Programming Leftovers: Python, Perl, Rust and More

• Keep a journal of your activities with this Python program

  Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 43: Olympic Rings and Self-Descripting Numbers

  These are some answers to the Week 43 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar. Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (January 19, 2020). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

• SaltStack Introduces Plugin Oriented Programming with New Open-Source Innovation Modules to Power Scalable Automation and Artificial Intelligence

• JFrog Launches Free ConanCenter to Improve C/C++ DevOps Package Search and Discovery English

  JFrog, the Universal DevOps technology leader known for enabling liquid software via continuous updates, announces today the launch of the free ConanCenter, enabling better search and discovery while streamlining C/C++ package management. Conan is an open-source, decentralized, and multi-platform package manager for developers to create and share native binaries.

• Rav1e Kicks Off 2020 With Speed Improvements For Rust-Based AV1 Encoding

  Xiph.org's Rustlang-written "Rav1e" AV1 video encoder is back on track with delivering weekly pre-releases after missing them over the past month due to the holidays. With Rav1e p20200115 are not only performance improvements but also binary side and build speed enhancements. The new Rav1e pre-release should be roughly 30% faster while also delivering slight enhancements to the image quality at the highest speed (10). That's a winning combination with speed and image quality improvements together!

• RPushbullet 0.3.3

  Release 0.3.3 of the RPushbullet package just got to CRAN. RPushbullet offers an interface to the neat Pushbullet service for inter-device messaging, communication, and more. It lets you easily send (programmatic) alerts like the one to the left to your browser, phone, tablet, … – or all at once. This release further robustifies operations via two contributed PRs. The first by Chan-Yub ensures we set UTF-8 encoding on pushes. The second by Alexandre permits to downgrade from http/2 to http/1.1 which he needed for some operations with a particular backend. I made that PR a bit more general by turning the downgrade into one driven by a new options() toggle. Special thanks also to Jeroen in help debugging this issue. See below for more details.

today's howtos

• How to install WPS Office 2019 on elementary OS 5.1 Hera

• How to Secure an Outdated Web Application in 5 Minutes

• Smarter reusable IPFS chunks from HTML documents

• How To Setup OpenLDAP Server on Debian 10

• Number word sequences

Review: Zorin 15.1 "Lite"

Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based operating system that aims to make Linux easy for Windows and macOS users. In the words of Zorin, it is "the alternative to Windows and macOS designed to make your computer faster, more powerful, secure and privacy respecting". Zorin's main product is the paid-for "Ultimate" edition, which will set you back €39 and comes with macOS, Windows, Linux and "Touch" layouts (i.e. themes) as well as a relatively large collection of software and "installation support". Other editions of Zorin are free but come with less pre-installed software and fewer desktop layouts. For this review I dusted off a MacBook that dates from late 2009 and installed the "Lite" edition which, as the name suggests, is designed to breathe new life into older hardware. The laptop is one of the plastic, white MacBooks. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB of RAM - I doubled the amount of RAM a few months ago. The laptop has mostly been running Fedora with the MATE desktop and the i3 window manager as an alternative environment, both of which ran fine. Zorin's Lite edition uses Xfce as the desktop environment. First impressions and installation Zorin's website is either modern and clean or yet another bootstrap site, depending on your view. There are just three links in the navigation menu: Download, Computers and Help (the Computers section links to vendors that sell laptops with Zorin pre-installed). The Download section lists Zorin's Ultimate edition first, followed by the Core, Lite and Education editions. Clicking any of the Download links for the free versions triggers a "Sign up to our newsletter & Download" pop-up window featuring a huge "Sign up & Download" button and a very small "Skip to download" link. I am not a fan of this type of marketing. I don't mind that they ask if I maybe want to sign up to their mailing list, but I take issue with the fact that the dialogue window has been designed to make the "No thanks" option easy to miss. Such marketing techniques assume that users need to be tricked into signing up to receiving marketing materials, which reflects poorly on the project as a whole.