Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 17, 2024

• The New Stack ☛ Golang: How to Write a For Loop

  Programming Loops: You know them, you love them.

• Rlang ☛ Parameter Constraints & Significance

  Setting the values of one or more parameters for a GARCH model or applying constraints to the range of permissible values can be useful.

• Peter 'CzP' Czanik ☛ When it comes to sudo logging, pretty is not always better

  Version 1.9.16 of sudo will introduce a new logging option: json_compact. This does not affect logging to syslog, only logging to files. Previously, sudo created human-readable JSON log files. With this new setting enabled, logs are no longer pretty but can be easily read by logging software.

• Peter Czanik: Working with sudo’s json_compact logs in syslog-ng

  Version 1.9.16 of sudo will feature a new option for logging: json_compact. Why is this important? This new format can easily be read and parsed by a log management software, like syslog-ng.

• Peter 'CzP' Czanik ☛ Working with sudo’s json_compact logs in syslog-ng

• Rlang ☛ simstudy enhancement: specifying idiosyncratic follow-up times for longitudinal data

  A researcher reached out to me a few weeks ago. They were trying to generate longitudinal data that included irregularly spaced follow-up periods.

• Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Status update, April 2024

  Hi!

  The X.Org Foundation results are in, and I’m now officially part of the Board of Directors. I hope I can be of use to the community on more organizational issues! Speaking of which, I’ve spent quite a bit of time dealing with Code of Conduct matters lately. Of course I can’t disclose details for privacy, but hopefully our actions can gradually improve the contribution experience for FreeDesktop.Org projects.

• Perl / Raku

  • [Repeat] Olaf Alders ☛ Getting Started with perlimports

    Reducing software dependencies is one way to reduce an application’s attack surface. I’ve laid out how perlimports can be used to manage and reduce Perl dependencies in both modern and legacy applications. It’s not difficult, but it should be done with care.

• Python

  • Jon Chiappetta: Thank you Python for years of service and reliability so far (and the ctypes module!)

    So I’ve run into this issue in the past but I finally started looking into why Python is soo slow at running basic math operations in a long loop, for example, simple stream cipher operations.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Write once, run forever: The power of Bash scripts

    Sysadmins facing repetitive tasks should take control with Bash scripting. This guide dives into the fundamentals, equipping you to automate tasks and optimize your workflow.

• Other

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Philippe Normand: From WebKit/GStreamer to rust-av, a journey on our stack’s layers

      In this post I’ll try to document the journey starting from a WebKit issue and ending up improving third-party projects that WebKitGTK and WPEWebKit depend on.

      I’ve been working on WebKit’s GStreamer backends for a while. Usually some new feature needed on WebKit side would trigger work on GStreamer. That’s quite common and healthy actually, by improving GStreamer (bug fixes or implementing new features) we make the whole stack stronger (hopefully). It’s not hard to imagine other web-engines, such as Servo for instance, leveraging fixes made in GStreamer in the context of WebKit use-cases.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Performance Blog: Performance Testing Newsletter, Q1 Edition

        Welcome to the latest edition of the Performance Testing Newsletter! The PerfTools team empowers engineers with tools to continuously improve the performance of Mozilla products. See below for highlights from the changes made in the last quarter.

      • Thunderbird ☛ Mozilla Thunderbird: Team Thunderbird Answers Your Most Frequently Asked Questions

        We know the Thunderbird community has LOTS of questions! We get them on Mozilla Support, Mastodon, and X.com (formerly Twitter). They pop up everywhere, from the Thunderbird subreddit to the teeming halls of conferences like FOSDEM and SCaLE. During our March Community Office Hours, we took your most frequently asked questions to Team Thunderbird and got some answers. If you couldn’t watch the full session, or would rather have the answers in abbreviated text clips, this post is for you!

      • Will Kahn-Greene: Observability Team Newsletter (2024q1) [Ed: Spyware in Mozilla software]

        Observability Team is a team dedicated to the problem domain and discipline of Observability at Mozilla.

        We own, manage, and support monitoring infrastructure and tools supporting Mozilla products and services. Currently this includes Sentry and crash ingestion related services (Crash Stats (Socorro), Mozilla Symbols Server (Tecken), and Mozilla Symbolication Service (Eliot)).

        In 2024, we'll be working with SRE to take over other monitoring services they are currently supporting like New Relic, InfluxDB/Grafana, and others.