today's leftovers

• Apache Software Foundation retires slew of Hadoop-related projects

  It's been no secret lately that Apache Hadoop, once the poster child of big data, is past its prime. But since April 1st, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the retirement to its "Attic" of at least 19 open source projects, 13 of which are big data-related and ten of which are part of the Hadoop ecosystem.

• SODA Foundation Announces 2021 Data & Storage Trends Survey

  Data and storage technologies are evolving. The SODA Foundation is conducting a survey to identify the current challenges, gaps, and trends for data and storage in the era of cloud-native, edge, AI, and 5G. Through new insights generated from the data and storage community at large, end-users will be better equipped to make decisions, vendors can improve their products, and the SODA Foundation can establish new technical directions — and beyond! The SODA Foundation is an open source project under Linux Foundation that aims to foster an ecosystem of open source data management and storage software for data autonomy. SODA Foundation offers a neutral forum for cross-project collaboration and integration and provides end-users quality end-to-end solutions. We intend to use this survey data to help guide the SODA Foundation and its surrounding ecosystem on important issues.

• Kube World at SUSECON – The Rancher Journey Continues

  SUSECON is only a few weeks away, and the excitement is starting to build. While working on my keynote, I took some time to look back on how much has happened since SUSE completed its acquisition of Rancher Labs in December of last year. It’s just unreal how fast things are moving. It hasn’t even been six months, and more things have happened than many companies can accomplish in a year or more.

• Improving the remote experience: treadmill

  Last year I decided to add an improvement to my home office, a treadmill. I thought about during the total lock-down we suffered in Spain in spring 2020. The reason for not trying it earlier was that I was skeptical about keeping my productivity level while walking on the treadmill. Finally I made the decision to try out and asked for one to The Three Wise Men. They were kind enough to bring it. After a few weeks using it, I would like to report about it since several of my colleagues at MBition/Daimler asked me about it. I hope that reading about my experience is useful to you. [...] I detected a productivity decrease in those activities which require high levels of concentration or creativity like complex meetings with many people that I facilitate, those times when I need to come up with new ideas, analysis of complex data, etc. The good news is that I did detect this productivity reduction early. The longer I have been using the treadmill though, the more type tasks I can do without noticing a productivity reduction. So I plan to try again during the coming weeks some of those activities that I dropped early on. Walking is helping me a lot to go through those days with back to back meetings. I pay better attention and get less bored compared to standing up. As I get more used to walking, my energy levels during the afternoons are increasing, as mentioned, which helps me to get through the last couple of hours during long working days. It was not like that at first though, so plan accordingly.

• Studies for episode 35

  Here under studies for episode 35, a montage of roughly 30 Sketches, featuring Pepper at various ages, Arra dragon, Carrot and Torreya (a new character), Arra's pilot.

• Hangover 0.6.5 Released For Running Windows Software On ARM64, POWER

  Hangover is the project that crafts Wine with a modified QEMU and other bits for allowing x86 32-bit and 64-bit Windows programs to run on alternative architectures under Linux. But before getting too excited, at this stage it still supports a limited number of real-world software packages and the architecture support is primarily focused on AArch64 and PPC64LE. While Linux is seemingly the primary focus, there is also some macOS support with Hangover too.

Ubuntu: Shirt, Community and Amazon Listening

• Hirsute Hippo Ubuntu-fr t-shirt

  The French speaking Ubuntu community really likes making ubuntu t-shirts. Each six months, releases after releases, they make new ones. Here is the Hirsute Hippo. You can buy it before the 26th of April for €15 (+ shipping costs) and receive it at the end of May 2021. You can buy it later but it will be more expensive and you will not have any garanty of stock.

• Ubuntu Blog: (Re)introducing the Community Team [Ed: Canonical wants the public to think that it's a community rather than a company (SUSE and IBM do the same, but their facade is rather poor)]

  The Ubuntu community is, and always will be, a major part of the Ubuntu project. It is one of the biggest reasons all of this (gestures around) even exists. Over the past month or so, the beginnings of a new Community team has been taking shape inside Canonical with the specific purpose of serving the community.

• Ubuntu Blog: Transcribing user interviews with Amazon Transcribe

  We try to do as much user testing as we can at Canonical, and one of the techniques that we employ is user interviews. Our UX team will talk to users regularly – usually there’s a user interview happening on every day of the week. Aside: if you’re interested, you can sign up to join the Canonical user interview panel.

Programming Leftovers

• Rust Compiler April Steering Cycle

  On Friday, April 9th, the Rust Compiler team had a planning meeting for the April steering cycle. Every fourth Friday, the Rust compiler team decides how it is going to use its scheduled steering and design meeting time over the next three Fridays.

• Oil Shell 0.8.9 Is Released

  Oil Shell is a not-really drop-in replacement for Bash with its own programming language for "serious" shell programming. The latest release has some very minor changes to the oil-language and that's about it. It may be worth a look if you want a shell language where you can use variables without quotes. [...] You can take a look at the "Oil Language Idioms" for examples of how regular bash compares to oil and acquire the technology from http://www.oilshell.org/releases.html if you want to see how it works. None of the GNU/Linux distributions we looked at have OSH in their repositories, so you will have to compile it yourself. It is a quick and small compile with nearly no dependencies, so you'll have it up and running in less than a minute.

• Twine the easiest game engine for non-coder

  In this article, we will give you a short introduction to a wonderful open-source tool called Twine that allows you to write your own interactive stories easily. What it is, why we should use it, we will recommend a tutorial and more.

• Stupid RCU Tricks: rcutorture fails to find an RCU bug

  If you are running a kernel built with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y, RCU read-side critical sections can be preempted by higher-priority tasks, regardless of whether these tasks are executing kernel or userspace code. If there are enough higher-priority tasks, and especially if someone has foolishly disabled realtime throttling, these RCU read-side critical sections might remain preempted for a good long time. And as long as they remain preempted, RCU grace periods cannot complete. And if RCU grace periods cannot complete, your system has an OOM in its future. This is where RCU priority boosting comes in, at least in kernels built with CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y. If a given grace period is blocked only by preempted RCU read-side critical sections, and that grace period is at least 500 milliseconds old (this timeout can be adjusted using the RCU_BOOST_DELAY Kconfig option), then RCU starts boosting the priority of these RCU readers to the level specified by the rcutree.kthread_prio kernel boot parameter, which defaults to FIFO priority 2. RCU does this using one rcub kthread per rcu_node structure. Given a default Kconfig, this works out to one rcub kthread per 16 CPUs.

• Single-shot signal/slot connections

  Sometimes it’s useful to establish a connection between a signal and a slot that should be activated only once. This is not how signal/slot connections normally behave. [...] The static_cast isn’t technically necessary, in this case. But it becomes necessary, should we want to also pass some other arguments (for instance, if we want the connection to be queued as well as single-shot). This closed a long-standing and very voted feature request. Sometimes, by removing the pebble in your shoe, you make many other people happy.

• The 10 Best Agile Frameworks: Choosing The Right Framework For You

  Agile software development is a methodology related to application development focusing on an iterative process, where cross-functional teams collaborate to produce better solutions. Agile frameworks are unique methods or techniques in the development process following Agile principles. Most companies use these frameworks to mitigate their particular needs. Many popular Agile frameworks are available in the market. Different businesses utilize them according to their specific needs. It is significant for the product’s success to embrace a solid framework that aligns with the team’s requirements. That’s where we come in. Today we will help you to choose an Agile framework that matches your team requirements.