Programming Leftovers

 

• RcppSpdlog 0.0.3: New features and much more docs

  A good month after the initial two releases, we are thrilled to announce relase 0.0.3 of RcppSpdlog. This brings us release 1.8.1 of spdlog as well as a few local changes (more below). RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovic. This version of RcppSpdlog brings a new top-level function setLogLevel to control what events get logged, updates the main example to show this and to also make the R-aware logger the default logger, and adds both an extended vignette showing several key features and a new (external) package documentation site.

 

• Hacktoberfest Mauritius 2020

  Saamiyah pinged me a few days ago about the Hacktoberfest event that she was organising and asked whether I would be free to present a topic. Sure, why not? As many tech meetups at the moment, the Hacktoberfest event also was virtual. It was hosted on the Jitsi instance of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. The event was scheduled to start at 19h30 on Friday, i.e last evening. I was late to join but "luckily" so was everybody.

               

• Meet the 24-year-old who’s tracking every broken McDonald’s ice-cream machine in the US

                   

                     

  It turned out to be harder than he’d thought. Initially, he created an API that attempted to add a McSundae from every McDonald’s location to its cart once every minute. The app figured out what he was up to and blocked him — “It was like, you can’t do this, you look like a bot,” he recalled.

                     

  After a night of trial and error, Zahid figured out the magic time frame. Now, his bot attempts to add a McSundae every 30 minutes. If the bot successfully adds the item, it lets McBroken know that the location’s machine is working. If it can’t, the location gets a red dot. (A Twitter user claiming to be a McDonald’s employee has confirmed that the method works.)

• Robbi Nespu: Fedora - KDE development journey (Qt5X11Extras)

• Robbi Nespu: Fedora - KDE development journey (Qt5UiPlugin)

• Perl Weekly Challenge 83: Words Length and Flip Array

  These are some answers to the Week 83 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

• Four Features That Justify a New Unix Shell

  This post elaborates on these points. I've condensed the rationale into four critical features for the OSH language.

  I give examples of each feature, link to docs (in progress), and comment on the future of the project.

• Node.js 15.0 Is Released - LinuxReviews

  Support for the QUIC protocol, a new AbortController class, a updated N-API with new methods for managing ArrayBuffers, V8 updated to version 8.6 and NPM updated to version 7.0 are among the highlights in the latest Node.js framework for creating JavaScript-based network services like web servers, chat servers and all kinds of real-time applications. [...] Node.js 15.0 is a "regular" support release with support throughout June 2021. Node.js uses even numbers for LTS releases. The Node.js 14.x branch is the corrent "Long Term Support" branch with support throughout April 2023 and the older Node.js 12.x will be supported until April 2022. The 10.x branch will go EOL in April 2021.

• The 20 Best Java Courses for Beginners and Experienced Programmers

  When it comes to creating computer applications that can also be run in a network among distributed servers and clients, Java is still the most powerful programming language available. You can also build a small scale application module commonly known as an applet with Java.

• OpenJ9 0.23 Released As Latest Eclipse Java Virtual Machine

  Version 0.23 of the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine was released this week in continuing to focus on being a high performance, open-source JVM.

'This was bigger than GNOME and bigger than just this case.' GNOME Foundation exec director talks patent trolls and much, much more

Patent assertion entities: do not pick a fight with open source. It won't end well for you. This is the message from GNOME Foundation executive director Neil McGovern, who will speak on the subject at the Open Source Summit Europe next week. McGovern talked to The Register ahead of the event on patents, Microsoft, and more. The open-source outfit develops the default desktop environment on major Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Red Hat. In late August 2019, Rothschild Patent Imaging filed a lawsuit against the GNOME foundation claiming that GNOME Shotwell, a photo manager, infringed one of its patents. “We didn't receive a letter before the court documents were filed or any sort of warning, it was just filed and then within a week there was a settlement request for $75,000,” McGovern told us.

Debian Janitor: Hosters used by Debian packages

The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor. The Janitor knows how to talk to different hosting platforms. For each hosting platform, it needs to support the platform- specific API for creating and managing merge proposals. For each hoster it also needs to have credentials. At the moment, it supports the GitHub API, Launchpad API and GitLab API. Both GitHub and Launchpad have only a single instance; the GitLab instances it supports are gitlab.com and salsa.debian.org. This provides coverage for the vast majority of Debian packages that can be accessed using Git. More than 75% of all packages are available on salsa - although in some cases, the Vcs-Git header has not yet been updated. Of the other 25%, the majority either does not declare where it is hosted using a Vcs-* header (10.5%), or have not yet migrated from alioth to another hosting platform (9.7%). A further 2.3% are hosted somewhere on GitHub (2%), Launchpad (0.18%) or GitLab.com (0.15%), in many cases in the same repository as the upstream code. Also: Multiple git configurations depending on the repository path

Benchmarks and Graphics Leftovers: x86, Zink, and Navi

• Intel Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake vs. AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U Linux Performance

  For the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarking thus far with the Core i7 1165G7 on the Dell XPS 13 9310 it's primarily been compared against the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U on the AMD side since those are the only Renoir units within my possession. But a Phoronix reader recently provided me with remote access to his Lenovo ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8 cores / 16 threads) for seeing how the Tiger Lake performance compares against that higher-end SKU. Phoronix reader Tomas kindly provided SSH access to his ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U and 16GB of RAM. The Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U is quite close to the Ryzen 7 4800U with 8 cores / 16 threads but graphics capabilities in line with the 4700U. He's been quite happy with the ThinkPad X13 as a replacement to the Dell XPS 13 for business usage and has been running it with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the Linux 5.8 kernel.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Catching Up

  A rare Saturday post because I spent so much time this week intending to blog and then somehow not getting around to it. Let’s get to the status updates, and then I’m going to dive into the more interesting of the things I worked on over the past few days. Zink has just hit another big milestone that I’ve just invented: as of now, my branch is passing 97% of piglit tests up through GL 4.6 and ES 3.2, and it’s a huge improvement from earlier in the week when I was only at around 92%. That’s just over 1000 failure cases remaining out of ~41,000 tests. For perspective, a table.

• AMD 'Big Navi' 3DMark Firestrike results shared by HW testing firm

  The Linux specialists over at Phoronix have noticed that the AMD Linux driver has been tweaked to add support for a new graphics card dubbed the "navi10 blockchain SKU". It comments that the only visible difference in support for this card vs existing Navi 1X support, from the driver perspective, is that the patches disable the Display Core Next (DCN) and Video Core Next (VCN) support - basically creating a 'headless' Navi 1X graphics card. Cryprocurrency is showing signs of a resurgence in popularity and values, and some are worried that the latest and greatest GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD will be plucked from retailers even faster if they are viable mining platforms. It has been reported that AMD is trying to make sure retailers follow certain distribution practices with its upcoming Radeon RX 6000 series products, to make sure they are distributed to gamers and enthusiasts rather than scalpers and such like. An initiative like creating appealing crypto-specific Navi 1X products might help everyday consumers get their hands on a new Navi 2X graphics card too.