Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 22, 2023

• Dev snapshot: Godot 4.1 dev 1

  Here be dragons! First development snapshot for the upcoming Godot Engine 4.1 is available to early adopters and adventurous types.

• In Defense of No-code('s potential)

  No-code/low-code is the new hypename for tools that help you Do Computer Stuff without needing (much) programming skills. There are lots of tools in this space, most targeted at businesses, many selling themselves with “you won’t need a software developer”. I think the first use of low-code was in 2011 but this kind of “rapid application development” goes at least as far back as Visual Basic 6.¹ Many no-code tools are visual builders, which looks “easier” to nontechnical people.²

• A Short Guide to Qt Quick Effects

  With the Qt 6.5 LTS out in the wild, it is a good time to write more about the Qt 6 and effects. Laszlo already wrote a blog post about post-processing effects in Qt 6.5, focusing mostly on Qt Quick 3D, ExtendedSceneEnvironment and the general Qt effects story. This blog post gives a bit more details about the latest Qt Quick (2D) effects offerings.

• WebAssembly removes redundancies in developing browser-based apps

  Making its public debut in 2017, the WebAssembly open standard is designed to facilitate the execution of binary code on the web. For developers, Wasm brings benefits such as streamlining their workflow to remove areas of labor and material resource wastage.

• Cameron Kaiser: April patch set for TenFourFox

  As promised, there are new changesets to pick up in the TenFourFox tree. (If you're new to rolling your own TenFourFox build, these instructions still generally apply.) I've tried to limit their scope so that people with a partial build can just pull the changes (git pull) and gmake -f client.mk build without having to "clobber" the tree (completely erase and start over). You'll have to do that for the new ESR when that comes out in a couple months, but I'll spare you that today. Most of these patches are security-related, including one that prevents naughty cookies which would affect us as well, though the rest are mostly crash-preventers and would require PowerPC-specific attacks to be exploitable. There is also an update to the ATSUI font blacklist. As always, if you find problematic fonts that need to be suppressed, post them to issue 566 or in the comments, but read this first.

• Offline voice recognition module supports Arduino programming, custom voice commands

  We've already covered inexpensive offline voice recognition modules based on US516P6 or TW-ASR ONE microcontrollers that allow people to add smarts to their projects without a network connection for improved privacy and lower latency. Those are great in theory, but at the time (April 2022) documentation was lacking or only in Chinese, and they were fairly hard to use based on some of the comments in my earlier posts.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Embarrassments

  This Week

  I escaped my RADV pen once again. I know, it’s been a while, but every so often my handler gets distracted and I sprint for the fence with all my might.

  This time I decided to try out a shiny new Intel Arc A770 that was left by my food trough.

  The Dota2 performance? Surprisingly good. I was getting 100+ FPS in all the places I expected to have good perf and 4-5 FPS in all the places I expected to have bad perf.