Software: Zotero, PulseCaster and Qt Port of SFXR

• Zotero and LibreOffice

  If you’re working with LibreOffice and need to create a bibliography, this software makes it simple to manage your citations. You can tell how few people use LibreOffice’s Bibliography Database by the fact that a bug that would take 10 minutes to fix has survived since 2002. Instead, those who need bibliographies or citations rely on other software such as Zotero, which can be integrated into LibreOffice with an extension. That robust bug is that the Citation Format in the database table is called the Short Name in the input fields. Even more confusing, the examples give an arbitrary name, when to work with the citation insertion tool in Insert | Table of Contents and Index | Insert Bibliography Entry, it should in a standard form, such as (Byfield: 2016) for the MLA format. Add the fact that a single database is used for all files – an absurdity in these memory-rich days – and the neglect of the Bibliography Database is completely understandable.

• PulseCaster 0.9 released!

  For starters, PulseCaster is now ported to Python 3. I used Python 3.6 and Python 3.7 to do the porting. Nothing in the code should be particular to either version, though. But you’ll need to have Python 3 installed to use it, as most Linux bistros do these days. Another enhancement is that PulseCaster now relies on the excellent pulsectl library for Python, by George Filipkin and Mike Kazantsev. Hats off to them for doing a great job, which allowed me to remove many, many lines of code from this release. Also, due the use of PyGObject3 in this release, there are numerous improvements that make it easier for me to hack on. Silly issues with the GLib mainloop and other entrance/exit stupidity are hopefully a bit better now. Also, the code for dealing with temporary files is now a bit less ugly. I still want to do more work on the overall design and interface, and have ideas. I’ve gotten way better at time management since the last series of releases and hope to do some of this over the USA holiday season this late fall and winter (but no promises).

• SFXR Qt 1.3.0

  I just released version 1.3.0 of SFXR Qt, my Qt port of the SFXR sound effect generator.

today's howtos

• Copying large files with Rsync, and some misconceptions

• Wrestling with the register allocator: LuaJIT edition

• nbdkit supports exportnames

• Update on Easy PXE boot testing post: minus PXELINUX

• How to browse the hard drive from the terminal in Linux

• How to Convert Video Formats on Linux

• Chmod Command in Linux (File Permissions)

• Interactive learning and reinventing the wheel in programming.

• Rotate a video file by 90 degrees CW

• RHEL 8 update installed packages for security

Programming Leftovers

• post modern C tooling - draft

  Some of the C++ people have pulled off one of the cleverest and sneakiest tricks ever. They required 'modern' C99 and C11 features in 'recent' C++ standards. Microsoft has famously still clung onto some 80s version of C with their compiler for the longest time. So it's been a decade of hacks for people writing portable code in C. For a while I thought we'd be stuck in the 80s with C89 forever. However, now that some C99 and C11 features are more widely available in the Microsoft compiler, we can use these features in highly portable code (but forget about C17/C18 ISO/IEC 9899:2018/C2X stuff!!).

• Reading and Writing YAML to a File in Python

  In this tutorial, we're going to learn how to use the YAML library in Python 3. YAML stands for Yet Another Markup Language. In recent years it has become very popular for its use in storing data in a serialized manner for configuration files. Since YAML essentially is a data format, the YAML library is quite brief, as the only functionality required of it is the ability to parse YAML formatted files. In this article we will start with seeing how data is stored in a YAML file, followed by loading that data into a Python object. Lastly, we will learn how to store a Python object in a YAML file. So, let's begin. Before we move further, there are a few prerequisites for this tutorial. You should have a basic understanding of Python's syntax, and/or have done at least beginner level programming experience with some other language. Other than that, the tutorial is quite simple and easy to follow for beginners.

• Python Multiple Inheritance (with Examples)

  In this tutorial, we’ll describe Python Multiple Inheritance concept and explain how to use it in your programs. We’ll also cover multilevel inheritance, the super() function, and focus on the method resolution order. In the previous tutorial, we have gone through Python Class and Python (Single) Inheritance. There, you have seen that a child class inherits from a base class. However, Multiple Inheritance is a feature where a class can derive attributes and methods from more than one base classes. Hence, it creates a high level of complexity and ambiguity and known as the diamond problem in the technical world. We’ll be taking up this problem later in this tutorial.

• Adding Methods Retroactively

  Imagine you have a "shapes" library. We have a Circle class, a Square class, etc. A Circle has a radius, a Square has a side, and maybe Rectangle has height and width. The library already exists: we do not want to change it. However, we do want to add an area calculation. If this was our library, we would just add an area method, so that we can call shape.area(), and not worry about what the shape is.