Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
-
Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Emacs: Dead and Loving It
Emacs was originally created in 1976. I was born in 1984. I’ve been using Emacs as my primary editor since 2005. Back then GNU Emacs was still reeling from the schism with XEmacs1 and a lot of people felt that the project might be near the end of its long and storied history. I recall the Emacs development wasn’t moving particularly fast at the time, modern text editors and IDEs (e.g. TextMate and Eclipse) were on the rise, and there were quite a few articles proclaiming the death of Emacs. Yet Emacs is still here 19 years later and some of the editors and IDEs that were popular in 2005 are not. This year Emacs will turn 48 years, which is an amazing achievement for any piece of software!
-
Ubuntu ☛ Introducing Canonical’s Open Documentation Academy
Open and inclusive collaboration, and the sharing of ideas, remains the best way to develop software (and to do many other things!), but we also recognise that this “getting involved” step can be difficult. Where do you start? Who do you ask? What needs to be done?
It shouldn’t be this difficult. Open source projects should be as open to new contributors as they are to critical bug fixes, because new contributors are the next generation of critical bug fixers.
One of the problems is the lack of an established Getting involved process. At Canonical, this is something we can solve, and we want to help solve it together by inviting contributors to write documentation.
-
OSTechNix ☛ Pika Backup: The Ultimate Desktop Client For BorgBackup Users
Are you concerned about losing valuable photos, documents, or music from your GNU/Linux desktop?
-
[Repeat] Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Security decisions and free software
Of course not all libre programs are secure but software freedom gives you more security as you can study the source code and edit/publish it the way you want. So if there’s a security vulnerability, you won’t be forced to wait for the original author to find and fix it.
You may be a programmer or security researcher and fix it yourself or pay someone to do it for you, based on your needs. Anyhow, it’s a perk of using free software.
-
SaaS/Back End/Databases
-
PeerDB ☛ Moving a Billion Postgres Rows on a $100 Budget
Reading a table sequentially from Postgres is slow. It would take a long time to read 300M rows from Postgres. To make this process more efficient, we have to parallelize. We've got a clever way to quickly read parts of a table in Postgres using something called the TID Scan, which is a bit of a hidden gem. Basically, it lets us pick out specific chunks of data as stored on disk, identified by their Tuple IDs (CTIDs), which look like (page, tuple). This optimizes IO utilization and is super handy for reading big tables efficiently.
Here's how we do it: we divide the table into partitions based on the pages of the database, and each partition gets its own scan task. Each task handles about 500K rows. So, we partition the table into CTID ranges, with each partition having ~500K rows, and we process each partition parallelly (16 partitions at a time).
-