Programming/Development Leftovers
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Confessions of a Recovering Proprietary Programmer, Part XIX: Concurrent Computational Models - Paul E. McKenney's Journal — LiveJournal
The September 2022 issue of the Communications of the ACM features an entertaining pair of point/counterpoint articles, with William Dally advocating for concurrent computational models that more accurately model both energy costs and latency here and Uzi Vishkin advocating for incremental modifications to the existing Parallel Random Access Machine (PRAM) model here. Some cynics might summarize Dally's article as “please develop software that makes better use of our hardware so that we can sell you more hardware” while other cynics might summarize Vishkin's article as “please keep funding our research project“. In contrast, I claim that both articles are worth a deeper look. The next section looks at Dally's article, the section after that at Vishkin's article, followed by discussion.
TL;DR: In complete consonance with a depressingly large fraction of 21st-century discourse, they are talking right past each other.
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Creating a Web-of-Trust Implementation: Accessing Certificate Stores - vanitasvitae's blog
In this post, I will outline some progress I made towards a full WoT implementation. The current milestone entails integrating certificate stores more closely with the core API.
On most systems, OpenPGP certificates (public keys) are typically stored and managed by GnuPGs internal key store. The downside of this approach is, that applications that want to make use of OpenPGP either need to depend on GnuPG, or are required to manage their very own exclusive certificate store. The latter approach, which e.g. Thunderbird is taking, leads to a situation where there are multiple certificate stores with different contents. Your GnuPG certificate store might contain Bobs certificate, while the Thunderbird store does not. This is confusing for users, as they now have to manage two places with OpenPGP certificates.
There is a proposal for a Shared PGP Certificate Directory nicknamed “pgp.cert.d” which aims to solve this issue by specifying a shared, maildir-like directory for OpenPGP certificates. This directory serves as a single source for all OpenPGP certificates a user might have to deal with. Being well-defined through the standards draft means different applications can access the certificate store without being locked into a single OpenPGP backend.
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new month, new brainworm -- wingolog
Today, a brainworm! I had a thought a few days ago and can't get it out of my head, so I need to pass it on to another host.
So, imagine a world in which there is a a drive to build a kind of Kubernetes on top of WebAssembly. Kubernetes nodes are generally containers, associated with additional metadata indicating their place in overall system topology (network connections and so on). (I am not a Kubernetes specialist, as you can see; corrections welcome.) Now in a WebAssembly cloud, the nodes would be components, probably also with additional topological metadata. VC-backed companies will duke it out for dominance of the WebAssembly cloud space, and in a couple years we will probably emerge with an open source project that has become a de-facto standard (though it might be dominated by one or two players).
In this world, Kubernetes and Spiffy-Wasm-Cloud will coexist. One of the success factors for Kubernetes was that you can just put your old database binary inside a container: it's the same ABI as when you run your database in a virtual machine, or on (so-called!) bare metal. The means of composition are TCP and UDP network connections between containers, possibly facilitated by some kind of network fabric. In contrast, in Spiffy-Wasm-Cloud we aren't starting from the kernel ABI, with processes and such: instead there's WASI, which is more of a kind of specialized and limited libc. You can't just drop in your database binary, you have to write code to get it to conform to the new interfaces.
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August GNU spotlight with Amin Bandali: 12 new GNU releases
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KDChart 3.0.0 Released - KDAB
We just released KDChart version 3.0.0!
KDChart is a comprehensive business charting package with many different chart types and a large number of customization options. We are constantly improving the package, and have been doing so for years.
This is the first release of KDChart that supports Qt 6, and both Qt 5 and Qt 6 can be co-installed.
And get this: KDChart 3.0.0 is completely free! We’ve relicensed KDChart from the GPL to the MIT license and removed our commercial offering. This means that you can use it as you want without license restrictions. Find out more about the MIT license, here.
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Remi Collet: PHP version 8.0.23 and 8.1.10
RPMs of PHP version 8.1.10 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 34 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.
RPMs of PHP version 8.0.23 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 34 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php80 repository for EL 7.
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Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Web3: The Promise of a Blockchain-Based Internet of Value
On June 30, MIT hosted the Imagination in Action Web3 Summit, an event jointly organized by MIT Connection Science, Forbes, and Link Ventures. The Summit brought together almost 600 developers, entrepreneurs, investors, and academics to discuss the present state and potential evolution of Web3. The agenda featured a number of panels and talks. Speakers included Alex (Sandy) Pentland, - MIT professor and Connection Science Director, Michael Federle, - CEO of Forbes, John Werner, - Managing Director at Link Ventures, and Esther Dyson, - investor, journalist, and philanthropist.
The MIT Summit is the first in a series of Imagination in Action conferences. The next one will take place on October 6 in San Francisco, followed by one on January 17 at Davos, and back to MIT in June of 2023. The summits aim “to take us from reflections on the last major social and economic transformation precipitated by the arrival of the Internet era, to the economics to build and the governance to sustain Web3,” as well as to envision the possibilities of a Web3 future and to try to discern hype from reality in these early days of a potential new internet era.
I wasn’t able to attend the Summit in person, but I watched the recordings of a number of the sessions, where I heard a variety of opinions on what Web3 is about. This is not surprising. In their early years, major new technologies are generally accompanied by a mixture of excitement, speculation and confusion, as people sort out what the technology might be about and how it’s likely to evolve. Something important is going on out there, but it takes time and marketplace experience to sort things out.