Announcing the new Ubuntu Community Council

Thanks to all the Ubuntu Members that voted in the election, I am proud to announce our new Ubuntu Community Council! The full results of the election can be seen here but our winners are: Walter Lapchynski Lina Elizabeth Porras Santana Thomas Ward José Antonio Rey Nathan Haines Torsten Franz Erich Eichmeyer

today's leftovers

• If DT Made His Own OS, Things Would Be Radically Different!

  I often get asked by viewers, "If you made an OS, what would it look like?" I will never make my own OS or my own Linux spin, because I'm not interested in being a support channel for people, nor do I have the time.

• Daniel Stenberg (Curl): A server transition

  The main physical server (we call it giant) we’ve been using at Haxx for a very long time to host sites and services for 20+ domains and even more mailing lists. The machine – a physical one – has been colocated in an ISP server room for over a decade and has served us very well. It has started to show its age. Some of the more known sites and services it hosts are perhaps curl, c-ares, libssh2 and this blog (my entire daniel.haxx.se site). Some of these services are however primarily accessed via fronting CDN servers. giant is a physical Dell PowerEdge 1850 server from 2005, which has undergone upgrades of CPU, disks and memory through the years. giant featured an Intel X3440 Xeon CPU at 2.53GHz with 8GB of ram when decommissioned.

• On our Abusive Relationship with Mozilla’s Firefox

  One reaction to this problem has been to urge people to keep using, or switch to Mozilla Firefox. The reasoning is that only Firefox continues developing and maintaining an independent, functioning browser engine, with an independent code base. This should ensure that no single entity can turn into a monopoly, and dictate what web standards should be.

  Until recently, I have also held this line. I used Firefox, not only for my own sake, but for the sake of the web. But this stance has been becoming more and more burdensome. I ask myself, are they actually representing and defending who I want to imagine that they are?

  The more I think of it, the more the way Mozilla related to its users reminds me of emotional abuse.

• Linux Foundation Newsletter: October 2020 [Ed: The ‘Linux’ Foundation has just sent another newsletter from its Windows server]

• Why Open Access Is Necessary for Makers

  This is an Open Access Week guest post by Jordan Bunker, prototype engineer and open access advocate.

  After the world went into lockdown for COVID-19, Makers were suddenly confined to their workshops. Rather than idly wait it out, many of them decided to put their tools and skills to use, developing low-cost, rapid production methods for much-needed PPE and DIY ventilators in an effort to address the worldwide shortage.

  EFF is proud to celebrate Open Access Week.

• Formative assessment in the computer science classroom

• BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi & Bluetooth 5.0 LE SoC will sell at ESP8266 price point

  Hisilicon Hi3861 may be the first RISC-V WIFI SoC we’ve reported on, but due to political uncertainties and security concerns, supplies may not be available outside of China. So alternatives are welcomed, and Nanjing-based Bouffalo Lab (not a typo, 博流智能科技 in Chinese) has recently introduced BL602 and BL604 32-bit RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth LE SoC for low-power IoT applications that are supposed to compete against ESP8266 in terms of price but with higher performance and additional features. The BL602 will also be integrated into an upcoming Sipeed Longan-series board, and potentially a new IoT board from Pine64.

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.