Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 14, 2024

• Tony Finch ☛ Unix version control lore: what, ident

  There are a couple of version control commands that deserve wider appreciation: SCCS what and RCS ident. They allow you to find out what source a binary was built from, without having to run it – handy if it is a library! They basically scan a file looking for magic strings that contain version control metadata and print out what they discover.

• Nicolas Fränkel ☛ My opinion on the Tauri framework

  I’ve always liked GUI, both desktop-based and browser-based before you needed five years of training on the latter. That’s the reason I loved, and still love Vaadin: you can develop web UIs without writing a single line of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. I’m still interested in the subject; a couple of years ago, I analyzed the state of JVM desktop frameworks.

  I also like the Rust programming language a lot.

  Tauri is a Rust-based framework for building desktop applications. Here’s my view.

• Rlang ☛ How to Check if a Column Exists in a Data Frame in R

  When working with data frames in R, it’s common to need to check whether a specific column exists. This is particularly useful in data cleaning and preprocessing, to ensure your scripts don’t throw errors if a column is missing. Today, we’ll explore several methods to perform this check efficiently in R, and I encourage you to try these methods out with your own data sets.

• Undeadly ☛ afl-fuzz - American Fuzzy Lop

  So, I dug in to how to set this up in an OpenBSD environment. First of all, whatever porting effort needed to make it run was already fixed, so "sudo pkg_add afl" takes care of that. Then you need to have a space to run the tests in, and since the fuzzer is going to create a huge amount of junk files to throw at your program, you really want this to be inside a tmpfs or mfs. This affects the speed a lot. It doesn't need to be very big, just fast in creating and deleting files.

• Education

  • Rlang ☛ The Evolution of Melbourne’s Business Analytics and R Business User Group

    Maria Prokofieva, organizer of the Business Analytics and R Business User Group, spoke to the R Consortium last year about the Adoption of R by the Actuaries Community in Melbourne. Recently, Maria updated the R Consortium on the group’s focus, which has shifted towards business consultancy. The group provides a platform for graduate students to gain valuable industry experience and mentorship through various projects. The group is committed to ethical data governance and inclusive community building and prioritizes these values in all its initiatives.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • [Repeat] Andrew Hutchings ☛ Weird Amiga 1200 Issue Repaired

    In the last week, an Amiga 1200 was dropped off at my workshop to be repaired. That isn’t unusual, but the faults were unusual enough that I thought I should blog about them.

  • Hackster ☛ Circuitpython Tiled Marquee

    As part of my research with this arrangement of Neopixel 8x32 panels, I created this example that displays a message in marquee, with a rainbow effect.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Jason Becker ☛ Ugh, now I have to buy a record player

      I can’t bring myself to pay for digital files of songs I already pay to access, and I can’t be bothered to painstakingly curate a huge MP3 library. Those days are gone. Although I have no opposition to pay for digital media or software in general, I’m not sure my principles extend to buying the same thing effectively twice. But vinyl could be an interesting way to buy something a little different and support the artists I love.