today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 12, 2022

• Mike Blumenkrantz: New Era

  For those of you who weren’t present, Super Good Code took over XDC last week.

  The recording of The Talk is finally sliced, diced, and tuned to perfection thanks to the work of Arkadiusz Hiler. Watch it for the first time all over again to catch all the technical details and workout tips you missed.

  Additionally, the slides for the presentation are available for benchmarking.

• Carlafox, an open-source web-based CARLA visualizer

  Self-driving cars have the potential to change the paradigm of transportation. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey, 93% of all vehicle accidents are influenced by human error. Eliminating those accidents would be a giant leap forward, a safer means of transportation.

  However, developing autonomous driving systems requires a tremendous amount of training images, usually collected and labelled by human labor, which is costly and error-prone. To make things worse, gathering such a vast amount of real driving images is challenging because we cannot artificially make unusual corner cases or peculiar weather and lighting conditions.

  Over the past years, synthesized datasets from 3D game engines are gaining wide acceptance as a viable solution to tackle the problem. Besides these advances, monitoring and validating the data generation process is often still time-consuming and challenging.

• Cryptpad Review: A Google Docs / Forms Alternative and a Self-Hosting Bliss

  CryptPad as a software is free/libre open source software licensed under GNU AGPL developed by the France-based company Xwiki.

• Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, August-September 2022

  I have continued to work for Freexian on Debian LTS. In August I carried over 21 hours from July, and worked 13 hours. In September I was assigned an additional 17 hours, and worked 16 hours. I will carry over 9 hours into October.

• Weekly status of Packit Team: October 2022

• More API Endpoint Documentation for Project and Package Sources

• Using functions in bash to selectively run a group of Linux commands

  Using a function in bash allows you to create something in Linux that works as if it were a script within a script. Whenever the data being processed matches a set of conditions, your script can call a function that does further processing.

• Patent clouds for the Opus codec [LWN.net]

  Now a company called Vectis ("a premier full-suite IP licensing and consultancy boutique") is collecting patents that are claimed to read on Opus as a way of demanding royalties on its use. "The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or content". (Thanks to Paul Wise).