Segfaults and Twitter monkeys: a tale of pointlessness

For a few years in the 1990s, when PNG was just getting established as a Web image format, I was a developer on the libpng team.

One reason I got involved is that the compression patent on GIFs was a big deal at the time. I had been the maintainer of GIFLIB since 1989; it was on my watch that Marc Andreesen chose that code for use in the first graphics-capable browser in ’94. But I handed that library off to a hacker in Japan who I thought would be less exposed to the vagaries of U.S. IP law. (Years later, after the century had turned and the LZW patents expired, it came back to me.)

Then, sometime within a few years of 1996, I happened to read the PNG standard, and thought the design of the format was very elegant. So I started submitting patches to libpng and ended up writing the support for six of the minor chunk types, as well as implementing the high-level interface to the library that’s now in general use.

As part of my work on PNG, I volunteered to clean up some code that Greg Roelofs had been maintaining and package it for release. This was “gif2png” and it was more or less the project’s official GIF converter.

AArch64 support for ELF Dissector

After having been limited to maintenance for a while I finally got around to some feature work on ELF Dissector again this week, another side-project of mine I haven’t written about here yet. ELF Dissector is an inspection tool for the internals of ELF files, the file format used for executables and shared libraries on Linux and a few other operating systems.

[...]

ELF Dissector had its first commit more than six years ago, but it is still lingering around in a playground repository, which doesn’t really do it justice. One major blocker for making it painlessly distributable however are its dependencies on private Binutils/GCC API. Using the Capstone disassembler is therefore also a big step towards addressing that, now only the use of the demangler API remains.

Weekly Python StackOverflow Report: (clxxxiii) stackoverflow python report

denemo @ Savannah: Release 2.3 is imminent - please test.

Arguments | Another way to work with user inputs – Part 7

Call for setting up new obfs4 bridges

BridgeDB is running low on obfs4 bridges and often fails to provide users with three bridges per request. Besides, we recently fixed a BridgeDB issue that could get an obfs4 bridge blocked because of its vanilla bridge descriptor: <https://bugs.torproject.org/28655>

We therefore want to encourage volunteers to set up new obfs4 bridges to help censored users. Over the last few weeks, we have been improving our obfs4 setup guide which walks you through the process: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/obfs4proxy>p>

Preparing the bzip2-1.0.7 release

From bzip2-1.0.1 (from the year 2000), until bzip2-1.0.6 (from 2010), release tarballs came with a special Makefile-libbz2_so to generate a shared library instead of a static one.

This never used libtool or anything; it specified linker flags by hand. Various distributions either patched this special makefile, or replaced it by another one, or outright replaced the complete build system for a different one.

Bzip2 Is About To See Its First Real Update In Close To A Decade

The Bzip2 open-source compression program is about to see its first real release since September 2010. This new version brings new build systems, security fixes, and much more. 

Earlier this month we wrote about Bzip2 seeing a revival under new maintainership. With Federico Mena-Quintero having taken the reigns from Bzip2 creator Julian Seward, he's busy working on this imminent 1.0.7 release as well as longer-term plans like potentially porting parts of the program to Rust.

Kids can be so crurl: Lead dev unchuffed with Google's plan to remake curl in its own image

Google is planning to reimplement parts of libcurl, a widely used open-source file transfer library, as a wrapper for Chromium's networking API – but curl's lead developer does not welcome the "competition".

Issue 973603 in the Chromium bug tracker describes libcrurl,"a wrapper library for the libcurl easy interface implemented via Cronet API".

Cronet is the Chromium network stack, used not only by Google's browser but also available to Android applications.

Java and JavaScript remain the most popular programming languages

That's according to State of Developer Ecosystem report out of JetBrains, which saw the firm survey 7,000 coders about key industry trends. The main takeaways are that Java is the most popular primary programming language; JavaScript is the most used overall; Go is the most promising; and Python is the most studied.

69 per cent of developers (nice) have used JavaScript over the past 12 months, followed by HTML/CSS (61 per cent), SQL (56 per cent), Java (50 per cent), Python (49 per cent) and Shell scripting languages (40 per cent).

Candy Tsai: Outreachy Week 5: What is debci?

After being asked sooo many times what am I doing for this internship, I think I never explained it well enough so that others could understand. Let me give it a try here.

debci is short for “Debian Continuous Integration”, so I’ll start with a short definition of what “Continuous Integration” is then!

Token Based Authentication for Django Rest Framework

Django is of the popular web development framework based on python having a large community and is used by many top websites presently. And Django Rest Framework, one of the most popular python package meant for Django to develop rest api’s and it made things really easier from authentication to responses each and everything.

Report from February 2019 ISO WG21 C++ Standards Committee Meeting

The February 2019 ISO C++ meeting was held in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. As usual, Red Hat sent three of us to the meeting: I attended in the SG1 (parallelism and concurrency) group, Jonathan Wakely in Library, and Jason Merrill in the Core Working Group (see Jason’s report here). In this report, I’ll cover a few highlights of the meeting, focusing on the papers that were discussed.

The first part of the week in SG1 was spent primarily on papers related to the Executors proposal (p0443). First up was “Integrating executors with the parallel algorithms” (p1019). SG1 also saw this paper at the Fall WG21 meeting in San Diego (see my Fall 2018 trip report). Much of the discussion around this paper in Kona centered on whether supplying an executor to an algorithm required that the algorithm must execute on the supplied executor. Currently, execution policies are just hints to the algorithm, and the algorithm is free to ignore the hint (e.g., some algorithms have no profitable parallelization, or parallelization may not be profitable for small input ranges, so an algorithm may ignore the user’s request for parallelization).

We also spent some time trying to get a clearer definition of what counts as a Thread of Execution (ToE) in the context of p1019 (e.g., does a ToE imply TLS? What about fibers, SIMD lanes, etc.?) and the standard parallel algorithms, as well as how exceptions might be handled. Currently, exceptions in parallel algorithms terminate the calling program. The consensus was that we’d like to aim for executors supplied to algorithms to require that the algorithm strictly execute on the supplied executor. The author was asked to work on a subsequent revision of the paper with this guidance in mind. No conclusions were reached on the topic of exception propagation or what specifically constitutes a ToE in this context.

Next, there was a brief discussion on an experience report I wrote for the Fall meeting (p1192). I had no new information on this paper for Kona but expect to bring either an update or a new paper based on work I will be doing to replace the default execution backend of the libstdc++ implementation of parallel algorithms from Intel’s Thread Building Blocks to a backend based on OpenMP.

3D – Interactions with Qt, KUESA and Qt Design Studio, Part 1

I’m a 3D designer, mostly working in blender. Sometimes I come across interesting problems and I’ll try to share those here. For example, trying to display things on low-end hardware – where memory is sometimes limited, meaning every polygon and triangle counts; where the renderer doesn’t do what the designer wants it to, that sort of thing. The problem that I’ll cover today is, how to easily create a reflection in KUESA or Qt 3D Studio.

Neither KUESA or Qt 3D Studio will give you free reflections. If you know a little about 3D, you know that requires ray tracing software, not OpenGL. So, I wondered if there would be an easy way to create this effect. I mean, all that a reflection is, is a mirror of an object projected onto a plane, right? So, I wondered, could this be imitated?

Linear Regression in Python

Linear Regression is a supervised statistical technique where we try to estimate the dependent variable with a given set of independent variables. We assume the relationship to be linear and our dependent variable must be continuous in nature.

Announcing GitLabracadabra 0.2.1

Mid-October I started at work a tool in Python to create and update our projects hosted in our GitLab instance.

Kubernetes 1.15 Releaased, Offensive Security Reveals the 2019-2020 Roadmap for Kali Linux, Canonical Releases a New Kernel Live Patch for Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 LTS, Vivaldi 2.6 Now Available, and Mathieu Parent Announces GitLabracadabra

Mathieu Parent today announces GitLabracadabra 0.2.1. He started working on the tool to in Python to create and update projects in GitLab. He notes that "This tool is still very young and documentation is sparse, but following the 'release early, release often' motto I think it is ready for general usage."

Let’s Build A Simple Interpreter. Part 15.

Before moving on to topics of recognizing and interpreting procedure calls, let’s make some changes to improve our error reporting a bit. Up until now, if there was a problem getting a new token from text, parsing source code, or doing semantic analysis, a stack trace would be thrown right into your face with a very generic message. We can do better than that.

To provide better error messages pinpointing where in the code an issue happened, we need to add some features to our interpreter. Let’s do that and make some other changes along the way. This will make the interpreter more user friendly and give us an opportunity to flex our muscles after a “short” break in the series. It will also give us a chance to prepare for new features that we will be adding in future articles.

‘I code in my dreams too’, say developers in Jetbrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2019 Survey

Last week, Jetbrains published its annual survey results known as The State of Developer Ecosystem 2019. More than 19,000 people participated in this developer ecosystem survey. But responses from only 7000 developers from 17 countries were included in the report. The survey had over 150 questions and key results from the survey are published, complete results along with the raw data will be shared later. Jetbrains prepared an infographics based on the survey answers they received. Let us take a look at their key takeaways:

Python and "dead" batteries

Python is, famously, a "batteries included" language; it comes with a rich standard library right out of the box, which makes for a highly useful starting point for everyone. But that does have some downsides as well. The standard library modules are largely maintained by the CPython core developers, which adds to their duties; the modules themselves are subject to the CPython release schedule, which may be suboptimal. For those reasons and others, there have been thoughts about retiring some of the older modules; it is a topic that has come up several times over the last year or so.

It probably had been discussed even earlier, but a session at the 2018 Python Language Summit (PLS) is the starting point this time around. At that time, Christian Heimes listed a few modules that he thought should be considered for removal; he said he was working on a PEP to that end. PEP 594 ("Removing dead batteries from the standard library") surfaced in May with a much longer list of potentially dead batteries. There was also a session at this year's PLS, where Amber Brown advocated moving toward a much smaller standard library, arguing that including modules in the standard library stifles their growth. Some at PLS seemed to be receptive to Brown's ideas, at least to some extent, though Guido van Rossum was apparently not pleased with her presentation and "stormed from the room".

When and How to Win With New Programming Languages

Understanding Data Ops and it's impact on Application Quality

Time-of-Flight camera is powered by Jetson TX2

Lucid Vision Labs unveiled a MIPI-CSI2 equipped “Helios Embedded” version of its new Helios Time of Flight 3D camera that combines a Jetson TX2 with a Sony DepthSense IMX556PLR ToF sensor with under-5mm accuracy at 0.3 to 1.5 meters.

Time-of-Flight (ToF) technology spans a range of infrared laser scanners from 3D imaging and navigation systems found on autonomous robots and self-driving cars to the camera flash mechanism inside the Huawei Honor View 20 phone. Most ToF cameras are controlled from a Windows or Linux PCs, such as the Basler ToF Camera, the Terabee 3Dcam 80×60, or Lucid Vision Labs’ Helios ToF Camera, which was announced last October and is due to ship later this month. Now Lucid has announced a similar Helios Embedded version of the Helios ToF due in Q4 2019 that can operate autonomously thanks to its Jetson TX2 module.

Librem 5 June Software Update

Hi everyone! The Librem 5 team has been hard at work, and we want to update you all on our software progress.

Conferences

A couple of blog posts back, we mentioned that our hardware engineer gave a talk at KiCon—and it is available for watching now!

Also, recently Tobias Bernard attended the Libre Graphics Meeting, where he had lots of conversation around the future photo viewing application for the Librem 5 phone.

Instana Releases Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Operator Built on Quarkus

Red Hat OpenShift introduced Kubernetes (K8s) Operator support with version 3.11. Since that time, the number of Operators created by the OpenShift community has been steadily growing. Instana introduced our Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Operator at Red Hat Summit 2019, and will be demonstrating our K8s capabilities at KubeCon Barcelona this week.

Book Contest: Creating GUI Applications with wxPython

How to Use Python lambda Functions

Event - GNU Hackers Meeting (Madrid, Spain)

Twelve years after its first edition in Orense, the GNU Hackers Meeting (2019-09-04–06) will help in Spain again. This is an opportunity to meet, hack, and learn with other free software enthusiasts.