today's leftovers

• Automotive Grade Linux Announces L4B Software, Sibros, Sonatus, Telechips and TotalCross Platform as New Members

  Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open source platform for connected car technologies, announces five new members: L4B Software, Sibros, Sonatus, Telechips and TotalCross Platform.

• Cartesi is partnering with Binance Smart Chain and launches Incubation program to make DApp development easier with Linux

  Cartesi is partnering with Binance Smart Chain (BSC) to unlock the next generation of decentralized applications. Binance Smart Chain is a highly scalable blockchain that supports smart contracts and Ethereum Virtual Machine programmability, featuring high TPS (transactions per second), and fast decentralized trading with low fees. This partnership will enable advanced smart contract capabilities and massive computation for Cartesi DApps atop Binance Smart Chain, allowing DApp developers to jumpstart the next generation of decentralized games and DeFi products.

• Cartesi Announces Exciting Incubation Program To Bring Linux To DApps.

• MS Windows on Linux: wine and MinGW-w64

  I came across two separate discussions on LinuxQuestions.org that had a common root cause; a lack of Windows VST support in Carla and missing PE binary support in Wine causing Windows games to fail on Slackware. They made me think about how I could help fix the core issue, which is that both SlackBuilds.org and Slackware 3rd party repositories (like mine) do not offer MinGW packages or scripts. To address the issue I needed to create a MinGW-w64 package, which is what I did. More on that, further down. Back to the issue at hand and their common root cause.

• [Slackware] Updates available for OpenJDK 7

  Andrew Hughes (aka GNU/Andrew) announced a new release for IcedTea 2 on the distro-packager mailing list earlier this week.The new version 2.6.23 builds OpenJDK 7u271_b01. This release includes the July 2020 security fixes for Java 7 from Oracle. It is recommended that you upgrade your OpenJDK 7 to the latest version. If you have already moved to Java 8 then this article is obviously not relevant for you.

• International Day for Universal Access to Information: 28 September

  The International Day for Universal Access to Information 2020 focuses on to the right to information in times of crisis. It also highlights the advantages of having constitutional, statutory and/or policy guarantees for public access to information to save lives, build trust and help the formulation of sustainable policies through and beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

  UNESCO and its intergovernmental programs - the International Programme for Development of Communication and the Information for All Programme - provide a platform and frame for all the stakeholders to participate in international discussions on policy and guidelines in the area of access to information. Both programs also enable positive environment for ATI to flourish through the development of projects aimed to strengthen open science, multilingualism, ICTs for disabled and marginalized, and media and information literacy.

• By the Time You Finish Reading This, Your Tech Job Post May Be Outdated

  As the rate of technological advancement and change continues to accelerate, new tools are being developed and released at such a swift pace that no individual tech professional can stay on top of them all. Consequently, this leads to talent gaps that can delay digital transformation. For example, a recent study found that “only 23% of organizations believe they have the talent required to successfully complete their cloud native journey.”

Games Leftovers

• How to play Wolfenstein: the new order on Linux

• How to Get Started with Google Stadia

• Dead By Daylight with cross-play releases free for Stadia Pro on October 1 - plus more

  Google announced today that Dead By Daylight will launch free for Stadia Pro on October 1, and it will have cross-platform online play with all other platforms. That's huge and exactly how it should be done. Not only that, it's also coming with Crowd Choice, the new Stadia feature that's like Twitch integration - giving viewers of livestreams on YouTube the chance to vote on things. It was said that Crowd Choice will come to other games too like Baldu'rs Gate 3 and more to come.

• Playing chess by email

  It’s possible to play chess using email. This is possible because there are notations like PGN (Portable Game Notation) that describe the state of a game.

  By playing on your computer and sending the PGN of the game to your opponent, that person will be able to play their move and send you the new PGN so you can play.

Programming Leftovers

• Lex Fridman Talks to Gosling, Kernighan and Knuth

  As editor of I Programmer, I'm keen on the history of computer programming and this week I've come across a new resource - a series of podcasts in which Lex Fridman interviews some of the biggest names in computer science. The Lex Fridman Podcast was formerly known as The Artificial Intelligence Podcast and the first one dates from April 2018. They are all conducted by Lex Fridman, an AI researcher at MIT. Fridman does have some specifically AI-oriented interviews, there's one with Andrew Ng, for example. The one that alerted me to the series, however, was one posted on You Tube a week ago with James Gosling, the creator of the Java Language and is the one hundred and twenty sixth in the series.

• Git Worktrees: Parallel Development Guide

  Under specific scenarios, you may require different identical copies of your repository. At this point, you are probably thinking about cloning your storage – but there is a better solution. Git offers a better and more reliable workflow model – Git worktree. It gives a perfect copy of your entire repository. In this article, I will explain all you need to know about worktree and how you can use it step-by-step with the Git best practices. And once you know all these basics, Git Worktree will be relatively easy to implement as compared to other practices like cloning with Git Clone your repository.

• How to use C++ String Class

  A string literal is a sequence of characters in a constant array pointer terminated by the nul character, \0. When identified, by a variable, the string literal cannot really reduce or increase in length. Many operations cannot be done on the string literal. So, there is a need for a string class. The C++ string class is for a data structure, a collection of characters in sequence, which allows member functions and operators to act on the characters. The string class allows more manipulations on the corresponding string literal, than just the string literal. You need to have good knowledge of string literal, to understand this article.

• Reading and Writing Files with Python

  Files are used to store and organize data on a disk. We often use files when we need to store data permanently on a hard disk. For example, say we are building a software system that maintains student records. Now, we need to store the student data permanently for future use. For this purpose, we can use files to store data, and later on, we can open these files and access the stored data at any time. Reading and writing files are very common functions in Python. It is easy to create, read, and edit files in Python. Python comes with built-in functions for reading and writing files. You can open, write, and read files using the Python built-in functions.

• Simple k-NN FPS Tanimoto and cosine similarity search

  Yesterday I developed an simple program to search chembl_27.fps.gz for records with a Tanimoto similarity of at least 0.7 to caffeine. I started by mentioning the 1986 paper by Willet, Winterman, and Bawden Implementation of nearest-neighbor searching in an online chemical structure search system. As you can read from the title, that paper does a k-nearest neighbor search (k-NN search, also called a top-N search), and compares a Tanimoto similarity search to a cosine similarity search. So really, I'm only halfway there. In this essay I'll go the other half and implement the nearest neighbor search. As before, this code will do almost no error handling, and will only work for the uncompressed chembl_27.fps in the local directory.

• Python Qt5 - Use QStandardItem with Images.

  This tutorial show you how to use QStandardItem with Images.

• Python Print Function

  Python is one of the modern, multi-purpose, and high-level programming languages. Python is used for various purposes i.e. software development, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and back end development. More often, in any programming language, we need to print some data or string on the console. In python, we use the print () function to print the string or any kind of data on the console.

• Linux-Fu: Making AWK A Bit Easier

  awk is a kind of Swiss Army knife for text files. However, some of its limitations are often a bit annoying. I’ve used a simple set of functions to make awk a bit better, although I will warn you: it does require GNU extensions to awk. That is, you must use gawk and not other versions. Your system probably maps /usr/bin/awk to something and that something might be gawk. But it could also be mawk or some other flavor. If you use a Debian-based distro, update-alternatives is your friend here. But for the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you are using gawk.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 80: Smallest Positive Number Bits and Count Candies

  These are some answers to the Week 80 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar

• Ubuntu + Perl Web Development Environment Building

  I wrote here the steps to build a web system development environment using Perl and Ubuntu.

• A private not official branch for Perl 7 by several members of perl porters

  I found A private not official branch for Perl 7 by several members of perl porters.