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A double length Debian release
means the Release Team don't get much peace
What with last minute breaks
And the time that it takes
Treat them with respect today, please

The media teams on the hook
As we follow our normal play book
With laptops all primed
The images are timed
Once we're told we'll start taking our look

This is the last time for 11
And for Bookworm, it's just 12.7
Give us time for each test
As we all do our best
With our ThinkPads - I see at least seven :)

Next week Akademy, KDE’s annual community conference, will take place in Würzburg, Germany. There are a few features that I actually began during various conferences throughout the years to address real-world problems. I decided to have look at some of them again that would be most useful for people travelling to Akademy from abroad or who will be giving a presentation there.

Connect to a Wi-Fi network by scanning its QR code Wifi QR Code Scanner

Two years ago at Akademy in Barcelona the venue Wifi details were printed onto our attendee badges as QR code. Already during the conference I started adding a scanner to the networks menu using our fantastic Prison Framework scanner feature. However, with Qt 6 at the horizon and its significant changes to Qt Multimedia I didn’t pursuit it further at the time. Then, whenever I attended another sprint or got to a hotel where they handed out Wifi QR codes, I was reminded that I still haven’t finished the thing.

Still, all prerequisites under the hood have long been merged. The first task was to move the MeCard parser (the format used for those QR codes) from the QRCA scanner app into a shared location. Since MeCard can even contain WPA-EAP configuration I wanted to have the logic for setting up NetworkManager accordingly shared, too. In preparation for adding a sub-page for the camera viewfinder I replaced the full-screen QR code generator with an integrated one.

A huge challenge was that we either need to add a new connection or update an existing one with new credentials. It took me forever to figure out why it wouldn’t update the Wifi passphrase on my network: I’m meanwhile using WPA3-SAE at home! The code for setting up NetworkManager from MeCard didn’t handle “T=SAE” and thus didn’t generate any credentials. Funnily enough, our MeCard generator did. Once that was sorted, the code worked as intended.

However, after a lot of back and forth I abandoned the idea of putting it in the Network applet directly. Using Qt Multimedia, potentially loading a bunch of backends and codecs is probably not something we want to have in the shell. Instead, I will look into adding a button to the Network settings module instead. In the meantime, you can always use QRCA to scan a code a Wifi code.

Location-aware time zone setting

Last year’s Akademy was located in Thessaloniki, Greece which is in a different time zone for many of its attendees. Our phones automatically adjust to that using the cellular network and we don’t even think about it. Frequently during the conference people were confused which talk will come next when their laptop and phone disagreed on the time. Therefore, I wrote a daemon that automatically adjusts the time zone based on your physical location.

Enable location-based time zone option in “Date & Time” settings

For privacy, this uses KDE’s own GeoIP endpoint and is opt-in. It is also disabled when connected to a VPN (the endpoint could be in an entirely different location after all) or a metered connection. We’re considering adding a checkbox to Plasma’s Welcome Center on its “Privacy” page to make the feature more discoverable for laptop users. However, there’s still a few quirks to be ironed out to ensure that our users don’t bring down the server hosting that service since by definition you cannot put that sort of thing behind a CDN.

I can’t wait to travel to Würzburg next week. Given the convenient location I am positive that a lot of people and “old-timers” that I haven’t seen around in a while will stop by to say hello. Come join us, attendance is free and it’s always great fun!

Next Saturday, this year’s Akademy starts in Würzburg, Germany. After a rather long absence – the last Akademy I attended in person was in Mechelen (2008) – I am very much looking forward to meet old friends and make new ones. Mainly due to my own summer vacation plans and conflicting family matters, I was not able to make it to the event in recent years. Now, as the venue is only just over 100 kilometers from my home and I have no other commitments, I’m traveling to

My plan is to arrive on Friday late afternoon and join the welcome event. The conference schedule is pretty loaded and I have only decided on a few talks I definitely want to visit. For more, I need to take another look at the schedule and also the list of planned BoFs on Monday and Tuesday.

Topics I am interested in are (not in a particular order)

1. Getting KMyMoney to be properly build on the CI/CD for MacOS (both ARM and x86_64)
2. Meet people in person I only know from the online world
3. What is needed on the project configuration (Gitlab, metadata) side to move onto KF6

For 1. I hope to get some more background information out of the KDE’s CI and CD Infrastructure talk held by Ben, Hannah, Julius and Volker on Sunday and the CI/CD BoF on Tuesday.. For other topics I will see.

Looking forward to seeing many of you KDE fellows next week in Würzburg!

In less than a week this year’s Akademy starts in Würzburg, Germany, and as usual I’m very much looking forward to that :)

Talks

Akademy starts with two days full of presentations. Online participation is possible as well, you can register here.

I have two talks myself.

KDE’s CI and CD Infrastructure

Sunday, 14:30 in room 1, together with Ben, Hannah and Julius, details.

We want to give an overview of the many parts and options we have around continuous integration and deployment since the migration from Jenkins to Gitlab, to enable more people to do changes and adjustments there themselves.

Finding your way around Akademy - Venue maps and indoor routing in Kongress

Saturday, 18:00 in room 1, details.

A lightning talk about the use of OSM indoor venue maps in our conference companion app Kongress.

BoFs

Following the talks there will be three days of meetings on various topics (“BoFs”). There’s fewer BoFs I’m (co-)hosting or otherwise directly involved in than last year:

• KDE PIM (Monday 14:00)
• CI/CD (Tuesday 15:00)

While that should be a bit less stressful, those will be very busy days nevertheless, with already now too many sessions on the schedule I’d like to participate in.

And of course every event essentially is just one big Itinerary BoF in disguise.

Qt Contributor Summit

Right before Akademy there’s also the Qt Contributor Summit in Würzburg.

I have been asked to give a short presentation on experiences with migrating to Qt 6 and maintaining software on top of Qt 6, both from the KDE and from my work perspective. Currently that’s planned for the morning talks session on Thursday.

Kongress

And as usual there’s also code to finish before Akademy. This time the important one has been the venue map integration for Kongress. Not only does this have to be ready for my talk about it, it’s also meant to be used at Akademy.

Time-dependent maps

A big part still missing in the previous post was support for time-dependent content. While conceptually clear (OSM has time-conditional tags and we have an parser/evaluator for the opening hours expressions used in those) I was still hoping we might get away without that.

And we would now (again), but there was an intermediate state of the Akademy schedule until two days ago where “Room 1” referred to a different physical room on Saturday and Sunday than during the rest of the week. While that might sound confusing, this is actually not unusual, so properly supporting all that makes sense anyway.

With the rooms now having distinct names again I can’t easily demonstrate the full power of time-dependent content anymore, but you’ll still notice that the venue map looks different depending on which day you open it (by opening it from events on different dates, or by waiting a week).

Android dark mode support

To look good for the occasion we now also have proper Android dark mode support in KDE Frameworks, thanks to Julius’s recent work on icon recoloring, and the necessary changes in Kongress will be part of 24.08.1.

Kongress on Android in dark mode. xCal support

With September being packed with conferences, another problem has become pressing for Kongress as well: Pretalx (a widely used open source conference management software) apparently removed access to the schedule in iCal format, something Kongress relies on. Akademy isn’t affected due to using a different system, but SotM or the Matrix Conference are.

As a solution we could roll out quickly I added basic xCal read support to KF::CalendarCore, a format Pretalx still supports. This has been integrated yesterday and should make it in the September update of KDE Frameworks.

Itinerary

Since conferences involve travel for most people, Itinerary can’t go without attention either.

For making coordination of train trips easier, the “Share Journey” links you’ll get from Deutsche Bahn’s website can now be directly imported.

Akademy and all its sub-events are machine-readable on their corresponding websites as usual, and thus can also be imported by pasting/opening/dropping the corresponding URLs in(to) Itinerary.

The day trip shows some limitations though, we don’t have a good way to model that yet. It’s now imported as an event, but ideally it would be two bus trips, so you have the most crucial information (places and times of the bus departures) included.

Itinerary supports bus trips, but we have a few specialties here. The departure location of the return trip is still unknown (expecting that to be where we get dropped off), so this needs to be editable. For bus trips however Itinerary doesn’t allow arbitrary changes when editing, so you can’t accidentally end up with something that can no longer be matched against realtime data. That’s however irrelevant for chartered buses, those don’t show up on any schedule anyway.

So that bus trip is actually less of a bus trip in the public transport sense, but more an individual transport trip (ie. similar to taking your own bike or car). And that’s something we don’t support in Itinerary at all yet. If you have input on how that should look like, I’d be happy to hear that in the Itinerary Matrix channel!

Hoping nobody gets lost due to an Itinerary bug on the way and very much looking forward to seeing many of you next week in Würzburg!

Last post I lamented the failure of any the svg graphs I had for DAG Hamilton workflows to render in Blogger. I set out to rectify this and have had some initial success.

My first attempt to get svg to show up in Blogger has the DAG Hamilton logo as its subject. My approach was to bring the svg elements down to the most basic primitives I could manage, then scale and translate their individual coordinates to bring them into the view.

Fortunately, I was able to find an example from someone who had successfully rendered svg in Blogger. The subject blog post is eleven years old. It appears svg never totally caught on for some platforms. Nonetheless, I used this as a template, and, after some initial success, managed to render the Hamilton logo.

The post will step through the individual path components of the Hamilton logo (7) and show the code used to transform the coordinates to make the svg elements render at an appropriate location and size. The individual path elements that make up the logo are a large number of 3 coordinate bezier curves. The manner in which the curves listed is very format specific to the platform that created them. Unfortunately, I cannot recall which online png to svg converter I used to create the svg. Portable Inkscape kept crashing on the large png file, so I brute forced the issue by using an online converter.

The first element of the logo is basically a purple background for the whole logo. A gap or divit can be seen just left of center on the upper part. I'll cover the manual "fixing" of this further on.

Second path (orange)



Third path (deep purple)





Fourth path (yellow top point)

                                        

Fifth path (light orangey left leg were the star to face out from the screen)

                                      

Sixth path (medium purple little triangle in the center)

                                      

Seventh path (light orangey little triangle to the right of center)

                                   


Fixing that niggling divit on the top half of the logo (the thin subvertical line).


                                     


Final product. This is the one svg inline drawing I was able to show (content size limitations of Blogger?)

The full logo refuses to render (although I swear it did before). Well, at least there is an svg element showing up on the page (a purple star). <sigh> Another png . . .

                                   


The code. I'm not strong on HTML, but it was necessary to edit this post inline. As part of that exercise, I included the post outline generation as part of the script.

# python 3.12

# blog_post_make_outline.py

"""

Attempt to scale, translate, and inline svg

elements for display in Blogger.

"""

import re

import pprint

import sys

import copy

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# REGEX patterns.

PATHPAT = r'[<]path[ ]d[=]["]'

MPAT = r'M([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]'

          # first bezier curve coord

BEZPAT = (r'C([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]'

          # second bezier curve coord

          r'([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]'

          # third bezier curve coord

          r'([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[ ]')

ZPAT = r'Z[ ]'

FILLPAT = (r'["] fill[=]["]([#][A-F0-9][A-F0-9][A-F0-9]'

           r'[A-F0-9][A-F0-9][A-F0-9])["][ ]')

#                 transform="translate(4756.96875,109.12890625)" 

#                 transform="translate(5619,4112)"/>

TRANSFORMPAT = (r'transform[=]["]translate[(]'

                r'([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[,]([-]*[0-9]+[.]*[0-9]*)[)]["]')

# Output formats/constants.

BEZFMT = ('C{0:.7f} {1:.7f} '

          '{2:.7f} {3:.7f} '

          '{4:.7f} {5:.7f} ')

PATHFMT_OPEN = '<path d="'

PATHFMT_1 = 'M{mstartx:.5f} {mstarty:.5f} {path:s} Z '

PATHFMT_2 = '" fill="{fill:s}" transform="translate({translatex:.7f},{translatey:.7f})"'

PATHFMT_CLOSE = ' />'

SVG_TAG_OPEN = ('<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" '

                'xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" '

                "width='500px' height='500px'>")

SVG_TAG_CLOSE = '</svg>'

def parse_path(pathstring):

    """

    Capture path elements in a dictionary.

    pathstring is the svg string for the path (one line).

    For a path comprised entirely of bezier curves

    in the format (all one line):

    <ns0:path d="M0 0 C2.54601018 1.57157072 5.09846344 3.13131386 7.65625 4.68359375 C39.179 . . .  0 0 Z M-690.96875 4007.87109375 C-707.702 . . .  Z " fill="#C3368C" transform="translate(4756.96875,109.12890625)" />

    Returns dictionary.

    """

    retval = {}

    patpath = re.compile(PATHPAT)

    match = patpath.match(pathstring)

    startindex = match.span()[1]

    mpat = re.compile(MPAT)

    # MPAT

    match = mpat.match(pathstring[startindex:])

    mpatgroups = match.groups()

    retval['mpatgroups'] = []

    retval['mpatgroups'].append(mpatgroups)

    startindex += match.span()[1]

    bezpat = re.compile(BEZPAT)

    zpat = re.compile(ZPAT)

    retval['paths'] = []

    while match:

        pathpoints = []

        # BEZPAT

        match = bezpat.match(pathstring[startindex:])

        while match:

            # Sentinel.

            if not match:

                continue

            pathpoints.append(match.groups())

            startindex += match.span()[1]

            match = bezpat.match(pathstring[startindex:])

        retval['paths'].append(pathpoints)

        # ZPAT

        match = zpat.match(pathstring[startindex:])

        startindex += match.span()[1]

        # Then look for MPAT

        # MPAT

        match = mpat.match(pathstring[startindex:])

        # If MPAT not there, work on color and transform.

        if not match:

            continue

        startindex += match.span()[1]

        retval['mpatgroups'].append(mpatgroups)

    fillpat = re.compile(FILLPAT)

    match = fillpat.match(pathstring[startindex:])

    startindex += match.span()[1]

    print('adding fill . . .')

    fill = match.groups()[0]

    retval['fill'] = fill

    transformpat = re.compile(TRANSFORMPAT)

    match = transformpat.match(pathstring[startindex:])

    transform = match.groups()

    print('adding transform . . .')

    retval['transform'] = transform

    return retval

def parse_all_paths(svgfilepath):

    """

    Finds and parses all svg paths

    within an svg file (very format

    specific - bezier curves only).

    Returns list of dictionaries, one

    for each path line of the svg file.

    """

    # Do all paths in Hamilton logo.

    # Make list of dictionaries.

    patpath = re.compile(PATHPAT)

    with open(svgfilepath, 'r') as f:

        paths = []

        # Line one.

        next(f)

        # Line two.

        next(f)

        for linex in f:

            print(PATHPAT)

            print(linex[:30])

            match = patpath.match(linex)

            if not match:

                break

            paths.append(parse_path(linex))

    return paths

def work_paths(paths, fcn):

    """

    Apply an operation to all coordinates in

    the bezier curve paths represented in

    paths.

    Also covers translate and fill.

    paths is a list of dictionaries. Each

    dictionary represents one line of an

    svg file with a path made up of 

    bezier curves.

    """

    # Return value.

    newpaths = []

    # M - start of path segment.

    for pthx in paths:

        newmpatgroups = []

        for coordsx in pthx['mpatgroups']:

            newmpatgroups.append([fcn(x) for x in coordsx])

        newpaths.append({'mpatgroups':newmpatgroups})

    # to Z - end of path segment.

    # List of path dictionaries (paths).

    for pthx, newpath in zip(paths, newpaths):

        newpath['paths'] = []

        # Each M to Z path segment.

        for path in pthx['paths']:

            curvegroup = []

            for curve in path:

                newcurve = [fcn(x) for x in curve]

                curvegroup.append(newcurve)

            newpath['paths'].append(curvegroup)

    # transform and fill.

    for pthx, newpath in zip(paths, newpaths):

        newpath['transform'] = [fcn(x) for x in pthx['transform']]

        newpath['fill'] = pthx['fill']

    return newpaths

def translate_paths(paths, translation):

    """

    From a two tuple of x, y translation,

    adjust dictionary values for x, y 

    translation in each path in path

    list accordingly.

    Returns new dictionary

    """

    # TRANSLATE

    # ['mpatgroups', 'paths', 'fill', 'translate']

    translated_paths = copy.deepcopy(paths)

    for pathx in translated_paths:

        pathx['transform'][0] += translation[0]

        pathx['transform'][1] += translation[1]

    return translated_paths

def get_path_strings(paths):

    """

    From a list of path dictionaries, 

    builds one line strings for insertion

    into svg file.

    Returns list

    """

    pathdict_2 = {'fill':None,

                'translatex':None,

                'translatey':None}

    path_segment_dict = {'mstartx':None,

                         'mstarty':None,

                         'path':None}

    pathstrings = []

    for pathx in paths:

        # Copy and initialize fill/translate dictionary.

        fill_translate = copy.deepcopy(pathdict_2)

        fill_translate['fill'] = pathx['fill']

        fill_translate['translatex'] = pathx['transform'][0]

        fill_translate['translatey'] = pathx['transform'][1]

        # Zip together M and path segments.

        path_segs = zip(pathx['mpatgroups'], pathx['paths'])

        # For each path segment.

        path_strings = []

        for M, path_seg in path_segs:

            seg_dict = copy.deepcopy(path_segment_dict)

            seg_dict['mstartx'] = M[0]

            seg_dict['mstarty'] = M[1]

            # Build path segment string.

            path_seg_strings = [BEZFMT.format(*coords) for coords in path_seg]

            path = ''.join(path_seg_strings)

            seg_dict['path'] = path

            # Make final segment string with M (PATHFMT_1)

            path_with_M = PATHFMT_1.format(**seg_dict)

            path_strings.append(path_with_M)

        path_all_together = ''.join(path_strings)

        # Tack on fill/translate at end and beginning with d path flag.

        # Add to pathstrings.

        pathstrings.append(PATHFMT_OPEN  +

                           path_all_together +

                           PATHFMT_2.format(**fill_translate) +

                           PATHFMT_CLOSE)

    return pathstrings  

paths = parse_all_paths('hamilton_logo_large.svg')

print('len(paths) = {0:d}'.format(len(paths)))

pprint.pprint([x for x in paths[0]])

paths = work_paths(paths, float)

scale = 0.035

scaleit = lambda x: scale * x

paths = work_paths(paths, scaleit)

# pprint.pprint(paths[0]['paths'][0])

paths = translate_paths(paths, (125, 0))

pathstrings = get_path_strings(paths)

# with open('test_paths.txt', 'w') as f:

#     for pathx in pathstrings:

#         print(pathx, file=f)

#         print('\n\n', file=f)

GAP_FIX = "<polygon points='265 90.25, 245 143.75, 268 144.1, 295 90.25' style='fill: black;' />"

GAP_FIX_PROPER_COLOR = "<polygon points='265 90.25, 245 143.75, 268 144.1, 295 90.25' style='fill: #C3368C;' />"

TEXT = '<p>{0:s}</p>'

CODE = """

<p>&nbsp;</p><pre style="background: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-color: initial; border-bottom-style: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-radius: 10px; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-top-style: solid; border-width: 5px 0px 0px; color: #444444; font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;, Courier, monospace; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; margin-top: 0px; overflow-wrap: normal; overflow: auto; padding: 12px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">{0:s}</span></pre>

"""

textlist = ['blah blah blah',

            'blah blah blah again',

            'blah blah blah a third time',

            'blah blah blah a fourth time',

            'blah blah blah a fifth time',

            'blah blah blah a sixth time',

            'blah blah blah a seventh time',

            'fix divit',

            'final product']

fixed_divit = copy.deepcopy(pathstrings)

fixed_divit.insert(1, GAP_FIX_PROPER_COLOR)

svglist = [pathstrings[0:1],

           pathstrings[0:2],

           pathstrings[0:3],

           pathstrings[0:4],

           pathstrings[0:5],

           pathstrings[0:6],

           pathstrings[0:],

           pathstrings[0:] + [GAP_FIX],

           fixed_divit]

with open('blogpost.html', 'w') as f:

    for blah, svgels in zip(textlist, svglist):

        print(TEXT.format(blah), file=f)

        print(SVG_TAG_OPEN, file=f)

        for svgelement in svgels:

            print(svgelement, file=f)

        print(SVG_TAG_CLOSE, file=f) 

    print(TEXT.format('More blah about code'), file=f)

    print(CODE.format('>>> import this'), file=f)

print('Done')

Notes:

1) I had had good intentions of including a code box (the CODE string constant in the Python code) and I hit a bit of a wall. Not only is my code a mixed bag (this blog was always intended as a learning experience and a place for trying things out), it doesn't look good. We deal.

Which brings me to the point: you hear titles like front end developer, designer, website marketer etc. and think, "Well, it's kind of like art, kind of like coding . . . sort of creative." I now know, it's coding and it's thinking and it's grinding. All respect.

2) Steven Lott recently published a book that I bought (pdf). I have found it helpful. It's very pragmatic. I'm only about 15% of the way into it, but his treatment of regular expressions as just another tool not be scared of made me less tentative in my REGEX use (even if my REGEXes are far from elegant). Group capture with parens was really helpful for this exercise.

3) Our chief geology database administrator commented that the colors of the DAG Hamilton logo are those of the Spanish shawl nudibranch. There is a resemblance.

Photo courtesy of iNaturalist.

Thanks for stopping by.

Review: The Shepherd's Crown, by Terry Pratchett

Series: Discworld #41 Publisher: Harper Copyright: 2015 Printing: 2016 ISBN: 0-06-242998-1 Format: Trade paperback Pages: 276

The Shepherd's Crown is the 41st and final Discworld novel and the 5th and final Tiffany Aching novel. You should not start here.

There is a pretty major character event in the second chapter of this book. I'm not going to say directly what it is, but you will likely be able to guess from the rest of the review. If you're particularly adverse to spoilers, you may want to skip reading this until you've read the book.

Tiffany Aching is extremely busy. Witches are responsible for all the little tasks that fall between the cracks, and there are a lot of cracks. The better she gets at her job, the more of the job there seems to be.

"Well," said Tiffany, "there's too much to be done and not enough people to do it."

The smile that the kelda gave her was a strange one. The little woman said, "Do ye let them try? Ye mustn't be afraid to ask for help. Pride is a good thing, my girl, but it will kill you in time."

And that's before an earth-shattering change in the world of witches, one that leaves Tiffany shuttling between Lancre and the Chalk trying to be too many things to too many people. Plus the kelda is worried some deeper trouble is brewing. And then Tiffany gets an exiled elven queen who has never understood the worth of other people dumped on her, and has to figure out what to do with her.

The starting idea is great. I continue to be impressed with how well Pratchett handles Tiffany's coming-of-age story. Finding one's place in the world isn't one lesson or event; it's layers of them, with each new growth in responsibility uncovering new things to learn that are often quite different from the previous problems. Tiffany has worked through child problems, adolescent problems, and new adulthood problems. Now she's on a course towards burnout, which is exactly the kind of problem Tiffany would have given her personality.

Even better, the writing at the start of The Shepherd's Crown is tight and controlled and sounds like Pratchett, which was a relief after the mess of Raising Steam. The contrast is so sharp that I found myself wondering if parts of this book had been written earlier, or if Pratchett found a new writing or editing method. The characters all sound like themselves, and although some of the turns of phrase are not quite as sharp as in earlier books, they're at least at the level of Snuff.

Unfortunately, it doesn't last. There are some great moments and some good quotes, but the writing starts to slip at about the two-thirds point, the sentences began to meander, the characters start repeating the name of the person they're talking to, and the narration becomes increasingly strained. It felt like Pratchett knew the emotional tone he wanted to evoke but couldn't find a subtle way to express it, so the story and the characters start to bludgeon the reader with Grand Statements. It's never as bad as Raising Steam, but it doesn't slip smoothly off the page to rewrite your brain the way that Pratchett could at his best.

What makes this worse is that the plot is not very interesting. I wanted to read a book about Tiffany understanding burnout, asking for help, and possibly also about mental load and how difficult delegation is. There is some movement in that direction: she takes on some apprentices, although we don't see as much of her interactions with them as I'd like, and there's an intriguing new male character who wants to be a witch. I wish Pratchett had been able to give Geoffrey his own book. He and his goat were the best part of the story, but it felt rushed and I think he would have had more impact if the reader got to see him develop his skills over time the way that we did with Tiffany.

But, alas, all of that is side story to the main plot, which is about elves.

As you may know from previous reviews, I do not get along with Pratchett's conception of elves. I find them boring and too obviously evil, and have since Lords and Ladies. Villains have never been one of Pratchett's strengths, and I think his elves are my least favorite. One of the goals of this book is to try to make them less one-note by having Tiffany try to teach one of them empathy, but I didn't find any of the queen's story arc convincing. If Pratchett had pulled those threads together with something more subtle, emotional, and subversive, I think it could have worked, but instead we got another battle royale, and Lords and Ladies did that better.

"Granny never said as she was better than others. She just got on with it and showed 'em and people worked it out for themselves."

And so we come to the end. I wish I could say that the quality held up through the whole series, and it nearly did, but alas it fell apart a bit at the end. Raising Steam I would skip entirely. The Shepherd's Crown is not that bad, but it's minor Pratchett that's worth reading mainly because it's the send-off (and there are a lot of reasons within the story to think Pratchett knew that when writing it). There are a few great lines, some catharsis, and a pretty solid ending for Tiffany, but it's probably not a book that I'll re-read.

Content warning: major character death.

Special thanks to Emmet Asher-Perrin, whose Tor.com/Reactor re-read of all of Discworld got me to pick the series up again and finally commit to reading all of it. I'm very glad I did.

Rating: 6 out of 10

This is a big one, folks. Plasma 6.2’s soft feature freeze is now in effect, which means the last few features have just been merged! Now we’ll have six weeks of heavy bug-fixing before the final release in October. If you’re an industrious sort, the time to live on git master and report bugs is now! Current git master is completely suitable for daily driving.

And we’ve already been focusing on QA for a while, so new bug reports take priority — both triaging them and fixing them. Over the past few months, we’ve succeeded in dropping plasmashell’s total number of bug reports to 1022, the lowest in several years. And the number of unconfirmed bug reports is currently down to 301, the lowest since late 2015! Triaging and fixing bugs is a priority, and we’re promptly triaging all new Plasma new bug reports daily. Our goal is to push the number of unconfirmed bug reports under 200 by the end of September.

So please do submit bug reports for any issues you encounter; it’s not a black hole. If you’ve complained about bugs on social media recently and haven’t reported them on https://bugs.kde.org, fix that today! Do it! Do it now!

…But first check out the final Plasma 6.2 features; I think they’re pretty awesome. It’s gonna be a big release, full of useful stuff!

Notable New Features

It’s now possible to block apps from inhibiting sleep and screen lock, if you don’t like the fact that they do so (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Newly installed Plasma widgets are now shown at the top of the grid view and badged with “New!” for one hour, so it’s easy for you to find them right after installing them (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

While choosing a custom image for a user avatar on System Settings’ Users page, you can now crop the image if needed (someone going by the Pseudonym “Kuneho Cottonears”, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Added support for 7-day weather forecasts and “chance of precipitation” data for BBC UK Met weather stations shown in Plasma’ Weather widget (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Discover now gently guides you in the direction of writing better reviews for non-proprietary apps (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

https://i.imgur.com/SGTpj9a.mp4

Added a yearly notification to ask for donations; see this week’s earlier post for more details (TL;DR: optional, once per year, you can permanently disable it) (me: Nate Graham Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The plasma-apply-wallpaperimage tool now has a --fill-mode option, mirroring the existing GUI option for this, but now in a scriptable form (Heitor Augusto Lopes Nunes, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Due to popular demand, KWin’s Overview effect once again shows a linearized representation of two-dimensional virtual desktop layouts (e.g. 2×2, 3×3, etc) on the primary view, rather than hiding them entirely (Blazer Silving, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s System Tray now uses a better grid layout for the expanded view that leaves more space for text, which is especially important for languages like German and Russian. The new layout saves space, too (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

The settings for KWin’s colorblindness correction effect now live in the logical place where you’d expect to find them: on System Settings’ Accessibility page! (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Overhauled the UI of System Settings’ Accessibility page in a lot of little ways to make it actually be more… accessible! (Thiago Sueto, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s “Minimize All” widget now only minimizes and unminimizes windows on the current virtual desktop and activity, rather than all windows everywhere (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

If you enter global edit mode, and then from there enter a panel’s own edit mode, closing the panel’s configuration window now simply returns you to the global edit mode, rather than exiting from that too (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The error message shown when manually installing a Plasma widget fails is now more descriptive, and tells you the actual error so you can troubleshoot it (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made a pass over many areas of Plasma and System Settings to align text and labels with our Human Interface Guidelines’ best practices (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Too many merge requests to list TBH, so check them all out here!)

Dialog windows throughout KDE software have new icons again — this time they look nicer and more Breeze-styled (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.6. Link):

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a nasty issue that could cause corruption in files on SFTP servers that were edited by opening them from Dolphin in an app and then saving changes (Ser Freeman, kio-extras 24.12.0. Link)

Changing the system’s Global Theme now also changes the colors of any recolorable GTK apps, just like you’d expect (Michael Weghorn, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Performing a multi-finger touch swipe/gesture on your touchscreen no longer messes up Plasma and gets it caught in a weird limbo state (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Fixed a recent regression in Plasma’s desktop file/folder view that could cause items to snap back to their previous locations after being dragged somewhere else (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Job progress notifications shown by Plasma no longer let any buttons’ text get cut off in languages where words and phrases are long; now, the popups expand horizontally a bit to make room (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed two issues in Plasma’s Emoji Selector app seemingly caused during the Plasma 6 port that caused it to lose its prior selection highlight effect, and always copy the first item in the search results view rather than the selected one (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Substantially reduced the glitchiness of the tooltips for items in the expanded view of Plasma’s System Tray (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a glitch that could cause the Maliit virtual keyboard to be mis-positioned when using any vertical panels (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When Plasma’s Folder View widget is placed on a panel, its popup can now be resized to smaller than its default size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

It’s no longer possible to break System Settings quite terribly by opening a “Get New [thing]” window and then closing System Settings’ own main window (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.6. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 3 as last week). Current list of bugs
• 33 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 36 last week). Current list of bugs
• 149 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Substantially improved performance in Discover in multiple ways: launch time, time to load the UI, time to load icons, and smoothness of scrolling through long lists (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Discover now behaves more sensibly and only shows one authentication prompt when asked to update multiple Flatpak apps in an environment with hardened security for Flatpaks, as in openSUSE distros (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Installing a font now places it, by default, in a standardized location (e.g. ~/.local/share/fonts/rather than the legacy location (~/.fonts/), which means that sandboxed apps will be able to find and use them as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

So yeah, like I said, please test Plasma from current git master and open bug reports about issues you find. Another path is to help triage bug reports that the first crowd will be opening. Ask for more information, make them actionable, move them where needed! And of course, help fix triaged and confirmed bug reports.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.

Methods are functions that live on objects.

Table of contents

1. Operators
2. Some functions included with Python
3. Calling functions
4. Function arguments
5. Functions either return a value or perform an action
6. Methods are a special type of functions
7. Functions are everywhere in Python

Operators

Python includes operators, like the plus operator (+) and the minus operator (-):

>>> n = 9 >>> language = "Python" >>> language + " is fun" 'Python is fun' >>> n - 4 5 Some functions included with Python

But Python also includes many …

Read the full article: https://www.pythonmorsels.com/functions-and-methods/

Python is known for its simplicity and readability, but one feature it has historically lacked is a native switch case statement, commonly found in other programming languages like C, C++, and Java. Instead, Python developers often relied on a series of if-elif-else statements or dictionaries to emulate switch-case behavior.

However, with the release of Python 3.10, a new feature known as “Structural Pattern Matching” was introduced, which effectively brings a form of switch-case functionality to Python.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to use the switch case statement, Python’s new approach to handling multiple conditions in a more readable and efficient way.

Introduction to the match Statement

The match statement in Python 3.10 allows for pattern matching, which is more powerful and flexible than the traditional switch-case statements found in other languages. Pattern matching checks a given value against a series of patterns and executes the corresponding block of code when a match is found.

Here’s a basic structure of how a match statement works:

Pythondef example(value): match value: case pattern1: # Code block for pattern1 case pattern2: # Code block for pattern2 case _: # Default case (similar to 'default' in switch-case) Key Components:

• match statement: The equivalent of the switch keyword in other languages.
• case clauses: These represent the individual cases you want to check against, similar to case in switch-case.
• Wildcard (_): Acts as the default case, covering any values that don’t match the specified patterns.

Example: Basic Pattern Matching

Let’s start with a simple example of using match to simulate a switch-case statement that handles different types of user inputs.

Pythondef process_command(command): match command: case "start": return "Starting the system..." case "stop": return "Stopping the system..." case "restart": return "Restarting the system..." case _: return "Unknown command." # Testing the function print(process_command("start")) # Output: Starting the system... print(process_command("pause")) # Output: Unknown command.

In this example:

• The match statement checks the value of command.
• Depending on the matched value, the corresponding message is returned.
• The wildcard (_) case handles any input that doesn’t match the predefined commands, acting as a fallback or default case.

Advanced Pattern Matching

The match statement in Python 3.10 is not limited to simple value matching. It supports more complex patterns, including:

1. Matching Data Structures

You can use pattern matching with lists, tuples, and dictionaries.

Pythondef analyze_shape(shape): match shape: case ("circle", radius): return f"Circle with radius {radius}" case ("rectangle", width, height): return f"Rectangle with width {width} and height {height}" case ("square", side): return f"Square with side {side}" case _: return "Unknown shape" # Testing the function print(analyze_shape(("circle", 5))) # Output: Circle with radius 5 print(analyze_shape(("rectangle", 4, 6))) # Output: Rectangle with width 4 and height 6

2. Matching with Conditions (Guards)

You can add conditions to cases using if statements, known as “guards”.

Python 0: return "Negative number" case n if n == 0: return "Zero" case n if n > 0: return "Positive number" # Testing the function print(categorize_number(-5)) # Output: Negative number print(categorize_number(0)) # Output: Zero print(categorize_number(10)) # Output: Positive number" style="color:#D4D4D4;display:none" aria-label="Copy" class="code-block-pro-copy-button">def categorize_number(number): match number: case n if n < 0: return "Negative number" case n if n == 0: return "Zero" case n if n > 0: return "Positive number" # Testing the function print(categorize_number(-5)) # Output: Negative number print(categorize_number(0)) # Output: Zero print(categorize_number(10)) # Output: Positive number

3. Combining Patterns

You can also combine multiple patterns in a single case using the | (or) operator.

Pythondef get_day_type(day): match day: case "Saturday" | "Sunday": return "Weekend" case "Monday" | "Tuesday" | "Wednesday" | "Thursday" | "Friday": return "Weekday" case _: return "Invalid day" # Testing the function print(get_day_type("Sunday")) # Output: Weekend print(get_day_type("Monday")) # Output: Weekday print(get_day_type("Funday")) # Output: Invalid day

When to Use match Over if-elif-else

While you can still use if-elif-else statements, match provides a cleaner and more readable alternative when dealing with multiple conditions. It’s especially useful when:

• You have a large number of conditions to check.
• You want to match complex data structures.
• You need to execute different code blocks based on the structure of data, not just its value.

By mastering this new feature, you can write cleaner, more maintainable code that can easily adapt to complex logic scenarios.

As you start integrating match into your code, you’ll likely find many situations where it simplifies your conditional logic, making your Python code not only more efficient but also more Pythonic.

The post Understanding the Switch Case Statement in Python 3.10 appeared first on CodersLegacy.

A shiny new release 0.2.4 of pkgKitten arrived on CRAN earlier, and has also been been uploaded to Debian. pkgKitten makes it simple to create new R packages via a simple function invocation. A wrapper kitten.r exists in the littler package to make it even easier.

This release contains several improvements to the (optional) setup of the (wonderful) tinytest package, now supports the (now mandatory) ‘Authors@R’ and polished a few aspect around the package repository and continuous integrations.

The set of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.2.4 (2024-08-30)

• The .Rbuildignore stanza now includes .github

• The support of and usage illustrations of tinytest are much enhanced (Paul Hudor in #18 adressing #19 and #20)

• The .gitignore file now includes C++ related files

• Improvements and polish to badges and continuous integration

• The DESCRIPTION file now contains an Authors@R entry

More details about the package are at the pkgKitten webpage, the pkgKitten docs site, and the pkgKitten GitHub repo.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

It (was) that time of year again - last weekend we hosted a bunch of nice people at our place in Cambridge for the annual Debian UK OMGWTFBBQ!

Lots of friends, lots of good food and drink. Of course lots of geeky discussions about Debian, networking, random computer languages and... screws? And of course some card games to keep us laughing into each night!

Many thanks to a number of awesome friendly people for again sponsoring the important refreshments for the weekend. It's hungry/thirsty work celebrating like this!

• Codethink
• Mythic Beasts

The DropTimes presents a detailed FAQ explaining the transition from 'Drupal' to 'Drupal CMS.' Discover the reasons behind this branding decision, its impact on the Drupal ecosystem, and what it means for developers and users alike.

DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, from July 28th to August 4th 2024 and preceded by DebCamp from July 21st to July 27th. This was my second IRL DebConf (DC) and fourth one in total. I started in Debian with a DebConf, so its always an occassion when one happens.

This year again, I worked in fundraising team, working to raise funds from International sponsors. We did manage to raise good enough funding, albeit less than budgeted. Though, the local Korean team was able to connect and gather many Governmental sponsors, which was quite surprising for me.

I wasn’t seriously considering attending DebConf until I discussed this with Nilesh. More or less his efforts helped push me through the whole process. Thanks Nilesh for this. In March, I got my passport and started preparing documents for South Korean visa. It did require quite a lot of paper work but seeing South Koreas’s fresh passport visa rejection rate, I had doubts about visa acceptance. The visa finally got approved, which could be attributed to great documentation and help from DebConf visa team. This was also my first trip outside India, and this being to DebConf made many thing easy. Most stuff were documentated on DebConf website and wiki. Asking some query got immediate responses from someone in the DebConf channels.

We then booked a direct flight from Delhi, reaching Seoul in the morning. With good directions from Sourab TK who had reached Seoul a few hours earlier, we quickly got Korean Won, local SIM and T Money card (transportation card) and headed towards Seoul by AREX, airport metro. We spent the next two days exploring Seoul, which is huge. It probably has the highest number of skyscrappers I have ever seen. The city has good mix modern and ancient culture. We explored various plaes in Seoul including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Statue of King Sejong, Bukchon Hanok village, N Seoul Tower and various food markets which were amazing.

A Street in Seoul

Next, we to headed to Busan for DebConf using KTX (Korean high speed rail). (Fun fact, slogan for City of Busan is “Busan is Good”.) South Korea has good network of frequently running high speed trains. We had pre-booked our tickets because despite the frequency, trains were sold out most of the times. KTX ride was quite smooth, despite travelling at 300 Kmph at times through Korean countryside and long mountain tunnels.

PKNU Entrance

The venue was for DebConf was Pukyong National University (PKNU), Daeyeon Campus. PKNU had two campuses in the Busan and some folks ended up in wrong campus too. With good help and guidance from front desk, we got our dormitery rooms assigned. Dorms here were quite different ie:

• Rooms had heated floors. It seems to snow in Busan.
• Each area was had card based access. There was a seperate card for laundry too.
• Rooms had announcement systems right inside the room, though we couldn’t decipher any announcement as all of them were in Korean.
• Each room was provided with a dedicated access point and own SSID inside the room.

View from Dorm Room

Settling in was easy and we started meeting familiar folks after almost an year. The long conversations started again. Everyone was excited for DebConf.

Like everytime, first day was full of action (and chaos). Meet and greet, voluneteers checkin, video team running around and fixing stuff and things working (or not). There were some interesting talks and sponsors stalls . After day one, things more or less settled down. I again volunteered for video team stuff and helped in camera operations and talk directions which is always fun. As the tradition applies, saw few talks live on stream too sitting in the dorm room during the conf, which is always fun, when too tired to get ready and go out.

From Talk Director's chair

DebConf takes care of food needs for vegan/vegetration folks well, of which I’m one. I got to try different food items which was quite an experience. Tried using chopsticks again which didn’t work, which I later figured that handling metal ones were more difficult. We had late night ramens and wooden chopsticks worked perfectly. One of the days, we even went out to an Indian resturarent to have some desi aloo paratha, paneer dishes, samosas and chai (milk tea). I wasn’t particularyly craving desi food but wasn’t able to get something according to my taste so went there.

As usual Bits from DPL talk was packed

For daytrip, I went to Ulsan. San means mountains in Korean. Ulsan is a port city with many industries including Hyundai car factory, petrochemical industry, paint industry, ship building etc. We saw bamboo forest, Ulsan tower (quite a view towards Ulsan port), whale village, Ulsan Onggi Museum and the sea (which was beautiful).

The beautiful sea
View from Ulsan Bridge Observatory

Amongst the sponsors, I was most interested in our network sponsors folks who were National research and education networks (NREN) here. We had two network sponsors, KOREN and KREONET, thanks to efforts by local team. Initially it was discussed that they’ll provide 20G uplink each, so 40G in total, which was whopping but by the time the closing talk happened, we got to know we had 200G uplink to the Internet. This was massive update to last year where we had 1G main and 100M backup link. 200G wasn’t what is required but it was massive capacity and IIRC from the talk, we peaked at around 500M in usage but it’s always fun have astronomical amount of bandwidth for bragging rights ;)

Various mascots in attendence
Video and Network stats. Screengrab from closing ceremony

Now lets talk about things I found interesting about South Korea in general:

• Convience stores were everywhere, one could see same brand stores less than kilometer apart. We had even had two of them (GS25(s)), a road cross away too. These places were well stocked with almost everything even alcohol.
• There were wide footpaths and pedestrian friendly policies.
• Public transport and intra modal transfer is convient and easy to figure. Each metro station connects to multiple nearby buildings through underground walkways and one never had to go out in the sun (in hot and humid weather). Also Seoul and Busan metro networks were massive. Same T money card worked for buses (almost hop on, tap and hop off at your destination), metros and even cabs.
• South Korea pays special attention to maintaining their historical and cultural buildings. These venues had informational brochures in Korea, English, Japanese and Chinese.
• We got constant stream of “Public safety alerts” on our phones. Some phones even read them aloud for heatwaves and rains warnings, all in Korean.
• Trash was segrated at source everywhere.
• Public, high speed WIFI was omni-present in malls, public transport, airport etc. In metro, each coach had access points from all three telecom providers (SK Telecom, KT and LG U+) which also had almost similar voice and data plans.
• Police personals were quite helpful despite the language issue.
• Not many folks here are comfortable in English but one can always make use of various mobile translation apps.
• Cards are accepted everywhere and there’re too many of these cards ;)
• Food situation was bit difficult for me as a vegetration. We always have vegan/veg food in DebConf but outside, this whole concept doesn’t seem to exist here.
• I couldn’t find any public speedtest servers inside Korea. All my fast.com/speedtest.net servers were located either Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and even in United States. On the very last day, I got a speedtest servers in Seoul, inside SK Telecom.

Grand Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul
Starfield Library, Seoul

If one has to get the whole DebConf experience, it’s better to attend DebCamp as well because that’s when you can sit and interact with everyone better. As DebConf starts, everyone gets busy in various talks and events and things take a pace. DebConf days literally fly. This year, attending DebConf in person was a different experience. Attending DebConf without any organisational work/stress so was better and I was able to understand working of different Debian team and workflows better while also identified a few where I would like to join and help. A general conclusion was that almost almost all Debian team needs more folks to help out. So if someone want to join, they can probably reach out to team and they would be able to onboard new folks. Though this would require some patience. Kudos to the Korean team who were able to pull of this event under this tight timeline and thanks for all the hospitality.

DebConf23 Group Photo. Click to enlarge.
Credits - Aigars Mahinovs

This whole experience expanded my world view. There’s so much to see and explore and understand. Looking forward to DebConf25 in Brest, France.

The first Kdenlive Café of the year will be on Tuesday, September 3rd at 7PM UTC (9PM CET).

Come chat with the team!

Join us at: https://meet.kde.org/b/far-twm-ebr

The post Kdenlive Café appeared first on Kdenlive.

San Miguel de La Palma Tech Lovers, the meetup group As you probably know, I am the organiser of the meetup group San Miguel de La Palma Tech Lovers, a attempt to bring together the local tech community, remote workers located in the island and digital nomads visiting it. These two last groups are coordinated … Continue reading La Palma Tech Summer 2024 meetup: summary

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-35.

Telegram is neither “secure” nor “encrypted”

Tags: tech, telegram, security, privacy

Here a good reminder that the PR of Telegram is highly misleading. It’s not very secure, they don’t really care about your privacy.

https://rys.io/en/171.html

How Telegram’s Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr

Tags: tech, telegram, law

Yes, such an arrest is concerning. Now, lots of people are voicing the wrong concerns… this article actually does a good job explaining it.

https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/

Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?

Tags: tech, foss, values, licensing, fundraising

I’m not sure the “bubble” comparison properly applies. Still there are indeed signs of the Open Source movement getting in troubles. It’ll be all the more important to stick to the Free Software values.

https://tarakiyee.com/is-the-open-source-bubble-about-to-burst/

Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

Tags: tech, foss, licensing

It’s about time… I wish they would have gone for the AGPL + proprietary double license scheme instead of their odd licenses the last time.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-again

Top Programming Languages 2024 - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, language

Interesting to see Typescript and Rust picking up pace slowly. Otherwise Python, Java, Javascript and C++ are still the big four overall. For jobs, C# and SQL are good to have in your tool belt.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024

What RSS Needs

Tags: tech, rss

Very good list of the challenges ahead for RSS as a popular protocol. It’d be great to see some of it being tackled.

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/08/25/feeds

OpenSSH Backdoors

Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, linux

Interesting comparison between old attempts at backdooring OpenSSH and the latest xz attempt. There are lessons to be learned from this. It makes a good case for starting to sandbox everything.

https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/

Bypassing airport security via SQL injection

Tags: tech, security, airline

Woops, this was clearly a very bad security issue allowing to completely bypass airport security screening in the US.

https://ian.sh/tsa

SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL

Tags: tech, databases, sql

Looks like an interesting way to improve SQL. This feels like a nice extension, it’s much better than throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

https://research.google/pubs/sql-has-problems-we-can-fix-them-pipe-syntax-in-sql/

Python’s Preprocessor

Tags: tech, programming, python, metaprogramming

Interesting to see how far you can go preprocessing Python.

https://pydong.org/posts/PythonsPreprocessor/

Don’t use complex expressions in if conditions | Volodymyr Gubarkov

Tags: tech, programming, maintenance

Definitely a good advice, I see very complex expressions in if (or while BTW) conditions way too often. They tend to accumulate over time.

https://maximullaris.com/if_condition.html

Why Playwright is less flaky than Selenium

Tags: tech, web, frontend, tests, performance, reliability

Interesting reason which would explain the Selenium flakiness. It’s just harder to write tests with race conditions using Playwright.

https://justin.searls.co/links/2024-08-29-why-playwright-is-less-flaky-than-selenium/

Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog

Tags: tech, monitoring, reliability, debugging

How to avoid drowning in errors when getting serious about monitoring. Finding class of errors and treating them one by one will definitely help.

https://blog.danslimmon.com/2024/08/15/putting-a-meaningful-dent-in-your-error-backlog/

There can’t be only one

Tags: tech, design, databases

A weird detour via baseball obscure rules to justify why we should pay attention to the “Highlander problem”. This should be kept in mind especially for designing databases.

https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2024/aug/27/highlander-problem/

Building with purpose

Tags: tech, business, architecture

Definitely something architects should do more. Understanding the business needs should be the input to the technical decisions. Otherwise you might just happily build the wrong thing.

https://cremich.cloud/building-with-purpose

Bye for now!

Qt/.NET is a proposed toolkit for interoperability between C++ and .NET, including a Qt-based custom native host for managed assemblies, as well as a native-to-managed adapter module that provides higher-level interoperability services such as object life-cycle management, instance method invocation and event notification.

57th issue of Andrei Neagoie's must-read monthly Python Newsletter

Review: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher: Tor Copyright: 2023 ISBN: 1-250-24410-2 Format: Kindle Pages: 116

Thornhedge is a fantasy novella by T. Kingfisher, the pen name that Ursula Vernon uses for her adult writing. It won the 2024 Hugo Award for best novella. No matter how much my brain wants to misspell the title, it is a story about a hedge, not a Neolithic earthwork.

The fairy was the greenish-tan color of mushroom stems and her skin bruised blue-black, like mushroom flesh. She had a broad, frog-like face and waterweed hair. She was neither beautiful nor made of malice, as many of the Fair Folk are said to be.

There is a princess asleep in a tower, surrounded by a wall of thorns. Toadling's job is to keep anyone from foolishly breaking in. At first, it was a constant struggle and all that she could manage, but with time, the flood of princes slowed to a trickle. A road was built and abandoned. People fled. There was a plague. With any luck, the tower was finally forgotten.

Then a knight shows up. Not a very rich knight, nor a very successful knight. Just a polite and very persistent knight who wants to get into the tower that Toadling does not want him to get into.

As you might have guessed, this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. As you may have also guessed from the author, or from the cover text that says "not all curses should be broken," this version is a bit different. How and why it departs from the original is a surprise that slowly unfolds over the course of the story, in parallel to a delicate, cautious, and delightfully kind-hearted conversation between the knight and the fairy.

If you have read a T. Kingfisher story before, particularly one of her fractured fairy tales, you know what to expect. Toadling is one of her typical well-meaning, earnest, slightly awkward protagonists who is just trying to do the right thing in a confusing world full of problems and dangers. She's constantly overwhelmed and yet she keeps going, because what else is there to do. Like a lot of Kingfisher's writing, it's a story about quiet courage from someone who doesn't consider herself courageous. One of the twists this time is that the knight is a character from a similar vein: doggedly unwilling to leave any problem alone, but equally determined to try to be kind. The two of them together make for a story with a gentle and rather melancholy tone.

We do, eventually, learn the whole backstory of the tower, the wall of thorns, and Toadling. There is a god, a rather memorable one, who is frustratingly cryptic in the way that gods are. There are monsters who are more loving than most humans. There are humans who turn out to be surprisingly decent when it matters. And, like most of Kingfisher's writing, there is a constant awareness of how complicated the world is, how full it is of people who are just trying to get through each day, and how heavy of burdens people can shoulder when they don't see another way.

This story pulled me right in. It is not horror, although there are a few odd bits like there always are in Kingfisher stories. Your largest risk as a reader is that it might make you cry if stories about earnest people doing their best in overwhelming situations hit you that way. My primary complaint is that there was nowhere near enough ending for me. After everything I learned about the characters, I wanted to spend some time with them outside of the bounds of the story. Kingfisher points the reader in a direction and then leaves the rest to your imagination, and I can see why she chose that story construction, but I wanted more catharsis than I got.

That complaint aside, this is quintessential T. Kingfisher, and I am unsurprised that it won a Hugo. If you've read any of her other fractured fairy tales, or the 2023 Hugo winner for best novel, you know the sort of stories she tells, and you probably know whether you will like this. I am one of the people who like this.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Warning: If you're not into meat, you might want to skip the rest of this...

This year, I turned 50. Wow. Lots of friends and family turned up to help me celebrate, with a BBQ (of course!). I was very grateful for a lovely set of gifts from those awesome people, and I have a number of driving experiences to book in the next year or so. I'm going to have so much fun driving silly cars on and off road!

However, the most surprising gift was something totally different - a full-day course of hands-on pork butchery. I was utterly bemused - I've never considered doing anything like this at all, and I'd certainly never talked to friends about like it either. I was shocked, but in a good way!

So, two weekends back Jo and I went over to Empire Farm in Somerset. We stayed nearby so we could be ready on-site early on Sunday morning, and then we joined three other people doing the course. Jo was there to observe, i.e. to watch and take (lots of!) pictures.

I can genuinely say that this was the most fun surprise gift I've ever received! David Coldman, the master butcher working with us, has been in the industry for many years. He was an excellent teacher, showing us everything we needed to know and being very patient with us when we needed it. It was great to hear his philosophy too - he only uses the very best locally-sourced meat and focuses on quality over quantity. He showed us all the different cuts of pork that a butcher will make, and we were encouraged to take everything home - no waste here!

At the beginning of the day, we each started with half a pig. Over the next several hours, we steadily worked our way through a series of cuts with knife and saw, making the remaining pig smaller and smaller as we went.

We finished the day with three sets of meat. First, a stack of vacuum-packed joints, chops and steaks ready for cooking and eating at home. Second: a box of off-cuts that we minced and made into sausages at the end of the day. Finally: a bag of skin and bones. Our friend's dog got some of the bones, and Jo turned a lot of the skin into crackling that we shared with friends at the OMGWTFBBQ the next weekend.

This was an amazing day. Massive thanks to my good friend Chris Walker for suggesting this gift. As I told David on the day: this was the most fun surprise gift I've ever received. Good hands-on teaching in a new craft is an incredible thing to experience, and I can't recommend this course highly enough.