Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 05, 2023

• Debugging with Git Bisect

  Git is a powerful version control system that helps developers manage and track changes in their codebase.

• Probot: building a Mastodon bot

  I have long admired albums2hear, a Twitter bot that posts albums. You can read a bit more about it here. There was no mastodon equivalent and so I decided to build one. You can follow the bot – currently called Albums Albums Albums (or AlbumsX3) – here.

• 'Sheer greed': Industry reacts to Oracle's new Java pricing

  'Vendors have worked out a model where they can get more money out of you'

• Tim Bielawa: Querying block device sizes in Python on Linux and Mac OS X

  I drafted this blog post in 2016 (at least), but held off publishing it until I could have it fact checked. Well, 6 years have passed… I am 99% sure the information in this blog post is correct. But if you find an error with my explanation of the userspace-kernel-device dataflow then please send me an email so I can understand it better and update this post.

• Alex Vincent: Introducing Motherhen: Gecko-based applications from scratch

  Mozilla‘s more than just Firefox. There’s Thunderbird for e-mail, BlueGriffon for creating web pages, and ye olde SeaMonkey Application Suite. Once upon a time, there was the ability to create custom front-ends on top of Firefox using the -app option. (It’s still there but not really supported.) Mozilla’s source code provides a rich ecosystem to build atop of.

• David Teller: About Safety, Security and yes, C++ and Rust

  Recent publications by Consumer Reports and the NSA have launched countless conversations in development circles about safety and its benefits.

  In these conversations, I’ve seen many misunderstandings about what safety means in programming and how programming languages can implement, help or hinder safety. Let’s clarify a few things.

• Chromium bumped, more pkgs compiled in OE

  The upcoming Kirkstone-series had chromium 106.0.5249.119, have compiled a later version in OE, and some more packages:

  chromium-x11-109.0.5414.74
  fbgrab-1.5
  gmime-3.2.7
  gtkperf-0.40
  leptonica-1.82.0
  libforms-1.2.3
  libyui-4.1.1
  pointercal-0.0
  stalonetray-0.8.3
  tesseract-4.1.3
  tesseract-lang-4.1.0
  tslib-1.22
  xbindkeys-1.8.7
  xf86-input-tslib-2_1.1.1
  

  There was interest expressed in tesseract OCR package on the forum, so compiled that. No GUI though. One of the best-looking GUIs for tesseract seems to be gimagereader, but it has lots of dependencies. I could compile it if there is sufficient interest.��