Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 23, 2024

• Rlang ☛ How to Compare Two Columns in R: A Comprehensive Guide with Examples

  As an R programmer, you often need to compare two columns within a data frame to identify similarities, differences, or perform various analyses. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore several methods to compare two columns in R using base R functions and provide practical examples to illustrate each approach.

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.106 released

  Version 0.106 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated).

• Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ The long way towards resilience - Part 6

  In the previous post, we discussed the plateau of robustness, the second interim stop on the journey towards resilience, what it is good for, what its limitations are and what it means to get there.

  In this post, we will discuss what it means also to prepare for surprises, the additional realizations needed to guide us to the next plateau – and we will meet the probably biggest obstacle on our way.

• Norbert Preining ☛ CafeOBJ 1.6.2 released

  We have released version 1.6.2 of CafeOBJ, an algebraic specification and verification language.

• Roman Kashitsyn ☛ Transposing tensor files

  This article covered a few alternative designs for the safetensors file format and argued that moving the metadata section at the end of the file would make the format easier to use. The following table summarizes the design space.

• TecMint ☛ Beginner to Pro: 10 Must-Have Resources to Learn R Programming

  If you’re new to R or looking to expand your knowledge, here are some essential resources that can help you learn R from scratch or sharpen your skills, including official websites, top institutions, and interactive platforms.

• Matt Palmer ☛ Matthew Palmer: Your Release Process Sucks

  For the past decade-plus, every piece of software I write has had one of two release processes.

  Software that gets deployed directly onto servers (websites, mostly, but also the infrastructure that runs Pwnedkeys, for example) is deployed with nothing more than git push prod main. I’ll talk more about that some other day.

• Matt Palmer ☛ Matthew Palmer: Invalid Excuses for Why Your Release Process Sucks

  In my companion article, I made the bold claim that your release process should consist of no more than two steps:

  Create an annotated Git tag;

  Run a single command to trigger the release pipeline.

  As I have been on the Internet for more than five minutes, I’m aware that a great many people will have a great many objections to this simple and straightforward idea. In the interests of saving them a lot of wear and tear on their keyboards, I present this list of common reasons why these objections are invalid.

• Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Status update, November 2024

  Hi all!

  This month I’ve spent a lot of time triaging Sway and wlroots issues following the Sway 1.10 release. There are a few regressions, some of which are already fixed (thanks to all contributors for sending patches!). Kenny has added support for software-only secondary KMS devices such as GUD and DisplayLink. David Turner from Raspberry Pi has contributed crop and scale support for output buffers, that way video players are more likely to hit direct scan-out. I’ve added support for explicit sync in the Wayland backend for nested compositors.

• Python

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Visualizing the Python package SBOM data flow

    I'm working on improving measurability of Python packages by allowing Software Bill-of-Materials documents (SBOM) to be included in Python packages so that projects and build tools can record information about a package for downstream use.

    This is a cross-functional project where I need input from Python projects, Python packaging tools (build backends+tools and installers), but also from folks completely outside the Python community like SBOM tooling maintainers. With projects like this, it can be difficult to "see the forest through the trees". When you're reviewing the packaging PEP, it can be difficult to imagine how or who is using the new standard. This article is to help visualize the end-to-end data flow.

• Java

  • Frank Delporte ☛ How Organizations Became Stuck on Outdated Java Versions

    My recent blog post “Why Java 8 is a Ticking Time Bomb Hiding Within Your Organization” triggered quit some reactions… I went a step further and asked on social media: “Why is your company still on Java 8 (or older)? And why did you never move to 9, 10,… and got stuck on this outdated version?” Here is a summary of what I learned from the reactions.