Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 26, 2022

• Rust frontend patches v3

  This is the fixed version of our previous patch set for gccrs - We've adressed
  the comments raised in our previous emails.
  
  
  This patch set does not contain any work that was not previously included, such
  as closure support, the constant evaluator port, or the better implementation
  of target hooks by Iain Buclaw. They will follow up in subsequent patch sets.
  
  
  Thanks again to Open Source Security, inc and Embecosm who have accompanied us
  for this work.
  
  
  Many thanks to all of the contributors and our community, who made this
  possible.
  

• NextJS Starter Boilerplate to Speed up your work

  Next.js is an amazing React framework for building web apps, desktop apps (with Electron and Tauri) and mobile apps with Ionic.

• Python Optical Character Recognition (OCR): A Tutorial | Built In

  Optical character recognition (OCR) is a technology that recognizes text in images, such as scanned documents and photos. Perhaps you’ve taken a photo of a text just because you didn’t want to take notes or because taking a photo is faster than typing it. Fortunately, thanks to smartphones today, we can apply OCR so that we can copy the picture of text we took before without having to retype it.

• Elizabeth Mattijsen: Don't fear the grepper! (3)

• Pulseaudio startup script moved to /etc/init.d

  The saga of getting pulseaudio working in EasyOS was summarized in November 2021:

  https://bkhome.org/news/202111/how-pulseaudio-is-implemented-in-easyos.html

  The startup script was placed in /root/Startup, script 'pulseaudio', as wanted it to run after X has started. I did it this way, as that is how Slackware does it -- or at least how they did it back then.

• The Road to Qt Location

  The Qt Location module in Qt 5 provides functionality for geocoding and routing, for rendering maps and routes in a Qt Quick UI, and for accessing information about points of interests. Applications can use Qt Location to render maps, can add items on top of the map to highlight certain geographical areas, and the Qt Quick UI allows applications and users to pan, zoom, and tilt the map. Such applications will typically use the Qt Positioning module to be aware of the user's location. Qt Positioning has been available in Qt 6 since the Qt 6.2 release, and over the last months we have been working with customers, partners, and Open Source contributors to make the most important Qt Location functionality available in Qt 6 as well.

• Qt Creator 9 Beta2 released

  We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 9 Beta2!

• Game of Trees 0.77 released

  Version 0.77 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• Game of Trees -portable 0.77 released October 24, 2022

  This file details portable-specific changes to make things work on systems other than OpenBSD.

• Can We Use Trunk-Based Development for Legacy Software?

  Not right away! Trunk-Based Development requires that the software builds and passes enough tests, before we integrate our changes into the main branch (a.k.a., trunk). We have enough tests, if breaking the software is highly unlikely. By definition, legacy code has no or not enough tests. Hence, we cannot apply trunk-based development right way, but should evolve our development process towards it.

• Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so...

  That's right, the original Unix epoch was 1971-01-01T00:00:00. What timezone, you ask? Well, it sure wasn't "UTC", because that didn't replace GMT as the standard time until 1972. Secondly, note that time was measured in 1/60ths of a second, not in seconds. Why would that be?

• Editing metadata in trail camera images using R, magick and exiftool

  I have a new hobby: camera traps, also known as trail cameras. Strapped to trees in my local bushland they sit in wait, firing automatically when triggered by a passing animal. Once in a while, something quite magical happens.

  The camera model I chose is the Campark T85 which for me, had the right combination of features and price point. One useful feature is the ability to transfer images and video to a phone wirelessly (albeit through a rather clunky phone app). Unfortunately, images retrieved in this way have one major flaw: an almost-complete absence of metadata. There is no GPS in the camera of course, but the EXIF data does not include the date/time of the image, nor the camera make.

  With a little research, I found a way to add this information to the images later using R and some additional software named exiftool. Here’s how I did it.

• cobalt Is An Open-source Free Social Media Downloader App

  The cobalt project is released under the AGPL-3.0 License.

• Socialify Is A Great Tool for Open Source Developers

  Socialify is a free open source tool that aids open source project developer showcase their projects by generating catchy beautiful images.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.17 on CRAN: Maintenance

  A new release 0.4.17 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian as well.

  QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language.

  The release of RQuantLib comes five months after the previous maintenance, and brings a somewhat humurous upgrade from a default C++ standard of C++11 to C++14. We waited so long for C++11 to become available for R (which happened “eventually” when g++ 4.9 was no longer the default on Windows) and now it has become a constraint!! QuantLib 1.28, released today actually switched to C++14 as a minimum required. R also supports this as the default, but we still had C++11 hardwired so this quick maintenance release does away with that.