Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Development Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 01, 2026

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • YottaDB ☛ ACID Transactions Are Hard At Scale … Part 1

    There is a duality to Consistency and Isolation. Consistency is the requirement that from a business perspective, the bank must be in compliance with business rules as determined by application logic. Consider two transactions executing at the same time (concurrently, but more about concurrency later). Both of them change the funds in accounts, and while they are executing, their temporary, private view is that the bank is not in balance (between steps 1a and 1b in the example above).

    But when a process looks at any data other than what it is manipulating within the transaction, it should see the the bank as being in balance (Consistency). Isolation means that each transaction is executed as if it were the only transaction on the system. No application logic outside the transaction and executing concurrently with it should be able to see within the transaction, i.e., Isolation of a transaction provides Consistency for concurrent transactions.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Meet the LibreOffice project at FOSDEM in Brussels!

• Education

  • Luis Quintanilla ☛ Thoughts on the Social Web from FOSDEM 2026

    I had the opportunity to attend FOSDEM 2026 virtually, and I spent almost all of my time in the Social Web track.

    A few themes kept coming up across talks. Some were explicit, some were between the lines. Either way, they prompted a bunch of thoughts I wanted to capture.

• Programming/Development

  • Rlang ☛ Releasing dfms 1.0: Fast and Feature-Rich Estimation of Dynamic Factor Models in R

    I am very happy to announce the release of dfms version 1.0 (and 0.4.0 just a week earlier, see news), implementing major features such as support for dynamic factor models (DFMs) with autoregressive errors, mixed-frequency (monthly-quarterly) DFMs, including with autoregressive errors, and decomposition of forecast revisions into news releases [...]

  • Python

    • Tarek Ziadé: Catching Code Complexity with a Local LLM

      Performance issues in Python often don’t look like bugs.

      They don’t crash, they don’t fail tests, and they don’t stand out in code review. They just quietly turn into cliffs when the input size grows.