Kate Editor Set to Become KDE’s Answer to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code

Remember Kate? It's the default text editor in KDE Plasma environment and it is going to become a lot more awesome.

today's leftovers

• The State Of OpenCL To Vulkan Compute Layers On Linux In April 2021

  It is, in theory, possible to run OpenCL applications on Linux using any graphics driver capable of doing Vulkan Compute. We have examined the alternatives for doing so and found them to be technically interesting and practically useless. It may become possible to run Blender with OpenCL compute using Vulkan at some point in the far distant future. Don't expect to be able to do that today or next month.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Between Loads

  I’m typing this up between loads and runs of various games I’m testing, since bug reports for games are somehow already a thing, and there’s a lot of them. The worst part about testing games is the unbelievably long load times (and startup videos) most of them have, not to mention those long, panning camera shots at the start of the game before gameplay begins and I can start crashing. But this isn’t a post about games. No, no, there’s plenty of time for such things. This is a combo post: part roundup because blogging has been sporadic the past couple weeks, and part feature.

• Sid Meier: More than Just Civilization

  Let’s face it. The video games world is not getting any younger, and the most famous creators of yesterday are now well past 60. Sid Meier is no exception. I picked up his memoir and it was a good read. I am now pretty confident that we will see more publications in the same vein, as the age of pioneers reaches an end. For Linux gamers, Sid Meier’s current company, Firaxis, is a well known benefactor – one of the few friendly to our cause: Civilization 5, 6, and Beyond Earth have all been ported to Linux by Aspyr with the blessing of Firaxis. Even back in the Loki days, Civilization: Call To Power was one of the first games ported to Linux… while this was not a game by Sid Meier – just one from Activision who had secured the rights to the franchise. This is one of the things you will learn as you go through this memoir.

• My Dog's Garage Runs OpenBSD

  I was inspired by the April 2017 article in undeadly.org about getting OpenBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. My goal was to use a Raspberry Pi running OpenBSD to monitor the temperature in my garage from my home. My dog has his own little "apartment" inside the garage, so I want to keep an eye on the temperature. (I don't rely on this device. He sleeps inside the house whenever he wants.)

  If anything seems wrongheaded, please chalk it up to a frothy mixture of enthusiasm, ignorance, stubbornness, and "just-because-I-wanted-to-do-it-this-way-ness."

• News: Finland implements API framework proposed by the European Commission

                       

                         

  The Ministry of Finance set up the project on opening up and using public data in Finland on 30 April 2020. It will put into effect the aims given in the Government Programme by promoting wider and more effective public data use through society. The project will last until the end of 2022 and aims to promote the coherent use of data and functions, primarily through APIs. At the moment, there are no common principles for API development in the public sector in Finland.

Servers: Ceph, Istio, and Kubernetes

• Forging Industrial Grade, Scale Out Ceph Storage

  As tens of millions of Americans who have received their $1,400 Covid relief checks in recent weeks can attest, getting a little financial boost during stressful and difficult times can go a long way in helping to separate themselves from day-to-day survival and turn some of their attention to longer term plans. The same can be said for tech startups with ambitious ideas trying to gain traction in a rapidly evolving IT industry dominated by large, deep-pocketed, established players.

• Announcing Istio 1.9.3

  This release fixes the security vulnerability described in our April 15th post.

• Volume Health Monitoring Alpha Update

  The CSI Volume Health Monitoring feature, originally introduced in 1.19 has undergone a large update for the 1.21 release. Why add Volume Health Monitoring to Kubernetes? Without Volume Health Monitoring, Kubernetes has no knowledge of the state of the underlying volumes of a storage system after a PVC is provisioned and used by a Pod. Many things could happen to the underlying storage system after a volume is provisioned in Kubernetes. For example, the volume could be deleted by accident outside of Kubernetes, the disk that the volume resides on could fail, it could be out of capacity, the disk may be degraded which affects its performance, and so on. Even when the volume is mounted on a pod and used by an application, there could be problems later on such as read/write I/O errors, file system corruption, accidental unmounting of the volume outside of Kubernetes, etc. It is very hard to debug and detect root causes when something happened like this. Volume health monitoring can be very beneficial to Kubernetes users. It can communicate with the CSI driver to retrieve errors detected by the underlying storage system. PVC events can be reported up to the user to take action. For example, if the volume is out of capacity, they could request a volume expansion to get more space.