Programming, Graphics Development, and BSD

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 01, 2024

• Michal Pitr ☛ MapReduce from Scratch

  Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been building MapReduce from scratch.

  This will be a long article: we’ll understand the need for distributed computing, rediscover why MapReduce is a natural way to model many problems, build our own version, understand how individual parts fit together, and solve a real problem with it!

• Rachel ☛ Hitting every branch on the way down

  I keep seeing people saying that the answer to my complaints about autoconf is to rub *more* autoconf on the problem. I don't like this. In the general vein of "this should not be that hard", I decided to revisit something from two years ago and tried to use my build tool to generate my stuff on a fresh BSD-flavored install. (The exact flavor is unimportant here, and mentioning it by name would only trigger the weenies in the crowd, so I won't.)

• Python

  • University of Toronto ☛ The state of Python in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

    The big change between 22.04 and 24.04 for us is that 24.04 has entirely dropped Python 2 packages. There is no CPython 2, which has been unsupported by the main Python developers for years, but there's also no Python 2 version of PyPy, which is supported upstream and will be for a long time (cf). At the moment, the Python 2 binary .debs from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS still install and work well enough for us on Ubuntu 24.04, but the writing is on the wall there. In Ubuntu 26.04 we will likely have to compile our own Python from source (and not the .deb sources, which don't seem to readily rebuild on 24.04). It's possible that someone has a PPA with CPython 2 for 24.04; I haven't looked.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Étienne Deparis ☛ Parse zsh history file in ruby

    As I was trying to build a customized history browser for zsh, I quickly felt on a weird issue when trying to parse it in ruby.

• Graphics Stack

  • Collabora ☛ Effortless GStreamer Analytics Cross-Platform Support via ONNX Runtime

    GStreamer's support for diverse hardware and software platforms extends to its upstream Machine Learning capabilities, exemplified by its cross-platform ONNX Runtime implementation.

• BSD

  • NYC BUG ☛ May 1 NYC*BUG: Demystify ZFS Replication

    ZFS is theoretically a powerhouse for data protection and performance, but only if you can dodge its many traps. I'll demonstrate the common ZFS pitfalls and their solutions, along with practical strategies to simplify and scale your backups. I'll also introduce Zelta, a toolkit of management scripts built on Unix fundamentals designed to help you master ZFS with finesse.