today's howtos

• Copying files into a container at run time

• How to Automatically Disconnect Idle or Inactive SSH Sessions After Five Minutes of Inactivity

• Potential pitfalls with multi-NIC and cloud-netconfig

• PenTesting: Gaining Root Privileges on Kioptrix

• Read only rootfs

Programming: Kotlin, Python and More

• Android’s commitment to Kotlin

  When we announced Kotlin as a supported language for Android, there was a tremendous amount of excitement among developers. Since then, there has been a steady increase in the number of developers using Kotlin. Today, we’re proud to say nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps contain Kotlin code, with more and more Android developers introducing safer and more concise code using Kotlin. During this year’s I/O, we announced that Android development will be Kotlin-first, and we’ve stood by that commitment. This is one of the reasons why Android is the gold partner for this year’s KotlinConf.

• Google Reaffirms Commitment To Kotlin Programming Language For Android

  Google is continuing to embrace Kotlin programming for Android, making more Android APIs accessible by Kotlin, Jetpack Compose as a UI toolkit catered to Kotlin, and Kotlin extensions for more Google libraries. Google is also working to offer more Kotlin + Android learning material, working with JetBrains on improving the Kotlin code compiler, speeding up the build time of Kotlin code, and other improvements.

• Comparing equivalent Python statements

  While teaching one of my Python classes yesterday I noticed a conditional expression which can be written in several ways. All of these are equivalent in their behavior...

• Serving Files with Python's SimpleHTTPServer Module

  Servers are computer software or hardware that processes requests and deliver data to a client over a network. Various types of servers exist, with the most common ones being web servers, database servers, application servers, and transaction servers. Widely used web servers such as Apache, Monkey, and Jigsaw are quite time-consuming to set up when testing out simple projects and a developer's focus is shifted from producing application logic to setting up a server. Python's SimpleHTTPServer module is a useful and straightforward tool that developers can use for a number of use-cases, with the main one being that it is a quick way to serve files from a directory. It eliminates the laborious process associated with installing and implementing the available cross-platform web servers. Note: While SimpleHTTPServer is a great way to easily serve files from a directory, it shouldn't be used in a production environment. According to the official Python docs, it "only implements basic security checks."

Former Oracle product manager says he was forced out for refusing to deceive customers. Now he's suing the biz

A former Oracle employee filed a lawsuit against the database giant on Tuesday claiming that he was forced out for refusing to lie about the functionality of the company's software. The civil complaint [PDF], filed on behalf of plaintiff Tayo Daramola in US District Court in San Francisco, contends that Oracle violated whistleblower protections under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, the RICO Act, and the California Labor Code. According to the court filing, Daramola, a resident of Montreal, Canada, worked for Oracle's NetSuite division from November 30, 2016 through October 13, 2017. He served as a project manager for an Oracle cloud service known as the Cloud Campus BookStore initiative and dealt with US customers. Campus bookstores, along with ad agencies, and apparel companies are among the market segments targeted by Oracle and NetSuite. Daramola's clients are said to have included the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, the University of Texas at Austin, Brigham Young University and the University of Southern California. The problem, according to the complaint, is that Oracle was asking Daramola to sell vaporware – a charge the company denies. "Daramola gradually became aware that a large percentage of the major projects to which he was assigned were in 'escalation' status with customers because Oracle had sold his customers software products it could not deliver, and that were not functional," the complaint says.

Debian Developers Take To Voting Over Init System Diversity

It's been five years already since the vote to transition to systemd in Debian over Upstart while now there is the new vote that has just commenced for judging the interest in "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers care (or not) in supporting alternatives to systemd. Due to Debian developers having differing opinions on handling non-systemd bugs in 2019 and the interest/commitment to supporting systemd alternatives in the scope of Debian packaging and various related friction points, they've taken to a new general resolution over weighing init system diversity.