Tux Machines
BSD, GNU/Linux, and Free Software Miscellany
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 09, 2024
Audiocasts/Shows
Late Night GNU/Linux – Episode 302
How the boss of WordPress spectacularly failed to read the room, why the CUPS vulnerabilities didn’t live up to the hype, Mozilla disappoints once again, great news for home automation, Valve supports Arch, and a Raspberry Pi 500 looks imminent. With guest host Andy from GNU/Linux Dev Time.
Canonical/Ubuntu Family
Ubuntu Fridge ☛ The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 860
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 860 for the week of September 29 – October 5, 2024. The full version of this issue is available here.
BSD
FreeBSD ☛ Celebrating FreeBSD Day with Tara Stella: A Journey from GNU/Linux to FreeBSD
In the spirit of FreeBSD Day 2024, we spoke with Tara Stella, a distinguished architect with a long history in open source development. With three decades of experience, Tara’s transition from GNU/Linux to FreeBSD is inspiring and insightful. A Legacy in Open Source Tara’s journey in open source began in 1995 with Linux.
Server
Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Finding Related Images in Hugo
The Good Old Days relaunched last month with version 8 and I spent last week dissecting the changes from the new theme made by Mr. Creosote as it’s always fun to get inspired. They also have a museum page where you can go back in time to see what the site looked like back in the day.
One of the things I really like is the way The Good Old Days displays lists, such as this one: all it takes is a cool cover and a small title/year combination in ribbon-style. But you can hover over the cover make a screenshot appear instead—a feature I intended to Steal Like an Artist for my own game list page.
Rob Knight ☛ Setting Up Mastodon Author Tags
Mastodon 4.3 released today with a bunch of features but the one most people, including me, are excited about is author tags - this isn't the name of them but they also don't seem to have a proper name as far as I can tell. Anyway, you need to do two things to get the "More from X" section you can see in the screenshot above. The first is to add the fediverse:creator tag to your site in your head, which I previously wrote about here.
Databases
YottaDB ☛ Bid Wars
The entire auction process demonstrates YottaDB’s capability to manage concurrent transactions and handle bidding conflicts gracefully, ensuring the auction runs smoothly despite a frenzy of bidders.
As you examine the source code, you might notice there’s no error handling. This isn’t an oversight but rather a deliberate choice so I could highlight this under-appreciated gem. From my perspective, it’s fascinating how YottaDB handles writes so seamlessly you don’t need to include error-handling code for them.
For those not familiar with M, I hope you find the code approachable and clear. The real value here is in YottaDB’s ability to manage conflicts internally, which simplifies development and keeps your code clean. While error handling remains important in other contexts, the fact that YottaDB takes care of conflicts automatically is a powerful feature that I believe deserves more attention.
Rlang ☛ DuckDB vs dplyr vs base R
TL;DR: For a very simple analysis (means by group on 100M rows), duckdb was 125x faster than base R, and 28x faster than readr+dplyr, without having to read data from disk into memory. The duckplyr package wraps DuckDB’s analytical query processing techniques in a dplyr-compatible API. Learn more at duckdb.org/docs/api/r and duckplyr.tidyverse.org.