Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 01, 2024

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.4.0 on CRAN: Upstream Bugfix

  widely used by (currently) 1151 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 34.6 million / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 584 times according upstream bugfix yesterday (to improve views of sparse matrices). We uploaded it yesterday too but it once agfain took a day for the hard-working CRAN maintainers to concur that the two NOTEs from reverse-dependency checking over 1100 packages were in a fact false positves. And so it appeared on CRAN earlier today. We also increased the versioned dependency on Rcpp to match the use of optional entry-point headers Rcpp/Light, Rcpp/Lighter and Rcpp/Lightest. No other changes were made.

• Noah Liebman ☛ Yet another take on layout breakouts

  A common design pattern is content that fills the screen with some gutter on small viewports, then has some maximum width to keep things readable. Sometimes, though, you want something that’s wider than that maximum width, either full screen width (edge-to-edge), or that breaks out, where it’s wider by some amount when there’s enough space.

• Roger Comply ☛ Raivo OTP breaks users' one-time passwords | ParanoidPenguin.net

  Finding a solid and reliable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that you can trust is not a task to be taken lightly. For iOS, my choice has been the open-source application Raivo OTP. However, after yesterday’s automatic update, I no longer have my OTPs.

• Sean Conner ☛ Unicode. Why did it have to be Unicode?

  Good. Two and a half thousand lines of code is tractable. Now, just to show how easy it is to profile Lua code, here's the code I'm using for my gopher server: [...]

• Daniel Lemire ☛ Quickly checking whether a string needs escaping

  In software, we often represent strings by surrounding them with quotes ("). What happens if the string itself contains quotes? We then need to escape the string. For example, the quote character (") or the backlash character (\) should be replaced by \" or \\. Most programmers are familiar with this process.

• Sean Conner ☛ Profile results are as expected as the Spanish Inquisition

  I'm constantly surprised at the results of profiling—it's almost never what I think the problem is. And here, it's clear that I messed up pretty bad somewhere in the gopher code.

  Now off to more profiling to see where it all goes pear shaped.

• Andrew Healey ☛ Lisp Compiler Optimizations

  I recently added some optimizations to my compiler that turns Lisp into JavaScript.

  The features I added are constant folding and propagation, and dead-code elimination, which work together to produce smaller programs that do less work.

• Modus Create LLC ☛ Liquid Haskell through the compilers

  Liquid Haskell is a compiler plugin for GHC that can verify properties of Haskell programs. It used to be a standalone analyser tool, but it was converted to a plugin later on. This makes it feasible to support Haskell modules that use the latest language features, and immediately integrates the verification into the build workflows; but it also implies that Liquid Haskell is rather coupled with the internals of GHC. A consequence of this coupling is that a version of Liquid Haskell is likely to require modifications to support newer versions of the compiler. The effort of making these modifications is large enough that Liquid Haskell has lagged three or four versions behind GHC HEAD.

• Databases

  • The Register UK ☛ Codd almighty! Has it been 50 years of SQL already?

    In the fifty years since SQL was first proposed, it has become the dominant query language for working with relational databases. As such, it underpins the transactions vital to the workings of government, business and the world's economy. But like many standards, its path to global domination is not been a straight one, and in the early years of its gestation, the story could have been very different.

• Python

  • Python Speed ☛ Let’s optimize! Running 15× faster with a situation-specific algorithm

    The task we’re trying to do—turning darker areas into black, and lighter areas into white—is called thresholding. Since the image is different in different regions, with some darker and some lighter, we’ll get the best results if we use local thresholding, where the threshold is calculated from the pixel’s neighborhood.

• Java

  • Margin Research ☛ Disassembling Dalvik — Margin Research

    In this post, we announce the release of a small library for disassembling Dalvik bytecode. This serves as a foundation for building static analysis tooling for Android applications and system services in Rust. Read on for an example graphview application, or just check out the crate’s source and documentation to get started with your own tooling!