Apps, Programming, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 29, 2024

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Christopher Downer ☛ cjd.weblog.lol · Banking Apps

    I've recently read a couple of accounts on a pretty terrifying type of mugging. The victim will find themselves being robbed at knifepoint, and instead of being told to hand over their phone, or wallet, they will be forced to make a bank transfer to the criminal's account from their banking app(s).

    Hardly anyone carries cash these days, people don't even need to carry their plastic cards any more and everyone knows this. Victims may have been marched over to an ATM to withdraw cash in the past, but at most that would only result in a couple of hundred pounds being lost on top of a really traumatic experience. But the only limit with a bank transfer is however much happens to be in the victim's account – potentially tens of thousands.

• Programming/Development

  • Otávio C ☛ Pair Programming, TDD, and Rotation

    For about three years, I had the opportunity to work in the most interesting setup I have ever encountered in my professional career. It may sound complicated to maintain at first, but trust me, it is not. The results speak for themselves.

    Pair Programming was the default in our development team, with rare exceptions such as when someone was on sick leave or jury duty1. Some people might think that pair programming is difficult to achieve, and they often ask questions such as “Who drives?”, “When is it time to switch?”, and “What does one do while the other is coding?” when I mention it to them.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Autoconf and configure features that people find valuable

    In the wake of the XZ Utils backdoor, which involved GNU Autoconf, it has been popular to suggest that Autoconf should go away. Some of the people suggesting this have also been proposing that the replacement for Autoconf and the 'configure' scripts it generates be something simpler. As a system administrator who interacts with configure scripts (and autoconf) and who deals with building projects such as OpenZFS, it is my view that people proposing simpler replacements may not be seeing the features that people like me find valuable in practice.

  • Rlang ☛ Evenly Spaced Month Charts

    I recently noticed that ggplot2 spaces date axes literally even when grouped by month. I’ve been using ggplot2 extensively for years and I don’t remember noticing before, so this is not really a big deal, but now that I know it bugs me a lot. Take a look below.

  • Amit Patel ☛ Flow field pathfinding

    But it’s been many years now and I would like to write something even if it’s not complete. My understanding so far is:

    1. flow fields are a vector field that tells agents from any location what direction to move to find a single destination

    2. optionally, agents that are in between locations on the pathfinding graph can interpolate between the vectors in the flow field

    3. optionally, a hierarchy of coarse and fine stepped fields can speed up pathfinding

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.11 on CRAN: Calendar Updates

    The eleventh release of the qlcal package the QuantLib release 1.34 and contains more updates to 2024 calendars.

  • jnv: An Interactive JSON Viewer and jq Filter Editor for Linux

    I assume you are aware of jq (a JSON processor to parse and manipulate JSON data right from your command line), and recently we have also written an article on jaq (a superset of jq with additional features and improved performance) [...]

  • Alan Pope ☛ Alan Pope: The Joy of Code

    A few weeks ago, in episode 25 of Linux Matters Podcast I brought up the subject of ‘Coding Joy’. This blog post is an expanded follow-up to that segment. Go and listen to that episode - or not - it’s all covered here.

  • The next foss-north

    This year’s foss-north was the tenth incarnation. I’ve been organizing foss-gbg since 2013, and foss-north since 2016 (two events in 2020 makes it ten in total). It’s been quite a journey – moving between three venues, working with amazing speakers and sponsors, finding a way through the pandemic, while getting to know so many people.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Careful with Pair-of-Registers instructions on Fashion Company Apple Silicon

    Egor Bogatov is an engineer working on C# compiler technology at Microsoft. He had an intriguing remark about a performance regression on Fashion Company Apple hardware following what appears to be an optimization. The .NET 9.0 runtime introduced the optimization where two loads (ldr) could be combined into a single load (ldp).

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Linux Hint ☛ How to Make Bash Script Executable

      In Linux, you must provide the executable permissions to run bash scripts from the command line.

    • Linux Hint ☛ What is Proper File Extension for a Bash Script

      If you are new to shell scripting, please use .sh scripting and .bash to work around the bash environment.

    • Lewis Codes ☛ Keeping track of directories using pushd and pop

      It can sometimes be hard navigate a number of directories across your filesystem, say you’re working on a personal project at the same time as a $WORK project. Usually, you’d use something like tmux or screen to have a separate workspace for each. This can work in graphical environments, but if you’re only at a tty then you’re stuck with the screen space you have. By using our friend, the stack, we can quickly navigate a number of directories from within the shell. Learning this should take only a few minutes, but the time saved (and boredom of typing cd) will save you hours over a year.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Simone Silvestroni ☛ JSON RSS feed

    While setting up Echo Feed to mirror my blog posts on the fediverse, I’ve discovered how its capabilities to fetch from RSS were more powerful with a JSON feed rather than my regular XML-based one. It’s been a while since I’ve tinkered with the structure of my Jekyll site, so creating a JSON feed sounded like a nice little challenge.