Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 28, 2025

• Rlang ☛ Software Review, Perspectives from an Academic

  My journey in creating my first R package all started when I received an email from a colleague who was working with archived soil samples that were collected prior to the advent of GPS technology. These samples were georeferenced using the Manitoba Original Survey Legal Descriptions, which originate from the Dominion Land Survey system, introduced in the late 19th century to organize the European settlement and colonization of Western Canada. I was asked by my colleague if there was an R package that could locate these samples so they could be plotted on a map. There wasn’t. The data was publicly available so I wrote a short script that searched the data set for the legal land description and returned the coordinates. This morphed into a series of functions, which eventually turned into a package! And thanks to the encouragement of the rOpenSci community assistant, Steffi LaZerte, I submitted my package for peer review. That is how mbquartR was born.

• Rlang ☛ rOpenSci News Digest, March 2025

  Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!

• Qt ☛ Expanded Client Areas and Safe Areas

  A staple of modern application design on desktop and mobile is that the content is front and center — with application and system UI elements seamlessly blending into the content in non-intrusive ways. We're now going to look at two new features of Qt 6.9 that help achieve this: expanded client areas, and safe areas.

• Qt ☛ Qt 6.8.3 Released

  We have released Qt 6.8.3 today. As a patch release, Qt 6.8.3 does not introduce new features but contains more than 300 bug fixes, security updates, and other improvements to the top of the Qt 6.8.2 release.

  [...]

  Qt for Python 6.8.3 has also been released by its usual means along with the Qt 6.8.3 release. 

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: tint 0.1.5 on CRAN: Maintenance

  A new version 0.1.4 of the tint package arrived at CRAN today. tint provides a style ‘not unlike Tufte’ for use in html and pdf documents created from markdown. The github repo shows several examples in its README, more as usual in the package documentation.

• Python

  • The New Stack ☛ Insert Data into a MySQL Database via a Python Script

    I want to show you something pretty cool that Python can do: Insert data into a MySQL database table.

• Rust

  • LWN ☛ A burst of progress on the GCC Rust front end

    Arthur Cohen has posted a massive series of patches in four parts

    (part 1,

    part 2,

    part 3,

    part 4)

    upstreaming all of the recent work on the GCC Rust front end. These

    changes include the Polonius borrow checker, the foreign-function

    interface, inline assembly support, if-let statement handling,

    multiple built-in derive macros, for loops, and more.

  • LWN ☛ Rust adopting Ferrocene Language Specification

    One recurring criticism of Rust has been that the language has no official specification. This is a barrier to adoption in some safety-conscious organizations, as well as to writing alternate language implementations. Now, the Rust project has announced that it will be adopting the Ferrocene Language Specification (FLS) developed by Ferrous Systems and maintaining it as part of the core project.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snap updates, Kubuntu Beta testing, Life updates!

    Fixed an issue in apparmor preventing QT6 webengine applications from starting.

    Beta testing!

    KDE Snaps:

    Updated Qt6 to 6.8.2

    Updated Kf6 6.11.0

    Rolling out 25.04 RC applications! You can find them in the –candidate channel!

  • Week 3–4 Progress [Ed: Why has it been outsourced to proprietary Microsoft GitHub? Sends the wrong message.]

    The past two weeks have been pretty packed — mid-semester exams were in full swing, and balancing that with project work was a bit tricky. Finding time to focus on both wasn’t easy, but somehow things started to fall into place.