by developers and users.

• Smalltalk-Inspired Pharo 8.0 Released

  Pharo is based on thus general concepts of Smalltalk. Thuss it is strongly object-oriented and everything in the Pharo language is an object. The language is dynamically typed; inheritance is simple; memory management is automatic via a garbage collector and its syntax is very simple and small. There's an enthusiastic collection of developers using Pharo, and the developers make regular commits and provide almost daily bug fixes. The language has a number of ways to interface with C, and there are Java and JavaScript libraries. The first change of note in Pharo 8 is the move to 64-bit as the recommended version for Windows - it already was the main version for Unix and OSX. Iceberg, the git client for Pharo, has also been improved in this release, with better management of projects and repositories management, improved merging, and faster loading and comparison for projects with big packages.

• HackSpace’s 25 ways to use a Raspberry Pi

  The latest issue of HackSpace magazine is out today, and it features a rather recognisable piece of tech on the front cover.

• Delete Files with Java 8

  A friend asked me to help him with the following in Bash -- delete all files but a whitelisted and use mix / max depth for directory traversal. It's probably possible in Bash with some crazy find, grep, etc one-liner.

• Asynchronous Tasks in Ansible

  Most users know Ansible well for its ability to perform configuration management as well as orchestrate complex software deployment. However, Ansible also has a reasonable arsenal of features that lend themselves to operational tasks. There are modules that can handle simple tasks such as creating user accounts and restarting daemons. But more than just modules, some core features of Ansible make it a great tool for any systems administrator. [...] You might think that Ansible will eventually timeout on long-running jobs. You would be correct in the default case. However, with a little configuration, you can still have Ansible take care of these tasks for you! Ansible offers the ability to asynchronously execute tasks. You have the option of configuring Ansible check back on a regular interval or you can even have Ansible “fire and forget” if you so choose. This can help you get around pesky ssh timeouts among other things! What is especially great about the asynchronous task feature is that it is really easy to use! There are only two flags affiliated with the feature. The -B flag is used to set our task timeout value. We pass a number of seconds with the flag.

• 'Thousands Of Tools Have Come & Gone, But Ansible & Bash Have Stood The Test Of Time'

• Container debugging minihint

  What’s in my container?

• Bdale Garbee: Digital Photo Creation Dates

  I thought briefly about hacking Piwigo to use the GPS time stamps, but quickly realized that wouldn't actually solve the problem, since they're in UTC and the pictures from our phone cameras were all using local time. There's probably a solution lurking there somewhere, but just fixing up the times in the photo files that were wrong seemed like an easier path forward. A Google search or two later, and I found jhead, which fortunately was already packaged for Debian. It makes changing Exif timestamps of an on-disk Jpeg image file really easy. Highly recommended! Compounding my problem was that my wife had already spent many hours tagging her photos in the Piwigo web GUI, so it really seemed necessary to fix the images "in place" on the Piwigo server. The first problem with that is that as you upload photos to the server, they are assigned unique filenames on disk based on the upload date and time plus a random hash, and the original filename becomes just an element of metadata in the Piwigo database. Piwigo scans the Exif data at image import time and stuffs the database with a number of useful values from there, including the image creation time that is fundamental to aligning images taken by different cameras on a timeline. [...] At this point, all the files on disk were updated, as a little quick checking with exif and exiv2 at the command line confirmed. But my second problem was figuring out how to get Piwigo to notice and incorporate the changes. That turned out to be easier than I thought! Using the admin interface to go into the photos batch manager, I was able to select all the photos in the folder we upload raw pictures from Karen's camera to that were taken in the relevant date range (which I expressed as taken:2019-12-14..2021), then selected all photos in the resulting set, and performed action "synchronize metadata". All the selected image files were rescanned, the database got updated...