Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Clayton Errington ☛ Website redesign and update
Over my time in web design and technology, I’ve found I enjoy the backend of web hosting than I do making the front-end from scratch myself. With this, I found Eleventy Excellent created by Lene Saile. Her design and layout was something I was looking for, and instead of creating it all myself, I find the benefit of showing other developers their hard work pays off and people like it too!
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OS News ☛ run0: a systemd-based, more secure replacement for sudo [Ed: "behaves like sudo" but controlled by Microsoft/NSA]
Poettering wants to address this problem, and has come up with run0, which behaves like sudo, but works entirely differently and is not SUID. Run0 asks the services manager to create a shell or command under the target user’s ID, creating a new PTY, sending data back and forth from the originating TTY and the new PTY.
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Licensing / Legal
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Numeric Citizen ☛ About the Super Greedy Broadcom Company
VMware is no longer synonym of IT innovations. Now, it has because the new Microsoft of the nineties: it is about licensing costs and tricks. Let me elaborate a little bit more.
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[Repeat] FSF ☛ FSF to be deposed in SFC v Vizio, updates relevant FAQ entry
FSF has always intended for the GNU licenses to promote the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve software — which requires that source code be shared with users.
Vizio's attempt to leverage an FSF FAQ to avoid being held accountable under the GNU GPL is both malicious and ironic. Users should be free to enforce their right to source code under the GNU GPL licenses through any available legal mechanism, without having to rely on a copyright holder to take action.
In that spirit, we have updated the above FAQ to read as follows: [...]
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Education
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Stephen Smith ☛ LinuxFest Northwest 2024
LinuxFest Northwest is an annual gathering of open source enthusiasts held in Bellingham halfway between the major cities of Vancouver, BC and Seattle, Washington. Sadly, the last proper event was held in 2019, then during COVID they tried running a virtual event with limited success and then when COVID ended they were going to startup again, but there was a major structural calamity at the Bellingham Technical College campus which caused it to close and LinuxFest to be canceled. Finally, this year, 2024, enough of the college is back open that the organizers were able to start the conference again. The main big building on the campus was still closed, but LinuxFest was able to spread across three of the smaller buildings to operate. It poured with rain for the entire conference which made people get quite wet when crossing between buildings.
This year I attended the conference both as an attendee and a speaker.
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[Old] NetSec BVBA ☛ Linux Fundamentals [PDF]
This book is meant to be used in an instructor-led training. For self-study, the intent is to read this book next to a working Linux computer so you can immediately do every subject, practicing each command.
This book is aimed at novice Linux system administrators (and might be interesting and useful for home users that want to know a bit more about their Linux system). However, this book is not meant as an introduction to Linux desktop applications like text editors, browsers, mail clients, multimedia or office applications.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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PostgreSQL ☛ HypoPG 1.4.1 is out!
I'm pleased to announce the release of the version 1.4.1 of HypoPG, an extension adding support for Hypothetical Indexes, compatible with PostgreSQL 9.2 and above.
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SQLite ☛ Why SQLite Uses Bytecode
Every SQL database engine works in roughly the same way: It first translates the input SQL text into a "prepared statement". Then it "executes" the prepared statement to generate a result.
A prepared statement is an object that represents the steps needed accomplish the input SQL. Or, to think of it in another way, the prepared statement is the SQL statement translated into a form that is more easily understood by the computer.
In SQLite, a prepared statement is an instance of the sqlite3_stmt object. In other systems, the prepared statement is usually an internal data structure that is not directly visible to the application programmer. Developers of other SQL database engines do not necessary call these objects "prepared statements". But such objects exists, whatever they might be called. This paper will use the term "prepared statement".
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