today's leftovers

• Resurrecting my Iomega Zip 100 parallel-port drive – Linux comes to the rescue

  Back in 1998 I purchased what was then a state-of-the-art storage medium: an external Iomega Zip 100 drive, which used removable 100 MB ‘SuperFloppy’ disks. Until 2002 I backed up my important files on removable Zip 100 MB disks. Over several years in the 1990s Iomega released various models of the Zip 100 GB drive: internal SCSI; internal IDE; internal ATAPI; external DB-25 IEEE 1284 parallel port; external USB 1.1. I bought the external DB-25 IEEE 1284 parallel port, model Z100P2. When affordable CD drives and external hard disk drives started to appear I began using those for backups instead, and the Zip drive and a box full of Zip 100 MB disks had been gathering dust on a shelf at home since I stopped using them in 2002.

• PiMod Zero for Raspberry Pi Zero SBC broadcasts video to your older NTSC TV (Crowdfunding) - CNX Software

  Playing retro games or watching older movies on your Raspberry Pi Zero board over a modern digital video interface like HDMI clearly ruins the experience! While it should be possible to use to 2-pin reserved for video composite on the Raspberry Pi Zero to connect to an old TV, PiMod Zero HAT allows you to get back that retro feeling even with TVs lacking RCA composite and audio inputs by broadcasting video over VHF to older NTSC compatible televisions.

• The missing ps2pdf mystery

  Posting here as a placemarker, putting down the thoughts so far. Will append to this post if/when solved. Feodor reported that /usr/lib/cups/backend/pdf-writer wants /usr/bin/ps2pdf, which is missing. 'pdf-writer' is a script, and I had to hunt where that came from. It is in PET package 'cups_pdf'. This is an ancient PET, for printing a Postscript or PDF to file. But the GTK print dialog offers "Print to file" as well, so 'cups_pdf' is redundant, so have removed that PET. I looked at packages.debian.org and found that 'ps2pdf' is part of the 'ghostscript' package. Interesting, my ghostscript, compiled in OE, doesn't have it.

• Kubernetes: Introducing Indexed Jobs

  Once you have containerized a non-parallel Job, it is quite easy to get it up and running on Kubernetes without modifications to the binary. In most cases, when running parallel distributed Jobs, you had to set a separate system to partition the work among the workers. For example, you could set up a task queue to assign one work item to each Pod or multiple items to each Pod until the queue is emptied.

Free Software Leftovers

• `Writing a Technical Book

  I was inspired to write this post after reading a similar post called How to Write a Technical Book by SerHack. Not because there is something wrong with their post, but because I’d like to focus a bit more on what are your options, and also show how I like to work.

  During the last ten years, I have published six technical books about programming. Most of them are self-published works but I recently published Roguelike Development With JavaScript with Apress which is a traditional publisher famous for its programming books. My first popular book was Quick Guide for FirefoxOS Programming published a long time ago. I really like that it got featured in the Leanpub bestseller at the time, it made me really proud. Besides that, I’ve spent the last sixteen years working for a major publisher of Hindu Literature in English.

  The reason behind telling you all this, is because my comprehension about book writing has changed and evolved over time, and what I think is the best way to write a book today is not necessarily the same as my own choices in the past. Basically, I don’t want you to repeat my own mistakes.

• The effect of CPU, link-time (LTO) and profile-guided (PGO) optimizations on the compiler itself

  In other words, how much faster will a compiler be after it's been built with various optimizations? Given the recent Clang12 release, I've decided to update my local build of Clang11 that I've been using for building LibreOffice. I switched to using my own Clang build instead of openSUSE packages somewhen in the past because it was faster. I've meanwhile forgot how much faster :), and openSUSE packages now build with LTO, so I've built Clang12 in several different ways to test the effect and this is it...

• Chromium 90 packages – again 32bit related issues

  There’s new ‘chromium‘ and ‘chromium-widevine-plugin‘ packages in my repository. And chromium-ungoogled packages will follow soon. Chromium was upgraded to 90.0.4430.72 but unfortunately the 32bit package which I have built (twice) crashes immediately on startup. This happens both on Slackware 14.2 and on -current. The error message looks like it is something different than the glibc-2.3x related seccomp crash behavior in the previous Chromium 89.x releases. Since I don’t have hardware that is running a 32bit Slackware OS and could only test on QEMU virtual machines so far, I can not confirm with 100% certainty that the new Chromium will or will not work on your 32bit Slackware OS, which is why I also kept the older 32bit chromium-89.0.4389.114 package in the repository. Let me know about your experiences down here in the comments section! I am getting tired of begging Google developers not to break 32bit binaries every major release. I’d be grateful if people running 32bit Slackware who are affected by the 32bit Chromium crashes, would chime in. Else I will eventually have to drop 32bit support.

• One more week of CfP

  Usually foss-north takes place ~April. This year, foss-north 2021 will be virtual. We shifted the date to the end of May to try to make it possible to at least go hybrid and have some sort of conference experience, but in light of the current COVID-19 situation and the pace of the roll-out of the vaccination programmes, we decided for a virtual event.

• Go Embed and Angular

  Hi, there. Today’s article will be a rather short article. In this article I would like to showcase Go 1.16 new embed package. If you are familiar with Go you might know embedding functionality already from famous other libraries like go-bindata. The problem with go-bindata has been that upstream vanished one day and then multiple forks appeared and every company or person was doing their own thing with embedding assets into Go programs. With the new embed package this shall be changed and embedding files shall be officially supported and more easy in the future.

• Dancer2 0.301002 Released

  On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, I'd like to announce the availability of Dancer2 0.301002. This release includes a number of enhancements and documentation changes along with several bugfixes. The most notable enhancement is a brand new command line interface, and I highly encourage you to check it out.

Security and Google

• WordPress to treat Google's new ad-tracking tech as a security issue

  The project that manages the WordPress content management system, which claims to power about 41% of the Web, will treat Google's new ad-tracking technology, Federated Learning of Cohorts, as a security issue and block it from working.

• Google Project Zero will give a 30-day grace period before disclosing security issues

  Google’s Project Zero, a team of dedicated security engineers tasked with reducing the number of “zero day” vulnerabilities around the entire internet, says it will give developers an extra 30 days before disclosing vulnerability issues, in order to give end-users time to patch their software.

  Developers will still have 90 days to fix bugs, but Project Zero will wait another 30 days before it discloses the details of the bug publicly. If a flaw is being actively exploited in the wild, a company will have seven days to issue a patch, and a three-day grace period if requested. But Google Project Zero will wait 30 days before it discloses technical details.

• FeedBurner stirs in its slumber to announce more feature deprecations

  Last week, Google announced that they’re making changes to FeedBurner. Like everyone else who received the email from Google, I expected this to be the time when the service passed on to the Google Graveyard. However, they merely announced the deprecation of yet more features. FeedBurner is a syndication feed “optimization” and analytics service that Google acquired in 2007. It can count feed subscribers, track views and click-through links, a feed-to-email conversion service, WebSub/PuSH, and it presents people that open your feed in a browser with a webpage preview view of the feed. The service is probably best known for its “subscriber count” widgets that many bloggers proudly display on their blogs. The search giant announced that the valuable feed-to-email service is being discontinued in July 2021. This is going to be a rude awakening for many, as newsletter services are surprisingly expensive for a service that costs next to nothing to provide. I developed my own feed-to-newsletter service. The high costs of the commercial offerings were one of the main reasons behind my decision.