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The Drupal Association is excited to announce the DrupalCon Portland 2024 t-shirt design contest! For this year's DrupalCon North America, we want to see the Drupal community's design ideas for the official DrupalCon Portland t-shirt. Do you have a fantastic idea in mind? Let’s see your creativity!

The winner will get THEIR design on the front of the official t-shirt for DrupalCon Portland 2024!

Now, for the finer details…

Your design must include the DrupalCon Logo and will only be featured on the front of the t-shirt. Sponsor logos will be added to the t-shirts sleeves after the design is finalized. Specs: PNG or PDF preferred, 16 inches tall, and graphics need to be 300 dpi. All designs must be submitted by 12 February 2024 at 24:00 UTC, after which the submission form will close.

The top four designs as chosen by the Drupal Association will then be voted upon by the public, with voting closing on 28 February. The winning design will be on the front of the official DrupalCon Portland 2024 t-shirt and will be announced during the Driesnote at the conference! The winner will receive a complimentary ticket to their choice of either DrupalCon Portland 2024 or DrupalCon North America 2025.

How do I enter?

To enter: Simply create your design, then fill out our submission form by 12 February to submit your final design. We also ask that you include a sentence or two describing why you chose your design and how it represents the Drupal community.

So, what are you waiting for? Submit your design now, and please help us spread the word throughout the Drupal community!

Good luck to all of our participants!

** Drupal Association staff will not be permitted to enter this contest.

I have now completed the final phase of The Python Coding Place launch. The members’ area is now live with:

• Video courses across all levels (some live and more to come over coming weeks and months)
• A members’ forum
• Live workshops and cohort courses are coming soon

And members also get access to the full archive at The Python Coding Stack where I published articles about various Python topics weekly.

Read more about The Python Coding Place at thepythoncodingplace.com, and maybe you can join as a member. There’s an introductory offer at the moment to mark these early days. It’s a one-time fee that gives access forever.

If you’re new to programming, you can start the free course A Python Tale: https://thepythoncodingplace.thinkific.com/courses/a-python-tale

Hopefully, see you there!

The post The Python Coding Place appeared first on The Python Coding Book.

I Just bought a LicheePi 4A RISC-V embedded computer (like a RaspberryPi but with a RISC-V CPU) for $322.68 from Aliexpress (the official site for buying LicheePi devices). Here is the Sipheed web page about it and their other recent offerings [1]. I got the version with 16G of RAM and 128G of storage, I probably don’t need that much storage (I can use NFS or USB) but 16G of RAM is good for VMs. Here is the Wiki about this board [2].

Configuration

When you get one of these devices you should make setting up ssh server your first priority. I found the HDMI output to be very unreliable. The first monitor I tried was a Samsung 4K monitor dating from when 4K was a new thing, the LicheePi initially refused to operate at a resolution higher than 1024*768 but later on switched to 4K resolution when resuming from screen-blank for no apparent reason (and the window manager didn’t support this properly). On the Dell 4K monitor I use on my main workstation it sometimes refused to talk to it and occasionally worked. I got it running at 1920*1080 without problems and then switched it to 4K and it lost video sync and never talked to that monitor again. On my Desklab portabable 4K monitor I got it to display in 4K resolution but only the top left 1/4 of the screen displayed.

The issues with HDMI monitor support greatly limit the immediate potential for using this as a workstation. It doesn’t make it impossible but would be fiddly at best. It’s quite likely that a future OS update will fix this. But at the moment it’s best used as a server.

The LicheePi has a custom Linux distribution based on Ubuntu so you want too put something like the following in /etc/network/interfaces to make it automatically connect to the ethernet when plugged in:

auto end0 iface end0 inet dhcp

Then to get sshd to start you have to run the following commands to generate ssh host keys that aren’t zero bytes long:

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* systemctl restart ssh.service

It appears to have wifi hardware but the OS doesn’t recognise it. This isn’t a priority for me as I mostly want to use it as a server.

Performance

For the first test of performance I created a 100MB file from /dev/urandom and then tried compressing it on various systems. With zstd -9 it took 16.893 user seconds on the LicheePi4A, 0.428s on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 with a i5-6300U CPU (Debian/Unstable), 1.288s on my E5-2696 v3 workstation (Debian/Bookworm), 0.467s on the E5-2696 v3 running Debian/Unstable, 2.067s on a E3-1271 v3 server, and 7.179s on the E3-1271 v3 system emulating a RISC-V system via QEMU running Debian/Unstable.

It’s very impressive that the QEMU emulation is fast enough that emulating a different CPU architecture is only 3.5* slower for this test (or maybe 10* slower if it was running Debian/Unstable on the AMD64 code)! The emulated RISC-V is also more than twice as fast as real RISC-V hardware and probably of comparable speed to real RISC-V hardware when running the same versions (and might be slightly slower if running the same version of zstd) which is a tribute to the quality of emulation.

One performance issue that most people don’t notice is the time taken to negotiate ssh sessions. It’s usually not noticed because the common CPUs have got faster at about the same rate as the algorithms for encryption and authentication have become more complex. On my i5-6300U laptop it takes 0m0.384s to run “ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 localhost id” with the below server settings (taken from advice on ssh-audit.com [3] for a secure ssh configuration). On the E3-1271 v3 server it is 0.336s, on the QMU system it is 28.022s, and on the LicheePi it is 0.592s. By this metric the LicheePi is about 80% slower than decent x86 systems and the QEMU emulation of RISC-V is 73* slower than the x86 system it runs on. Does crypto depend on instructions that are difficult to emulate?

HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key KexAlgorithms -ecdh-sha2-nistp256,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp521,diffie-hellman-group14-sha256 MACs -umac-64-etm@openssh.com,hmac-sha1-etm@openssh.com,umac-64@openssh.com,umac-128@openssh.com,hmac-sha2-256,hmac-sha2-512,hmac-sha1

I haven’t yet tested the performance of Ethernet (what routing speed can you get through the 2 gigabit ports?), emmc storage, and USB. At the moment I’ve been focused on using RISC-V as a test and development platform. My conclusion is that I’m glad I don’t plan to compile many kernels or anything large like LibreOffice. But that for typical development that I do it will be quite adequate.

The speed of Chromium seems adequate in basic tests, but the video output hasn’t worked reliably enough to do advanced tests.

Hardware Features

Having two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 USB-3 ports, and Wifi on board gives some great options for using this as a router. It’s disappointing that they didn’t go with 2.5Gbit as everyone seems to be doing that nowadays but Gigabit is enough for most things.

Having only a single HDMI port and not supporting USB-C docks (the USB-C port appears to be power only) limits what can be done for workstation use and for controlling displays. I know of people using small ARM computers attached to the back of large TVs for advertising purposes and that isn’t going to be a great option for this.

The CPU and RAM apparently uses a lot of power (which is relative – the entire system draws up to 2A at 5V so the CPU would be something below 5W). To get this working a cooling fan has to be stuck to the CPU and RAM chips via a layer of thermal stuff that resembles a fine sheet of blu-tack in both color and stickyness. I am disappointed that there isn’t any more solid form of construction, to mount this on a wall or ceiling some extra hardware would be needed to secure this. Also if they just had a really big copper heatsink I think that would be better. 80386 CPUs with similar TDP were able to run without a fan.

I wonder how things would work with all USB ports in use. It’s expected that a USB port can supply a minimum of 2.5W which means that all the ports could require 10W if they were active. Presumably something significantly less than 5W is available for the USB ports.

Other Devices

Sipheed has a range of other devices in the works. They currently sell the LicheeCluster4A which support 7 compute modules for a cluster in a box. This has some interesting potential for testing and demonstrating cluster software but you could probably buy an AMD64 system with more compute power for less money. The Lichee Console 4A is a tiny laptop which could be useful for people who like the 7″ laptop form factor, unfortunately it only has a 1280*800 display if it had the same resolution display as a typical 7″ phone I would have bought one.

The next device that appeals to me is the soon to be released Lichee Pad 4A which is a 10.1″ tablet with 1920*1200 display, Wifi6, Bluetooth 5.4, and 16G of RAM. It also has 1 USB-C connection, 2*USB-3 sockets, and support for an external card with 2*Gigabit ethernet. It’s a tablet as a “laptop without keyboard” instead of the more common “larger phone” design model.

They are also about to release the LicheePadMax4A which is similar to the other tablet but with a 14″ 2240*1400 display and which ships with a keyboard to make it essentially a laptop with detachable keyboard.

Conclusion

At this time I wouldn’t recommend that this device be used as a workstation or laptop, although the people who want to do such things will probably do it anyway regardless of my recommendations. I think it will be very useful as a test system for RISC-V development. I have some friends who are interested in this sort of thing and I can give them VMs.

It is a bit expensive. The Sipheed web site boasts about the LicheePi4 being faster than the RaspberryPi4, but it’s not a lot faster and the RaspberryPi4 is much cheaper ($127 or $129 for one with 8G of RAM). The RaspberryPi4 has two HDMI ports but a limit of 8G of RAM while the LicheePi has up to 16G of RAM and two Gigabit Ethernet ports but only a single HDMI port. It seems that the RaspberryPi4 might win if you want a cheap low power desktop system.

At this time I think the reason for this device is testing out RISC-V as an alternative to the AMD64 and ARM64 architectures. An open CPU architecture goes well with free software, but it isn’t just people who are into FOSS who are testing such things. I know some corporations are trying out RISC-V as a way of getting other options for embedded systems that don’t involve paying monopolists.

The Lichee Console 4A is probably a usable tiny laptop if the resolution is sufficient for your needs. As an aside I predict that the tiny laptop or pocket computer segment will take off in the near future. There are some AMD64 systems the size of a phone but thicker that run Windows and go for reasonable prices on AliExpress. Hopefully in the near future this device will have better video drivers and be usable as a small and quiet workstation.

I won’t rule out the possibility of making this my main workstation in the not too distant future, all it needs is reliable 4K display and the ability to decode 4K video. It’s performance for web browsing and as an ssh client seems adequate, and that’s what matters for my workstation use. But for the moment it’s just for server use.

• [1] https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a
• [2] https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/lichee/th1520/lp4a.html
• [3] https://www.ssh-audit.com/

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2. Dell 32″ 4K Monitor and DisplayPort Switch After determining that the Philips 43″ monitor was too large...
3. Dell PowerEdge T30 I just did a Debian install on a Dell PowerEdge...

The PSF is pleased to announce its third batch of PSF Fellows for 2023! Let us welcome the new PSF Fellows for Q3! The following people continue to do amazing things for the Python community:

Dustin IngramLinkedIn, Github, Social, WebsiteMarlene Mhangami Twitter, GitHub, WebsiteNikita SobolevGitHub, WebsiteRaquel DouLinkedIn 

Thank you for your continued contributions. We have added you to our Fellow roster online.

The above members help support the Python ecosystem by being phenomenal leaders, sustaining the growth of the Python scientific community, maintaining virtual Python communities, maintaining Python libraries, creating educational material, organizing Python events and conferences, starting Python communities in local regions, and overall being great mentors in our community. Each of them continues to help make Python more accessible around the world. To learn more about the new Fellow members, check out their links above.

Let's continue recognizing Pythonistas all over the world for their impact on our community. The criteria for Fellow members is available online: https://www.python.org/psf/fellows/. If you would like to nominate someone to be a PSF Fellow, please send a description of their Python accomplishments and their email address to psf-fellow at python.org. Quarter 4 nominations are currently in review. We are accepting nominations for Quarter 1 2024 through February 20, 2024.

Are you a PSF Fellow and want to help the Work Group review nominations? Contact us at psf-fellow at python.org

Note: This blog was originally published on November 2, 2022 and has been updated to reflect new information and insights. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is what we do to ensure our website is as visible as possible to our target markets when they search for topics related to our website on Google, Bing, and other search engines. We do this by optimizing our website for users while following search engine guidelines.

We’re very happy to welcome Petr Viktorin as the Deputy Developer in Residence! Better yet, he is joined by Serhiy Storchaka as the Supporting Developer in Residence. This transforms the residency program into a full blown team! We couldn’t be happier.

It’s exciting to be able to begin to realize the full vision of the Developers in Residence program, with special thanks to Bloomberg for making it possible for us to bring Petr on board. The initial idea behind the Developer in Residence was to have three to five people hired directly by the Python Software Foundation to help with developer efficiency at CPython, where most of the contributors are volunteers. Three to five people is a good amount to allow for handling both day-to-day tasks, as well as planning and executing on larger-scale projects.

We were only able to start with a single Developer in Residence, initially sponsored by Google for the initial year, and by Meta for the following two years. We were clear that adding more developers in residence would multiply the impact of the role but, of course, the big question is funding. Fortunately, the success of the initial one-person program allowed for a new sponsor to participate, interested in extending the program with another developer. Thank you, Bloomberg!

We announced the job opening back in July, and the interview process was extensive. The Foundation received close to 100 applications, and it was a very tough decision, as most were excellent candidates. One surprise in particular was that despite the Deputy role being described as targeting programmers of various experience levels, we received many more applications from Python core developers than during the initial Developer in Residence job opening.

Naturally, the core developers bubbled up in the interview process. We were especially impressed by Petr Viktorin’s experience with maintaining Python at Red Hat, his interest in the C API, and his long-term existing contributions to Python. Given the transformative recent developments inside the interpreter in terms of performance and scalability, Petr’s skillset was the perfect match. We’re excited he accepted the offer!

However, there was one more person who we were also ready to hire on the spot: Serhiy Storchaka, a rare example of a core developer generalist, with plenty of C experience and contributions across the entire codebase. Consistently one of the top most prolific contributors to Python, we felt like we needed to secure him as a member for the Residents team. Unexpectedly, a generous anonymous donation allowed us to hire Serhiy as well. Thank you!

We are calling the role the Supporting Developer in Residence to make it clear the funding level here isn’t as high as in the Deputy case. Please contact us if your organization can help sponsor Serhiy to bump him to the Deputy salary. Serhiy sure deserves it!

After an initial meeting with the Steering Council, the Residents team is now ready to take on a more active role in shaping the development of the language. The Council advised that while every team member is expected to prioritize unblocking other contributors and keeping the developer experience smooth, with three people on the team each Resident can now also spend a percentage of their time on feature work aligned with their interests.

There are some exciting times ahead for Python!

In this tutorial, we have laid down the top Python programming interview questions usually asked by the top five IT companies. You’ll find 10 questions with their answers for each of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Let’s start the Google interview questions and answers first. 50 Interview Questions With Answers Python is the number […]

The post Top 50 Python Programming Interview Questions With Answers appeared first on TechBeamers.

The DrupalGovCon 2023 presented both triumphs and challenges, marking a return to in-person events post-pandemic. As the Director of Web Development at DSFederal and a co-lead for the event, Nneka Hector reflects on the community's eagerness for in-person interaction and addresses lessons learned from this year's conference. The interview covers key takeaways, the impact of speakers, attendee feedback, team dynamics, and plans to further the Drupal community's collaboration and learning opportunities.

In this episode, I started with a plan to work on Stripe checkout, but realized that I needed to come up with a better plan and also improve the base template of the app. We ended up doing more design work than working with Stripe, but we ended the stream with a solid plan of what to do next.

Staff seat board member and senior sysadmin Ian Kelling shares his personal musings on the board process improvements, his experience working at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), why Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) should get more attention, some lessons learned from the GNU Tools Cauldron, FSF's legal defense of GCC, and why the FSF needs your financial support.

Staff seat board member and senior sysadmin Ian Kelling shares his personal musings on the board process improvements, his experience working at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), why Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) should get more attention, some lessons learned from the GNU Tools Cauldron, FSF's legal defense of GCC, and why the FSF needs your financial support.

We silently skipped releasing in December (it was too close to the holidays, a lot of people were away) so by date you may have been expecting alpha 4, but instead it’s alpha 3:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3130a3/

This is an early developer preview of Python 3.13

Major new features of the 3.13 series, compared to 3.12

Python 3.13 is still in development. This release, 3.13.0a3, is the third of six planned alpha releases.

Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current state of new features and bug fixes and to test the release process.

During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase (2024-05-07) and, if necessary, may be modified or deleted up until the release candidate phase (2024-07-30). Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Many new features for Python 3.13 are still being planned and written. Work continues apace on both the work to remove the Global Interpeter Lock , and to improve Python performance. The most notable changes so far:

• In the interactive interpreter, exception tracebacks are now colorized by default .
• Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped , reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files. (Most tools handling docstrings already strip leading indentation.)
• PEP 594 (Removing dead batteries from the standard library) scheduled removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.
• Many other removals of deprecated classes, functions and methods in various standard library modules.
• New deprecations , most of which are scheduled for removal from Python 3.15 or 3.16.
• C API removals and deprecations. (Some removals present in alpha 1 have been reverted in alpha 2, as the removals were deemed too disruptive at this time.)

(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Thomas know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.13 will be 3.13.0a4, currently scheduled for 2023-02-13.

 More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 719 , 3.13 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at Issues · python/cpython · GitHub.
• Help fund Python and its community.

 Enjoy the new releases

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

Regards from snowy Amsterdam,

Your release team,
Thomas Wouters
Ned Deily
Steve Dower
Łukasz Langa

Hello fellow Pythonista! 🐍

Put the date in your calendar!

We’re delighted to announce that EuroPython 2024 will be held again in Prague between the 8th and 14th of July, 2024. To stay up to date with the latest news please visit our website and we encourage you to sign up to our monthly community newsletter.

A banner depicting the logo and the dates for EuroPython 2024.

Sitting on the Vltava river, the city boasts numerous cultural, culinary, architectural, artistic, civic and tourist attractions. The beautiful historic centre is a UNESCO world heritage site. So, in addition to the conference, there&aposs a LOT to see, do and enjoy. Prague has an extensive and modern public transport system, so travelling around won&apost be a problem and getting there is easy via well serviced train, air and road infrastructure. With an average July high of 25°c, remember to pack your shorts and sandals with your laptop, along with a spirit of adventure to explore one of the most visited and vibrant cities in Europe.

As with previous years, Monday and Tuesday (8th and 9th) will be for tutorials and workshops; the main conference talks will take place on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (10th, 11th and 12th) with Saturday and Sunday (13th and 14th) for community sprints.

Our prospectus for sponsorship will be forthcoming soon, but if you already want to sponsor one of Europe’s biggest, friendliest and longest running community organised software development conferences, please do reach out to us at sponsoring@europython.eu and we’d be delighted to help.

Because EuroPython is a community organised conference, our volunteers are at the heart of everything we do. Without them, there simply wouldn’t be a conference. We’ll soon start recruiting volunteers, who are organised into teams responsible for different aspects of the conference. To register your interest please email volunteers@europython.eu.

Can’t wait for EuroPython? come check out past years photos from on our website: https://ep2024.europython.eu/

We look forward to seeing you in Prague,

VB on behalf of the EuroPython Board.

Project: Drupal coreDate: 2024-January-17Security risk: Moderately critical 11∕25 AC:None/A:None/CI:None/II:None/E:Theoretical/TD:DefaultVulnerability: Denial of ServiceAffected versions: >=8.0 <10.1.8 || >=10.2 <10.2.2Description: 

The Comment module allows users to reply to comments. In certain cases, an attacker could make comment reply requests that would trigger a denial of service (DOS).

Sites that do not use the Comment module are not affected.

Solution: 

Install the latest version:

• If you are using Drupal 10.2, update to Drupal 10.2.2.
• If you are using Drupal 10.1, update to Drupal 10.1.8.

All versions of Drupal 10 prior to 10.1 are end-of-life and do not receive security coverage. (Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 have both reached end-of-life.)

Drupal 7 is not affected.

Reported By: 

• Alexander Antonenko
• Doug Green

Fixed By: 

• Lee Rowlands of the Drupal Security Team
• Benji Fisher of the Drupal Security Team
• Juraj Nemec of the Drupal Security Team
• xjm of the Drupal Security Team
• Lauri Eskola, provisional member of the Drupal Security Team

Join the FSF and friends on Friday, January 19, from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

This post is brought to you from our partners at Skynet Technologies.

Uplifting the digital experience of your Drupal website by making it accessible is inevitable.

The reason behind digital evolution is its easy availability for all. But unfortunately, the web is still full of inaccessible experiences, which become a hindrance for users with any sort of disability. And that is the reason why Drupal incorporated various accessibility features with time to ensure its website accessibility.

Along with accessibility features, Drupal has accessibility modules as well that are contributed by its active community. The modules improve Drupal website accessibility without having to put much effort into coding.

Let’s know which are those modules that enhance Drupal website accessibility.

Top Drupal web accessibility modules! #1 All in One Accessibility

Drupal All in One Accessibility is an AI based accessibility module to enable Drupal websites to be accessible among people with hearing or vision impairments, motor impaired, color blind, dyslexia, cognitive & learning impairments, seizure and epileptic, and ADHD problems. It manages website UI and design related alteration as an accessibility interface.

Drupal All in One Accessibility module installs in just 2 minutes. PRO version reduces the risk of time-consuming accessibility lawsuits.

This module improves accessibility compliance for the standards WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, WCAG 2.2, ADA, Section 508, European EAA EN 301 549, Canada ACA, California Unruh, Israeli Standard 5568, Australian DDA, UK Equality Act, Ontario AODA, France RGAA, German BITV, Brazilian Inclusion law LBI 13.146/2015, Spain UNE 139803:2012, JIS X 8341, Italian Stanca Act, and Switzerland DDA.

It is a cornerstone of improving web accessibility through its ease of use for companies of all sizes. Top features of the module:

1. Accessibility statement
2. Accessibility interface for UI design fixes
3. Dashboard Automatic accessibility score
4. AI based Image Alternative Text remediation
5. AI based Text to Speech Screen Reader
6. Keyboard navigation adjustments
7. Content, Color, Contrast, and Orientation Adjustments
8. Supports 53 languages
9. PDF / Document Remediation Add-On
10. White Label Subscription
11. Live site translation add-on
12. Custom widget color, position, icon size, and type
13. Dedicated email support

#2 Monsido Tools

Monsido tool helps to optimize Drupal websites easily and swiftly. The tool ensures that the website is validated for the de facto international standard, which is WCAG 2.1. So that website will be accessible to everyone in each region.

Monsido scans your Drupal website to identify all persisting accessibility issues and gives you suggestions on addressing the issues to rectify them. It also finds SEO errors and helps you optimize every page of your website.

#3 Editoria11y Accessibility Checker

Editoria11y (editorial accessibility ally) is supported by Princeton University. It is made focusing on content quality and accessibility.

The module checks content automatically, authors are not required to get trained to use it. It detects issues that appear after Drupal assembles the pages by testing rendered content.

Editoria11y prioritizes content issues by inserting alerts and tooltips to help authors fix the problems without troubling them with complex code. It majorly supplements the accessibility issues and does not replace the elements.

#4 Civic Accessibility Toolbar

The Civic Accessibility Toolbar has a block with accessibility utilities which is an aid for end-users if they wish to switch between theme versions with higher color contrast and update text font sizes as well.

The module enables its users to create a block with both or at least one of the utilities to make your Drupal website accessible for visually impaired users. It is tested with Garland, Bartik, Zen Starterkit, Stark, and Olivero themes.

It uses colourContrast and fontSize cookies to remember user selection. The cookies only use functional or necessary details and don’t keep the user’s personal information.

#5 Accessibility toolkit

Basically, Accessibility Toolkit helps Drupal developers with reusable tools so that they can fulfil the requirements of people with disabilities by making websites compatible with assistive technologies. It is tested for Drupal 7, 8, and 9. It does this through aggressive CSS additions and remembers the setting using Drupal's built-in usage of jQuery Cookie.

It provides a block with all little settings to allow for –

• High contrast mode
• Dyslexic font support
• Text scaling
• Inverted colors mode
• Keyboard navigation (only for D8/D9)

#6 Fluidproject UI Options

The module is maintained by Ukrainian developers. It helps users to modify a web page’s line height, font size and style, contrast, and link style. All changes are retained using cookies for a longer span. Fluidproject UI options integrate Drupal libraries into non-admin pages.

To use this module, you need to have Grunt and NPM installed for compiling the infusion library, and a jQuery 1.7 version is required.

However, the module cannot do internationalization through the Drupal interface, JSON files within the module folder can perform this function. This Drupal accessibility module is tested with its most popular themes successfully. Please note here that some of its themes require additional CSS to adjust font size and line heights. Also, Contrast settings don’t work properly for website elements that use CSS gradients.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: PDF Document Accessibility Remediation

#7 High contrast

High contrast provides a quick solution for users to switch between an active theme and its high-contrast version.

It only needs to install it and press the tab from the keyboard, then click on the ‘Toggle high contrast’ link. You will find yourself in high contrast mode, returning to normal view is possible via following the same steps.

#8 Style Switcher

This Drupal website accessibility module enables every website visitor to select the stylesheet they want to view the site content with. They only require clicking on its link to get the new look of the website.

Style Switcher reduces the duplication of work since developers don’t need to create themes for alternative stylesheets. Themer has the capacity to provide a theme with alternate stylesheets and the Site builder can add alternate stylesheets in the admin section.

The module gathers and presents all the styles as a list of links in a block for site visitors. Thus, all visitors can easily choose their preferred styles. And the module uses cookies, so, if a user returns to the site, they get the same chosen style.

#9 Text Resize

The text resize accessibility module offers a block to end-users that helps in changing the font size of text on Drupal websites. The block includes a button to increase or decrease the text size, which is an aid for visually impaired users. Text resize uses JavaScript with jQuery and jQuery Cookie to bring accessibility.

#10 Automatic Alternative Text

The Automatic Alternative Text accessibility module uses the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services API or Alttext.ai to generate alternative texts for images if the alt text is missing.

The module provides algorithms to process images. It can be used to understand if the image has relevant content or not. It also has features like categorizing the content of images, describing the images in human-readable language, and estimating the dominant and accent colors of the image.

P.S. All above-mentioned modules have free and premium versions available. You can select the best suited version.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Voluntary Product Assessment Template (VPAT)

Some more contributed modules to fine-tune the Drupal website’s accessibility!

• CKEditor Abbreviation
• HTML Purifier
• Siteimprove
• htmLawed
• Block ARIA Landmark Roles

Read more for detail information.

Wrapping up

Having an accessible website is crucial and the need of an hour. All in One Accessibility is a quick and comprehensive solution with AI based features to improve your website accessibility compliance at next level. The cherry on top is its 2 minutes installation and 10 days free trial. Not limited to this, the dashboard add-ons and upgrades like PDF / document accessibility remediation, white label subscription, and live site translation helps in increasing digital accessibility.

We are pleased to announce the return of the Hatchery program in PyCon US 2024.

What is the Hatchery program?

This program offers the pathways for PyCon US attendees to introduce new tracks, activities, summits, demos, etc., at PyCon US—activities that all share and fulfill the Python Software Foundation’s mission within the PyCon US schedule.

The program began as a trial led by Ee Durbin and Naomi Ceder in 2018, resulting in the creation of several new tracks that are now staples of PyCon US, for example: PyCon US Charlas, Mentored Sprints, and Maintainer’s Summit.

The Hatchery program was paused during the pandemic, and we are excited to restart and refresh this program for PyCon US 2024.

With the Hatchery program, we want to provide the opportunity for you, the Python community members, to take active participation and lead new activities and events at PyCon US. We want to provide a transparent process for this, and we also want to ensure that every attendee, whether they are new to the community, or have been at the conference for the 10th time, have the equal opportunity to propose ideas for PyCon US.

What belongs in a Hatchery program

PyCon US offers a wide range of events for the attendees to engage with the community during the conference. In addition to the talks, Charlas, keynotes, tutorials, posters, and lightning talks, at PyCon US we further support the Python community by hosting summits (e.g. The Python Language Summit, Education Summit), Sprints, and Open Spaces: one-hour meet ups in dedicated rooms throughout the conference. PyCon US also hosts other events like the PyLadies Luncheon, Members Lunch, and PyLadies Auction. We also offer community booths and Startup Row alongside the Sponsor Booths in the expo hall.

Despite all of the above, as conference organizers we still receive great, creative suggestions and ideas from the community for more things that they’d like to see at PyCon US. This is where the Hatchery program comes in.

If you have an idea for new and different kinds of events, activities, summits, or tracks at PyCon US, or things that do not fit in any of the existing talks, charlas, tutorials, and posters tracks, please propose that as a Hatchery.

A few examples of topics that have been accepted for the program (not a complete list, creativity is expressly encouraged):

• Maintainers' Summit
• The Art of Python
• Foreign language talk track (see the PyCon US Charlas, the first track created in the hatchery, and now a part of PyCon US).
• Scientific data summit
• Mentored Sprints

See the full guidelines and criteria for proposals at https://us.pycon.org/2024/events/hatchery/

Hatchery Program Rebooted!

Since it’s been a few years since the last time the Hatchery program ran, meaning, some folks might have already forgotten about it, and newer community members might not yet know what it’s about. With that in mind we decided that this is a good time for us to introduce some changes to the Hatchery program.

One-off events are encouraged!

Previous versions of the Hatchery prioritized programs that have potential to become a new staple and repeat program at PyCon US, and one-off events were given a lower priority. We recognize that this might put a high barrier of entry, and could potentially cause organizer burnout. People might feel like they are now “obligated” to continue the program year after year even if they no longer have the bandwidth to do it. Therefore, we want to focus on the experimental aspect of Hatchery. If your Hatchery program is accepted this year, you are free to continue it again next year. But if you just want to experiment and host an activity only for this year, that’s okay too!

Rolling admission

You can propose your idea for the Hatchery starting today, until approximately 4 weeks before the conference. 

We will be reviewing your ideas and proposals as they come in, and we will do our best to support and accommodate your request. We aim to give you a decision within 2 weeks, depending on the nature of your proposal. (i.e. if your proposal requires a more complicated room set up, we may need extra time to figure out the feasibility for that).

Proposal submissions for the Hatchery Program are open until April 17, 2024, or until all the spaces have been filled.

Note that the conference venue is limited in terms of size and available rooms. We might not be able to provide you with a room you need for your program if you wait until the last minute to submit your idea. Therefore, we encourage you to submit your ideas as soon as you can!

How to submit your Hatchery proposal?

Please visit the PyCon US 2024 Hatchery page. Submissions are open through the PyCon US 2024 Hatchery CFP on Pretalx here. Please note that Pretalx accounts used for the main conference PyCon US 2024 CFP will not be carried over; all submitters will be required to create a new account for the PyCon US 2024 Hatchery CFP.

Thank you. If you have any questions about the Hatchery, please get in touch with us, pycon-hatchery@python.org. The PyCon US Hatchery Committee members are: Elaine Wong, Mariatta Wijaya, and Naomi Ceder.

Join us TOMORROW, January 18 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our regularly scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

This month we'll be discussing the return of the Nonprofit Summit to DrupalCon Portland 2024!  We're currently looking for breakout discussion leaders, and we'll be answering questions about what that involves, as well as throwing around ideas for potential topics. 

And we'll of course also have time to discuss anything else that's on our minds at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits -- including our plans for NTC in March.  Got something specific you want to talk about? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google doc: https://nten.org/drupal/notes!

All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.

This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone. 

• Join the call: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81817469653

  • Meeting ID: 818 1746 9653
    Passcode: 551681

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  • Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kpV1o65N

• Follow along on Google Docs: https://nten.org/drupal/notes

View notes of previous months' calls.

Data analysis is a broad term that covers a wide range of techniques that enable you to reveal any insights and relationships that may exist within raw data. As you might expect, Python lends itself readily to data analysis. Once Python has analyzed your data, you can then use your findings to make good business decisions, improve procedures, and even make informed predictions based on what you’ve discovered.

In this tutorial, you’ll:

• Understand the need for a sound data analysis workflow
• Understand the different stages of a data analysis workflow
• Learn how you can use Python for data analysis

Before you start, you should familiarize yourself with Jupyter Notebook, a popular tool for data analysis. Alternatively, JupyterLab will give you an enhanced notebook experience. You might also like to learn how a pandas DataFrame stores its data. Knowing the difference between a DataFrame and a pandas Series will also prove useful.

Get Your Code: Click here to download the free data files and sample code for your mission into data analysis with Python.

In this tutorial, you’ll use a file named james_bond_data.csv. This is a doctored version of the free James Bond Movie Dataset. The james_bond_data.csv file contains a subset of the original data with some of the records altered to make them suitable for this tutorial. You’ll find it in the downloadable materials. Once you have your data file, you’re ready to begin your first mission into data analysis.

Understanding the Need for a Data Analysis Workflow

Data analysis is a very popular field and can involve performing many different tasks of varying complexity. Which specific analysis steps you perform will depend on which dataset you’re analyzing and what information you hope to glean. To overcome these scope and complexity issues, you need to take a strategic approach when performing your analysis. This is where a data analysis workflow can help you.

A data analysis workflow is a process that provides a set of steps for your analysis team to follow when analyzing data. The implementation of each of these steps will vary depending on the nature of your analysis, but following an agreed-upon workflow allows everyone involved to know what needs to happen and to see how the project is progressing.

Using a workflow also helps futureproof your analysis methodology. By following the defined set of steps, your efforts become systematic, which minimizes the possibility that you’ll make mistakes or miss something. Furthermore, when you carefully document your work, you can reapply your procedures against future data as it becomes available. Data analysis workflows therefore also provide repeatability and scalability.

There’s no single data workflow process that suits every analysis, nor is there universal terminology for the procedures used within it. To provide a structure for the rest of this tutorial, the diagram below illustrates the stages that you’ll commonly find in most workflows:

A Data Analysis Workflow

The solid arrows show the standard data analysis workflow that you’ll work through to learn what happens at each stage. The dashed arrows indicate where you may need to carry out some of the individual steps several times depending upon the success of your analysis. Indeed, you may even have to repeat the entire process should your first analysis reveal something interesting that demands further attention.

Now that you have an understanding of the need for a data analysis workflow, you’ll work through its steps and perform an analysis of movie data. The movies that you’ll analyze all relate to the British secret agent Bond … James Bond.

Setting Your Objectives

The very first workflow step in data analysis is to carefully but clearly define your objectives. It’s vitally important for you and your analysis team to be clear on what exactly you’re all trying to achieve. This step doesn’t involve any programming but is every bit as important because, without an understanding of where you want to go, you’re unlikely to ever get there.

The objectives of your data analysis will vary depending on what you’re analyzing. Your team leader may want to know why a new product hasn’t sold, or perhaps your government wants information about a clinical test of a new medical drug. You may even be asked to make investment recommendations based on the past results of a particular financial instrument. Regardless, you must still be clear on your objectives. These define your scope.

In this tutorial, you’ll gain experience in data analysis by having some fun with the James Bond movie dataset mentioned earlier. What are your objectives? Now pay attention, 007:

• Is there any relationship between the Rotten Tomatoes ratings and those from IMDb?
• Are there any insights to be gleaned from analyzing the lengths of the movies?
• Is there a relationship between the number of enemies James Bond has killed and the user ratings of the movie in which they were killed?

Now that you’ve been briefed on your mission, it’s time to get out into the field and see what intelligence you can uncover.

Acquiring Your Data

Once you’ve established your objectives, your next step is to think about what data you’ll need to achieve them. Hopefully, this data will be readily available, but you may have to work hard to get it. You may need to extract it from the data storage systems within an organization or collect survey data. Regardless, you’ll somehow need to get the data.

In this case, you’re in luck. When your bosses briefed you on your objectives, they also gave you the data in the james_bond_data.csv file. You must now spend some time becoming familiar with what you have in front of you. During the briefing, you made some notes on the content of this file:

Heading Meaning Release The release date of the movie Movie The title of the movie Bond The actor playing the title role Bond_Car_MFG The manufacturer of James Bond’s car US_Gross The movie’s gross US earnings World_Gross The movie’s gross worldwide earnings Budget ($ 000s) The movie’s budget, in thousands of US dollars Film_Length The running time of the movie Avg_User_IMDB The average user rating from IMDb Avg_User_Rtn_Tom The average user rating from Rotten Tomatoes Martinis The number of martinis that Bond drank in the movie

As you can see, you have quite a variety of data. You won’t need all of it to meet your objectives, but you can think more about this later. For now, you’ll concentrate on getting the data out of the file and into Python for cleansing and analysis.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-for-data-analysis/ »

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

Now that I’m freelancing, I need to actually track my time, which is something I’ve had the luxury of not having to do before. That meant something of a rethink of the way I’ve been keeping track of my to-do list. Up to now that was a combination of things like the bug lists for the projects I’m working on at the moment, whatever task tracking system Canonical was using at the moment (Jira when I left), and a giant flat text file in which I recorded logbook-style notes of what I’d done each day plus a few extra notes at the bottom to remind myself of particularly urgent tasks. I could have started manually adding times to each logbook entry, but ugh, let’s not.

In general, I had the following goals (which were a bit reminiscent of my address book):

• free software throughout
• storage under my control
• ability to annotate tasks with URLs (especially bugs and merge requests)
• lightweight time tracking (I’m OK with having to explicitly tell it when I start and stop tasks)
• ability to drive everything from the command line
• decent filtering so I don’t have to look at my entire to-do list all the time
• ability to easily generate billing information for multiple clients
• optionally, integration with Android (mainly so I can tick off personal tasks like “change bedroom lightbulb” or whatever that don’t involve being near a computer)

I didn’t do an elaborate evaluation of multiple options, because I’m not trying to come up with the best possible solution for a client here. Also, there are a bazillion to-do list trackers out there and if I tried to evaluate them all I’d never do anything else. I just wanted something that works well enough for me.

Since it came up on Mastodon: a bunch of people swear by Org mode, which I know can do at least some of this sort of thing. However, I don’t use Emacs and don’t plan to use Emacs. nvim-orgmode does have some support for time tracking, but when I’ve tried vim-based versions of Org mode in the past I’ve found they haven’t really fitted my brain very well.

Taskwarrior and Timewarrior

One of the other Freexian collaborators mentioned Taskwarrior and Timewarrior, so I had a look at those.

The basic idea of Taskwarrior is that you have a task command that tracks each task as a blob of JSON and provides subcommands to let you add, modify, and remove tasks with a minimum of friction. task add adds a task, and you can add metadata like project:Personal (I always make sure every task has a project, for ease of filtering). Just running task shows you a task list sorted by Taskwarrior’s idea of urgency, with an ID for each task, and there are various other reports with different filtering and verbosity. task <id> annotate lets you attach more information to a task. task <id> done marks it as done. So far so good, so a redacted version of my to-do list looks like this:

$ task ls ID A Project Tags Description 17 Freexian Add Incus support to autopkgtest [2] 7 Columbiform Figure out Lloyds online banking [1] 2 Debian Fix troffcvt for groff 1.23.0 [1] 11 Personal Replace living room curtain rail

Once I got comfortable with it, this was already a big improvement. I haven’t bothered to learn all the filtering gadgets yet, but it was easy enough to see that I could do something like task all project:Personal and it’d show me both pending and completed tasks in that project, and that all the data was stored in ~/.task - though I have to say that there are enough reporting bells and whistles that I haven’t needed to poke around manually. In combination with the regular backups that I do anyway (you do too, right?), this gave me enough confidence to abandon my previous text-file logbook approach.

Next was time tracking. Timewarrior integrates with Taskwarrior, albeit in an only semi-packaged way, and it was easy enough to set that up. Now I can do:

$ task 25 start Starting task 00a9516f 'Write blog post about task tracking'. Started 1 task. Note: '"Write blog post about task tracking"' is a new tag. Tracking Columbiform "Write blog post about task tracking" Started 2024-01-10T11:28:38 Current 38 Total 0:00:00 You have more urgent tasks. Project 'Columbiform' is 25% complete (3 of 4 tasks remaining).

When I stop work on something, I do task active to find the ID, then task <id> stop. Timewarrior does the tedious stopwatch business for me, and I can manually enter times if I forget to start/stop a task. Then the really useful bit: I can do something like timew summary :month <name-of-client> and it tells me how much to bill that client for this month. Perfect.

I also started using VIT to simplify the day-to-day flow a little, which means I’m normally just using one or two keystrokes rather than typing longer commands. That isn’t really necessary from my point of view, but it does save some time.

Android integration

I left Android integration for a bit later since it wasn’t essential. When I got round to it, I have to say that it felt a bit clumsy, but it did eventually work.

The first step was to set up a taskserver. Most of the setup procedure was OK, but I wanted to use Let’s Encrypt to minimize the amount of messing around with CAs I had to do. Getting this to work involved hitting things with sticks a bit, and there’s still a local CA involved for client certificates. What I ended up with was a certbot setup with the webroot authenticator and a custom deploy hook as follows (with cert_name replaced by a DNS name in my house domain):

#! /bin/sh set -eu cert_name=taskd.example.org found=false for domain in $RENEWED_DOMAINS; do case "$domain" in $cert_name) found=: ;; esac done $found || exit 0 install -m 644 "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/fullchain.pem" \ /var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem install -m 640 -g Debian-taskd "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/privkey.pem" \ /var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem systemctl restart taskd.service

I could then set this in /etc/taskd/config (server.crl.pem and ca.cert.pem were generated using the documented taskserver setup procedure):

server.key=/var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem server.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem server.crl=/var/lib/taskd/pki/server.crl.pem ca.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/ca.cert.pem

Then I could set taskd.ca on my laptop to /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/ISRG_Root_X1.crt and otherwise follow the client setup instructions, run task sync init to get things started, and then task sync every so often to sync changes between my laptop and the taskserver.

I used TaskWarrior Mobile as the client. I have to say I wouldn’t want to use that client as my primary task tracking interface: the setup procedure is clunky even beyond the necessity of copying a client certificate around, it expects you to give it a .taskrc rather than having a proper settings interface for that, and it only seems to let you add a task if you specify a due date for it. It also lacks Timewarrior integration, so I can only really use it when I don’t care about time tracking, e.g. personal tasks. But that’s really all I need, so it meets my minimum requirements.

Next?

Considering this is literally the first thing I tried, I have to say I’m pretty happy with it. There are a bunch of optional extras I haven’t tried yet, but in general it kind of has the vim nature for me: if I need something it’s very likely to exist or easy enough to build, but the features I don’t use don’t get in my way.

I wouldn’t recommend any of this to somebody who didn’t already spend most of their time in a terminal - but I do. I’m glad people have gone to all the effort to build this so I didn’t have to.