Software Code’s “Wayback Machine” Gets a Boost

Call it the Wayback Machine of code: a searchable open archive of software source code across iterations; from buggy beta versions, to sophisticated contemporary release. Software Heritage is a non-profit initiative developed and hosted by the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation. Officially created in 2015, the project has been growing over the years. It now spans 5.6 billion source files from more than 88 million projects. Software Heritage is itself built on open-source code. It gathers source files by trawling through repositories that developers uses to create and share code, such as Github, Gitlab, GoogleCode, Debian, GNU and the Python Package Index, with users able to trace detailed revision history of all the codebase versions that it stores.

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.]