Programming Leftovers

• Graphics in Qt 6.0: QRhi, Qt Quick, Qt Quick 3D

  Last year we had a three part blog series about Qt's new approach to working with 3D graphics APIs and shading languages: part 1, part 2, part 3. For Qt Quick, an early, opt-in preview of the new rendering architecture was shipped in Qt 5.14, with some improvements in Qt 5.15. With the release of Qt 6.0 upcoming, let's see what has happened since Qt 5.15. It will not be possible to cover every detail of the graphics stack improvements for Qt Quick here, let alone dive into the vast amount of Qt Quick 3D features, many of which are new or improved in Qt 6.0. Rather, the aim is just to give an overview of what can be expected from the graphics stack perspective when Qt 6.0 ships later this year.

• Multi-Layer Perceptron & Backpropagation - Implemented from scratch

  Writing a custom implementation of a popular algorithm can be compared to playing a musical standard. For as long as the code reflects upon the equations, the functionality remains unchanged. It is, indeed, just like playing from notes. However, it lets you master your tools and practice your ability to hear and think. In this post, we are going to re-play the classic Multi-Layer Perceptron. Most importantly, we will play the solo called backpropagation, which is, indeed, one of the machine-learning standards. As usual, we are going to show how the math translates into code. In other words, we will take the notes (equations) and play them using bare-bone numpy.

 

• PyDev of the Week: William Horton

  This week we welcome William Horton (@hortonhearsafoo) as our PyDev of the Week! William is a Backend Engineer at Compass and has spoken at several local Python conferences. He is a contributor to PyTorch and fastai. Let’s spend some time getting to know William better! Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc): A little about myself: people might be surprised about my educational background–I didn’t study computer science. I have a bachelors in the social sciences. So by the time I finished undergrad, the most programming I had done was probably doing regressions in Stata to finish my thesis. I decided against grad school, and instead signed up for a coding bootcamp (App Academy) in NYC. The day I’m writing this, September 28, is actually 5 years to the day that I started at App Academy. Since then I’ve worked at a few different startups in NYC, across various industries: first investment banking, then online pharmacy, and now real estate. I’m currently a senior engineer on the AI Services team at Compass, working on machine learning solutions for our real estate agents and consumers. I like to spend my free time on a few different hobbies. I’m a competitive powerlifter, so I like to get into the gym a few times a week (although with the pandemic in NYC I didn’t lift for six months or so). I’ve actually found powerlifting to be a pretty common hobby among software engineers. Every time someone new joined my gym, it seemed like they came from a different startup. I love to play basketball. And I’m passionate about music: I’ve been a singer almost my whole life, and most recently was performing with an a cappella group in NYC. And in the last year I’ve picked up the guitar, after not touching it since I was a teenager, and that has been very fulfilling.

• Malayalam fonts: Beyond Latin font metrics | Soliloquies

  This year’s annual international conference organized by TeX Users Group — TUG2020 — was held completely online due to the raging pandemic. In TUG2020, I have presented a talk on some important Malayalam typeface design factors and considerations. The idea and its articulation of the talk originated with K.H. Hussain, designer of well-known fonts such as Rachana, Meera, Meera Inimai, TNJoy etc. In a number of discussions that ensued, this idea was developed and later presented at TUG2020. Opening keynote to TUG2020 was delivered by Steve Matteson, about the design of Noto fonts. He mentioned that Noto was originally envisaged to be developed as a single font containing all Unicode scripts; but that was changed due to a couple of reasons: (1) huge size of resulting font and (2) the design of many South/South-East Asian characters do not fit well within its Latin font metrics.

• Jérôme Gardou hired full-time to work on the memory manager

  I proudly announce that ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired Jérôme Gardou to work full-time on the ReactOS kernel’s memory manager for the next 3 months. Jérôme is a ReactOS veteran who has been contributing to the project since 2009. He has deep expertise into nearly all parts of ReactOS, ranging from various user-mode components (mostly related to low-level graphics) over their kernel-mode counterparts and down to bare-metal components like the kernel memory manager. During the upcoming months, Jérôme is going to overhaul the Mm (Memory Manager) and Cc (Cache Controller) components of the kernel. Both of them are core parts of the operating system, which are involved in every memory request and file operation. Improving them is expected to have a substantial effect on the overall stability and performance of ReactOS.

• "Open-Source Windows" ReactOS To See Improved Memory Management - Phoronix

  ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired one of their long-time contributors to work full-time on the "open-source Windows" implementation's memory management for the next quarter. ReactOS is funding longtime contributor Jérôme Gardou to work full-time for the next three months on the open-source operating system's memory manager and cache controller code within its kernel. ReactOS hopes this overhaul to the MM/CS code will yield "a substantial effect on the overall stability and performance of ReactOS."

Corsair Power Supplies May Soon See Sensor Support Exposed Under Linux

Select high-end Corsair power supplies such as their RMi / HXi / AXi series are able to expose various sensor metrics via USB interface to the system. To date this sensor functionality has only worked under Windows with their proprietary software but now an open-source driver is seeking mainline inclusion for supporting these sensors under Linux. Independent developer Wilken Gottwalt reverse-engineered the micro-controller found on the Corsair RMi/HXi/AXi power supplies and found it to be a proprietary but simple USB HID protocol. The controller exposes temperatures, current, and voltage levels along with other information like power uptime, power used, and power supply fan speed. This protocol on select models can also allow configuring the fan mode and mono/multi-rail voltage handling, and over-current protection. Also: Qualcomm QCS610 micro SoM and devkit to power AI and ML smart cameras

Games: Nonsense Soccer, Bound By Blades and Halloween at Humble Store

• Nonsense Soccer is a highly amusing local multiplayer platformer-soccer-hybrid | GamingOnLinux

  After your next local multiplayer game? Nonsense Soccer is out in Early Access and it's already a huge amount of fun if you're the competitive type. Nonsense Soccer takes the classic sport and turns it into a side-on platformer-soccer-hybrid and the result is chaotic. Simple enough for anyone young and old to pick up their favourite gamepad and get kicking. It's actually been available for a little while already, with the new Steam release being their second major update.

• Check out the fresh demo of Bound By Blades and take down some fierce monsters | GamingOnLinux

  Bound By Blades might look welcoming with the sweet colourful style and wonderful music, but this action-RPG gets quickly intense. Inspired somewhat by Monster Hunter, it originally tried going through Kickstarter to gather funds back in 2019. It failed but the development has continued anyway. The idea is that you go through increasingly tough battles, slaying big creatures in the unique four-corner combat arena where you run between four corners, dodging enemy attacks and unleash your own. After a year of work, the new demo is out now.

• Humble Store has a big Halloween sale on right now | GamingOnLinux

  Prepare for Halloween with some new games? It's not like you're able to go out much with the COVID19 disease still raging on so staying in and playing games sound great to me. To help with that you can check out the Humble Store Halloween Sale, which has a number of big hits going on some pretty high discounts. While it's a Halloween sale, the majority of the titles oddly aren't really scary or much related to the event, still it's another good chance to build up your collection.

today's howtos

• How To Install HAProxy on CentOS 8 - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HAProxy on your CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, HAProxy is a free HTTP/TCP high availability load balancer and proxy server. It spreads requests among multiple servers to mitigate issues resulting from a single server failure. HA Proxy is used by a number of high-profile websites including GitHub, Bitbucket, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Tuenti, and is used in the OpsWorks product from Amazon Web Services. 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 through the step by step installation HAProxy on a CentOS 8.

• How To Install Python 3.9 on Ubuntu 20.04 – TecAdmin

  Python is an object-oriented, high-level programming language. It is an open source with a large community. Python is used as key languages among the top tech companies like Google. The Python 3.9 stable version has been released with several improvements and security updates. It included multiple new modules, improved existing modules and many other features. You can choose deadsnakes PPA for Python installation on Ubuntu 20.04 system. Use this tutorial to install Python 3.9 On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux system via Apt-Get. You can also choose second method to install Python using source code.

• YAML for beginners | Enable Sysadmin

  YAML Ain't a Markup Language (YAML), and as configuration formats go, it's easy on the eyes. It has an intuitive visual structure, and its logic is pretty simple: indented bullet points inherit properties of parent bullet points. But this apparent simplicity can be deceptive. It's easy (and misleading) to think of YAML as just a list of related values, no more complex than a shopping list. There is a heading and some items beneath it. The items below the heading relate directly to it, right? Well, you can test this theory by writing a little bit of valid YAML.

• colorls – turbocharged alternative to ls

  The part of the operating system responsible for managing files and directories is called the file system. It organizes our data into files, which hold information, and directories (also called ‘folders’), which hold files or other directories. Several commands are frequently used to create, inspect, rename, and delete files and directories. One of these commands is ls, which prints the names of the files and directories in the current directory. A directory is really just a file. It’s a special file with special rules. The ls utility appeared in the first version of AT&T UNIX. Are you looking to liven up your shell? Want a bit more beauty on your terminal? colorls might be the ticket. colorls is a command-line utility that aims to improve on ls. color is written in Ruby.