Programming Leftovers

• The PyCon Italia 2022 multiplicity

  The common thread in all these years of participation was not so much the Python language as the people I met and the community of which I felt more and more part, which is why the 2022 edition of PyCon Italia was special because it allowed me to resume this tradition in the presence after two years of interruption.

  This year I experienced PyCon Italia from multiple points of view, from which I will try to tell you about my conference, I am sure that you will recognize yourself in one of them and that you will want to participate in a new role, and I hope you will participate in the next edition of PyCon Italia becoming part of the great Italian Python community.

• [Release] Status of Python 3.11 release

  We may be pushing the final release until December if the stability of Python 3.11 doesn't improve.

• Announcing perlcritic Policy ValuesAndExpressions::ProhibitFiletest_rwxRWX

  Since several places in the Perl documentation caution against the use of the file access operators (-r and friends), and since I was unable to find a Perl::Critic policy dealing with this, I thought I would make one: Perl::Critic::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::ProhibitFiletest_rwxRWX. This policy is assigned to the 'bugs' theme. It has low severity because there are some uses of these operators that seem legitimate to me -- or at least I see no easy way to get around their use.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 172: Prime Partition and Five-Number Summary

• [Old] Five Tips to Writing RISC-V Assembly

  Writing assembly is itself an art. When C, C++, or any other language is compiled, the compiler determines the art of writing assembly. However, this time, we will some of the techniques and decisions we can make to write these ourselves.

  We will use RISC-V to see how to design logic, write up the logic, and translate the logic into assembly.

• libmagic: The Blathering

  The libmagic library is older than over half of the human population of Earth, yet it is still in active development and is in the 99.9th percentile of most frequently installed Ubuntu packages. The library’s ongoing development is not strictly limited to bug fixes and support for matching new file formats; the library frequently receives breaking changes that add new core features to its matching engine. libmagic has a custom domain specific language (DSL) for specifying file format patterns. Run `man 5 magic` to read its documentation. The program compiles its DSL database of file format patterns into a single definition file that is typically installed to /usr/share/file/magic.mgc. libmagic is written in C and includes several manually written parsers to identify various file types that would otherwise be difficult to represent in its DSL (for example, JSON and CSV). Unsurprisingly, these parsers have led to a number of memory safety bugs and numerous CVEs.

• IAR Systems enable innovation in Automotive, providing full support for Renesas RH850 - TechNode Global

  The IAR Embedded Workbench for RH850 and IAR Build Tools for RH850 have been upgraded to the latest technology platforms, including the latest C/C++ language (library support for the C++17 language standard), which will allow developers to build far more advanced code to handle more complex tasks.

• Passing an Object as a Parameter | Adam Young's Web Log

  I think there area couple of competing guidelines here: Don’t Repeat Yourself versus Let the Complexity Emerge. But let’s start with your previous article on Naive Implementations. The very first implementation should be Naive, changing as little code as possible. As such, the example at the start where you pull the initials out in the calling location is possibly the right one. It does, however, split the logic up to two places, so it might even be easier to pass the whole object in, and pull the initials out in the display code. This could get into a discussion of model-view-controller approach. Are the initials part of the model or part of the view? Here is where we let the complexity emerge. If it is only ever used in this one location, you can think of it as part of the view. If the initials get any wider use, they start migrating toward the model. Thus, I would need more context before I could say what the right design is for them.

Security and Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

• Cybersecurity experts question Microsoft's Ukraine report

  Microsoft President Brad Smith spent much of last Wednesday traveling across Washington to promote his company’s sweeping report on the current state of cyberwarfare and disinformation in the Russia-Ukraine war.

  He sat down with David Ignatius, foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, for a webcast on its findings. Afterwards, he headed to the Reagan Institute’s Center for Freedom and Democracy to give a 20-minute speech about the 27-page report called “Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War” before joining Senator Angus King (I-ME) for a panel discussion.

  The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NPR and others covered the study as an accurate and revealing look at an otherwise opaque and confusing digital front in the Ukraine war.

• QSB-082: Memory management issues in PV frontend drivers

  We have just published Qubes Security Bulletin (QSB) 082: Memory management issues in PV frontend drivers. The text of this QSB is reproduced below. This QSB and its accompanying signatures will always be available in the Qubes Security Pack (qubes-secpack).

• XSAs released on 2022-07-05

  The Xen Project has released one or more Xen Security Advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is affected. Therefore, user action is required.

• New RedAlert Ransomware targets Windows, Linux VMware ESXi servers [Ed: This actually requires someone breaking into the machine in the first place; with Windows, it's a walk in the park as there are back doors]

Games: Last Call BBS, Lord Winklebottom, and More

• Last Call BBS, the final game from Zachtronics is out in Early Access

  With Zachtronics moving on from game development, their last game is now out in Early Access with Last Call BBS although it's actually not just one game.

• Quirky murder mystery adventure Lord Winklebottom Investigates releases July 28th

  Lord Winklebottom Investigates is an upcoming adventure from UK-based developer Cave Monsters, and they've recently confirmed it will release on July 28th. This game will be coming along with full Native Linux support too.

• Don't Starve Together big Curse of Moon Quay update out now

  Curse of Moon Quay is the latest major update for the Native Linux survival game Don't Starve Together and it sounds like a great one. They also updated it with Steam Deck support recently too!

• Humble Choice has Deep Rock Galactic this month

  Another month has arrived and so a fresh Humble Choice bundle is here and with it comes an absolutely fantastic game with Deep Rock Galactic.

• 13 years ago we appeared online, Happy Birthday to GamingOnLinux

  Can you believe it? GamingOnLinux is now officially 13 years old and that suddenly makes me feel quite old.

How to Create and Configure 404 Error Page in NGINX

When you host your website on the NGINX web server, it will handle the client request, but when the request is not fulfilled, it will return an error. This error will be displayed to a user via a basic HTML page with the error code (404, 403, 500, 503), as shown below.