today's leftovers

• Realtek 802.11ax WiFi Driver "rtw89" Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.16 - Phoronix

  Arriving in the wireless-drivers-next branch this week is the "rtw89" driver as a Realtek-contributed open-source 802.11ax WiFi driver. This new rtw89 Linux Wifi driver is initially for supporting the Realtek 8852AE 802.11ax ASIC. A new driver was developed rather than extending the existing Realtek wireless kernel drivers since the register address ranges have been totally refined, new formats, and other fundamental changes over existing Realtek wireless chipsets.

• SALSA Back In Development As A Small ALSA Library For Linux Systems - Phoronix

  Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE is back to hacking on SALSA, the "small ALSA" library that he started a decade ago but hadn't seen a new release in six years or any code activity for the past four years... until this week.

• Is Linux a Waste of Time and Should You Stick to Windows?

  But Linux is not bad just because it's different. Far from being a waste of time, Linux can be one of the most rewarding operating systems to learn, because once you gain knowledge about how it works, that knowledge lasts for a long time. No one company has the authority to substantially change how all of Linux works from one release to the next. So if you want a computer you can learn and stick with for a long time to come, Linux can be more than worth the investment of your time.

• How We Hired Our Last Employee: Equitable Hiring Processes for Small (and Large) Organizations

  It's really hard for Conservancy to hire new employees. Like many small organization that are overloaded with work, it's hard to make the time to conduct a proper hiring process, and no one on staff is dedicated to making sure the process goes smoothly. Because it is very important to our organizational values to make sure that our hiring is fair and also that we wind up with the best person for the job, we were very careful in how we designed our search.

• Week numbers in LibreOffic Calc

  I use week numbers for all sorts of things. It gives me more granularity than a month, and they’re more accurate for certain use cases. For example, people assume a month has four weeks, but 48 leaves us four weeks short of the 52 weeks in a year. Renters and mortgage payers know all to well the fun of realising a specific month has three payments, not two.

• Google clarifies Spanner/PostgreSQL interface • The Register

  Google has clarified details of the interface between its popular distributed SQL database-management-cum-storage-service Spanner and the open-source RDBMS PostgreSQL. According to a blog published this week, Spanner's PostgreSQL interface uses "the familiarity and portability of PostgreSQL" to make developers' lives easier. "Teams can be assured that the schemas and queries they build against the Spanner PostgreSQL interface can be easily ported to another PostgreSQL environment, giving them flexibility and peace of mind," said Justin Makeig, product manager for Cloud Spanner.

• It's Safety First as 'All Things Open' Returns In-Person on Sunday - FOSS Force

  On Sunday when All Thing’s Open kicks off at the Raleigh Convention Center it will mark a return to in-person events for the open source conference. Like most in-person events, last year ATO was forced to go digital in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. To use a term that tech usually reserves for cloud deployments, this year’s All Things Open will be a hybrid event — meaning it’ll take place as an in-person event at the Raleigh Convention Center in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, and online for folks at home. Even the presentations will be hybrid, with some being live streamed as they take place before an in-person audience, and others being prerecorded and available only online. We asked Todd Lewis, the creator and chair of the event that in 2019 drew over 5,000 attendees, how it felt to be launching the in-person part of this years conference now that vaccinations have made that possible, despite the continuing spread of the COVID virus.

• How to disable Gtk-Message warnings in your app

• Legacy Social Media: Free as in Beer, Not as in Speech

• A first for search and rescue from space

  "Once it was confirmed that we could detect the faint transmissions on-board I used 'GNU Radio' to build the signal processing system that would run on the satellite. GNU Radio is a free and open-source library that breaks down complex signal processing systems into simple blocks. The ability to reprogram the SDR payload for any type of signal demonstrates the versatility when open-source software is combined with a powerful space platform such as OPS-SAT."

Software Licence/Licensing in Russia and in EU (EUPL)

• The Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation has developed an open license - itsfoss.net

  In the git repository of the software complex “Data showcases of the NSUD”, developed by order of the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, the text of the license entitled “State open license, version 1.1” was found. According to the explanatory text, the rights to the text of the license belong to the Ministry of Finance. The license is dated June 25, 2021. In fact, the license is permissive and close to the MIT license , but it was created with an eye on Russian legislation and is much more verbose. The terms of the license contain many clarifications, already following from the legislation of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the license contains controversial points in terms of definitions. Thus, the source code is defined as “a computer program in the form of text in a programming language that can be read by a person”, which does not necessarily imply the possibility of obtaining executable code from it, and also that this code is not generated from the real source code (that is, code in the preferred form for making changes).

• Article from Krzysztof Żok, Faculty of Law - University of Poznań

  Krzysztof Żok, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland), publishes in the Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology (volume 15, winter 2021) a well-documented article on the EUPL and in particular on the reference to “a work or software” as the factor determining the scope of the licence.

  Here are the summary notes that the author provides in conclusion: [...]

Programming Leftovers

• How the Integrated Gradients method works? - Vincent Lequertier's blog

  For artificial intelligence (AI) transparency and to better shape upcoming policies, we need to better understand the AI’s output. In particular, one may want to understand the role attributed to each input. This is hard, because in neural networks input variables don’t have a single weight that could serve as a proxy for determining their importance with regard to the output. Therefore, one have to consider all the neural network’s weights, which may be all interconnected. Here is how Integrated Gradients does this.

• Want a piece of GitLab? It's going to cost you: IPO price per share settles at $77

  The one-stop shop approach by DevOps darling GitLab appears to have attracted an Initial Public Offering price of $77, giving the loss-making biz a potential valuation of $11bn GitLab finally filed for an IPO in September and this week upped the estimated price per share to between $66 and $69. The eventual price has turned out to be $77, well above the initial $55 to $60 first estimated. 8.42 million shares of Class A common stock are being sold. Founder and CEO Sytse Sijbrandij is selling another 1.98 million shares, according to the filing. Should that $77 price survive the start of trading today, GitLab's market value will nudge past $11bn.

• Functional vs. object-oriented programming: The basics

  Committing to a programming paradigm is an important step in any application development effort. While they are hardly the only two options when it comes to overarching development models, the choice between functional programming and object-oriented programming is one that an increasing number of developers face today.

• There is no 'printf'.

  Pop quiz! What will the following program return?

• Malicious packages mitmproxy2 and mitmproxy-iframe removed from PyPI directory - itsfoss.net

  The author of mitmproxy , a tool for analyzing HTTP / HTTPS traffic, drew attention to the appearance of a fork of his project in the Python Package Index (PyPI) directory. The fork was distributed under the similar name mitmproxy2 and the non-existent version 8.0.1 (current release of mitmproxy 7.0.4) with the expectation that inattentive users will perceive the package as a new version of the main project ( typesquatting ) and wish to try the new version. In terms of its composition, mitmproxy2 was similar to mitmproxy, with the exception of changes in the implementation of malicious functionality. The changes were reduced to the termination of setting the HTTP header ” X-Frame-Options: DENY “, which prohibits the processing of content inside the iframe, disabling protection against XSRF attacks and setting the headers ” Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * “, ” Access-Control- Allow-Headers: * “and” Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, DELETE, OPTIONS “.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 134: Pandigital Numbers and Distinct Term Count

• Sourcing vs executing in Bash

  What if, from the shell prompt, I could source the script, to bring the function definitions into my current environment, and then manually invoke the check function on a single pull request?

  Sourcing the script as it is would have the unwanted effect of running checks on all the pull requests, because the last line in the script actually invokes main, as it’s supposed to.

• Rust-Based Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 Released With Improved Live Migration, Faster Boot Time - Phoronix

  Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 debuted this week as the Intel-led open-source VMM focused on supporting modern cloud workloads and written in the Rust programming language while leveraging the Linux's KVM virtualization code or the Microsoft MSHV hypervisor on Windows. Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 continues to focus on only supporting 64-bit software, providing a minimal attack surface and other security improvements in part by leveraging Rust, and other modern-focused design principals.

• Dyn async traits, part 6

  A quick update to my last post: first, a better way to do what I was trying to do, and second, a sketch of the crate I’d like to see for experimental purposes.