Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 15, 2024

• KDAB ☛ Mastering Embedded Updates, Continued

  We’ve explained some of the architectural elements of building your own firmware over-the-air (OTA) soution for IoT and embedded systems in a previous blog. But what about the hardware requirements? Or processes? Let’s explore issues that are essential to solve for a robust OTA solution.

• Abin Simon ☛ Putting Go's Context package into context

  Hello Gophers and other beings of the world wide web. The context package is something all Gophers would have used at some point in their life, but do you know what it looks like inside(because apparently the real beauty is on the inside)?

• Michael's and Christian's blog ☛ A Tweedie Trilogy — Part II: Offsets

  TLDR: This second part of the trilogy will have a deeper look at offsets and sample weights of a GLM. Their non-equivalence stems from the mean-variance relationship. This time, we not only have a Poisson frequency but also a Gamma severity model.

  This trilogy celebrates the 40th birthday of Tweedie distributions in 2024 and highlights some of their very special properties.

• Adriaan Roselli ☛ YouTube and Vimeo Web Component

  If you want something done right, post it wrong.

  In the long history of the innertubes, if you ask for help with code you typically won’t get much of a response. But if you post code and assert it is ideal and perfect and an immutable reflection of your pristine ego, then folks will give it a good kick.

• Jeff Triplett ☛ 🤖 More Blocking Bots with Django ❌

  I forgot I wrote the middleware, so I rewrote it tonight before rediscovering it while looking for both articles to share. That was fun, so I’m not writing more tonight. 😬

• Dan Slimmon ☛ Fight understanding decay with a rich Incident Summary

  It only takes a few off-the-rails incidents in your software career to realize the importance of writing things down. That’s why so many companies’ incident response protocols define a scribe role. The scribe’s job, generally, is to take notes on everything that happens. In other words, the scribe produces an artifact of the response effort.

• Rlang ☛ Large Language Models (LLMs) in R with tidychatmodels

  Hey guys, welcome back to my R-tips newsletter. Lately it’s felt like Python, which has dozens of tools for Large Language Models (LLMs), is moving faster into LLMs than the R community. Thankfully, I stumbled upon a new R package that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Mistral AI, and more all inside of R. It’s called tidychatmodels, and I’m sharing how to get started in under 5 minutes. Let’s go!

• Python

  • Earthly ☛ How to Create a Python Virtual Environment with uv

    Virtual environments solve these problems by isolating dependencies for each project, allowing you to maintain different packages and Python versions without conflict. A virtual environment is an independent environment created on top of an existing Python installation. It has its own independent set of Python packages installed in its site directories and only contains packages from its base environment (the system-wide Python installation) if explicitly specified. The environment is disposable and can be easily deleted and recreated as required.

• Rust

  • LWN ☛ Rust 1.79.0 released

    Version

    1.79.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes this time

    include inline const expressions, the "associated item bounds

    syntax", and more.

• Education

  • Jay Little ☛ Jay Little - The Court of Fossalot - SouthEast LinuxFest 2024

    So it's that time of year and I spent last weekend at SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) 2024 in Charlotte, NC. This was my second year of attending and it absolutely lived up to the lofty expectations set by my first trip last year. This year was less about the sessions for me and more about the people. Which is interesting to say because if I'm being honest about my visit last year, it was also similar.

    Let's be up front: The highlight of this year was going to the "Retro Linux Ragchew" and meeting some of the maintainers of the classic distribution Slackware Linux. Fun fact: It was the second Linux distribution ever created and it was also the first one I ever installed on my own hardware as a teenager. In any event meeting Alan, Jeff and Fuzz (sorry, I never actually caught your name my man) and staying up until 3:30 am in the morning partying with them was an absolute blast.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Jeff Triplett ☛ 🤖 Super Bot Fight 🥊

    Earlier this week, I ran across this Blockin’ bots. blog post and this example, the mod_rewrite rule blocks AI Agents via their User-Agent strings.