today's leftovers

• Mad Dog 21/21: Hat In Hand

  IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat is for Ginni Rometty as vital and significant as Lou Gerstner’s development of IBM’s services business in the 1990s. If IBM can properly integrate Red Hat, IBM’s legacy businesses and strategic initiatives will all be reinvigorated. This is not merely desirable, but absolutely necessary. Without the Red Hat acquisition, IBM is threatened with advancing torpidity and imminent decline. For IBM right now, it is Red Hat do or die. Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating system already contributes to the viability of IBM’s server offerings. But when an IBM hardware customer, let’s say a mainframe shop, installs RHEL it does so with other Linux alternatives on other platforms looming as contenders. Until now, those contenders could argue that IBM’s hardware is not the most prominent platform for RHEL, and therefore not the primary recipient of updates, security fixes and enhancements. That will no longer be the case. IBM will be able to assert its prominence in the Red Hat universe. A similar case can now be made for services arrangements that include the use of Red Hat products. When it comes to strategic initiatives, IBM will be able to combine its AI technologies including Watson related services, with Red Hat products and services. Basically, IBM’s position in competition with HP, Microsoft and Oracle will be enhanced, even if Red Hat continues to assert its independence and self-direction.

• How Open Policy Agent Works to Secure Cloud-Native Workloads

  A core element of IT security is having proper policies in place that define what is and what isn't allowed for a given process or entity. In the cloud-native world, where there are multiple distributed elements that can live in different deployment modalities, the challenge of defining and implementing policy is nontrivial, but that's the challenge that the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project is looking to solve. In a session at the DockerCon Europe 2018 event in Barcelona, Spain, this week, Torin Sandall, software engineer at Strya, and Justin Cormack, software engineer at Docker, outlined how OPA can help to create and enforce security.

• QtWS post (-scriptum)

  This week I was briefly in Berlin for the Qt World Summit, or QtWS for short. I was there to run the KDE booth as part of the exposition at the summit, rather than to do any talks (or, for that matter, watch any). First, a bunch of thanks are in order: to Sari and Milja from Moodboard for organising most of the things, to Katica from the Qt Company for doing PR on the show floor, to Kai and Roman from KDE for standing at the booth with me, and to the 700-or-so attendees for listening to us when we talk about KDE as a community, about KDE Frameworks and Plasma in laptops, tablets, phones and embedded. Thanks also to Paul and kde-promo for getting us some nice source material for stickers and shirts.

• Fedora 30 To Finally Use GnuPG 2 As The Default

  While many Linux distributions have moved past GnuPG 1 and some no longer even packaging it, Fedora Linux continues using GnuPG 1 as the default gpg, but that is likely to change with Fedora 30.

• Please test GnuTLS 3.6 in experimental

  GnuTLS 3.6.x has been marked stable with release 3.6.5. Binary packages are available in experimental. - Please test! FWIW I have rebuilt all reverse build-dependencies without finding GnuTLS-triggered build errors.

• Two printers with one Rpi?

  Last time I tried printing with the raspberry pi I had only one machine to try with now I have two. Lets see if the Pi can handle two instances of AtCore and control two 3d printers at the same time. This is a follow up to AtCore takes to the pi. So please read that for more about the RPi setup. This post is in video form, please enjoy.

• Arch Linux ARM on the Allwinner NanoPi A64

  I've obtained two NanoPi A64's a long while ago and recently thought of setting them up as a HA cluster as an exercise. Since setting it up with real hardware is a lot more fun then with VM's or containers. And I wanted to try out aarch64 and see how well that fares on mainline Linux.

• Electron and the Decline of Native Apps

• Phoronix Test Suite 8.4.1 Released For Better BSD Support, RHEL7 Bug Workaround

  Phoronix Test Suite 8.4.1 is now available as a minor but important update to last month's Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet release.

OSS Leftovers

• How Can We Bring FOSS to the Virtual World?

  Will the free and open-source revolution end when our most personal computing happens inside the walled gardens of proprietary AI VR, AR, MR, ML and XR companies? I ask, because that's the plan. [...] Buying all this is the cost of entry for chefs working in the kitchen, serving apps and experiences to customers paying to play inside Magic Leap's walled garden: a market Magic Leaps hopes will be massive, given an investment sum that now totals close to $2 billion. The experience it created for me, thanks to the work of one early developer, was with a school of digital fish swimming virtually in my physical world. Think of a hologram without a screen. I could walk through them, reach out and make them scatter, and otherwise interact with them. It was a nice demo, but far from anything I might crave. But I wondered, given Magic Leap's secretive and far-advanced tech, if it could eventually make me crave things. I ask because immersive doesn't cover what this tech does. A better adjective might be invasive.

• Open source will be the next big thing for the channel

  With cloud vendors developing more industry-specific solutions, channel partners must also hone in on vertical industry knowledge to capitalise on these markets.  Flexibility will also be a key selling point which open source solutions provide: enterprises are seeking a hybrid-cloud approach to eliminate vendor lock-in, which means they’re likely to benefit from working with open source channel partners. With the rapid development and maturity that open source solutions provide, a shift toward higher adoptions rates in cloud workloads on Linux will become the new norm.

• AI & data science: Open source makes NSE smart and secure

  National Stock Exchange of India (NSE which used V-SAT to transmit data securely in 1993, had shifted to Red Hat open source later. In the last few years it has been strengthening that partnership further with the integration of cloud infrastructure in its data systems to not simply improve data security, but also to implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science in its systems. The implementation of cloud-based AI platform enables NSE to clock a daily turnover of Rs 3,00,000 crore with 1.2 billion daily transactions. It is the largest stock exchange in India in terms of market volume and market share. Says Yatrik R Vin, CFO, NSE India, “There are certain cases on which we use open source’s capabilities extensively. They are risk management at client and investor level, cost reductions and making our systems talk to the public without manual intervention.” He reminisces that during the financial crisis of 2008, not a single rupee was affected, because of the risk management capabilities of the eight-sigma level open source core systems that were in use at NSE India.

• List of Twitters of Free Software Projects and Communities

• OpenSMTPD proc filters & fc-rDNS

   

  I have committed full proc filtering support today, allowing a standalone filter to perform all kind of filtering on every single phase of an SMTP session.

 

• TenFourFox FPR11 available

  TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 11 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). Issue 525 has stuck, so that's being shipped and we'll watch for site or add-on compatibility fallout (though if you're reporting a site or add-on that doesn't work with FPR11, or for that matter any release, please verify that it still worked with prior versions: particularly for websites, it's more likely the site changed than we did). There are no other changes other than bringing security fixes up to date. Assuming no problems, it will go live tomorrow evening as usual.

Programming Leftovers

• C Programming Language - Introduction

  This tutorial is the first part of a C programming language course on Linux. C is a procedural programming language that was designed by American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie. Please note that we'll be using Linux for all our examples and explanation. Specifically, we'll be using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• DSF 2019 Board Election Results

  I'm pleased to announce the winners of our 2019 DSF Board of Directors election. [...] This year we had 17 great candidates and while not everyone can get elected each year I hope they all consider running again in the 2020 election. Another item of note with this election is that our Board is now comprised of two thirds women, which is a first for the DSF.

• coloured shell prompt

• Create multiple threads to delete multiple files with python

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