Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 27, 2024

• Startup

  I’ve been seeing a lot of ultra technical posts fly past my news feed lately and I’m tired of it. There’s too much information out there, too many analyses of vague hardware capabilities, too much handwaving in the direction of compiler internals.

  [...]

  Today I’ll be firing up the pasta maker on this ticket that someone nerdsniped me with. This is the sort of simple problem that any of us smoothbrains can understand: app too slow.

  Here at SGC, we’re all experts at solving app too slow by now, so let’s take a gander at the problem area.

  I’m in a hurry to get to the gym today, so I’ll skip over some of the less interesting parts of my analysis. Instead, let’s look at some artisanal graphics.

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.98 released

  The version control system gameoftrees 0.98 has been released and should soon show up in OpenBSD -current packages. An update for the -portable version will follow as well.

• Linux Hint ☛ 30 Golang programming examples for beginners

  30 examples of coding in golang as your reference point for the most common tasks. Golang capabilities from basic syntax to handling files, web requests, and data formats.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.17 on CRAN: New Upstream

  Version 0.0.17 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN overnight following and has been uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog

  This releases updates the code to the version 1.14 of spdlog which was release

  Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.17 (2024-04-25)

• Minor continuous integration update

• Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.14.0

is also a diffstat site.

• Python

  • Kodi Foundation ☛ The Sun Sets on Python 2

    The final version of Kodi Leia (v18.9) was released in October 2020. Leia was also noteworthy as being the final version which made use of the Python 2 language, with Kodi Matrix and beyond using the newer Python 3. That move was made due to Python 2 being marked as end-of-life on 1st January 2020 by its authors, who now no longer support it and so it does not receive any updates or security patches. Python 3 is fully supported and updated, but Python 3 code is not directly compatible with Python 2.

    This means that, as Kodi Leia moves out of support, so does Python 2 for Kodi. As a result, we will no longer be accepting any updates for Python 2 addons into our repository, and the Leia repo will be frozen. Any Leia installation will still be able to access the repo, but addon updates will only be accepted in Python 3, with the effect that they can only be run on Kodi Matrix or later. This will free up the Team Kodi volunteers who review addon submissions to focus entirely on Python 3 addons, making reviews simpler and faster and so minimising the delays between submission and release of acceptable addons into the repo.

  • Earthly ☛ Python Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup and Selenium

    Web scraping gives you the ability to automatically gather the data you need to fine-tune your LLM. With web scraping, you can target websites to extract relevant data and ensure that your LLM encounters the language and style you need.

    In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to scrape the content of a website using Beautiful Soup and Selenium. By the end of the article, you’ll have a better understanding of web scraping in Python and how it can help you fine-tune your LLM.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Rohan Kumar ☛ Best practices for inclusive CLIs

    This began as a reply to another article by Lucas F. Costa; it lists practices to improve user-experience (UX) of command-line interfaces (CLIs). It comes from a good place, and has some good advice: I particularly like its advice on input-validation and understandable errors. Unfortunately, a number of its suggestions are problematic, particularly from an accessibility perspective.

    This is a “living article” that I plan on adding to indefinitely. If you like it, come back in a month or two and check the “changelog” link in the article header.

  • University of Toronto ☛ The importance of an ordinary space in a Unix shell command line

    In the sidebar to yesterday's entry I (originally) made a Unix command line mistake by unthinkingly leaving out an ordinary, innocent looking space (it's corrected in the current version of the entry after it was noted by Emilio in a comment). This innocent looking mistake and its consequences are an illustration of something in Unix shell command lines, although I'm not sure of just what, so I'm going to write it up.