OSS: Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Animal Vision, Outreachy and LibreOffice

• US 2020 Election Security: Auditing Tool Coming Soon

  The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it is working with a non-partisan, non-profit group to customize an open source, post-election auditing tool to verify votes in the upcoming 2020 elections. The tool is known as Arlo. VotingWorks, an organization focused on developing secure election technology, is CISA’s partner. Arlo is used to conduct risk-limited audits (RLA), which VotingWorks calls the “best safeguard we have against hacked or otherwise faulty voting systems.” In an RLA, Arlo determines how many ballots to count, selects which ballots to inspect and compares audited votes to tabulated votes. Election officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Ohio and Georgia are currently piloting the software and others are expected to join. Colorado became the first state to implement RLAs when in 2017 it audited one race in each of 50 of its 64 counties.

• New machine learning from Alibaba and Netflix, mimicking animal vision, and more open source news

  Have you ever wondered how your dog or cat sees the world? Thanks to work by researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK and Australia's University of Queensland, you can find out. The team just released software that allows humans to see the world as animals do. Called micaToolbox, the software can interpret digital photos and process images of various environments by mimicking the limitations of animal vision. Anyone with a camera, a computer, or smartphone can use the software without knowing how to code. But micaToolbox isn't just a novelty. It's a serious scientific tool that can help "help biologists better understand a variety of animal behaviors, including mating systems, distance-dependent signalling and mimicry." And, according to researcher Jolyon Troscianko, the software can help identify "how an animal's camouflage works so that we can manage our land to protect certain species."

• Some Of The Interesting Open-Source Projects For Outreachy's Winter 2019 Round

  Outreachy recently kicked off their winter (December to March) round of internships for diversity in tech with 49 individuals tackling a range of open-source tasks. Complementing the useful contributions made this summer during their previous round, some more interesting tasks are being tackled over the next few months too. In going through the 49 projects, some of the interesting ones include: - Adding "did you mean?" hints to Git when entering incorrect sub-commands.

• [LibreOffice] QA/Dev Report: November 2019

  585 bugs, 67 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 365 people.

Programming/Development: Dirk Eddelbuettel, Dependencies and Python

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.9.800.3.0

  A small Armadillo bugfix upstream update 9.800.3 came out a few days ago. The changes, summarised by Conrad in email to me (and for once not yet on the arma site are fixes for matrix row iterators, better detection of non-hermitian matrices by eig_sym(), inv_sympd(), chol(), expmat_sym() and miscellaneous minor fixes. It also contains a bug fix by Christian Gunning to his sample() implementation. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 679 other packages on CRAN.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: RDieHarder 0.2.1

  A new version, now at 0.2.1, of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself) is now on CRAN. This version has only internal changes. Brian Ripley, tireless as always, is testing the impact of gcc 10 on CRAN code and found that the ‘to-be-default’ option -fno-common throws off a few (older) C code bases, this one (which is indeed old) included. So in a nutshell, we declared all global variables extern and defined them once and only once in new file globals.c. Needless to say, this affects the buildability options. In the past we used to rely on an external library libdieharder (which e.g. I had put together for Debian) but we now just build everything internally in the package.

• There are (at least) three distinct dependency types

  Using dependencies is one of the main problems in software development today. It has become even more complicated with the recent emergence of new programming languages and the need to combine them with existing programs. Most discussion about it has been informal and high level, so let's see if we can make it more disciplined and how different dependency approaches work. What do we mean when we say "work"? In this post we are going to use the word "work" in a very specific way. A dependency application is said to work if and only if we can take two separate code projects where one uses the other and use them together without needing to write special case code. That is, we should be able to snap the two projects together like Lego. If this can be done to arbitrary projects with a success rate of more than 95%, then the approach can be said to work. It should be especially noted that "I tried this with two trivial helloworld projects and it worked for me" does not fulfill the requirements of working. Sadly this line of reasoning is used all too often in online dependency discussions, but it is not a response that holds any weight. Any approach that has not been tested with at least tens (preferably hundreds) of packages does not have enough real world usage experience to be taken seriously.

• Monads aren't as hard as you think

  I’ve been scared of monads ever since I first heard of them. So many references to burritos, or nuclear waste containers, or some other analogy that didn’t make sense to me. So if you’re scared of monads too, maybe my take on what a monad is will help.

• Print all git repos from a user

• Print all git repos from a user

• Talk Python to Me: #241 Opal: Full stack health care apps

  Open source has permeated much of the software industry. What about health care? This highly regulated and important industry might seem to be the domain of huge specialized software companies.

• Sleepy snake

  I love this drawing! I’ve always been charmed by cartoonists’ ability to capture an essence in a seemingly simple drawing. Objects are reduced to stereotypes, but with some whimsy thrown in. Ben has always had this gift: to create just the right stroke to perfectly express an attitude or feeling. Here Sleepy is snug in his bed, covered by a blanket. Even in his custom bed, he’s too long to fit, but he’s comfortable. The pillow isn’t shaped like a real pillow, but it’s exactly our cartoon Platonic ideal of a pillow.

• Generate a Python Random Number

  Here is a quick guide on Python’s random number. You can always refer to it whenever you need to generate a random number in your programs. Python has a built-in random module for this purpose. It exposes several methods such as randrange(), randint(), random(), seed(), uniform(), etc. You can call any of these functions to generate a Python random number. Usually, a random number is an integer, but you can generate float random also. However, you first need to understand the context as a programmer and then pick the right function to use.

• Trigger Local Python App Remotely

  With an old Mac I have lying around at home and free web-based services, I’ve setup a simple app that fetches some data from an external service (YNAB) in order to run some daily budget calculations that I used to calculate manually for a long time. The output of my app is then sent back to my phone within seconds so I can trigger it from anywhere. I wanted to share the approach I’m using which has cost me nothing. This (obviously) isn’t an approach that should be used for large scale applications or anything other than pet projects. I just wanted to highlight how simple it can be using existing free tools. There are plenty of low cost, production ready, and scalable options out there (like AWS Lambda) if you prefer to start with that approach. My app is written in Python and served via Flask to a local endpoint (http://localhost:5000) which ngrok points to. I then have a IFTTT webhook hitting the Ngrok URL after clicking an IFTTT button widget from my phone. The app ends up broadcasting the output to my Slack account so I end up getting a push notification on my phone containing the app output within seconds of hitting the button:

• Raspberry Pi Christmas Shopping Guide 2019

  Stuck for what to buy your friends and family this Christmas? Whether you’re looking to introduce someone to Raspberry Pi and coding, or trying to find the perfect gift for the tech-mad hobbyist in your life, our Christmas Shopping Guide 2019 will help you complete your shopping list. So, let’s get started…

Some Free Sticky Notes Applications For Ubuntu Linux!

Sticky notes application is one application that looks trivial but is very useful. This application is usually used to note something. We can choose several Sticky Notes applications below to be used on Ubuntu and other linux distributions!.