news
Free Software, Education, and Open Data
-
Mike Rockwell ☛ From Dropbox to Nextcloud
Dropbox, in contrast, has a pretty good Linux client that has been reliable throughout my time with the service. But Dropbox was always going to be a temporary solution. There’s no way I was ever going to pay for their Plus plan. $10 per month, billed yearly, for 2TB of storage doesn’t make sense for me. It offers way more storage than I need and the price is just too steep.
And that’s not to mention that using Dropbox means my data is stored on someone else’s hardware, which I’m not too fond of.
-
Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Projectile 3.4
Projectile 3.4 is out! After the four releases that preceded it this summer, this one is polish rather than ambition.
Most of it came out of an annoyance I’d been living with for years without ever quite naming it: a lot of what I work on isn’t one directory. CIDER is really CIDER plus cider-nrepl plus orchard plus clj-refactor plus a handful of others. RuboCop is RuboCop plus rubocop-ast plus rubocop-rails and the other extension gems plus the style guide. I’ve been maintaining families of repositories for the better part of a decade.
-
University of Toronto ☛ Revisiting Flymake and Flycheck in GNU Emacs (as of Flycheck v39)
Not that long ago I wrote an entry on my views on Flymake and Flycheck in GNU Emacs, when Flycheck v36 was the latest release and my impression was that there hadn't been deep changes in Flycheck for a while. To summarize my views, the two were basically equal but Flymake was a bit better if you only used Eglot while Flycheck gave you more flexibility, especially if you weren't using a LSP client. All of that changed in Flycheck 38 (and Flycheck 39), which added a bunch of exciting and important features (cf). Now, my view is that you should pick Flycheck if you're at all on the fence.
-
Chris Maiorana ☛ Using ffap to jump to file includes in Emacs
Lord knows I have trouble finding files sometimes. Over the years I’ve tried lots of schemes in Org Mode and elsewhere for the sole purpose of keeping track of stray items. Using includes in Org Mode has been helpful, but I didn’t have a way of jumping to those included files for quick access. Until now! Read on.
-
Chris Maiorana ☛ The Emacs pastoral tradition
You’ve probably noticed, Emacs users tend to be a different breed than other computer users. While you can be reasonably sure that anyone who uses vim or VSCode is probably a developer, or someone who works in software engineering, devops, or systems administration, Emacs users can be from virtually anywhere else on the map.
While conventional software has the basics—like users, functions, documentation, and best practices—Emacs has a tradition.
In this article, we’ll look at: [...]
-
LWN ☛ rsync 3.5.0 released
Version 3.5.0 of rsync has been released with a huge number of security fixes: [...]
-
SaaS/Back End/Databases
-
PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, 14.24 and 19 Beta 3 Released!
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of PostgreSQL, including 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24, as well as the third beta release of PostgreSQL 19. This release fixes 28 security vulnerabilities and over 110 bugs reported over the last several
This release skips PostgreSQL 18 versions from PostgreSQL 18.4 to 18.6.
-
-
Education
-
Raspberry Pi ☛ How to improve students’ problem-solving skills using subgoal labels
When faced with a programming problem, computing educators often start solving it without a second thought. Before writing a single line of code, experienced programmers use a range of skills to choose their approach and make other key decisions. Thanks to repeated practice, many of these decisions feel automatic and require little conscious thought. However, for beginner programmers, starting a programming problem can feel overwhelming, requiring intense thought and concentration.
-
APNIC ☛ APNIC 62 keynotes explore automation, trust, and the future of the Internet
APNIC 62 will feature two keynote speakers who approach the future of the Internet from different but complementary perspectives. One will explore how networks are becoming more automated and intelligent. The other will examine the human relationships that make global cybersecurity cooperation possible.
Together, their presentations highlight the technical and social foundations of a resilient Internet.
-
Rlang ☛ From Raw Data to Regulatory Results: Clinical Trial Programming in R using the pharmaverse workshop
Description: Have you ever wondered how raw patient data from a clinical trial transforms into the actual evidence used to approve new medicines? This two-hour, hands-on workshop aims to answer this question by giving you a glimpse into the clinical trial data pipeline. We’ll start with a crash course on industry data standards, tracing the journey from raw data to SDTM (Study Data Tabulation Model), into analysis-ready ADaM datasets, and finally into Tables, Listings, and Graphs (TLGs). From there, you will step into the shoes of a clinical statistical programmer: firstly, you will be guided through creating your own simple ADaM dataset(s) using the {admiral} package and test data. Then, you will bring your analyses to life using {ggplot2} and a tabulation package of your choice to build the kinds of polished visualizations and summary tables that drive real-world medical breakthroughs. No prior clinical trial experience is required, just bring your foundational R skills and your curiosity!
-
-
Licensing / Legal
-
The Drone Girl ☛ The Part 107 test is changing — and here's what's on it now
The following piece on the latest changes to the Part 107 test was written by Ritsuko Abrams, an FAA Part 107 certified remote pilot who writes about drone regulation for Office20, a U.S.-Japan consultancy aimed at helping pilots get U.S. certification from Japan.
-
-
Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
-
Open Data
-
Sean Coates ☛ YULBBS
With this data captured, I didn’t want to just plot it on a map—that part has been done, and frankly done better than I could spend the effort on doing myself. Instead, I built YULBBS: a retrocomputing project, inspired by my adolescent introduction to social computing.
YULBBS has 4 main functions: [...]
-
-