Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 13, 2024

• Tom's Hardware ☛ AMD Zen 5 support arrives with five new instructions — GNU compiler collection posted

  Per an update to GCC, Zen 5 will apparently have support for new instructions, including the AI-focused AVXVNNI.

• Barry Kauler ☛ hwclock fail in easyVoid 6.0.3

  easyVoid 6.0.2 was released a little while ago, and the guys have been testing it. Some fixes have gone into 6.0.3, and it is built with the latest packages from the Void repo. There is a new problem: [...]

• The Register UK ☛ The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

  Bucky Wirth didn't just invent Pascal. Pascal grew out of a proposal to improve Algol. The Algol committee turned it down and picked someone else's, more complicated, idea instead. That became Algol 68 and killed the language forever. As a result, we got other languages that were the indirect offspring of Algol: which took Algol's ideas and changed them. Languages such as BCPL, which was turned into B, which became C – and C++ and everything built from them.

  All because the Algol guys didn't like Bucky Wirth's simple, clean, proposal. Wirth went on to create Pascal. This was a big hit. A large part of the Apple Lisa operating system was implemented in Pascal, and that went on to profoundly influence the Mac. A Unix was implemented in a Pascal dialect, too. It was called TUNIS: the Toronto University System, and it was written in a Pascal derivative called Concurrent Euclid.

• University of Toronto ☛ Go 1.22's go/types Alias type shows the challenge of API compatibility

  What this shows is that true long term backward compatibility is very hard, and it's especially hard in an area that is inherently evolving, like exposing information about an evolving language. Getting complete backward compatibility requires more or less everything about an exposed API to be frozen, and that generally requires the area to be extremely well understood (and often pushes towards exposing very minimal APIs, which has its own problems).

• Lewis Dale ☛ TIL: Why Date.parse gives unexpected results for GMT | LewisDale.dev

  Someone posted about this in a Discord server I’m on: Javascript’s Date object has a parse function, Date.parse that takes a string can converts it to a timestamp. If you give it a non-standard string, in this case Jan 1, 1970, it should still parse it.

• Sean Conner ☛ An extensible programming language

  A few days ago I wrote about adding a factorial operator to my assembler, and I noted that I knew not of any other languages that had such a feature. So imagine my surprise as I'm reading about XL (via Lobsters) and the second example is factorial! Not only that, but that was an example of extending the language itself! The last time I was this excited about software was reading about Synthesis OS, a JIT-based operating system where you could create your own system calls.

• Earthly ☛ Building a Monorepo with Gradle

  Gradle is a powerful and flexible build tool used for code compilation, testing, and deployment. It’s widely used in Java and Android ecosystems but supports many other languages as well, including Kotlin, C/C++, and JavaScript.

  One of Gradle’s key features is its ability to handle monorepos efficiently. A monorepo is a repository that includes multiple distinct projects within its structure. This approach offers several advantages, including facilitating code sharing, collaboration, and reuse among projects, which ultimately reduces redundancy and promotes consistency.

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ 2024.07 Dr Raku

    A Dr Raku has started producing and posting beginner tutorial videos this week. So far, three videos have been posted: Yours truly finds the hands a bit distracting. FOSDEM 2024 The video of The Art of Concurrent Scripting with Raku presentation by Brian Duggan is available for downloading and/or playing.

• Python

  • Medevel ☛ How to Upload files to a Directory with Flask and Python?

    In this tutorial, we will explore how to upload files to a directory using Flask, a popular Python web framework. Flask provides a lightweight and flexible way to handle file uploads, allowing you to build web applications that accept and store user-submitted files.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • It's FOSS ☛ Cut Command Examples

    The Cut command lets you extract a part of the file to print without affecting the original file. Learn more here.

• Java

  • Red Hat ☛ Connect a Quarkus app to an external SQL Server database [Ed: Red Hat boosting Microsoft proprietary stuff that does not even (truly) run on GNU/Linux]

    Quarkus is a full-stack, Java-based framework for building, deploying, and running applications, including building and deploying applications in containers without manually creating YAML files. It offers a zero-configuration database container using its dev services feature, enabling rapid development and testing. However, having an external database for your application is vital for regulatory compliance. It brings benefits such as isolation, a simplified development workflow, and independence from the development environment. 

• Events

  • Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) ☛ Linux Plumbers Conference: Linux Plumbers Conference CFP announced

    The Linux Plumbers Conference is proud to announce that it’s website for 2024 is up and the CFP has been issued.  We will be running a hybrid conference as usual, but the in-person venue will be Vienna, Austria from 18-20 September. Deadlines to submit are 4 April for Microconferences and 16 June for Refereed and Kernel Summit track presentations.  Details for other tracks and accepted Microconferences will be posted later.

• Education

  • APNIC ☛ Notes from DNS OARC 42

    The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers to share concerns and information, and learn about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet two to three times a year in a workshop format. The most recent workshop was held in Charlotte, North Carolina in early February 2024. Here are my thoughts on the material that was presented and discussed at this workshop.

  • Herman Õunapuu ☛ FOSDEM 2024: my experience, some notes and tech tips :: ./techtipsy — Ramblings of a tech enthusiast.

    FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is a huge non-profit, volunteer-organized conference that’s free of charge to attend thanks to sponsors and donations. It took place in Brussels, Belgium at the ULB campus.

    I heard about this conference from a friend who went there years ago, and after hearing about the experience and the content there I knew I had to be there at least once in my life. But then a pandemic happened, so it was sort of in the backlog for a while.

    My current employer provides a perk that allows developers to attend technical conferences. After the FOSDEM 2024 schedule was available I put together an initial set of talks to attend, presented it to my employer, and got a green light to attend (and travelling/accommodation paid for).

• Standards/Consortia

  • Quartz ☛ Stellantis is now the final major automaker to adopt Tesla's EV charging standard

    Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep and Chrysler, has announced that select battery-electric vehicles will adopt the proposed North American Charging Standard (NACS) next year. The company is also making adapters available for vehicles with the Combined Charging System (CCS) port, so drivers in North America can use “a growing private and public” number of NACS charging ports, Stellantis said.

    That’s a big win for Tesla, who’s been working to make its charging plug the industry standard. NACS, also known as as SAE J3400, is a connector developed by the EV maker. In an effort to standardize its system, the company opened its port design to charging stations and vehicle manufacturers around the world in November 2022.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Best practices for HTML anchor titles

    I’m going back to inline links, but I’m making sure each link has alt text. I should have been doing that already for accessibility, but this way I can always render them out into their own section if I end up doing a Gemini (or Gopher) site as well.

    James Savage, who has among the coolest names ever, asked on Mastodon if I had any best practice references when it came to using title attributes. Easy, I thought! But then I went digging.

    I had always assumed title attributes were meant to match the destination page title, with optional information added if required for context. But was this codified anywhere, or did I just pick it up years ago and take it as rote?

  • Hackaday ☛ Ethernet For Hackers: The Very Basics

    Ethernet is ubiquitous, fast, and simple. You only need two diffpairs (four wires) to establish a 100Mbit link, the hardware is everywhere, you can do Ethernet over long distances easily, and tons of the microcontrollers and SoCs support it, too. Overall, it’s a technology you will be glad to know about, and there’s hundreds of scenarios where you could use it.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Molly White ☛ We need to talk about digital ownership

    We need to talk about digital ownership.

    You might have been told you should seek to "own your own data". That the future of the web itself is the prophesied "ownership era", which will follow the "read" and "write" eras we've experienced to date. That creators online need to "own their audiences" rather than remain beholden to Big Tech platforms.

    But what is ownership online? What should it be?

    In reality, people who talk about digital ownership are often talking about vastly different concepts, which muddies the waters. It would be helpful if instead they described precisely what rights they're trying to ensure.

    Let's talk about a few types of ownership by specifically identifying the types of rights involved.