Mozilla: Localization, VR, WebAssembly and More

• Localization Workshop in Kolkata (November 2017)

  Last November, Jeff, Peiying and I (flod) headed to Kolkata for the last of our planned localization workshops. The group of languages represented at the event included Bengali (both Bangladesh and India), Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Tamil and Telugu. If you’re surprised by the number of languages, consider that India alone has 22 languages listed in the Indian Constitution, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg, with a much larger variety of languages spoken, and sometime officially recognized at the State level.

• Making a Web Thing on the ESP8266

  Today I’m going to walk you through creating a simple Web Thing using an inexpensive off-the-shelf ESP8266 board. The power of web things comes from their ability to connect the digital world of web pages with the physical world of things. We recently released the Things Framework, a collection of software intended to make it easy to create new web things. The relevant library for this example is the webthing-esp8266 library, which makes easy it to connect Arduino-programmed ESP8266 boards with the Web of Things. We hope that this lowers the barrier to creating compelling experiences with our gateway and the Web Thing API.

• Introducing Hubs: A new way to get together

  Today, we’re excited to share a preview release of Hubs by Mozilla, a new way to get together online within Mixed Reality, right in your browser. Hubs is the first experiment we’re releasing as part of our Social Mixed Reality efforts, and we think it showcases the potential for the web to become the best, most accessible platform to bring people together around the world in this new medium.

• Enabling Social Experiences Using Mixed Reality and the Open Web

  Today, Mozilla is sharing an early preview of an experiment we are calling “Hubs by Mozilla”. Hubs is an immersive social experience that is delivered through the browser. You simply click on a web link to begin interacting with others inside virtual reality.

• How does dynamic dispatch work in WebAssembly?

  WebAssembly is a stack-based virtual machine and instruction set, designed such that implementations can be fast and safe. It is a portable target for the compilation of languages like C, C++, and Rust. [...] But C, C++, and Rust all have some capability for dynamic dispatch: function pointers, virtual methods, and trait objects. On native targets like x86, all these forms compile down into a jump to a dynamic address. What do these forms compile down into when targeting WebAssembly?

• BlinkOn 9: Working on the Web Platform from a cooperative

  Last week, I attended BlinkOn 9. I was very happy to spend some time with my colleagues working on Chromium, including a new developer who will join my team next week (to be announced soon!). This edition had the usual format with presentations, brainstorming, lightning talks and informal chats with Chromium developers. I attended several interesting presentations on web platform standardization, implementation and testing. It was also great to talk to Googlers in order to coordinate on some of Igalia’s projects such as the collaboration with AMP or MathML in Chromium.

Games: GOG, Cities: Skylines - Parklife and More

• Comedy adventure game HIVESWAP: Act 1 is now on GOG

  For those who love comedy adventure games, you might want to take a look at HIVESWAP: Act 1 as it's now on GOG.

• Cities: Skylines - Parklife now has a very short gameplay teaser

  Cities: Skylines - Parklife, the new expansion coming next month now has a rather short gameplay teaser. For those who didn't see the previous announcement, Parklife will further expand the city-builder from developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive to include: amusement parks, nature reserves, city parks and zoos, and giving new life to your empty land with custom parks and gardens.

• GOG now have the Linux version of retro-inspired FPS STRAFE: Millennium Edition

  For those of you GOG fans itching for some FPS action, you might want to check out STRAFE: Millennium Edition as GOG now have the Linux build too. Really good to see GOG add some many Linux builds lately, really pleasing to see! Naturally, the GOG build comes with the latest version of the game including a few of the Linux issues that came up being squashed. It's also 64bit, so no lib hunting required.

10 Great LXDE Themes

When it comes to Linux desktop environment aesthetics, the LXDE desktop environment is probably the weakest. The default skin it comes with, to be frank, is kind of dated and bland. Not to worry! Since this desktop environment is on Linux, you can tear it apart and make it look however you’d like! So why not make a list dedicated to great themes you can install right now into your LXDE session? I should mention, since this is LXDE, you’ll be able to use both XFCE4 themes as well as GTK2+ themes. (And the panel even has support for images if you want.)

Tumbleweed Gets New Mesa, KDE Frameworks, GNOME Packages

A total of four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released this week that brought new updates for the Linux Kernel, Mesa and a major version update of libglvnd. RADV received several fixes in snapshot 20180424 with the update to Mesa 18.0.1. Mesa core also had some patches to fix issues around overriding the OpenGL/ES supported version through environment variables, and a patch to fix an issue with texture samples found in “The Witness” through Wine. An updated description for the SSLProtocol option was made available with the apache2 2.4.33 package and apparmor 2.13 delivered a change of the (writeable) cache directory to /var/cache/apparmor/ with the new btrfs layout. The reason for using /var/lib/apparmor/cache/, which was “it’s part of the / subvolume”, is gone, and /var/cache makes more sense for the cache, according to the changelog. The cleanup process and behavior are a lot better with the update of ccache 3.4.2. Backup tool deja-dup 38.0 was a major update and exclude snap cache directories by default. GTK has a new ‘Widgetbowl‘ demo and the wayland backend now supports the stable xdg-shell protocol in gtk3 3.22.30. Linux Kernel 4.16.3 arrived in the snapshot and the GL Vendor-Neutral Dispatch library, libglvnd, was bumped to major version 1.0.0 thanks to EGL and GLX interfaces being defined and stable. The Tumbleweed rating tool is currently treading the snapshot as stable with an 88 rating.