today's leftovers
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Tech Notes: Chrome, 10 years later
It's been around 10 years since I worked on Chrome. Here are some stories that have surely been embellished by my own memory over that decade of distance. Treat them all as only maybe 60% true. I figured I could at least write them down before I totally forget them.
What I did. I worked on Chrome from the early days, from 2007 to 2012, which just about covers the second half of my twenties. I had other stuff going on in my life, of course — including, for example, my wedding — but in terms of anything I did with my life that the larger world cares about, Chrome is what I fed my twenties to. Today it has more than 2.5 billion users. It's still a weird feeling to go to a cafe and see the person next to me have "my" software up on their screen.
I joined the project with the goal to make Linux Chrome a thing, which meant first working on Windows-only Chrome for some years before eventually leading the Linux team.
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The architecture of Mastodon
While uncertainty surrounds Twitter, people are looking into alternative microblogging platforms. One such application is gaining a lot of popularity, Mastodon. The concept is similar to Twitter: we can post toots (short messages), which are visible to our followers; we can boost (retweet) posts or favorite (like) them.
However, there is a significant difference. While Twitter is a centralized platform, there are many independent Mastodon instances. Each Mastodon instance is a small Twitter with its own user base, administrators, and moderation rules. These instances are not isolated: they communicate and exchange data with each other, creating a federated network. Thanks to that, you can easily follow a person from another instance and see their posts in your feed.
From an IT perspective, let's take a high-level look at the architecture of a single Mastodon instance and how different instances communicate. Specifically, we'll be looking at how the Mastodon network-of-instances might scale.
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Google ADT-4 could be a hybrid Android TV developer Kit with ATSC 3.0 and DVB-S2 TV tuners - CNX Software
Google is allegedly about to release the ADT-4 hybrid developer kit for Android TV based on Amlogic S905X4 processor with AV1 video support, as well as ATSC 3.0 and DVB-S2 tuners.
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CIQ Expands Open Source Expertise With Two New Hires As A Part Of Continued Growth [Ed: More people flee Red Hat, will work on RHEL clones]
Zane Hamilton and Justin Burdine depart Red Hat to take sales and solution engineering leadership roles.
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openSUSE Tumbleweed - Review of the week 2022/49 - Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)
A very bad thing happened: we missed one snapshot this week! Only 6 out of 7 made it through QA. Snapshot 20221207 has been declined to be published (a python module update broke ansible, and a few more issues). Nevertheless, let’s focus on the positive: you received 6 snapshots to apply on your machine (1202..1206, 1208).
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Elektrobit and SUSE – powering autonomous cars - TechHQ
Autonomous cars, and other transport features that rely on autonomy, mean that vehicles, and the manufacturers of the IIoT devices inside them, are increasingly reliant on software. In fact, by 2030, a full 30% of a vehicle’s value is set to come from its software.
Elektrobit is the name behind the code in a billion devices, smoothing out autonomous processes in more than a hundred million vehicles. It’s a perfect example of an organization that has to focus on the software that’s running on automotive hardware.
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EuroBSDCon 2022 Trip Report: Patrick McEvoy | FreeBSD Foundation
For me, the road to EuroBSDcon Vienna started in July of 2022, when I started quizzing board members for details on the conference location and shopping around for rental equipment with the help of the other stream team member. While the details on the conference space were scarce, I kept at it, quizzing mailing lists and web-sleuthing my way to contacts at the Technical University of Vienna. I was very excited to see everyone in person again and it was well worth the effort.
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PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.5.5, 4.6.4 and 4.7.3 Released | PowerDNS Blog
Today we have released maintenance updates of PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.5.5, 4.6.4 and 4.7.3, containing fixes for a few minor issues. For more details on the other fixes, consult the changelogs available at 4.5.5, 4.6.4, 4.7.3.
The source tarballs (4.5.5, 4.6.4, 4.7.3) and signatures (4.5.5, 4.6.4, 4.7.3) are available from our download server. Packages for various distributions are available from our repository.
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Music Playing: Both Whole-House and Mobile | The Changelog
Ampache has a feature called localplay which allows it to control a mpd server. I tested this out with mpd and snapcast. It works, but is highly limited. Basically, it causes Ampache to send a playlist — a literal list of URLs — to the mpd server. Unfortunately, seeking within a track is impossible from within the Ampache interface.
I will note that once a person is using mpd, snapcast makes a much easier whole-house solution than the streaming option I was trying to get working 8 years ago.
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Mesa 3D Gets Support for RDNA3 Graphics Cards In Linux | Tom's Hardware
Linux graphics library Mesa 3D has released an update, version 22.3.0, that adds a number of optimizations and new features to the open-source library. The biggest of these updates is support for AMD's RDNA3 graphics architecture within AMD's own Radeon Vulkan Driver.
This will provide Linux gamers with support for AMD's latest RX 7000 series graphics cards running on the RDNA3 GPU architecture when running titles that use the Vulkan API. This support should also extend to compatibility layers such as Proton and Wine, which are designed to run Windows DirectX-based titles on Linux through Vulkan.
Along with RDNA3 support, the new Mesa 3D update also adds a boatload of other additions and optimizations: including Ray Tracing in the RADV driver, and the addition of the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer for analyzing potential bottlenecks in an application's ray tracing pipeline.