today's leftovers

• [Mesa-dev] 18.3 release plan

• Mesa 18.3 Gets A Release Date Towards The End Of November

  Intel open-source developer Dylan Baker has laid out a proposed release schedule for the upcoming Mesa 18.3 quarterly feature release.  There are two key dates: 31 October is the proposed branching date and 21 November is the proposed Mesa 18.3.0 release date. Between those two dates would be the usual weekly release candidates and there is the potential for the Mesa 18.3.0 release to be drawn out to the end of November or early December depending upon any open blocker bugs, which is common for the Mesa quarterly feature releases.

• Google Code-in 2018 is about to start!

  After a break in 2017, the KDE community is participating in the Google Code-in contest as a mentoring organization. This means that pre-university students aged 13 to 17 from all over the world will be able to contribute to the Free Software movement by helping KDE develop software products that give users control, freedom, and privacy. Google Code-in is a global online contest with the goal of helping teenagers get involved in the world of open source development. Mentors from the participating organizations lend a helping hand as participants complete various bite-sized tasks in coding, graphics design, documentation, and more. This year we have tasks from KDE Connect, a project that enables all your devices to communicate with each other; GCompris, an educational software suite; KDE Partition Manager, our disk partitioning utility; and the KDE Visual Design Group, our interface usability experts.

• Celebrating KDE’s 22 years and embracing new contributors at LaKademy 2018

  Almost two weeks ago we had the seventh edition of the LaKademy, an event that has been held in Brazil since 2012. As you may know LaKademy’s main goal is to get together the Latin American contributors of KDE community and to attract new ones. We don’t have talks like in Akademy because the event’s idea is to be a space for sprints. So people work in small groups doing specific tasks like fixing bugs, developing new features or translating software and documentation.

• openSUSE Security Update For Leap

  openSUSE has released an updated kernel for Leap 42.3 to address several vulnerabilities. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to cause a denial of service or escalate their privileges.

• Death Road to Canada adds 4-player local co-op along with new game modes

  In today’s post, we’re talking about failure. In episode 4, “Fail Better,” we learn how Google has systematically learned to embrace (each and every) failure as an opportunity to learn, grow, and prevent classes of similar problems from happening again. We also learn how one of the most popular video game franchises of all time may not have been so successful had the developers been successful in their first attempt at an algorithm for some rather prominent non-player characters (NPCs). Whether we like it or not, some amount of failure is inevitable. To this end, I started this week’s discussion with Jared and Michael by asking about how an early failure may have led to a different—or even a beneficial—outcome.

• Failure as a catalyst: Designing a feedback loop for success

  Emotional Resonance (context): I was turned down by Red Hat for a scrum master position because I wasn’t “qualified enough” even though this is what I had been doing prior to my job search. Red Hat was a fantastic opportunity for me and an opportunity to work on tech at a software company. I really wanted to work there. I longed to work there. (Note: Red Hat saw the error of their ways 4 months later and offered me a position that was hand crafted for my experience. The rest is history. And I’m forever grateful to my hiring manager.)

• Arm expands DesignStart program for Linux embedded designs

  Arm has expanded its DesignStart program to include the Cortex-A5 CPU, Arm's low-power and Linux-capable application processor, according to the processor IP vendor. Developers can now accelerate embedded and IoT SoC design for applications including medical, smart home, gateways and wearables. [...] When ready to tape out a custom chip, time to market can be accelerated with Arm's Artisan physical IP. Developers can also benefit from design enablement platforms being supported by 18 foundry partners with process technology ranging from 250nm to 5nm, Arm said. Earlier in October 2018, Arm announced its DesignStart program would be offering Cortex-M processors without any license fee or royalty on Xilinx FPGAs. Through expanding the program to offer Cortex-A5, Arm is looking to support innovation across the entire design spectrum of embedded and IoT devices. DesignStart also helps speed up SoC implementation with free access to the industry-leading library of physical IP, tailored for a range of fabs and process nodes, through Arm Artisan physical IP.

• Inexpensive Webcam

   

  Using a $5 Rpi Zero W from Microcenter, physically soldered the tiny webcam wires to the Zero: 3 V black to pin 1 on GPIO, ground to pin 6, D+ to PP22 pad next to the microusb and D- to PP23 usb pad. This wasn’t easy and I made a mess of the usb pads, but it works!  

• The Best Android Phones Under $300

Android Leftovers

• How to reset Android Pie's Adaptive Battery

• Google just quietly gave us a killer midrange Android option

• Google's Android is now officially ten years old

• Jaguar Land Rover finally adds Apple CarPlay, Android Auto support

• The one thing Android OEMs can learn from iPhone XR

• Android fraud ring was stealing millions in fake ad revenue

OSS Leftovers

• The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® HTTP Server v2.4.37

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® HTTP Server 2.4.37, the latest version of the world’s most popular Web server. Apache HTTP Server is an Open Source HTTP server for modern operating systems that include UNIX, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS/X, and Netware. For more than 23 years, the award-winning server software has been lauded as a secure, efficient, and extensible server that provides HTTP services observing the current HTTP standards.

• Benjamin Mako Hill: Why organizational culture matters for online groups

  Leaders and scholars of online communities tend of think of community growth as the aggregate effect of inexperienced individuals arriving one-by-one. However, there is increasing evidence that growth in many online communities today involves newcomers arriving in groups with previous experience together in other communities. This difference has deep implications for how we think about the process of integrating newcomers. Instead of focusing only on individual socialization into the group culture, we must also understand how to manage mergers of existing groups with distinct cultures. Unfortunately, online community mergers have, to our knowledge, never been studied systematically.

• Why does the C Programming language refuse to die?

  As a technology research analyst, I try to keep up pace with the changing world of technology. It seems like every single day, there is a new programming language, framework, or tool emerging out of nowhere. In order to keep up, I regularly have a peek at the listicles on TIOBE, PyPL, and Stackoverflow along with some twitter handles and popular blogs, which keeps my FOMO (fear of missing out) in check. So here I was, strolling through the TIOBE index, to see if a new programming language is making the rounds or if any old timer language is facing its doomsday in the lower half of the table. The first thing that caught my attention was Python, which interestingly broke into the top 3 for the first time since it was ranked by TIOBE. I never cared to look at Java, since it has been claiming the throne ever since it became popular. But with my pupils dilated, I saw something which I would have never expected, especially with the likes of Python, C#, Swift, and JavaScript around.

• RcppTOML 0.1.4: Now with TOML v0.5.0

• GitHub suffers major outage caused by faulty storage appliance

   

  Actual repository data wasn't affected, but at just before midnight last night, UK time, the MySQL databases containing push and pull requests were borked.

• NAB, Microsoft join to build ATM with facial recognition

   

  The proof-of-concept uses a cloud-based application developed using Azure Cognitive Services and artificial intelligence to identify customers who opt in to the service.

Raspberry Pi lookalike offers HDMI 2.0 and optional M.2

Geniatech’s “XPI-S905X” is a new Raspberry Pi pseudo clone with a quad -A53 Amlogic S905X plus 2GB RAM, up to 16GB eMMC, 4K-ready HDMI 2.0, LAN, 4x USB, touch-enabled LVDS, and optional M.2. Geniatech, which is known for Qualcomm based SBCs such as the Snapdragon 410 based, 96Boards-like Development Board IV and Snapdragon 820E based Development Board 8, has posted specs for a Raspberry Pi form factor board with a quad -A53, Amlogic S905X with 1/6GHz to 2GHz performance. No pricing is available for the XPI-S905X, which appears to be aimed at the OEM market.