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Programming Leftovers

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Development
  • An Introduction to Python for Non-Programmers

    Welcome to the first entry in this Python for non-programmers series.

    If you’re reading this, you probably have developed a curiosity about programming and are looking for a good place to start. I have good news for you. Python is one of the best languages with which to start that journey. Why? We’ll get into that in a minute. But first, let’s discover exactly what this language is and can do.

    Python is what’s called a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Let’s break that definition down.

    First, what is a high-level language? Let’s consider this:

    At the bottom, you have the computer hardware, which only understands what’s called “machine language.” Because machine language (or machine code) is so close to the hardware, it’s considered a low-level language (because it exists at such a low level).

    As you rise up away from the low level, languages become high-level, because they are abstracted away from the hardware. High-level languages do not need to view or access the details of the computer. If they did, they’d be considerably harder to use.

  • Raku Advent Calendar: Day 3 – Silently

    Santa was working on some programs to handle all of the intracacies of modern-day just-in-time package delivering, and got annoyed by some parts of the program getting noisy because some elf had left some debug statements in there. Ah, the joys of collaboration!

    So Santa wondered whether there could be a way to be less distracted by what otherwise seemed to be a perfectly running program. Looking at the Wonderful Winter Raku Land, after a little bit of searching, Santa found the silently module. That was great! It’s a module that exports a single subroutine silently that takes a block to execute, and will capture all output made by the code running in that block.

  • Installing Qt via Conan Package Manager

    We have been working intensely for months for the Conan package manager to distribute Qt packages. Today, we are happy to provide you a technology preview.

  • Why curl is used everywhere, even on Mars

    When I speak of curl in this post, I lump curl the command line tool and libcurl the library into one, and I just call them curl. Related: my webinar titled “Why everyone is using curl and you should too“.

    I believe just about every curl user has their own story and explanation about why they use curl in their product or device. I think there are several good reasons why users, including many of the world’s largest and most successful tech giants, decide they can lean on curl for Internet transfers.

    curl is used in mobile phone and tablet apps, it is used in TVs, cars, motorcycles, fridges, settop boxes, printers, smart watches, medical devices and computer games, both on desktop and in game consoles and of course in just about every web or Internet server out there. It was also used to land on mars. Put simpler: in almost every internet-connected device.

  • Runtime control of debug output: Endless Orange Week | Philip Withnall

    Recently at Endless we had a week of focused working on projects which are not our day-to-day work. It was called ‘Endless Orange Week’, and everyone was encouraged to explore a topic of their choosing.

    I chose to look at two projects, both of which included a D-Bus/API component. My thinking was that review of the new interfaces on each project might take a while, so it would make sense to have two projects running in parallel so I could switch between them when blocked.

    I’m going to blog about the two projects separately, to avoid one mega-long post.

    The first project was to add a D-Bus debug interface for applications. This would allow debug output from an application to be turned on and off at runtime, rather than just being set with a command line argument or environment variable when the application is first started.

    This would allow users and developers to get debug output from long-running applications without having to restart them, as quite often restarting a process will destroy the state you were hoping to debug.

  • Notcurses 3.0 Released For Adding "Bling" To Your Terminal Apps - Phoronix

    For those wanting to add some "bling" to your command-line programs to make some "rad" terminal apps, Notcurses 3.0 was released today for designing colorful and complex text-user interfaces. Notcurses allows adding a range of multimedia, Unicode, and other graphics capabilities to command-line applications across Linux / macOS / Windows.

    Notcurses isn't designed to be a drop-in replacement to Ncurses or the likes but is trying to bling up the terminal but not necessarily most practical or efficient for long-time power users of the terminal. It does though have many cool effects if that's your thing and some of the functionality would spice up terminal apps if desiring a more modern TUI.

  • Understanding the MIXAL insertion sort. | Adam Young’s Web Log

    A debugger is a wonderful tool for understanding what actually happens in a piece of code. Donald Knuth’s coding in TAOCP is archaic enough that I do not understand it just by reading through. This is due to a combination of my unfamiliarity with MIXAL, as well as some of the coding conventions he’s chosen. So, I’m going to step through the MIXAL code in mixvm, and annotate what I find.

  • Insertion sort From Knuth to Gnu AARCH64 | Adam Young’s Web Log

    Now that I can run the Knuth version of the Insertion sort via MIXAL, I want to convert it to AARCH64 Assembly. What I am going to try to do here is a line by line translation. This is not necessarily how I would write the insertion sort in AARCH64 assembly, but rather a direct translation of the MIXAL version.

    I started by defining constants for the output parameters. This is the equivalent to the TERM definition in the MIXAL version.

    I print out the completed buffer. You can see some trial and error here; I was trying to calculate N, the length of the buffer, bases on the addreses, just as I had done for Hello World messages, but the fact that I needed to put a blank in the first position made that logic more complex than I wanted. So, while I hand caluclated the leng of the bufffer (26) I add 2 to account for the lead blank and the trailing \n.

    IUn MIXAL, Many of the comparisons are done between registers and memory. AARCH64 does not support this. You also cannot add two integers without first loading one of them into a register. Thus, many single commands in MIXAL become multiple.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.