● 07.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/07/2023: PipeWire 0.3.74 and Mozilla Thunderbird 115

Posted in News Roundup at 12:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• While Red Hat continues to wrangle with its approach to open developer access on the Red Hat Enterprise Linus (RHEL) source code front (and that’s another story in and of itself), China has stepped up its efforts to achieve IT independence in the face of a traditional reliance upon US technologies with the launch of its open source desktop operating system.

• OpenKylin, or openKylin, stems from what its makers call an ‘open source community’ founded by (again quoting from its core home page) ‘basic’ software and hardware enterprises, non-profit organizations, community organizations, colleges and universities.

• Do my eyes deceive me? Apparently not. According to Statcounter, the Linux share on the desktop has actually now passed 3% for the first time.

• Linux hit a major milestone, with its desktop market share crossing the 3% mark for the first time in its history.

• Linux already runs the majority of web servers in the world, as well as the majority of smartphones, thanks to Android being Linux-based. Despite being the world’s most used operating system, Linux has never made much headway on the desktop.

• According to Statcounter, Linux has finally crossed 3% in the desktop market in June 2023, coming in at 3.07%.

• Linux may be benefiting from a number of factors…

• After performing various attacks on the corporate environment, it is important to review and analyze logs from the exploited network to determine if any of my red team techniques are observable. With that knowledge, I can implement compensating firewall controls or deploy an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) to prevent attacks. To obtain these logs, I installed Splunk Enterprise in a Ubuntu VM on my SOC network. On the Ubuntu VM, I configured a Splunk agent that receives data and indexes, enabling efficient search and analysis.

• After spinning up a Ubuntu VM, I downloaded Splunk Enterprise, then installed and configured it as my Splunk agent. I’ve attached a link in the references below showing how to do this.

• Containers have gained popularity because they make it easy to deploy and update services and applications as portable, self-contained packages to scale. Given how many different methods of deploying containers there are, you need to make the right choice for your needs.

• One choice is Docker, which users can install on many different operating systems. For example, if your purpose is developing for Docker, you can install it on any given Linux distribution, macOS or even Windows. But, when it comes to deploying those to users, it gets much more complicated. That is precisely why admins use specialized operating systems to deploy and manage containers.

Kernel Space

• If you build your own hardware for Linux, you’ll probably eventually want to write a driver which runs as a privileged program. While there are many things you can do in user space, for the ultimate control and performance, you can’t beat a driver.

• One problem, though, is that drivers can really crash your system in a big way. In the old days, it was common to have a dedicated system for driver development. Today, for many drivers, you can get away with running a virtual machine that you can crash and reload without much trouble.

• The videos cover diverse topics like interrupts, completions, polling, and threads. He even uses a Raspberry Pi, which will be very useful for many embedded projects. Of course, the trend these days is to have one driver — like the USB driver — and have it provide user-space access so that everyone doesn’t have to write their own drivers. But, as usual, that only goes so far.

Applications

• This is a quick bugfix release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 0.3.x releases.

Instructionals/Technical

• Monitoring system metrics provides insights into how a system is performing and can help identify issues that may impact system availability, user experience, and overall system health. By monitoring metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, disk utilization, network traffic, and other critical parameters, you can proactively identify and resolve issues before they become significant problems.

• In this article, you’ll learn how to set up a monitoring stack consisting of Grafana, Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Node-exporter using Docker-compose. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a fully functional monitoring system that can help you keep track of your system’s performance and identify any issues that may arise.

• Unlike the situation with NFS v3 locks, where you have to dig into the kernel data structures to find the client who owns a lock, it appears that the NFS v4 server directly exposes this information in files under /proc/fs/nfsd. Based on casual inspection, ‘clients/<id;>/states’ appears to contain information on delegations and locks from that client, while ‘clients/<id>/info’ identifies the client. Actual locks in the ‘states’ file are ‘type: lock’, as opposed to the other types (which may appear in quantity, due to delegations).

• For my desktop environment, I use fvwm with a completely custom setup (this old entry on my desktop is still pretty accurate MyDesktop). These days my multiple browsers are actually Firefox profiles, so I have a cover script to run Firefox with my ‘JavaScript enabled’ profile and whatever remaining command line options; this is more or less ‘firefox -P Javascript “$@”‘ (although in practice I always use it with –new-window, because for browser organization I usually prefer windows over tabs).

• This is the fourth in a series about archiving to removable media (optical discs such as BD-Rs and DVD+Rs or portable hard drives). Here are the first three parts: [...]

• At this point we could conclude our investigation. We’re now able to reliably trigger the “taking countermeasures” message using strace fault injection.

• There is one more thing though. When sending ICMP Echo Request messages, does ping remember the send timestamp in some kind of hash table? That might be wasteful considering a long-running ping sending thousands of packets.

• Ping is smart, and instead puts the timestamp in the ICMP Echo Request packet payload!

• Here’s how the full algorithm works: [...]

• When it comes to managing files on a computer, finding specific files or directories quickly and efficiently can be a common task. Whether you’re a developer looking for a specific code file, a system administrator searching for log files, or a regular user trying to locate a document, having a reliable and user-friendly file search tool can greatly simplify the process. One such tool that has gained popularity among Linux users is “fd”. Designed as a user-friendly alternative to the traditional find command, fd provides a more intuitive and efficient method for searching files and directories. In this detailed tutorial, we will discuss what is fd, key differences between the fd and find command. We will also learn how to install and use fd command to efficiently search files and directories in Linux.

• Money Manager Ex (abbreviated as “MMEX”) is an open-source, cross-platform personal finance manager which uses single-entry bookkeeping. The program has a long history – having been first released in February 2006 – and is actively developed by a team of about thirty contributors. MMEX was awarded the “Community Choice” Project of the Month in July 2020.

• The program’s interface is straightforward and intuitive, yet highly customizable (in terms of categories, searches and reports). It is secure, as the data is stored in a non-proprietary SQLite database with AES encryption. On the project’s Wiki page, the developers state that Money Manager Ex “includes all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application. The design goals are to concentrate on simplicity and user-friendliness – something one can use every day.”

• I began using MMEX a year and a half ago, as an experiment on Linux Mint. I found it to be accurate, stable and well suited to my needs. The program is easy to set up, thanks to its use of built-in wizards. It also has a detailed User Manual (available in thirteen languages).

• Protocol analyzer tools, such as Wireshark and tcpdump, can help network administrators identify protocols in the network, analyze network performance and discover network devices.

• Kubernetes admin and author Chad M. Crowell discusses how to prep for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam, whether getting a Kubernetes certification is worth it and more.

• We do a lot of things with GIMP, but much of what we do with GIMP is edit photos. Sometimes we think that our photo would look lots better if that (insert object here) just wasn’t in the picture. Let’s explore some ways to remove an object from a photo.

• The >, >>, &, && and || characters are extremely useful whenever you’re working on the Linux command line.

• The mkdir command can create not just a directory but also a complex directory structure if you ask in the right way.

• If you recently switched from Windows to Linux, you will want to install Windows fonts in your Linux distribution. These fonts will then be available in programs such as Libre Office and other software in your Linux distribution.

• Client URL or cURL is a data transfer tool in Linux that can make different kinds of requests from the client side to any remote server. With the curl command, you can make simple and complex requests to the server to access the necessary information. In this article, we explain what is the curl command and its different use cases in Linux for you to harness its power.

Games

• Well, the results are here. In the USA the FTC was trying to block Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard but Microsoft has won the fight. Now Microsoft are one big step closer to actually properly closing the deal, and a rather big consolidation of the gaming industry given how big Activision Blizzard are.

• Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun was updated by Auroch Digital recently, and now it should be properly fully playable on Steam Deck and desktop Linux. Note: Focus Entertainment previously sent me a key.

• The Khronos Group who oversee various standards like OpenGL, Vulkan and OpenXR announced recently they’ve put up a “Request for Proposals” to fund work on Monado.

• Valve has bundled up all the recent Beta updates for Steam Deck and desktop Steam into a fresh stable update so here’s a list of what’s new. Pretty much all of it is shared between Steam Deck and desktop because this is just a normal Steam Client update.

• Another fresh release went out recently for The Force Engine, a rebuilt game engine to play STAR WARS – Dark Forces and eventually Outlaws nicely on modern systems.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Linux Lite 6.6 RC1 is now available for testing.

• This is one our largest releases on record since we began in 2012.

• We’ve added 1000′s of lines of new code in the form of supporting a large range of languages. We’ve massively increased the number of language translations across the entire Menu and Sub-Menu system, by adding support for 22 Languages. We had the time to take on a task of this magnitude so we used it completely.

• We’re releasing this RC with a longer than usual test time to allow for feedback and corrections to occur. There are some details below, but all of the changes will be in the Final Release Announcement.

• We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4.4, a new Solus 4 series release named Harmony. This release delivers new desktop environment updates, software stacks, and hardware enablement.

• blendOS v3 “Bhatura” has now been released, with a host of new features, including the ability to switch between 7 desktop environments with system track, seamless atomic background updates, support for 10 container distributions and Nix, reproducible systems (containers and dotfiles), new developer-friendly CLI utilities for system and user operations and a lot more.

• A brand new stable Q4OS 5.2 version codenamed ‘Aquarius’ is immediately available for download and use in production environments. This is a long-term support LTS version to be supported for at least five years with security patches and software updates. Q4OS Aquarius is based on Debian Bookworm 12 and Plasma 5.27.5, optionally Trinity 14.1.1 desktop environment, and it’s available for 64bit/x64 computers. A 32bit/i686pae edition for older i386 systems with or without PAE extension will follow soon, in a few days. We plan to bring Aquarius for ARM devices as well.

• The objective is to provide rock stable, as lightweight as possible, Debian based operating system with added value thanks to unique Q4OS tools. We keep the Plasma desktop appearance as the Debian stock one, however users who like Q4OS brand are recommended to switch to Q4OS dedicated Debonaire theme in system settings. Desktop profiler, an exclusive Q4OS tool, features custom profiles support, so a user can export the current desktop status snapshot, modify it and even create customized profiles on his own. Any profile is importable, so a user can import and apply it later on another hardware, getting a unique possibility of easy installation and configuration of the pre-defined set of applications and packages at once. In other words, a user easily gets a fresh operating system installation configured and ready to work with a minimal post installation effort. In addition, each desktop environment may keep its own applications profiles.

BSD

• Matthieu Herrb (matthieu@) has written some notes on his work at the (recently-concluded) g2k23 hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia. His article, Wayland on OpenBSD, starts: [...]

• There are several reasons why it’s important to look at alternative operating systems, particularly open source ones. Firstly, open source operating systems tend to be more customizable and configurable compared to proprietary operating systems. This allows users to have more control over their system, and to tailor it to their specific needs

• Another important reason to look at alternative operating systems is to avoid vendor lock-in. Proprietary operating systems often come bundled with specific hardware or software, which can limit the flexibility of the user.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• Back in 2009, there was some “turmoil” within PCLinuxOS. Texstar had taken a sabbatical from the role of leading PCLinuxOS to take care of some other life issues. He left control in the hands of those he thought he could trust. Except certain individuals among that “trusted group” tried to wrestle control of PCLinuxOS away from Texstar. Texstar re-established himself in the lead role, and those responsible for the failed mutiny left PCLinuxOS to establish another (now defunct) distro. It split the PCLinuxOS user base into two opposing camps. In the largest camp were those loyal to Texstar and his vision for PCLinuxOS. A smaller group either openly sympathized with the mutineers, or even followed them to the new distro.

• So, just in case you’re not aware, the website for The PCLinuxOS Magazine was struck by ransomware in mid-June. Other than just pure, criminal extortion, there was no reason to strike the magazine’s website. The magazine website does not use trackers. The magazine website does not collect any PPI (personal private information). The magazine website does not sell anything. Everything there is offered up FOR FREE. There was literally NOTHING for the attackers to profit from. No customer data, nothing. Attacking the magazine website is just pure criminal extortion.

• [...]

• That forced us to “restore” the magazine site using an old backup from 2018. That was the newest backup we had that we knew to be “clean.” That meant that we “lost” everything from December 2018 until June 2023. Since we are all volunteers, spread out across the globe, we were able to fill in most of the missing files. The PDF files were restored pretty much the same day that the ransomware attack occurred. The ebook files were restored a day later. The CrankyZombie, a.k.a. YouCanToo, had all of the HTML files, and had them restored in short order.

• The only files we weren’t able to recover were the “log files” that kept track of page visits and download counts. Que sera sera. We can live without those files.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• The company that might be Red Hat’s biggest rival when it comes to enterprise Linux, Germany-based SUSE, today announced that it is forking Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the purpose of continuing to make a RHEL-compatable distribution available for those that need or want it.

• The company said in a statement that it plans to invest more than $10 million into this project, and that it intends to contribute the project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to the source code.

• A storm is brewing in open-source land that could change the Linux distro landscape

• Today, SUSE announced that it is creating a hard fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and that it will develop and maintain an RHEL-compatible distribution. SUSE says that it will invest $10 million into this project over the coming years. One major open source company forking another major open source company’s project is equivalent to going nuclear. But there’s a reason SUSE is doing this now, and that it will likely be championed by many in the open source community. It’s a complicated story.

• SUSE has announced that it is getting into the business of creating RHEL clones and investing $10 million in the project.

• One of the Linux stories of the moment has come from Red Hat, with their ongoing efforts to make accessing the source of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux product a paid-for only process. This has caused consternation and annoyance alike, from the open source community angry at any liberties taken with the GPL, and from the community of RHEL users and customers concerned as to what it might mean for them.

• Now a new player has entered the fray in the form of SuSe, who have announced the creation of an RHEL fork with the intention of maintaining a freely-available Red Hat compatible operating system distribution.

• Fresh on the heels of Red Hat’s source code lockout, SUSE has decided to undertake something entirely novel.

• Over the coming years, they plan to invest over $10 million into an RHEL-compatible distro free of restrictions.

• If you did not get the memo, here’s what you missed (to get up to speed)…

Fedora Family / IBM

• Today SUSE announced its intent to do a “hard fork” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and yesterday Oracle came out with a press release aimed squarely at Red Hat and IBM, and trying to claim the high road in keeping Linux “open and free.” It’s fair to say that the knives are out. It’s not surprising but it is disappointing in a number of ways. I still have a number of other posts in the works but wanted to get some thoughts down on this one before too much time passes.

• If you read Oracle’s press release without any awareness of Oracle’s history with open source, it sure reads like Oracle is a champion of all that’s good and open. It says so many lofty things about Oracle’s contributions to Linux (fair, Oracle has made significant kernel contributions, and Oracle database running on Linux was huge for adoption) and Oracle’s goal for transparency and openness around Linux. That one requires a bit more examination.

• The Fedora Project is considering a proposal to introduce some limited usage telemetry in a future release. Predictably, quite a few users are not delighted with this development.

• The suggested “privacy preserving” change would introduce some very limited telemetry into Fedora 40 next year, and as far as we can tell, this would only apply to the default GNOME desktop edition. The accompanying discussion is, as you might expect, already quite spirited.

• The proposal actually seems fairly modest. It would be fully anonymized, not collect any personally identifiable information, not collect search queries, and so on. Last time we looked, the project hadn’t got as far as defining exactly which stats would be collected.

• Oracle is weighing in on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux debacle, promising it will never restrict access to its own source code.

• Red Hat drew widespread condemnation when it announced it would begin restricting access to RHEL source code to paying customers. In addition, the customer agreement prohibits customers from sharing and redistributing the source code or from using it to create a downstream distro. The move was seen as a way to target Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux, all of which are 1:1 compatible with RHEL and is widely believed to be in violation of the GPL.

• Oracle has responded, calling out Red Hat and IBM for not being good open source citizens in a press release entitled, “Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To.”

Debian Family

• In the last few years, there has been a lot of discussion about favoritism in Debian and Outreachy. Evidence already shows widespread rule breaking. Nonetheless, favoritism is often spoken about in abstract terms. There is an unfair focus on the woman or beneficiary, there is a lot less focus on the male decision makers and there is often no acknowledgment of the women who missed out.

• This blog aims to complete that information gap. By looking at some incredibly talented women who Outreachy & Debian rejected, we can see how wrong it was in 2019.

• One of my first Outreachy applicants, back in the days when the program was called Outreach Program for Women, was Juliana Louback from Brazil. Outreachy rejected her. The same woman was selected for an internship at the IBM Watson lab, a scholarship to Columbia University and eventually employment at Google. Fortunately, after her Outreachy application was rejected, Juliana came back to Debian a few months later and we selected her for Google Summer of Code. She worked on JSCommunicator.

• Two candidates were selected to do translation work, not actual development. One of the chosen Outreachy candidates from 2013 was subject of a discussion on debian-private about meeting for beer. This woman didn’t ask for this attention. Did other candidates waste their time in the application process?

• There was a lot of controversy about the women applying for things from Albania. People have shared photos of them all wearing the same red t-shirts. There is speculation that some, maybe all of them, were paid to attend the conference and make it look bigger. Izabela is the woman sitting in the back of this photo from 2016…

• Last month, the Debian project released Debian 12, with the usual low-key fanfare that Debian usually announces a release with. Even though we shipped with some bugs we’d rather not have (which are at least fixable over the next point releases), the feedback for Debian 12 has been nothing short of overwhelmingly good. From users to the independent Linux blogs to the YouTubers to the tech news sites, the vast majority of feedback so far is that it’s not just one of Debian’s most important releases, but also an incredibly timely one, considering other distributions with stable releases- most of which who come from commercial companies who do not necessarily have their user’s best interest at heart.

• I deleted my original draft for this blog post, it was getting incredibly long, and I’ll split it up over a few upcoming posts instead. The most important message I want to convey here is a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to Debian 12 in any form. Your work is incredibly important, and the result of that work over this release was nothing short of spectacular. Consider yourself a hero!

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In the traditional computing threat model, privileged system software like the hypervisor, host OS, firmware, and DMA-capable devices were all granted access to the data and code of your workloads. This was widely accepted because it seemed necessary for the system managing VM resources (memory, execution, and hardware access) to also have access to the workload’s data. How else could it manage it after all?

Open Hardware/Modding

• This project started with a rolling ball escapement designed by JBV Creative. That mechanism simply flips back and forth as a ball bearing rolls from one side of the track to the other. Perpetual motion is impossible, of course, so this mechanism relies on a weight to turn the gear system that pivots the track. The ball is just there for timing: when it reaches the end of the track, it pushes a lever that releases the mechanism and lets the weight drop a little. This will work until the weight reaches the ground or runs out of cord.

• As promised in my video comparing SilverTip Lab’s DIY Pocket NAS (express your interest here) to the ASUSTOR Flashstor 12 Pro, this blog post outlines how I built a 6-drive M.2 NAS with the Rock 5 model B.

• Behold XRP (Experiential Robotics Platform) — an open robotics platform to help you find your feet in the world of engineering, robotics, and software development.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• One of the traditional arguments for using open source is that it’s available for free. Well yes, you can get open source projects for zero cost. However, that is not the reason why it improves DX. So what makes open source a winner, if not cost?

• Debian‘s contributions to the free software community has been tremendous. Debian was one of the early distributions in the 1990’s that combined the GNU tools (compiler, linker, shell, editor, and a set of Unix tools) with the Linux kernel and published a free software operating system. Back then there were little guidance on how to publish free software binaries, let alone entire operating systems. There was a lack of established community processes and conflict resolution mechanisms, and lack of guiding principles to motivate the work. The community building efforts that came about in parallel with the technical work has resulted in a steady flow of releases over the years.

• From the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, there was at the time already an established definition of free software. Inspired by free software definition, and a belief that a social contract helps to build a community and resolve conflicts, Debian’s social contract (DSC) with the free software community was published in 1997. The DSC included the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which directly led to the Open Source Definition.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• On behalf of the Thunderbird team, Thunderbird Council, our global community of contributors, and our extended Mozilla family, I am incredibly excited to announce the initial launch of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” for Linux, macOS, and Windows! With this year’s version, we’re delivering much more than just another yearly release. Supernova represents a modernized overhaul of the software – both visually and technically – while retaining the familiarity and flexibility you expect from Thunderbird.

• “Supernova is the beginning of a new era for Thunderbird,” says Ryan Sipes, Thunderbird’s Product and Business Development Manager. “It lays a beautiful, solid groundwork for future releases that will make Thunderbird a significantly better email client – and we won’t stop until it’s the best option out there.”

• Mozilla Thunderbird, the popular open-source email client, has unveiled its latest version, Thunderbird 115, packed with exciting features and improvements. The update brings a refreshing Supernova user interface (UI) that enhances the overall user experience. Thunderbird 115 introduces several enhancements to its core functionalities with a sleek and modern design.

• Thunderbird has always been the go-to choice for millions of Open Source lovers worldwide. Developed by the Mozilla Foundation, the same organization behind the popular Firefox browser, Thunderbird is built on a foundation of collaboration and community-driven innovation.

• Its cross-platform compatibility has been a game-changer for individuals and organizations alike. With Windows, macOS, and Linux versions, Thunderbird transcends operating system boundaries and enables users to seamlessly switch between devices without sacrificing functionality or data integrity

• Many of the major UI changes teased last year make their debut here in Thunderbird 115, which has been dubbed “Supernova” and is available to download for Windows, macOS, and Linux from July 11 from a beautifully revamped Thunderbird homepage. The changes are more than skin deep, too.

• The client’s codebase has undergone extensive rebuilding in order to lay a “solid groundwork for future releases that will make Thunderbird a significantly better email client”, to quote Ryan Sipes, Thunderbird’s Product and Business Development Manager.

• Dubbed “Supernova”, Thunderbird 115 comes with the Supernova UI which features an updated 3-pane window with refreshed folder, message list, and message display panes, updated Quick Filter, Calendar, and Address Book with a new Vertical view, and a dynamic unified toolbar.

• In addition, there’s a new icon for the display options, the icons for the “Calendar”, “Tasks New”, and “Edit” tabs have been updated, new “Move To” and “Copy To” actions were added to the Folder context menu, and a new option was added to show tags in the Folder Pane meatball menu.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• We have talked before about how ccache affects build times of PostgreSQL. Now I was wondering how different build directory layouts affect ccache. I was never a user of separate build directories in the make build system (“vpath builds”), so this never concerned me much. But now with Meson this is required.

• TigerBeetle is a distributed financial transactions database, designed for mission critical safety. How do you test something so critical? Well, we could tell you (and we will), but why not show you?

• TLDR: You can now run TigerBeetle… compiled to WebAssembly… in your browser! With perfect network conditions, then not-so-perfect Jepsen’esque conditions, and finally, with unprecedented (cosmic) levels of disk corruption.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice 7.6 will be released as final in mid-August 2023 (check the Release Plan), with LibreOffice 7.6 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 7.6 started in mid December, 2022. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.6 Beta 1, 354 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 151 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

• LibreOffice 7.6 RC1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard version.

• In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla (you just need a legit email account in order to create a new account).

FSF

• The FSF tech team has continued to keep busy since we last wrote an appeal article! In addition to other ongoing projects, on the network security front we’re working to replace our old Nagios alerting stack with Prometheus, a more modern tool that we’re currently adapting to our network. We plan on using plain Prometheus, with some of our own automation to configure graphs and site-wide monitoring, rather than integrating with third party systems that typically offer proprietary editions.

• There’s a fair bit of work going into this change, but it will be worth the effort. Prometheus will highlight the most important issues in alerts based on the time of day, so we can focus on the really important issues when we’re out of the office. This will help us with faster issue response times. We’ve also been fortunate to have very few critical problems in the last several months that would have required us to physically visit the colocation facility.

• Some of the other work we’re wrapping up is the AMT (“associate membership tool”) data import. AMT was our old, internally developed member database. We switched to CiviCRM, an AGPLv3 constituent relationship manager, several years ago, and it really helped with fundraising and emailing people who want to learn more about free software. We had a bit more data that needed to be exported from our old membership database into the new one before we could call it complete. And aside from updating our internal documentation, we’re finally done with that data migration. We had the original virtual machine (VM) turned off, and we’re using a newer Trisquel installation running the MariaDB database software for working with, filtering, and converting data into an importable format. It’s a good feeling to fully replace an outdated system, and, going forward, we can now focus on completing the last few edge cases.

Programming/Development

• This is a note to self:

• Except where absolutely necessary, stop being fancy.

• When confronted with, “Can this be done?”

• If the answer is an immediate “Yes”, go ahead, do that.

• But if the answer is, “Well, you could, but you’d have to…”

• Just stop right there. Don’t go do that.

• Here I’ll highlight a subset of the regex language that’s not hard to understand or remember. Throughout I’ll also tell you what to ignore. Most of these things are shortcuts that save a little verbosity at the expense of a lot of complexity. I’d rather verbosity than complexity, so I stick to this subset.

• Presence probability, typically obtained with presence-(pseudo)absence modelling methods like GLM, GAM, GBM or Random Forest, is conditional not only on the suitability of the environmental conditions, but also on the general prevalence (proportion of presences) of the species in the study area. So, a species with few presences will generally have low presence probabilities, even in suitable conditions, simply because its presence is indeed rare.

• Timeboxing reduces risk by limiting how much time (hence money) we commit to something, so we can double down on winners and stop investing in losers. The goal of a timeboxed effort is not to complete something but rather to evaluate feasibility and profitability. By the end of a timeboxed effort, we should not count on having a deliverable, but we should have more material for the decision on whether to continue spending time on it.

Perl / Raku

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.