Feeds

The Goal

Administrative users creating and updating orders in the backend may want to:

• Preview the order receipt before emailing customers.
• Send a copy of the order receipt to an email address other than the contact email address for the order.

Developers may want to:

• Preview the order receipt for testing purposes when working on environments with outgoing emails disabled

A Solution

We can add a button to the right of the existing, "Resend receipt" button that appears on Order View pages, like this:

The Goal

Core Drupal Commerce provides Order Receipt functionality. An Order Receipt is an email notification sent to a customer when an order is placed. It lets the customer know that the order has been received and includes a summary of the order. For each Order Type, you can turn order receipts on/off and, if enabled, specify that a copy be sent to a specific recipient.

The Drop Times is now the official media partner for Drupal Mountain Camp 2024. Expect the latest camp updates and insights exclusively from us. Stay connected for all things Drupal Mountain Camp!

Recently, Randy Fay of the DDEV project blogged about two new Docker providers available (and supported by DDEV) for MacOS: Rancher Desktop and OrbStack. Both of these join Colima and Docker Desktop as supported Docker providers for DDEV on MacOS. 

What is a Docker provider?

I know that I certainly have asked this question - more times than I care to admit. As Randy explains in the blog post:

All of the Docker Providers on every platform (except Linux) are actually wrappers on the open-source Docker/Moby project, which is supported by Docker, Inc.

In other words, in order for DDEV to talk to Docker, it needs a provider. But, not all Docker providers are created equal. Neither Docker Desktop nor OrbStack are open-source - both have free versions (with restrictions); for most commercial use cases, there is a cost involved. Colima and Rancher Desktop are both open-source.

Features vary between Docker providers as well, so it only makes sense that performance differences also exist. Fortunately, Randy has written another blog post summarizing the performance differences between the various Docker providers on MacOS.

tl;dr if you have Mutagen enabled with DDEV, then they're all pretty fast, with OrbStack having the edge.

Why switch Docker providers?

While Colima is (IMHO) heads-and-tails better than Docker Desktop for Mac, upgrading Colima itself has been a bit of a rocky road. I have learned to never assume that my databases will remain intact during a Colima upgrade. This usually isn't a deal-breaker, but for me, it is squarely in the inconvenience category.

I'm hoping that the situation is smoother with Rancher Desktop.

Getting started with Rancher Desktop

As I (currently) use DDEV on MacOS with Colima (and Mutagen enabled,) I decided to give Rancher Desktop a try, as it is an open-source option. 

Using the instructions provided by the DDEV project, I downloaded Rancher Desktop from the official site. A bit surprisingly, the recommended installation method was not Homebrew, but rather a bit of an old-school MacOS .dmg file.

After downloading Rancher Desktop (but before installing it,) the steps I took to install and change over from Colima began with:

$ ddev poweroff $ colima stop

Next, I double-clicked to install Rancher Desktop - making sure to uncheck the "Kubernetes" checkbox as the DDEV instructions suggested. I didn't touch any other settings during the Rancher Desktop install.

Once that was installed, I restarted my Terminal app, then navigated to one of my DDEV projects.

$ cd ~/sites/d10 $ docker context use rancher-desktop $ ddev start

If you haven't used it before, the docker context use rancher-desktop bit basically tells Docker which provider to use. In other words, you can have multiple providers installed (like I do with Colima and Rancher Desktop) and switch between them using the docker context use command.

With that, installation was complete. 

My experience with Rancher Desktop

In short: uneventful (in a good way)

I didn't have any issues at all - it all went very smoothly. From a performance standpoint, Drupal 10 sites feel a little bit snappier than with Colima, but this is purely qualitative, not quantitative. 

The (minor) downside

When switching Docker providers, while project code isn't touched, unfortunately, project databases don't automatically come along. In his blog post, Randy suggests using ddev snapshot --all as an initial step in the process to back up all databases. I tend to take a more piecemeal approach - individually exporting databases while using Colima, then importing them while using Rancher Desktop. For example, here's my process for moving a database from Colima to Rancher Desktop (assuming my system is currently using Rancher Desktop):

$ cd ~/sites/d10 $ ddev poweroff $ colima start $ docker context use colima $ ddev start $ ddev export-db > db-backup.sql.gz $ ddev poweroff $ docker context use rancher-desktop $ ddev start $ ddev import-db –file=db-backup.sql.gz $ ddev drush cr

Granted, it's a bit wordy, but it works for me.

So, Orbstack?

At the present time, I have no plans to test-drive Orbstack. While Randy's blog post does indicate I would experience a minor performance boost, at this time, I'd rather just stick with an open-source solution.

One of our Professional Module Development course graduates, Jay Volk, recounted his recent experience with Orbstack:

My experience is that OrbStack is really fast and while not open source (it's $8/mo.) it seems well worth the cost and I'm happy to support this project.  Orbstack will take your existing Docker settings and move them to Orbstack when starting up (it asks your permission.) This proved to be no problem for DDEV but occasionally causes problems with the other solution I sometimes need, Lando.  Easy enough, Docker can reclaim settings back from OrbStack and with a Docker restart you're good to go again with that (albeit slower) solution.

Conclusion

I wrote the first draft of this blog post about 2 weeks ago - since then I've stuck with Rancher Desktop and have no plans to go back to Colima. I'm pretty sure the performance is a bit better than Colima and I've had absolutely zero issues. The real test (for me at least) will be when it comes time to update Rancher Desktop - assuming it is a smooth experience, I doubt I'll be returning to Colima. 

Header image generated by ChatGPT-4 using the prompt: "Create a cartoon image of a cowboy lassoing a giant laptop computer using 2:1 aspect ratio". If someone could identify the two flying objects to the right of the laptop, I'd be most appreciative.

Python is always getting better, and 2023 brought a number of exciting developments. As part of the Faster CPython project, Python 3.12 is speedier than previous versions. The new release brings improved error messages and more powerful f-strings. You can also enjoy support for the Linux perf profiler, static typing improvements, and changes to subinterpreters.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) focused on enhancing security in 2023, with the help of inaugural Security Developer-in-Residence Seth Michael Larson. As part of this comprehensive effort, PyPI completed its first security audit. Plus, the year brought new major versions of pandas, Django, and Pydantic. Another exciting development was Mojo, a superset of Python that’s specifically designed for use in machine-learning contexts.

Here at Real Python, we’ve published over a hundred written tutorials and video courses this year, plus weekly podcast episodes. Keep reading to revisit an old favorite or embark on a new learning journey. You can also check out the wrap-up podcast episode.

Join Now: Click here to join the Real Python Newsletter and you'll never miss another Python tutorial, course update, or post.

Practice Your Skills

Practice makes perfect, especially when it comes to programming. This year, the Real Python team expanded the Python Basics learning path with exercises designed to strengthen your Python skills and help you apply your knowledge in real-world scenarios.

In these courses, you can test your knowledge by completing review exercises and challenges before comparing your work to the instructors’ solutions:

• Python Basics Exercises: Numbers and Math
• Python Basics Exercises: Object-Oriented Programming
• Python Basics Exercises: Modules and Packages

By actively engaging with these exercises, you’ll solidify your understanding of Python concepts and build confidence in your programming abilities. Another way to test your knowledge is by taking quizzes, and we added several in 2023. For help along the way, be sure to join Real Python’s community chat and weekly office hours.

Customize Your Coding Environment

Your coding environment plays a crucial role in your productivity as a programmer, so it’s definitely worthwhile to explore your options and make yourself at home. That means picking the perfect editor or IDE for your use case and then tweaking how it works for you.

In these tutorials, you’ll learn how to customize your coding environment to suit your needs:

• Boost Your Coding Productivity With Ptpython
• Choosing the Best Coding Font for Programming
• JupyterLab for an Enhanced Notebook Experience

By exploring these resources, you’ll discover tools and techniques that can enhance your coding experience, making you more efficient and comfortable as you write Python code.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/popular-python-tutorials-2023/ »

[ 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 ]

The Visual Layout Suite module is a great improvement of the core editorial experience leveraging Layout Builder and many contrib modules. Basicailly, it enables Layout Builder, depends on several contrib modules that improves Layout Builder and ads its custom magic.

One of the most important features is the use of utility classes allowing the configuration of the look and feel easily from the frontend with an instant preview. Additionally, it allows to restrict the utility classes a user can use, so the user is not overwhelmed by the extra options and also the look and feel of the page can be limited to be compliant with the style guide of the site. New utility classes can be easily added and components can be configured to only use a reduced set of utility classes to un clutter the UI.

VLSuite integrates with any Drupal component that integrates with Layout Builder and more: entity fields, paragraphs, Views, SDC, medias, etc. And there's no dependency on any theme, external service or certain entities. The only soft dependency is a Bootstrap 5 theme to enjoy all the VLSuite features out of the box. However, you can use any theme as long as it provides the utility classes you require. T

All the previous information means you could add VLSuite to an existing site with minimal…

I find most descriptions of WebAssembly to be uninspiring: if you start with a phrase like “assembly-like language” or a “virtual machine”, we have already lost the plot. That’s not to say that these descriptions are incorrect, but it’s like explaining what a dog is by starting with its circulatory system. You’re not wrong, but you should probably lead with the bark.

I have a different preferred starting point which is less descriptive but more operational: WebAssembly is a new fundamental abstraction boundary. WebAssembly is a new way of dividing computing systems into pieces and of composing systems from parts.

This all may sound high-falutin´, but it’s for real: this is the actually interesting thing about Wasm.

fundamental & abstract

It’s probably easiest to explain what I mean by example. Consider the Linux ABI: Linux doesn’t care what code it’s running; Linux just handles system calls and schedules process time. Programs that run against the x86-64 Linux ABI don’t care whether they are in a container or a virtual machine or “bare metal” or whether the processor is AMD or Intel or even a Mac M3 with Docker and Rosetta 2. The Linux ABI interface is fundamental in the sense that either side can implement any logic, subject to the restrictions of the interface, and abstract in the sense that the universe of possible behaviors has been simplified to a limited language, in this case that of system calls.

Or take HTTP: when you visit wingolog.org, you don’t have to know (but surely would be delighted to learn) that it’s Scheme code that handles the request. I don’t have to care if the other side of the line is curl or Firefox or Wolvic. HTTP is such a successful fundamental abstraction boundary that at this point it is the default for network endpoints; whether you are a database or a golang microservice, if you don’t know that you need a custom protocol, you use HTTP.

Or, to rotate our metaphorical compound microscope to high-power magnification, consider the SYS-V amd64 C ABI: almost every programming language supports some form of extern C {} to access external libraries, and the best language implementations can produce artifacts that implement the C ABI as well. The standard C ABI splits programs into parts, and allows works from separate teams to be composed into a whole. Indeed, one litmus test of a fundamental abstraction boundary is, could I reasonably define an interface and have an implementation of it be in Scheme or OCaml or what-not: if the answer is yes, we are in business.

It is in this sense that WebAssembly is a new fundamental abstraction boundary.

WebAssembly shares many of the concrete characteristics of other abstractions. Like the Linux syscall interface, WebAssembly defines an interface language in which programs rely on host capabilities to access system features. Like the C ABI, calling into WebAssembly code has a predictable low cost. Like HTTP, you can arrange for WebAssembly code to have no shared state with its host, by construction.

But WebAssembly is a new point in this space. Unlike the Linux ABI, there is no fixed set of syscalls: WebAssembly imports are named, typed, and without pre-defined meaning, more like the C ABI. Unlike the C ABI, WebAssembly modules have only the shared state that they are given; neither side has a license to access all of the memory in the “process”. And unlike HTTP, WebAssembly modules are “in the room” with their hosts: close enough that hosts can allow themselves the luxury of synchronous function calls, and to allow WebAssembly modules to synchronously call back into their hosts.

applied teleology

At this point, you are probably nodding along, but also asking yourself, what is it for? If you arrive at this question from the “WebAssembly is a virtual machine” perspective, I don’t think you’re well-equipped to answer. But starting as we did by the interface, I think we are better positioned to appreciate how WebAssembly fits into the computing landscape: the narrative is generative, in that you can explore potential niches by identifying existing abstraction boundaries.

Again, let’s take a few examples. Say you ship some “smart cities” IoT device, consisting of a microcontroller that runs some non-Linux operating system. The system doesn’t have an MMU, so you don’t have hardware memory protections, but you would like to be able to enforce some invariants on the software that this device runs; and you would also like to be able to update that software over the air. WebAssembly is getting used in these environments; I wish I had a list of deployments at hand, but perhaps we can at least take this article last year from a WebAssembly IoT vendor as proof of commercial interest.

Or, say you run a function-as-a-service cloud, meaning that you run customer code in response to individual API requests. You need to limit the allowable set of behaviors from the guest code, so you choose some abstraction boundary. You could use virtual machines, but that would be quite expensive in terms of memory. You could use containers, but you would like more control over the guest code. You could have these functions written in JavaScript, but that means that your abstraction is no longer fundamental; you limit your applicability. WebAssembly fills an interesting niche here, and there are a number of products in this space, for example Fastly Compute or Fermyon Spin.

Or to go smaller, consider extensible software, like the GIMP image editor or VS Code: in the past you would use loadable plug-in modules via the C ABI, which can be quite gnarly, or you lean into a particular scripting language, which can be slow, inexpressive, and limit the set of developers that can write extensions. It’s not a silver bullet, but WebAssembly can have a role here. For example, the Harfbuzz text shaping library supports fonts with an embedded (em-behdad?) WebAssembly extension to control how strings of characters are mapped to positioned glyphs.

aside: what boundaries do

They say that good fences make good neighbors, and though I am not quite sure it is true—since my neighbor put up a fence a few months ago, our kids don’t play together any more—boundaries certainly facilitate separation of functionality. Conway’s law is sometimes applied as a descriptive observation—ha-ha, isn’t that funny, they just shipped their org chart—but this again misses the point, in that boundaries facilitate separation, but also composition: if I know that I can fearlessly allow a font to run code because I have an appropriate abstraction boundary between host application and extension, I have gained in power. I no longer need to be responsible for every part of the product, and my software can scale up to solve harder problems by composing work from multiple teams.

There is little point in using WebAssembly if you control both sides of a boundary, just as (unless you have chickens) there is little point in putting up a fence that runs through the middle of your garden. But where you want to compose work from separate teams, the boundaries imposed by WebAssembly can be a useful tool.

narrative generation

WebAssembly is enjoying a tail-wind of hype, so I think it’s fair to say that wherever you find a fundamental abstraction boundary, someone is going to try to implement it with WebAssembly.

Again, some examples: back in 2022 I speculated that someone would “compile” Docker containers to WebAssembly modules, and now that is a thing.

I think at some point someone will attempt to replace eBPF with Wasm in the Linux kernel; eBPF is just not as good a language as Wasm, and the toolchains that produce it are worse. eBPF has clunky calling-conventions about what registers are saved and spilled at call sites, a decision that can be made more efficiently for the program and architecture at hand when register-allocating WebAssembly locals. (Sometimes people lean on the provably-terminating aspect of eBPF as its virtue, but that could apply just as well to Wasm if you prohibit the loop opcode (and the tail-call instructions) at verification-time.) And why don’t people write whole device drivers in eBPF? Or rather, targetting eBPF from C or what-have-you. It’s because eBPF is just not good enough. WebAssembly is, though! Anyway I think Linux people are too chauvinistic to pick this idea up but I bet Microsoft could do it.

I was thinking today, you know, it actually makes sense to run a WebAssembly operating system, one which runs WebAssembly binaries. If the operating system includes the Wasm run-time, it can interpose itself at syscall boundaries, sometimes allowing it to avoid context switches. You could start with something like the Linux ABI, perhaps via WALI, but for a subset of guest processes that conform to particular conventions, you could build purpose-built composition that can allocate multiple WebAssembly modules to a single process, eliding inter-process context switches and data copies for streaming computations. Or, focussing on more restricted use-cases, you could make a microkernel; googling around I found this article from a couple days ago where someone is giving this a go.

wwwhat about the wwweb

But let’s go back to the web, where you are reading this. In one sense, WebAssembly is a massive web success, being deployed to literally billions of user agents. In another, it is marginal: people do not write web front-ends in WebAssembly. Partly this is because the kind of abstraction supported by linear-memory WebAssembly 1.0 isn’t a good match for the garbage-collected DOM API exposed by web browsers. As a corrolary, languages that are most happy targetting this linear-memory model (C, Rust, and so on) aren’t good for writing DOM applications either. WebAssembly is used in auxiliary modules where you want to run legacy C++ code on user devices, or to speed up a hot leaf function, but isn’t a huge success.

This will change with the recent addition of managed data types to WebAssembly, but not necessarily in the way that you might think. Like, now that it will be cheaper and more natural to pass data back and forth with JavaScript, are we likely to see Wasm/GC progressively occupying more space in web applications? For me, I doubt that progressive is the word. In the same way that you wouldn’t run a fence through the middle of your front lawn, you wouldn’t want to divide your front-end team into JavaScript and WebAssembly sub-teams. Instead I think that we will see more phase transitions, in which whole web applications switch from JavaScript to Wasm/GC, compiled from Dart or Elm or what have you. The natural fundamental abstraction boundary in a web browser is between the user agent and the site’s code, not within the site’s code itself.

conclusion

So, friends, if you are talking to a compiler engineer, by all means: keep describing WebAssembly as an virtual machine. It will keep them interested. But for everyone else, the value of WebAssembly is what it does, which is to be a different way of breaking a system into pieces. Armed with this observation, we can look at current WebAssembly uses to understand the nature of those boundaries, and to look at new boundaries to see if WebAssembly can have a niche there. Happy hacking, and may your components always compose!

‘Chingam’/ചിങ്ങം (named after the first month of Malayalam calendar) is the newest libre/open source font released by Rachana Institute of Typography in the year 2024.

It comes with a regular variant, embellished with stylistic alternates for a number of characters. The default shape of characters D, O, ഠ, ാ etc. are wider in stark contrast with the shape of other characters designed as narrow width. The font contains alternate shapes for these characters more in line with the general narrow width characteristic.

Users can enable the stylistic alternates in typesetting systems, should they wish.

• XeTeX: stylistic variant can be enabled with the StylisticSet={1} option when defining the font via fontspec package. For e.g.

% in the preamble
\newfontfamily\chingam[Ligatures=TeX,Script=Malayalam,StylisticSet={1}]{Chingam}
…
\begin{document}
\chingam{മനുഷ്യരെല്ലാവരും തുല്യാവകാശങ്ങളോടും അന്തസ്സോടും സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യത്തോടുംകൂടി ജനിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളവരാണ്‌…}
\end{document}

• Scribus: extra font features are accessible since version 1.6

• LibreOffice: extra font features are accessible since version 7.4. Enable it using Format→Character→Language→Features.

• InDesign: very similar to Scribus; there should be an option in the text/font properties to choose the stylistic set.

Development

Chingam is designed and drawn by Narayana Bhattathiri. Based on the initial drawings on paper, the glyph shapes are created in vector format (svg) following the glyph naming convention used in RIT projects. A new build script is developed by Rajeesh that makes it easier for designers to iterate & adjust the font metadata & metrics. Review & scrutiny done by CVR, Hussain KH and Ashok Kumar improved the font substantially.

Download

Chingam is licensed under Open Font License. The font can be downloaded from Rachana website, sources are available in GitLab page.

I'm going to FOSDEM'24. Assuming to meet Debian and Kernel folks there, this should be a good opportunity to do PGP keysigning.

If you also go there and you're interested in keysigning: Send me your key via email to fosdem24-keysigning@kleine-koenig.org. I'll collect the keys, create a paper list for a keysigning party and send it back to you in the week before FOSDEM. The list will only be made available to other participants.

Then maybe wear a "keysigning" badge (or a crepe tape with that caption) that allows us to identify others on the list. If there are not too many who are interested, I guess that should work fine. (If this idea becomes too successful, I'd close the list after the first 100 participants.)

Future-proofing your module (and dependencies) with GitLab CI james Mon, 01/08/2024 - 19:00 Image Body

Since Drupal 8, there has been a mostly smooth migration path between major versions, so you can upgrade from 8 to 9 to 10 relatively easily.

One bump in the road can be the availability of modules for the new version. Drupal 8 and 9 were only supported for a year after the release of their successors, which didn’t help. While quite a lot of modules had a release supporting the next version quickly, there seemed to be quite a few that were very slow to update, and quite a few sites were waiting for one or two modules to release compatible versions before being able to upgrade. I think there are…

Dear Pythonistas, after many years of commitment, the current Python Montreal board of directors team has decided to pass the torch. We are now opening the doors to new, passionate members of the Python community to continue to make our organization shine.

Election calendar:

• Application period officially open
• Announcement of applications: January 22, 2024 on our social networks
• Opening of the online voting period from January 22 to 31, 2024
• Physical event to learn more about the candidates and interact with them: January 29, 2024 at MP-103
• Announcement of the new CA: February 1, 2024

If you share our passion for Python and would like to actively contribute to its development in Montréal, we invite you to fill out this application form.

Review: The Faithless, by C.L. Clark

Series: Magic of the Lost #2 Publisher: Orbit Copyright: March 2023 ISBN: 0-316-54283-0 Format: Kindle Pages: 527

The Faithless is the second book in a political fantasy series that seems likely to be a trilogy. It is a direct sequel to The Unbroken, which you should read first. As usual, Orbit made it unnecessarily hard to get re-immersed in the world by refusing to provide memory aids for readers who read books as they come out instead of only when the series is complete, but this is not the fault of Clark or the book and you've heard me rant about this before.

The Unbroken was set in Qazāl (not-Algeria). The Faithless, as readers of the first book might guess from the title, is set in Balladaire (not-France). This is the palace intrigue book. Princess Luca is fighting for her throne against her uncle, the regent. Touraine is trying to represent her people. Whether and to what extent those interests are aligned is much of the meat of this book.

Normally I enjoy palace intrigue novels for the competence porn: watching someone navigate a complex political situation with skill and cunning, or upend the entire system by building unlikely coalitions or using unexpected routes to power. If you are similar, be warned that this is not what you're going to get. Touraine is a fish out of water with no idea how to navigate the Balladairan court, and does not magically become an expert in the course of this novel. Luca has the knowledge, but she's unsure, conflicted, and largely out-maneuvered. That means you will have to brace for some painful scenes of some of the worst people apparently getting what they want.

Despite that, I could not put this down. It was infuriating, frustrating, and a much slower burn than I prefer, but the layers of complex motivations that Clark builds up provided a different sort of payoff.

Two books in, the shape of this series is becoming clearer. This series is about empire and colonialism, but with considerably more complexity than fantasy normally brings to that topic. Power does not loosen its grasp easily, and it has numerous tools for subtle punishment after apparent upstart victories. Righteous causes rarely call banners to your side; instead, they create opportunities for other people to maneuver to their own advantage. Touraine has some amount of power now, but it's far from obvious how to use it. Her life's training tells her that exercising power will only cause trouble, and her enemies are more than happy to reinforce that message at every opportunity.

Most notable to me is Clark's bitingly honest portrayal of the supposed allies within the colonial power. It is clear that Luca is attempting to take the most ethical actions as she defines them, but it's remarkable how those efforts inevitably imply that Touraine should help Luca now in exchange for Luca's tenuous and less-defined possible future aid. This is not even a lie; it may be an accurate summary of Balladairan politics. And yet, somehow what Balladaire needs always matters more than the needs of their abused colony.

Underscoring this, Clark introduces another faction in the form of a populist movement against the Balladairan monarchy. The details of that setup in another fantasy novel would make them allies of the Qazāl. Here, as is so often the case in real life, a substantial portion of the populists are even more xenophobic and racist than the nobility. There are no easy alliances.

The trump card that Qazāl holds is magic. They have it, and (for reasons explored in The Unbroken) Balladaire needs it, although that is a position held by Luca's faction and not by her uncle. But even Luca wants to reduce that magic to a manageable technology, like any other element of the Balladairan state. She wants to understand it, harness it, and bring it under local control. Touraine, trained by Balladaire and facing Balladairan political problems, has the same tendency. The magic, at least in this book, refuses — not in the flashy, rebellious way that it would in most fantasy, but in a frustrating and incomprehensible lack of predictable or convenient rules. I think this will feel like a plot device to some readers, and that is to some extent true, but I think I see glimmers of Clark setting up a conflict of world views that will play out in the third book.

I think some people are going to bounce off this book. It's frustrating, enraging, at times melodramatic, and does not offer the cathartic payoff typically offered in fantasy novels of this type. Usually these are things I would be complaining about as well. And yet, I found it satisfyingly challenging, engrossing, and memorable. I spent a lot of the book yelling "just kill him already" at the characters, but I think one of Clark's points is that overcoming colonial relationships requires a lot more than just killing one evil man. The characters profoundly fail to execute some clever and victorious strategy. Instead, as in the first book, they muddle through, making the best choice that they can see in each moment, making lots of mistakes, and paying heavy prices. It's realistic in a way that has nothing to do with blood or violence or grittiness. (Although I did appreciate having the thin thread of Pruett's story and its highly satisfying conclusion.)

This is also a slow-burn romance, and there too I think opinions will differ. Touraine and Luca keep circling back to the same arguments and the same frustrations, and there were times that this felt repetitive. It also adds a lot of personal drama to the politics in a way that occasionally made me dubious. But here too, I think Clark is partly using the romance to illustrate the deeper political points.

Luca is often insufferable, cruel and ambitious in ways she doesn't realize, and only vaguely able to understand the Qazāl perspective; in short, she's the pragmatic centrist reformer. I am dubious that her ethics would lead her to anything other than endless compromise without Touraine to push her. To Luca's credit, she also realizes that and wants to be a better person, but struggles to have the courage to act on it. Touraine both does and does not want to manipulate her; she wants Luca's help (and more), but it's not clear Luca will give it under acceptable terms, or even understand how much she's demanding. It's that foundational conflict that turns the romance into a slow burn by pushing them apart. Apparently I have more patience for this type of on-again, off-again relationship than one based on artificial miscommunication.

The more I noticed the political subtext, the more engaging I found the romance on the surface.

I picked this up because I'd read several books about black characters written by white authors, and while there was nothing that wrong with those books, the politics felt a little too reductionist and simplified. I wanted a book that was going to force me out of comfortable political assumptions. The Faithless did exactly what I was looking for, and I am definitely here for the rest of the series. In that sense, recommended, although do not go into this book hoping for adroit court maneuvering and competence porn.

Followed by The Sovereign, which does not yet have a release date.

Content warnings: Child death, attempted cultural genocide.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Will Vincent is a former board member of the Django Software Foundation. He's written 3 books on Django, writes a django newsletter, is a podcast co-host for Django Chat.

★ Support this podcast while learning ★

The Complete pytest Course, is the best way to learn pytest quickly.

• Python testing with pytest from beginner through advanced.
• Covers applying pytest to projects, including continuous integration and reporting.
• Even covers combining features to great effect and effectiveness.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ <p>Will Vincent is a former board member of the Django Software Foundation. He's written 3 books on Django, writes a django newsletter, is a podcast co-host for Django Chat.</p> <br><p><strong>★ Support this podcast while learning ★</strong></p><p><a href="https://courses.pythontest.com/p/complete-pytest-course">The Complete pytest Course</a>, is the best way to learn pytest quickly.</p><ul><li>Python testing with pytest from beginner through advanced.</li><li>Covers applying pytest to projects, including continuous integration and reporting.</li><li>Even covers combining features to great effect and effectiveness.</li></ul> <strong> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/PythonPeople" rel="payment" title="★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★">★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★</a> </strong>

This year was hard from a personal and work point of view, which impacted the amount of Free Software bits I ended up doing - even when I had the time I often wasn’t in the right head space to make progress on things. However writing this annual recap up has been a useful exercise, as I achieved more than I realised. For previous years see 2019, 2020, 2021 + 2022.

Conferences

The only Free Software related conference I made it to this year was DebConf23 in Kochi, India. Changes with projects at work meant I couldn’t justify anything work related. This year I’m planning to make it to FOSDEM, and haven’t made a decision on DebConf24 yet.

Debian

Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian.

I started the year working on retrogaming with Kodi on Debian. I got this to a much better state for bookworm, with it being possible to run the bsnes-mercury emulator under Kodi using RetroArch. There are a few other libretro backends available for RetroArch, but Kodi needs some extra controller mappings packaged up first.

Plenty of uploads were involved, though some of this was aligning all the dependencies and generally cleaning things up in iterations.

• retroarch: 1.13.0-dfsg+3, 1.14.0+dfsg-1, 1.15.0+dfsg-1, 1.16.0.3+dfgs-1
• libretro-core-info uploads: 1.14.0-1, 1.15.0-1.
• libretro-bsnes-mercury: 094+git20220807-2, 094+git20220807-3, 094+git20220807-4, 094+git20220807-5, 094+git20220807-6, 094+git20220807-7, 094+git20220807-8.
• kodi-game-libretro: 20.2.0-2, 20.2.2-1, 20.2.2-2, 20.2.4-1, 20.2.4-2
• rcheevos: 10.5.0-2, 10.6.0-1, 10.7.0-1, 10.7.1-1.

I continued to work on a few packages within the Debian Electronics Packaging Team. OpenOCD produced a new release in time for the bookworm release, so I uploaded 0.12.0-1. There were a few minor sigrok cleanups - sigrok 0.3, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-4 + libsigrok 0.5.2-4 / 0.5.2-5.

While I didn’t manage to get the work completed I did some renaming of the ESP8266 related packages - gcc-xtensa-lx106 (which saw a 13 upload pre-bookworm) has become gcc-xtensa (with 14) and binutils-xtensa-lx106 has become binutils-xtensa (with 6). Binary packages remain the same, but this is intended to allow for the generation of ESP32 compiler toolchains from the same source.

onak saw 0.6.3-1 uploaded to match the upstream release. I also uploaded libgpg-error 1.47-1 (though I can claim no credit for any of the work in preparing the package) to help move things forward on updating gnupg2 in Debian.

I NMUed tpm2-pkcs11 1.9.0-0.1 to fix some minor issues pre-bookworm release; I use this package myself to store my SSH key within my laptop TPM, so I care about it being in a decent state.

sg3-utils also saw a bit of love with 1.46-2 + 1.46-3 - I don’t work in the storage space these days, but I’m still listed as an uploaded and there was an RC bug around the library package naming that I was qualified to fix and test pre-bookworm.

Related to my retroarch work I sponsored uploads of mgba for Ryan Tandy: 0.10.0+dfsg-1, 0.10.0+dfsg-2, 0.10.1+dfsg-1, 0.10.2+dfsg-1, mgba 0.10.1+dfsg-1+deb12u1.

As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team, both from project members and those external to the project.

I continue to keep an eye on Debian New Members, even though I’m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. Mostly my involvement is via Front Desk activities, helping out with queries to the team alias, and contributing to internal discussions as well as our panel at DebConf23.

Finally the 3 month rotation for Debian Keyring continues to operate smoothly. I dealt with 2023.03.24, 2023.06.26, 2023.06.29, 2023.09.10, 2023.09.24 + 2023.12.24.

Linux

I had a few minor patches accepted to the kernel this year. A pair of safexcel cleanups (improved error logging for firmware load fail and cleanup on load failure) came out of upgrading the kernel running on my RB5009.

The rest were related to my work on repurposing my C.H.I.P.. The AXP209 driver needed extended to support GPIO3 (with associated DT schema update). That allowed Bluetooth to be enabled. Adding the AXP209 internal temperature ADC as an iio-hwmon node means it can be tracked using the normal sensor monitoring framework. And finally I added the pinmux settings for mmc2, which I use to support an external microSD slot on my C.H.I.P.

Personal projects

2023 saw another minor release of onak, 0.6.3, which resulted in a corresponding Debian upload (0.6.3-1). It has a couple of bug fixes (including a particularly annoying, if minor, one around systemd socket activation that felt very satisfying to get to the bottom of), but I still lack the time to do any of the major changes I would like to.

I wrote listadmin3 to allow easy manipulation of moderation queues for Mailman3. It’s basic, but it’s drastically improved my timeliness on dealing with held messages.

Work related

This year only involved a single upstream related submission; a fix for tpm_tis interrupts with the Lenovo P620 that then got dropped when the change that caused the issue was reverted.

That wraps up 2023. I’ve got no particular goals for this year; looking around my desk I’ve a few ARM based devices I’d like to get running a mainline kernel. I need to play about a bit more with the retroarch bits (if I really had time I’d do the migration for Kodi to PCRE2, as that’s currently causing testing migration issues), perhaps getting some more controller mappings packaged. But no promises.

If you&aposve ever taken one of my data science courses, you&aposve probably noticed that I frequently recommend the Anaconda distribution of Python.

You might be left wondering:

• What is the Anaconda distribution, and why do people recommend it?
• How is it related to conda?
• How is it related to Miniconda?
• As a Data Scientist, which of these do I need to be familiar with?

I&aposll answer those questions below! &#x1F447;

What is Anaconda?

Anaconda is a Python distribution aimed at Data Scientists that includes 250+ packages (with easy access to 7,500+ additional packages). Its value proposition is that you can download it (for free) and "everything just works." It&aposs available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

A new Anaconda distribution is released a few times a year. Within each distribution, the versions of the included packages have all been tested to work together.

If you visit the installation page for many data science packages (such as pandas), they recommend Anaconda because it makes installation easy!

What is conda?

conda is an open source package and environment manager that comes with Anaconda.

As a package manager, you can use conda to install, update, and remove packages and their "dependencies" (the packages they depend upon):

• If Anaconda doesn&apost include a package that you need, you use conda to download and install it.
• If Anaconda doesn&apost have the version of a package you need, you use conda to update it.

As an environment manager, you can use conda to manage virtual environments:

• If you&aposre not familiar with virtual environments, they allow you to maintain isolated environments with different packages and versions of those packages.
• conda is an alternative to virtualenv, pipenv, and other related tools.

conda has a few huge advantages over other tools:

• It&aposs a single tool to learn, rather than using multiple tools to manage packages, environments, and Python versions.
• Package installation is predictably easy because you&aposre installing pre-compiled binaries.
• Unlike pip, you never need to build from source code, which can be especially difficult for some data science packages.
• You can use conda with languages other than Python.

What is Miniconda?

Miniconda is a Python distribution that only includes Python, conda, their dependencies, and a few other useful packages.

Miniconda is a great choice if you prefer to only install the packages you need, and you&aposre sufficiently familiar with conda. (Here&aposs how to choose between Anaconda and Miniconda.)

Summary:

• Anaconda and Miniconda are both Python distributions.
• Anaconda includes hundreds of packages, whereas Miniconda includes just a few.
• conda is an open source tool that comes with both Anaconda and Miniconda, and it functions as both a package manager and an environment manager.

Personally, I make extensive use of conda for creating environments and installing packages. And since I&aposm comfortable with conda, I much prefer Miniconda over Anaconda.

Do you have questions about conda, Anaconda, or Miniconda? Let me know in the comments section below! &#x1F447;

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in the months of November and December 2023.

Since the last report, 35 people contributed approximately 1500 code changes, focusing on bugfixes and improvements for the coming 24.02 release based on Qt6.

Transition to Qt6/KDE Frameworks 6

As we plan for KDE Gear 24.02 to be our first Qt6-based release, there's been on-going work on more Qt6 porting, removing deprecated functions, removing support for the qmake build system, and so on.

New feature

Kontact, KMail, KAddressBook and Sieve Editor will now warn you when you are running an unsuported version of KDE PIM and it is time to update it. The code for this is based on Kdenlive.

Itinerary

While the focus for Itinerary was also on completing the transition to Qt 6, with its nightly Android builds switching over a week ago, there also were a number of new features added, such as public transport arrival search, a new journey display in the timeline and a nearby amenity search. See Itinerary's bi-monthly status update for more details.

KOrganizer

In KOrganizer it is no possible to search for events without specifying a time range (BKO#394967). A new configuration option was added to only notify about events that the user is organizer or attendee of. This is especially useful when users add a shared calendar from their colleagues, but don't want to be notified about events that they do not participate in. Korganizer intercepts SIGINT/SIGTERM signal. It will avoid to lose data during editing.

Akonadi

Work has begun on creating a tool that would help users to migrate their Akonadi database to a different database engine. Since we started improving SQLite support in Akonadi during the year, we received many requests from users about how they can easily switch from MySQL or PostgreSQL to SQLite without having to wipe their entire configuration and setup everything from scratch with SQLite. With the database migrator tool, it will be very easy for users to migrate between the supported database engines without having to re-configure and re-sync all their accounts afterwards.

Dan's work on this tool is funded by g10 Code GmbH.

KMail

The email composer received some small visual changes and adopted a more frameless look similar to other KDE applications. In addition, the composer will directly display whether the openPGP key of a recipient exists and is valid when encryption is enabled.

The rust based adblocker received further work and adblock lists can be added or removed.

We removed changing the charset of a message and now only support sending emails as UTF-8. This is nowaday supported by all the other email clients. But we still support reading emails in other encoding.

Now kmail intercepts SIGINT/SIGTERM signal. It avoids to close by error KMail during editing.

Laurent finished to implement the "allow to reopen closed viewer" feature. This provides a menu which allows to reopen message closed by error.

In addition a lot of bugs were fixed. This includes:

• Fix bug 478352: Status bar has "white box" UI artifact (BKO#478352).
• Load on demand specific widget in viewer. Reduce memory foot.
• Fix mailfilter agent connection with kmail (fix apply filters)

A lot of work was done to rewrite the account wizard in QML. Accounts can now be created manually.

KAddressBook

Bug 478636 was fixed. Postal addresses was ruined when we added address in contact. (BKO#478636). Now KAddressbook intercepts SIGINT/SIGTERM signal. It avoids to close by error it during editing contact.

Kleopatra

Development focussed on fixing bugs for the release of GnuPG VS-Desktop® (which includes Kleopatra) in December.

• OpenPGP keys with valid primary key and expired encryption or signing subkeys are now handled correctly (T6788).
• Key groups containing expired keys are now handled correctly (T6742).
• The currently selected certificate in the certificate list stays selected when opening the certificate details or certifying the certificate (T6360).
• When creating an encrypted archive fails or is aborted, then Kleopatra makes sure that no partially created archive is left over (T6584).
• Certificates on certain smart cards are now listed even if some of the certificates couldn't be loaded (T6830).
• The root of a certificate chain with two certificates is no longer shown twice (T6807).
• A crash when deleting a certificate that is part of a certificate chains with cycles was fixed (T6602).
• Kleopatra now supports the special keyserver value "none" to disable keyserver lookups (T6761).
• Kleopatra looks up a key for an email address via WKD (key directory provided by an email domain owner) even if keyserver lookups are disabled (T6868).
• Signing and encryption of large files is now much faster (especially on Windows where it was much slower than on Linux) (T6351).

pim-sieve-editor

2 bugs were fixed in sieveeditor:

• Fix BUG: 477755: Fix script name (BKO#477755).
• Fix bug 476456: No scrollbar in simple editing mode (BKO#476456).

Now sieveeditor intercepts SIGINT/SIGTERM signal. It avoids to close by error it during editing sieve script.

pim-data-exporter

Now it intercepts SIGINT/SIGTERM signal. It avoids to close application during import/export.

Posted on January 7, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, period:victorian, FreeSoftWear

CW for body size change mentions

I needed a corset, badly.

Years ago I had a chance to have my measurements taken by a former professional corset maker and then a lesson in how to draft an underbust corset, and that lead to me learning how nice wearing a well-fitted corset feels.

Later I tried to extend that pattern up for a midbust corset, with success.

And then my body changed suddenly, and I was no longer able to wear either of those, and after a while I started missing them.

Since my body was still changing (if no longer drastically so), and I didn’t want to use expensive materials for something that had a risk of not fitting after too little time, I decided to start by making myself a summer lightweight corset in aida cloth and plastic boning (for which I had already bought materials). It fitted, but not as well as the first two ones, and I’ve worn it quite a bit.

I still wanted back the feeling of wearing a comfy, heavy contraption of coutil and steel, however.

After a lot of procrastination I redrafted a new pattern, scrapped everything, tried again, had my measurements taken by a dressmaker [#dressmaker], put them in the draft, cut a first mock-up in cheap cotton, fixed the position of a seam, did a second mock-up in denim [#jeans] from an old pair of jeans, and then cut into the cheap herringbone coutil I was planning to use.

And that’s when I went to see which one of the busks in my stash would work, and realized that I had used a wrong vertical measurement and the front of the corset was way too long for a midbust corset.

Luckily I also had a few longer busks, I basted one to the denim mock up and tried to wear it for a few hours, to see if it was too long to be comfortable. It was just a bit, on the bottom, which could be easily fixed with the Power Tools1.

Except, the more I looked at it the more doing this felt wrong: what I needed most was a midbust corset, not an overbust one, which is what this was starting to be.

I could have trimmed it down, but I knew that I also wanted this corset to be a wearable mockup for the pattern, to refine it and have it available for more corsets. And I still had more than half of the cheap coutil I was using, so I decided to redo the pattern and cut new panels.

And this is where the “or two” comes in: I’m not going to waste the overbust panels: I had been wanting to learn some techniques to make corsets with a fashion fabric layer, rather than just a single layer of coutil, and this looks like an excellent opportunity for that, together with a piece of purple silk that I know I have in the stash. This will happen later, however, first I’m giving priority to the underbust.

Anyway, a second set of panels was cut, all the seam lines marked with tailor tacks, and I started sewing by inserting the busk.

And then realized that the pre-made boning channel tape I had was too narrow for the 10 mm spiral steel I had plenty of. And that the 25 mm twill tape was also too narrow for a double boning channel. On the other hand, the 18 mm twill tape I had used for the waist tape was good for a single channel, so I decided to put a single bone on each seam, and then add another piece of boning in the middle of each panel.

Since I’m making external channels, making them in self fabric would have probably looked better, but I no longer had enough fabric, because of the cutting mishap, and anyway this is going to be a strictly underwear only corset, so it’s not a big deal.

Once the boning channel situation was taken care of, everything else proceeded quite smoothly and I was able to finish the corset during the Christmas break, enlisting again my SO to take care of the flat steel boning while I cut the spiral steels myself with wire cutters.

I could have been a bit more precise with the binding, as it doesn’t align precisely at the front edge, but then again, it’s underwear, nobody other than me and everybody who reads this post is going to see it and I was in a hurry to see it finished. I will be more careful with the next one.

I also think that I haven’t been careful enough when pressing the seams and applying the tape, and I’ve lost about a cm of width per part, so I’m using a lacing gap that is a bit wider than I planned for, but that may change as the corset gets worn, and is still within tolerance.

Also, on the morning after I had finished the corset I woke up and realized that I had forgotten to add garter tabs at the bottom edge. I don’t know whether I will ever use them, but I wanted the option, so maybe I’ll try to add them later on, especially if I can do it without undoing the binding.

The next step would have been flossing, which I proceeded to postpone until I’ve worn the corset for a while: not because there is any reason for it, but because I still don’t know how I want to do it :)

What was left was finishing and uploading the pattern and instructions, that are now on my sewing pattern website as #FreeSoftWear, and finally I could post this on the blog.

1. i.e. by asking my SO to cut and sand it, because I’m lazy and I hate doing that part :D↩︎

GNU mailutils version 3.17 is available for download. This is a maintenance release, including some new features:

Use of TLS in pop3d and imap4d

If not explicitly specified, the TLS mode to use (ondemand, connect, etc.) is derived from the configured port.  E.g., for imap4d, port 143 implies ondemand mode, and port 993 implies connection mode.

The global tls-mode setting is used only when the mode cannot be determined otherwise, i.e. neither per-server tls-mode is given nor the port gives any clues as to the TLS mode to use.

The following article demonstrates a useful trick in Tkinter to create multiple “screens” (e.g. a login screen, register screen, main page screen) within a single window! Instead of creating a new window for each screen, we will use a single tkinter window, which swaps dynamically between multiple “screens” (represented by frames).

This is more efficient and faster than creating a new window every time.

Complete Code:

The core idea is simple, we have multiple classes, each of which represents a window. These classes inherit from the Frame class, essentially making them frames as well. To “swap” between screens, we destroy the existing frame (including all of its children objects) and then create the new frame to take its place.

A YouTube video explaining this code step-by-step is included at the bottom of this article.

import tkinter as tk def center_window(width, height): x = (root.winfo_screenwidth() // 2) - (width // 2) y = (root.winfo_screenheight() // 2) - (height // 2) root.geometry(f'{width}x{height}+{x}+{y}') class WelcomeWindow(tk.Frame): def __init__(self, master): super().__init__() self.master = master self.master.title("Welcome") center_window(200, 150) login_button = tk.Button(self, text="Login", width=10, command = self.on_login) login_button.pack(padx=20, pady=(20, 10)) register_button = tk.Button(self, text="Register", width=10, command = self.on_register) register_button.pack(pady=10) self.pack() def on_login(self): for widget in self.winfo_children(): widget.destroy() self.destroy() LoginWindow(self.master) def on_register(self): for widget in self.winfo_children(): widget.destroy() self.destroy() RegisterWindow(self.master) class LoginWindow(tk.Frame): def __init__(self, master): super().__init__() self.master = master self.master.title("Login") self.master.resizable(False, False) center_window(250, 150) tk.Label(self, text="Username:").grid(row=0, column=0) self.username_entry = tk.Entry(self) self.username_entry.grid(row=0, column=1, padx=10, pady=10) tk.Label(self, text="Password:").grid(row=1, column=0) self.password_entry = tk.Entry(self, show="*") self.password_entry.grid(row=1, column=1, padx=10, pady=10) submit_button = tk.Button(self, text="Submit", width=8,command = self.on_successful_login) submit_button.grid(row=2, column=1, sticky="e", padx=10, pady=(10, 0)) submit_button = tk.Button(self, text="Back", width=8, command = self.on_back) submit_button.grid(row=2, column=0, sticky="w", padx=10, pady=(10, 0)) self.pack() def on_back(self): for widget in self.winfo_children(): widget.destroy() self.destroy() WelcomeWindow(self.master) def on_successful_login(self): for widget in self.winfo_children(): widget.destroy() self.destroy() MainWindow(self.master) class RegisterWindow(tk.Frame): def __init__(self, master): super().__init__() self.master = master self.master.title("Register") self.master.resizable(False, False) center_window(300, 250) tk.Label(self, text="First Name:").grid(row=0, column=0, sticky="w") self.first_name_entry = tk.Entry(self, width=26) self.first_name_entry.grid(row=0, column=1, padx=10, pady=10, sticky="e") tk.Label(self, text="Last Name:").grid(row=1, column=0, sticky="w") self.last_name_entry = tk.Entry(self, width=26) self.last_name_entry.grid(row=1, column=1, padx=10, pady=10, sticky="e") tk.Label(self, text="Password:").grid(row=2, column=0, sticky="w") self.password_entry = tk.Entry(self, show="*", width=26) self.password_entry.grid(row=2, column=1, padx=10, pady=10, sticky="e") tk.Label(self, text="Email:").grid(row=3, column=0, sticky="w") self.email_entry = tk.Entry(self, width=26) self.email_entry.grid(row=3, column=1, padx=10, pady=10, sticky="e") submit_button = tk.Button(self, text="Submit", width=8) submit_button.grid(row=7, column=1, padx=10, pady=10, sticky="e") submit_button = tk.Button(self, text="Back", width=8, command = self.on_back) submit_button.grid(row=7, column=0, sticky="w", padx=10, pady=(10, 10)) self.pack() def on_back(self): for widget in self.winfo_children(): widget.destroy() self.destroy() WelcomeWindow(self.master) class MainWindow(tk.Frame): def __init__(self, master): super().__init__() self.master = master center_window(500, 500) self.pack() root = tk.Tk() root.eval('tk::PlaceWindow . center') WelcomeWindow(root) root.mainloop()

This marks the end of the Switching between multiple Screens in Tkinter Tutorial. Any suggestions or contributions for CodersLegacy are more than welcome. Questions regarding the tutorial content can be asked in the comments section below.

The post Switching between Multiple Screens in Tkinter (dynamically) appeared first on CodersLegacy.