Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 05, 2024

• FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: May GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Eleven new GNU releases!

• Chris ☛ Inventing Fisher's Exact Test

  In a previous article, we needed a way to measure how well readers could tell apart the logistic distribution from the normal distribution, to have something to sort the scoreboard by. In coming up with such a metric, I accidentally re-invented Fisher’s exact test. Here’s how it happened.

• Nat Bennett ☛ You don't have to guess to estimate

  There are roughly three senses of "estimate." One is "a prediction of how much something will cost." One is "a guess." But another definition is a rough calculation.

• Karl Seguin ☛ Leveraging Zig's Allocators

  Let's say we wanted to write an HTTP server library for Zig. At the core of this library, we might have a pool of threads to handle requests. Keeping things simple, it might look something like: [...]

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.100 released

  Version 0.100 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated).

• Srht ☛ The state of SourceHut and our plans for the future

  Conrad will continue leading the efforts to k8s-ize our production infrastructure. Our AMS datacenter installation was provisioned with k8s in mind, rather than with the parameters we used for our earlier libvirt-based infrastructure. As a temporary measure, we have bolted our libvirt approach onto the servers we have installed here, but we are planning on gradually migrating our deployment to a k8s-based approach which is better suited to the infrastructure we have provisioned, as well as (hopefully) being more robust and scalable, meeting the original objectives of our k8s research. We have migrated our large persistent storage system to Ceph, and are working on moving our API and web services into k8s one at a time.

  Then there is the matter of “tech debt”. SourceHut’s codebase traces its lineage directly to our early prototypes, and there are many design choices and bright ideas which are not so bright in hindsight. We had initially planned to work on paying down tech debt between the “beta” and “full production” phases of SourceHut’s development lifecycle, but these areas are causing us enough headache that we have made the decision to spend some time reducing our tech debt today. In particular, we have the following goals: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2024.23 Sparkling

    Alexey Melezhik blogged about Sparky, their flexible and minimalist continuous integration server and distributed task runner written in Raku. The post titled “Sparky – simple and efficient alternative to Ansible” got quite a few likes and some comments on /c/rakulang as well!

• Python

  • James G ☛ Designing data loaders in Python classes

    Before I started working on Nanosearch, a Python library for making small search engines, I thought to myself "how do I want the API for this library to work?" I decided to sketch out some code for how I wanted the library to be used.

  • Yilei Yang ☛ PyCon US 2024

    This year's PyCon US is real special to me. Just 3 weeks before PyCon US 2024, I found out I had to find some other reasons going to the conference. One obvious purpose is to meet potential future employers and colleagues, and I did. But what ended up more important to me is a longer term discovery. PyCon has helped me to realize that I still want to continue my career working on this language thingy called Python.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Evan Hahn ☛ How to set a Zsh option only if supported

    This takes advantage of Zsh’s options associative array, which has keys for supported options. If the key exists, we set the option. Otherwise, we do nothing.

• R

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: ulid 0.4.0 on CRAN: Extended to Milliseconds

    A new version of the ulid package is now on CRAN. The packages provides ‘universally (unique) lexicographically (sortable) identifiers’ – see the spec at Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub for details on those – which offer sorting which uuids lack. The R package provides access via the standard C++ library, had been put together by Bob Rudis and is now maintained by me.

  • Rlang ☛ Full-time Korea R User Group Founder Victor Lee Sees AI Future for R and Quarto Textbooks

    The R Consortium recently interviewed Victor Lee, organizer of the Korea R User Group, about his role establishing and expanding the Korean R community. Victor shared his journey, beginning with an introduction to R and open source programming languages while working at the Hyundai Motor Company, and later, his efforts in establishing the tidyverse community in Korea. He highlighted his extensive experience with R, including writing blog posts, publishing Quarto books, and building websites for the Korea R User Group. Victor will be a Software Carpentry instructor at the Software Carpentry Workshops at Sejong University.