Events: Qt World Summit 2018, NetSurf Developer, LibreOffice Asia Conference

• Networking in Berlin: Qt World Summit 2018

  At our little booth we showcased Plasma running on a variety of devices, ranging from a Nexus 5X running Plasma Mobile through two ARM laptops to the powerful KDE Slimbook. Plasma was praised for its performance and reliability and since the focus of the event was mostly on embedded systems, we could easily demonstrate with our selection of devices that Plasma and the KDE Frameworks are a viable option for an endeavor in this area, too. It was very interesting to see the diverse set of people presenting their products and roaming the stalls, to see where Qt is in use today without you even realizing. We were approached by several companies evaluating using KDE Frameworks in their products and also tried to lay a foundation for an eventual partnership. And then there was Daimler who just parked an A-Class in the hallway, whose MBUX infotainment system is also powered by Qt.

• Vincent Sanders: A very productive weekend

  I just hosted a NetSurf Developer weekend which is an opportunity for us to meet up and make use of all the benefits of working together. We find the ability to plan work and discuss solutions without loosing the nuances of body language generally results in better outcomes for the project. [...] We rounded the Saturday off by going out for a very pleasant meal with some mutual friends. Sunday started by adding a bunch of additional topics to consider and we made good progress addressing these. We performed a bug triage and managed to close several issues and commit to fixing a few more. We even managed to create a statement of work of things we would like to get done before the next meetup. My main achievement on the Sunday was to add WEBP image support. This uses the Google libwebp library to do all the heavy lifting and adding a new image content handler to NetSurf is pretty straightforward.

• First LibreOffice Asia Conference to Take Place May 25-26, 2019 in Tokyo, Japan

  The Document Foundation published today more information on when and where the first ever LibreOffice Asia Conference event will take place this year. LibreOffice Asia Conference 2019 will be the project's first conference event to take place in a country in the Asia region where the free and open source software movement is rapidly growing. The Document Foundation decided it's time to put together a conference in Asia after the massive success of the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia 2018 event. "It’s a real leap of faith," says Franklin Weng, an Asian member in the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. "Asia is a rapidly growing area in adoptions of ODF and LibreOffice, but our ecosystem for LibreOffice and FOSS has not been good enough yet. In this conference, we’re not only trying to make the FOSS ecosystem in Asia more healthy but also to encourage Asian community members to show their potential.”

Programming: RenPyWeb, OpenCL 2.2-10, x86 vs. ARM for Web Crawling in Python

• RenPyWeb - Ren'Py in your HTML5 web browser

  I like the Ren'Py project, a popular game engine aimed at Visual Novels - that can also be used as a portable Python environment. One limitation was that it required downloading games, while nowadays people are used to Flash- or HTML5- based games that play in-browser without having to (de)install. Can this fixed? While maintaining compatibility with Ren'Py's several DSLs? And without rewriting everything in JavaScript? Can Emscripten help? While this is a Python/Cython project? After lots of experimenting, and full-stack patching/contributing, it turns out the answer is yes!

• OpenCL 2.2-10 Released With Fixes

  While "OpenCL-Next" will hopefully be on track for releasing later this year as the next big update to OpenCL, OpenCL 2.2-10 was released today by The Khronos Group as the latest maintenance update to the nearly two year old OpenCL 2.2 specification. OpenCL-Next can't come soon enough to hopefully bolster OpenCL GPU programming adoption and OpenCL 2.2 showing its age with the provisional specification for it approaching three years old. With today's OpenCL 2.2-10 update there are various fixes to community reported problems. Also, the KHR OpenCL extensions have been folded into the extensions specification.

• SPEED TEST: x86 vs. ARM for Web Crawling in Python

  Can you imagine if your job was to trawl competitor websites and jot prices down by hand, again and again and again? You’d burn your whole office down by lunchtime. So, little wonder web crawlers are huge these days. They can keep track of customer sentiment and trending topics, monitor job openings, real estate transactions, UFC results, all sorts of stuff. For those of a certain bent, this is fascinating stuff. Which is how I found myself playing around with Scrapy, an open source web crawling framework written in Python.

• The hard part in becoming a command line wizard

• How to Parse Hidden HTML With Selenium Headless Mode and Deploy it to Heroku

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #356 (Feb. 19, 2019)

• PyCon 2019 Tutorial Schedule! [Ed: OK, but it is already compromised. It took a bribe from Microsoft (the top sponsor) and posted Azure ads in its site in exchange. Appalling trend.]

Red Hat: Dstat, KubeVirt, Openwashing Banks and OpenShift 4

• Implementing Dstat with Performance Co-Pilot

  Dstat is a beloved tool by many, and a staple when diagnosing system performance issues. However, the original dstat is no longer actively developed. This poses an immediate problem for distributions like Fedora moving to a Python 3 stack, as it lacks a Python 3 implementation (both the tool itself, and its many plugins). It is also problematic in that the plugin system was relatively simplistic and in need of a significant redesign and rewrite to add new desired features.

• Re-Imagining Virtualization with Kubernetes and KubeVirt – Part II

  KubeVirt exposes a VirtualMachine entity in Kubernetes. This entity is persistent and defines the configuration of a virtual machine. This allows one to create, edit, start, stop, and start again a virtual machine (which one cannot do with a Kubernetes Pod). When the virtual machine is started, a VirtualMachineInstance is created, manifesting in Pod and Container in which the virtual machine runs. The VirtualMachine entity allows one to define virtual machines “the way you would expect it” from a virtualization expert’s perspective. You can name them, describe the virtual hardware devices, define multiple disks and networks. Expect to find your regular virtualization features here: CPU, memory, NUMA, CPU pinning, hugepages, CPU model selection, virtio-rng, memory overcommit, custom SMBIOS, cloud-init, boot order, serial console, graphical (VNC) console, custom PCI addresses for virtio devices, I/O threads, guest agent integration, and more being worked on.

• Why agile integration is key for open banking

  Many banks are striving to be more agile in their operations, their business practices, and even in their ability to innovate to deliver new products and services. With greater agility, banks can better meet the demands of today’s digital-savvy customers and excel in an increasingly competitive market. Initiatives like open banking can help facilitate that agility. Open banking uses open application programming interfaces (APIs) for third party developers, gives users greater transparency, and provides a model for the use of open source to build out solutions. We think that agile integration – bringing together containers, distributed integration, and APIs – is the best path to deliver open banking.

• OpenShift 4: A NoOps Platform

  In the previous post I described the goals that helped shape the OpenShift 4 vision. We want to make the day to day of software operations effortless – for operations teams and for developers. How do we make that goal – a NoOps platform for operations – a reality? What does “NoOps” mean in this context? At a ten thousand foot level, “Serverless” or “NoOps” for developers is characterized by tools and services that hide or minimize the operational burden from the developer. [...] That is why I am happy to announce the Developer Preview of OpenShift 4 is now available for public trial. This is a sneak peek of the next version of OpenShift, with an easy to use installer for starting a cluster on AWS on top of Red Hat CoreOS. The preview requires only credentials to an AWS account to provision infrastructure and a set of credentials to access the images for the preview.