Security Leftovers

• Security updates for Tuesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and mediawiki), openSUSE (firefox, libqt5-qtbase, and rubygem-actionpack-5_1), Red Hat (qemu-kvm, qemu-kvm-ma, and virt:rhel), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, and go1.15), and Ubuntu (dpdk, imagemagick, italc, libpgf, libuv1, pam-python, squid3, ssvnc, and teeworlds).

• Best practices for securing open source

• Announcing Istio 1.7.3

  This release fixes the security vulnerability described in our September 29 post.

• Announcing Istio 1.6.11

  This release fixes the security vulnerability described in our September 29 post.

• ISTIO-SECURITY-2020-010

today's howtos

• HPLIP 3.20.9 Released, Still Not Install in Ubuntu 20.04

  HPLIP 3.20.9, HP print, scan, and fax drivers for Linux, now is available to download. Though the release note is not ready at the moment of writing, HPLIP 3.20.9 package is already available to download in its website. Normally, there will be a list of new supported printers.

• DAPS in a Container

  DAPS is OpenSUSE’s “DocBook Authoring and Publishing Suite” that is used to build documentation for SUSE and OpenSUSE. It actually requires A LOT of dependencies when being installed and for that reason alone, it’s actually better to run it in a container. This is my image and how I use it.

• 4 ways to back up Linux Wine apps

• A Linux sysadmin's introduction to cgroups

• Simple Ways to Free Up Space in Ubuntu Linux

• How to install the Webmin web-based Linux admin GUI

• How to label a webpage as being out-of-date

• Fixing slow mouse with Raspberry PI OS

• Encrypting Files with Ansible Vault

• Setting up Fedora 33 beta L1&&L2 KVM guests all seating on the same office LAN

Python Programming

• Teaching Comparing Strings in Python the Hard Way

  Some long-time subscribers may remember that I am teaching math to 10-18 year old students. The COVID-19 situation nearly made me quit and look for an alternative to earn my rent, but my love for the kids and teaching them was stronger. After a few months of shortage, we found ways to responsibly resume the meetings, either online or with safety measures. When schools were closed, some parents wondered what they could do to drag their offsprings away from computers; playing computer games seemed to be the new all-time favorite hobby. Of course, resistance was expected. Why not turn this interest into something useful? I didn’t expect that kids as young as eight are interested to learn how to create games. But why not? I learned from electronic magazines and books how computers, MS BASIC, and Z80 assembly worked when I was ten, and I am sure I would have been interested with eight, if my classmate had broken his leg two years earlier… But that’s not the story I want to tell.

• This Python script mimics Babbage's Difference Engine

  After some contemplation, Charles Babbage's ghost replied, "This is all well and good, but here you only take the number of rows and give the number of marbles. With my table, I can also tell you how large a pyramid you might construct given a certain number of marbles; simply look it up in the table." Python had to agree that this was indeed the case, yet it knew that surely this must be solvable as well. With little delay, Python came back with another short script. The solution involves thinking through the math in reverse.

• Setup and debug a Django app in PyCharm Community Edition

  Did you know that the freely available PyCharm community edition is perfectly suited for developing and debugging Django web applications? The goal of the article is to help you setup a new Django application framework in the PyCharm community edition, to the point that you can run and debug the Django application in PyCharm. We’ll also setup a virtual environment for the PyCharm project and install Django inside this virtual environment. [...] PyCharm comes in two editions: the professional edition and the community edition. The professional edition needs to be bought. In contrast, JetBrains makes the community edition free and open source. With other words, you can download the community edition for free and get started with it right away. When inspecting the differences between the PyCharm editions, you’ll notice that the PyCharm professional edition features all sort of Django specific support as you can read here. From this information you might think that you absolutely need to purchase the PyCharm professional edition, when programming and debugging Django applications. This is incorrect. You can definitely program and debug your Django application with the free PyCharm community edition. In this article, I’ll explain step-by-step how you can setup and debug a Django application in the free PyCharm community edition.

• Using Google Login With Flask

  In this course, you’ll work through the creation of a Flask web application. Your application will allow a user to log in using their Google identity instead of creating a new account. There are tons of benefits with this method of user management. It’s going to be safer and simpler than managing the traditional username and password combinations.

• Python Morsels: Writing a for loop

  You can use a for loop to loop over any iterable (iter-able). Anything you're able to iterate over can be looped over with a for loop.

• Design of the Versioned HDF5 Library

  In a previous post, we introduced the Versioned HDF5 library and described some of its features. In this post, we'll go into detail on how the underlying design of the library works on a technical level. Versioned HDF5 is a library that wraps h5py and offers a versioned abstraction for HDF5 groups and datasets. Versioned HDF5 works fundamentally as a copy-on-write system. The basic idea of copy-on-write is that all data is effectively immutable in the backend. Whenever a high-level representation of data is modified, it is copied to a new location in the backend, leaving the original version intact. Any references to the original will continue to point to it.

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #440 (Sept. 29, 2020)

• Why use Python Programming for building a Healthcare Application

  Python is one of the best programming languages used across a plethora of industries. The healthcare sector is a significant benefactor of the language. With Python programming in healthcare, institutions and clinicians can deliver better patient outcomes through dynamic and scalable applications. Today, healthcare is generating tons of data from patients and facilities. By making the best use of this data, doctors can predict better treatment methods and improve the overall healthcare delivery system.

• The Python return Statement: Usage and Best Practices

  The Python return statement is a key component of functions and methods. You can use the return statement to make your functions send Python objects back to the caller code. These objects are known as the function’s return value. You can use them to perform further computation in your programs. [...] Most programming languages allow you to assign a name to a code block that performs a concrete computation. These named code blocks can be reused quickly because you can use their name to call them from different places in your code. Programmers call these named code blocks subroutines, routines, procedures, or functions depending on the language they use. In some languages, there’s a clear difference between a routine or procedure and a function. Sometimes that difference is so strong that you need to use a specific keyword to define a procedure or subroutine and another keyword to define a function. For example the Visual Basic programming language uses Sub and Function to differentiate between the two.

• Test and Code: 132: mocking in Python - Anna-Lena Popkes

  Using mock objects during testing in Python. Anna-Lena joins the podcast to teach us about mocks and using unittest.mock objects during testing.

• Resources: Python for Kids

  Friend of Mu, Kevin Thomas has been hard at work creating free-to-use resources for kids (and older kids) who want to learn Python, with the BBC micro:bit and Mu. [...] Meanwhile, in our secret fortress of solitude, the Mu “minions” (Munions..?) have been hard at work on some fantastic updates which we hope to reveal very soon.

• wxPython by Example – Drag-and-Drop an Image (Video)

  In this tutorial, you will learn how to drag an image into your #wxPython application and display it to your user.

• Solving Python Package Creation For End User Applications With PyOxidizer - Episode 282

  Python is a powerful and expressive programming language with a vast ecosystem of incredible applications. Unfortunately, it has always been challenging to share those applications with non-technical end users. Gregory Szorc set out to solve the problem of how to put your code on someone else's computer and have it run without having to rely on extra systems such as virtualenvs or Docker. In this episode he shares his work on PyOxidizer and how it allows you to build a self-contained Python runtime along with statically linked dependencies and the software that you want to run. He also digs into some of the edge cases in the Python language and its ecosystem that make this a challenging problem to solve, and some of the lessons that he has learned in the process. PyOxidizer is an exciting step forward in the evolution of packaging and distribution for the Python language and community.

• Sumana Harihareswara is an open-source software fairy... and other things I learned recording her DevJourney

• All You Need To Know For Selenium Testing On The Cloud

  Building large-scale web applications take a monumental effort. Testing the quality of these applications requires a whole other level of dedication. From a developer’s vantage point, the focus is on improving the feature set, speeding up the overall performance, and building a scalable product. As far as QA is concerned, a lot of focus is on usability testing and compatibility testing while testing a website or web application. If you are building a consumer-facing website or web application, your product is likely to be accessed by users from across the globe. Your product must be tested on various combinations of web browsers, devices, and platforms (operating systems) to ensure top-notch performance. Hence, browser compatibility testing becomes even more critical. No one wants to lose potential customers because of unpleasant user experience on select few browsers, devices, or platforms.

• Montreal Python User Group: Montréal-Python 80 – Pedal Kayak

  Greetings Python community, October is fast approaching with vibrant fall colour and our favourite apples. This is the occasion to set the table for our 80th event – Pedal Kayak – which will take place this coming October 26.

• Simple FPS fingerprint similarity search: variations on a theme

  It's easy to write a fingerprint search tool. Peter Willett tells a story about how very soon after he, Winterman, and Bawden published Implementation of nearest-neighbor searching in an online chemical structure search system (1986) (which described their nearest-neighbor similarity search implementation and observed that Tanimoto similarity gave more satisfactory results than cosine similarity), he heard from a company which wrote their own implementation, on a Friday afternoon, and found it to be very useful. Now, my memory of his story may be missing in the details, but the key point is that it's always been easy to write a fingerprint similarity search tool. So, let's do it! I'll call my program ssimsearch because it's going to be a simplified version of chemfp's simsearch command-line tool. In fact, I'll hard-code just about everything, with only the bare minimum of checking.