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In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of generating images with DALL·E by OpenAI API using Python.

By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how to use the OpenAI Python library, make API calls related to image generation, create images from text prompts, create variations of an image, and convert Base64 strings to PNG image files.

[ 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 ]

Mobile Apps Powered by Drupal Backend (Android, iOS) Editor Mon, 09/02/2024 - 13:24

There are new CMSs coming into the market almost every year. Aggregation of ratings and other dull figures are carried out to see how they match with each other. However, there is a solo survivor – Drupal among the rest. While this CMS has competed for the Viewers' Choice Awards for the last 10 years, its ratings have not ceased to soar. It has been used to build sites for UNICEF, Teach for America (website of the US Department of Education), Le Figaro (a well-known French newspaper), and others.

Airport integrations in Python 2024-09-02, by Dariusz Suchojad

Did you know you can use Python as an integration platform for your airport systems? It's Open Source too.

From AODB, transportation, business operations and partner networks, to IoT, cloud and hybrid deployments, you can now use Python to build flexible, scalable and future-proof architectures that integrate your airport systems and support your master plan.

➤ Read here about what is possible and learn more why Python and Open Source are the right choice.

More blog posts➤

Drupal and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) kanapatrick Mon, 09/02/2024 - 09:52

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) provide an enhanced user experience by combining the features of web and mobile applications. For Drupal developers, integrating a PWA can transform a website into a high-performance mobile application. This article offers a technical approach to achieving this integration.

Kdenlive 24.08 is out, and while summer is usually a quieter time for the team, this update comes packed with nifty new features, enhancements, and quality-of-life improvements, specially for Effects and Transitions. This version boosts performance in sequence playback and timeline preview rendering, improves handling of transcoding issues when importing large amounts of clips, adds VAAPI transcode profiles, and fixes GPU transcoding for Nvidia. On the packaging front, Whisper support has been improved for both Windows and macOS while also improving theming issues on all platforms.

 

Effects and Transitions

This release comes with many improvements to Effects and Transitions that were made possible thanks to your contributions to our fundraiser.

  User Interface

This version comes with a revamped user interface for all effect controls, resulting in a cleaner look and more efficient usage of space.

  Easing Modes

In addition to the existing easing modes (linear, smooth, and constant), we’ve added several new options like: Cubic In/Out, Exponential In/Out, Circular In/Out, Elastic In/Out, and Bounce In/Out for transitions and effects.

 

 

  Effect Groups

The new Effect Groups feature enables you to control and apply changes to all clips within a group or selection, making the effect editing process more flexible.

 

  Transform Effect UX

This release brings  several enhancements to the Transform effect, improving both usability and functionality. The handles’ visuals have been refined by adding more control points for easier adjustments. Now, you can move the frame from anywhere inside it, with the handles automatically disappearing during the move for a cleaner view. Also holding Alt+Click lets you cycle through clips without needing to select them in the timeline. We’ve also added a grid to the monitor, allowing clips to snap into place while moving.

  Curve Editor

This version introduces an initial prototype of the highly anticipated curve editor for keyframes. Please note that it is in a very alpha state and is not ready for production.

 

 

Other Highlights

This release includes over 130 commits. Here are a few highlights:

• Fixed many Python related issues
• Fixed Titles background issues
• Added timestamps to undo commands
• Fixed many crashes in various operations
• Add Actions to quickly add Marker/Guides in a specific category
• Run callback server for OAuth2 only if necessary.
• Fixed issues with custom Clip Jobs
• Fixed audio recording regressions

Full Changelog

• Fix Whisper / numpy version on Mac. Commit.
• Try to fix venv on Mac. Commit.
• Fix monitor data lost on switch from/to fullscreen on Windows. Commit. See bug #490708.
• Improve default track height calculation. Commit. See bug #490869.
• Ensure qtblend composition is always preferred to cairoblend unless specifically requested by user. Commit. See bug #491628.
• Better syntax for package check. Patch by Philippe Fremy. Commit.
• Fix effectstack view keeps scrolling when mouse leaves. Commit.
• Improve drag and drop of effects, don’t create 2 separate entries on dropping effect from list. Commit.
• Fix effect stack scroll on drag. Commit.
• Stop dragging effect stack when mouse is outside of the widget. Commit.
• Fix reuse. Commit.
• Fix some effect names not translated. Commit. Fixes bug #491438.
• Fix python venv on Windows. Commit.
• Fix possible crash on python install and enforce correct packages for Windows Whisper. Commit. See bug #490661.
• Switch openai installer to python requirements files, allowing to fix numpy error on Windows. Commit. See bug #491350.
• Fix rendering progress sometimes incorrect. Commit. See bug #490146.
• Fix NVidia transcoding of 10bit videos (convert to 8bit). Commit.
• Default to GPU transcoding if available. Commit.
• Fix incorrect param in audio thumb introduced in recent commit. Commit.
• Minor optimization for preview render. Commit.
• Fix titler incorrect background scale. Commit.
• Fix subtitle widget size on AppImage. Commit.
• Fix detection of build in MLT lumas. Commit.
• Fix subtitle widget using too much space. Commit.
• When doing an extract operation on all tracks and guides are not locked, move / delete the guides accordingly. Commit. See bug #490020.
• Fix titler background is pixelated. Commit. Fixes bug #431606.
• Fix deleting several single selection items sometimes deletes an unselected clip. Commit.
• Make audio only render faster. Commit. See bug #491109.
• Add video only vaapi transcode profile. Commit.
• Don’t start proxy/audio tasks if a clip requires transcoding. Commit.
• First round of fixes for task manager. Commit.
• Add vaapi transcoding profile. Commit.
• Fix crash in task manager. Commit.
• Separate file for audio tracks fixes: Fix muted tracks exported, don’t export audio for video render. Commit. See bug #491108.
• Fix timeline scrolling down by a few pixels when already at the bottom when using rubberband or spacer. Commit. Fixes bug #490956.
• Ensure missing timeline clips all have the “Invalid” markup text. Commit.
• Fix crash cutting missing timeline clip. Commit.
• Fix possible crash in keyframe editor. Commit.
• Scroll effect stack view when dragging an effect. Commit.
• Fix crash adding/editing keyframes on tracks/master when using group effects feature. Commit.
• Fix possible QT debug crash on paste. Commit.
• Add Actions to quickly add Marker/Guides in a specific category. Commit.
• Fix loading sequence clip broken by last commit. Commit.
• Fix single selection resize affecting other grouped items. Commit.
• Add a control uuid to each bin clip to ensure clips can not get mixed on project opening. Commit.
• Fix crash after undo spacer move with guides. Commit.
• Fix transform keyframe center seeking outside clip. Commit.
• Fix crash pasting single selected clip. Commit. Fixes bug #490370.
• Fix track effects cannot be deleted if “group effect” feature is enabled. Commit.
• Updating a bin clip (name, tag) should be applied to all timelines, not only the current one. Commit.
• Slightly better adjustment of tracks in multicam view for more than 4 tracks. Commit.
• Make multitrack tool operate on inactive tracks as well. Commit. See bug #489981.
• Fix color theme menu not showing active theme. Commit. Fixes bug #489958.
• Fix cannot restore audio after saving project with master muted. Commit. Fixes bug #489985.
• Fix crash transcoding an audio only clip. Commit.
• Generating comobox box from mlt enumeration parameters in generic effect UI. Commit.
• Add createdate to dynamic text keywords and some tooltip info. Commit. See bug #489119.
• Update SoK file copyright. Commit.
• Implement keyframe curve editor. Commit.
• Fix transcoding sometimes results in vfr clips. Commit.
• Fix avgblur minimum value for x offset. Commit.
• Add sliders to keyframe import offset (Fixes #1884). Commit.
• Update include/exclude lists with latest status. Commit.
• Allow Effects/Compositions widgets to be smaller. Commit.
• Consistently use USE_DBUS in CMake. Commit.
• Monitor qml overlay: don’t allow editing effect if timeline cursor is outside effect. Commit.
• Get rid of ugly public/private hack in tests. Commit.
• In comments, replace en_GB words “colour” and “analyse” with en_US versions. Commit.
• Rename CMake option for DBus from NODBUS to USE_DBUS. Commit.
• Nicer monitor handles for transform effect, don’t allow invalid rect on resize. Commit.
• [cmd rendering] Ensure proper kdenlive_render path for AppImage. Commit.
• [nightly flatpak] update otio. Commit.
• Explicitly mention that QT’s major version in MLT must match the one used for Kdenlive. Commit.
• Fix undo move effect up/down. On effect move, also move the active index, increase margins between effects. Commit.
• Fix removing a composition from favorites. Commit.
• Properly activate effect when added to a timeline clip. Commit.
• Transform effect: allow moving frame from anywhere inside it, hide handles on move. Commit.
• Fix spacer tool can move backwards and overlap existing clips. Commit.
• Transform effect: add top, bottom, left, right handles. Commit.
• Add easing method to video fades. Commit.
• Transform effect: fix handles move on click. Commit.
• Transform effect: when working in timeline with several clips using a transform effect, Alt+Click allows cycling through the clips. Commit.
• [nightly flatpak] Switch to llvm18. Commit.
• Add grid to monitor effects scene (it snaps). Commit.
• Run callback server for OAuth2 only if necessary. Commit.
• Fix extra dash added to custom clip job output. Commit. See bug #487115.
• Fix include list license. Commit.
• Fix usage of QUrl for LUT lists. Commit. See bug #487375.
• Rename include/exclude lists. Commit.
• For Qt5 require at least KF 5.115.0, for Qt6 KF 6.0.0. Commit.
• Allow custom whitelist files for effects / compositions (no ui yet). Commit.
• Fix startup crash on KF 6.3. Commit.
• Fix missing whitelist license. Commit.
• Implement effects whitelist (WIP). Commit.
• Fix default keyframe type referencing the old deprecated smooth type. Commit.
• Warn if custom clip job contains uneven number of quotes. Commit.
• Be more clever splitting custom ffmpeg commands around quotes. Commit. See bug #487115.
• Fix effect name focus in save effect. Commit. See bug #486310.
• Fix tests. Commit.
• Fix selection when cutting an unselected clip under mouse. Commit.
• Add timestamp to undo commands. Commit.
• Fix loading timeline clip with disabled stack should be disabled. Commit.
• Fix crash trying to save effect with slash in name. Commit. Fixes bug #487224.
• Remove quotes in custom clip jobe, fix progress display. Commit. See bug #487115.
• Replace custom style menu by new KStyleManager menu. Commit.
• Use KIconTheme::initTheme & KStyleManager::initStyle for proper styling. Commit.
• Fix setting sequence thumbnail from clip monitor. Commit.
• ClipJob: fix typo. Commit.
• ClipJob: correct and update info and whatsthis. Commit. See bug #487115.
• Fix locked track items don’t have red background on project open. Commit.
• Fix spacer tool doing fake moves with clips in locked tracks. Commit.
• Hide timeline clip status tooltip when mouse leaves. Commit.
• UI files: use notr=”true” instead of old comment=”KDE::DoNotExtract”. Commit.
• Fix wrong FFmpeg chapter export TIMEBASE. Commit. Fixes bug #487019.
• Fix tests build. Commit.
• With Qt6 the breeze-icons *.rcc files are no longer delivered. Commit.
• Code Gardening: split main() into logical pieces. Commit.
• Create sequence thumbs directly from bin clip producer. Commit.
• Play monitor on click – make configurable. Commit.
• Fix opening documentation link for shuttle on Windows. Commit.
• Fix merge error. Commit.
• Typo for build command: ninja is use in the cmake command, so sudo ninja install should be used. Commit.
• JogShuttle, add note and link for installation on Windows. Commit. Fixes bug #485602.
• Optimize playback of sequence clips (don’t default to rgba format which triggers expansive compositing checks). Commit.
• Correct typo “file exist” → “file exists”. Commit.
• Draft: Clarify that the remaining time calculation is an estimation. Commit.
• Fix tests warnings. Commit.
• Improve user feedback. Commit.
• Audio record: allow playing timeline when monitoring, clicking track rec… Commit. See bug #486198. See bug #485660.
• Feat: Implement effect groups. Commit.
• Work/audio rec fixes. Commit.
• Add multi-format rendering. Commit.
• Ensure Docks are correctly sorted in view menu. Commit.

The post Kdenlive 24.08.0 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

A small showcase of accessibility improvements made to the PyData Sphinx Theme, Fall 2023-Spring 2024

Dear Debian community,

this are my bits from DPL for August.

Happy Birthday Debian

On 16th of August Debian celebrated its 31th birthday. Since I'm unable to write a better text than our great publicity team I'm simply linking to their article for those who might have missed it:

https://bits.debian.org/2024/08/debian-turns-31.html

Removing more packages from unstable

Helmut Grohne argued for more aggressive package removal and sought consensus on a way forward. He provided six examples of processes where packages that are candidates for removal are consuming valuable person-power. I’d like to add that the Bug of the Day initiative (see below) also frequently encounters long-unmaintained packages with popcon votes sometimes as low as zero, and often fewer than ten.

Helmut's email included a list of packages that would meet the suggested removal criteria. There was some discussion about whether a popcon vote should be included in these criteria, with arguments both for and against it. Although I support including popcon, I acknowledge that Helmut has a valid point in suggesting it be left out.

While I’ve read several emails in agreement, Scott Kitterman made a valid point "I don't think we need more process. We just need someone to do the work of finding the packages and filing the bugs." I agree that this is crucial to ensure an automated process doesn’t lead to unwanted removals. However, I don’t see "someone" stepping up to file RM bugs against other maintainers' packages. As long as we have strict ownership of packages, many people are hesitant to touch a package, even for fixing it. Asking for its removal might be even less well-received. Therefore, if an automated procedure were to create RM bugs based on defined criteria, it could help reduce some of the social pressure.

In this aspect the opinion of Niels Thykier is interesting: "As much as I want automation, I do not mind the prototype starting as a semi-automatic process if that is what it takes to get started."

The urgency of the problem to remove packages was put by CharlesPlessy into the words: "So as of today, it is much less work to keep a package rotting than removing it." My observation when trying to fix the Bug of the Day exactly fits this statement.

I would love for this discussion to lead to more aggressive removals that we can agree upon, whether they are automated, semi-automated, or managed by a person processing an automatically generated list (supported by an objective procedure). To use an analogy: I’ve found that every image collection improves with aggressive pruning. Similarly, I’m convinced that Debian will improve if we remove packages that no longer serve our users well.

DEP14 / DEP18

There are two DEPs that affect our workflow for maintaining packages—particularly for those who agree on using Git for Debian packages. DEP-14 recommends a standardized layout for Git packaging repositories, which benefits maintainers working across teams and makes it easier for newcomers to learn a consistent repository structure.

DEP-14 stalled for various reasons. Sam Hartman suspected it might be because 'it doesn't bring sufficient value.' However, the assumption that git-buildpackage is incompatible with DEP-14 is incorrect, as confirmed by its author, Guido Günther. As one of the two key tools for Debian Git repositories (besides dgit) fully supports DEP-14, though the migration from the previous default is somewhat complex.

Some investigation into mass-converting older formats to DEP-14 was conducted by the Perl team, as Gregor Hermann pointed out..

The discussion about DEP-14 resurfaced with the suggestion of DEP-18. Guido Günther proposed the title Encourage Continuous Integration and Merge Request-Based Collaboration for Debian Packages’, which more accurately reflects the DEP's technical intent.

Otto Kekäläinen, who initiated DEP-18 (thank you, Otto), provided a good summary of the current status. He also assembled a very helpful overview of Git and GitLab usage in other Linux distros.

More Salsa CI

As a result of the DEP-18 discussion, Otto Kekäläinen suggested implementing Salsa CI for our top popcon packages.

I believe it would be a good idea to enable CI by default across Salsa whenever a new repository is created.

Progress in Salsa migration

In my campaign, I stated that I aim to reduce the number of packages maintained outside Salsa to below 2,000. As of March 28, 2024, the count was 2,368. Today, it stands at 2,187 (UDD query: SELECT DISTINCT count(*) FROM sources WHERE release = 'sid' and vcs_url not like '%salsa%' ;).

After a third of my DPL term (OMG), we've made significant progress, reducing the amount in question (369 packages) by nearly half. I'm pleased with the support from the DDs who moved their packages to Salsa. Some packages were transferred as part of the Bug of the Day initiative (see below).

Bug of the Day

As announced in my 'Bits from the DPL' talk at DebConf, I started an initiative called Bug of the Day. The goal is to train newcomers in bug triaging by enabling them to tackle small, self-contained QA tasks. We have consistently identified target packages and resolved at least one bug per day, often addressing multiple bugs in a single package.

In several cases, we followed the Package Salvaging procedure outlined in the Developers Reference. Most instances were either welcomed by the maintainer or did not elicit a response. Unfortunately, there was one exception where the recipient of the Package Salvage bug expressed significant dissatisfaction. The takeaway is to balance formal procedures with consideration for the recipient’s perspective.

I'm pleased to confirm that the Matrix channel has seen an increase in active contributors. This aligns with my hope that our efforts would attract individuals interested in QA work. I’m particularly pleased that, within just one month, we have had help with both fixing bugs and improving the code that aids in bug selection.

As I aim to introduce newcomers to various teams within Debian, I also take the opportunity to learn about each team's specific policies myself. I rely on team members' assistance to adapt to these policies. I find that gaining this practical insight into team dynamics is an effective way to understand the different teams within Debian as DPL.

Another finding from this initiative, which aligns with my goal as DPL, is that many of the packages we addressed are already on Salsa but have not been uploaded, meaning their VCS fields are not published. This suggests that maintainers are generally open to managing their packages on Salsa. For packages that were not yet on Salsa, the move was generally welcomed.

Publicity team wants you

The publicity team has decided to resume regular meetings to coordinate their efforts. Given my high regard for their work, I plan to attend their meetings as frequently as possible, which I began doing with the first IRC meeting.

During discussions with some team members, I learned that the team could use additional help. If anyone interested in supporting Debian with non-packaging tasks reads this, please consider introducing yourself to debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. Note that this is a publicly archived mailing list, so it's not the best place for sharing private information.

Kind regards Andreas.

This is the second part of a series of articles looking at the Batch API in Drupal. The Batch API is a system in Drupal that allows data to be processed in small chunks in order to prevent timeout errors or memory problems.

In the previous article we looked at how to setup the batch process using a form, with the batch methods being contained within the structure of the form class. When the form was submitted the batch process ran through 1,000 items and then printed out a result at the end.

Whilst there is nothing wrong with running the Batch API with everything in a form class, it is normally better to abstract the batch processing code into a separate class.

Using a separate batch class to contain the process and finish methods is a much better way of setting things up as it allows you to abstract away the batch process from the action that starts it. This means that you can start the batch from anywhere, even a Drush command.

Allowing you batch processes to be run via Drush is a really powerful feature for a module to include. It means that any big process that can be run by a user can be run automatically via a Drush command.

The Batch Class

To create a batch class I normally create a directory called "Batch" inside the module "/src" directory that contains any batch class I need to define. The contents of the class are the two batch methods from the form class used previously, namely the batchProcess() and batchFinished() methods.

The following shows the basic structure of this class.

Read more

All but about four hours of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. (I ended up going a bit over my 20% billing limit this month.)

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay.

man-db and friends

I released libpipeline 1.5.8 and man-db 2.13.0.

Since autopkgtests are great for making sure we spot regressions caused by changes in dependencies, I added one to man-db that runs the upstream tests against the installed package. This required some preparatory work upstream, but otherwise was surprisingly easy to do.

OpenSSH

I fixed the various 9.8 regressions I mentioned last month: socket activation, libssh2, and Twisted. There were a few other regressions reported too: TCP wrappers support, openssh-server-udeb, and xinetd were all broken by changes related to the listener/per-session binary split, and I fixed all of those.

Once all that had made it through to testing, I finally uploaded the first stage of my plan to split out GSS-API support: there are now openssh-client-gssapi and openssh-server-gssapi packages in unstable, and if you use either GSS-API authentication or key exchange then you should install the corresponding package in order for upgrades to trixie+1 to work correctly. I’ll write a release note once this has reached testing.

Multiple identical results from getaddrinfo

I expect this is really a bug in a chroot creation script somewhere, but I haven’t been able to track down what’s causing it yet. My sbuild chroots, and apparently Lucas Nussbaum’s as well, have an /etc/hosts that looks like this:

$ cat /var/lib/schroot/chroots/sid-amd64/etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.1 [...] 127.0.0.1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback

The last line clearly ought to be ::1 rather than 127.0.0.1; but things mostly work anyway, since most code doesn’t really care which protocol it uses to talk to localhost. However, a few things try to set up test listeners by calling getaddrinfo("localhost", ...) and binding a socket for each result. This goes wrong if there are duplicates in the resulting list, and the test output is typically very confusing: it looks just like what you’d see if a test isn’t tearing down its resources correctly, which is a much more common thing for a test suite to get wrong, so it took me a while to spot the problem.

I ran into this in both python-asyncssh (#1052788, upstream PR) and Ruby (ruby3.1/#1069399, ruby3.2/#1064685, ruby3.3/#1077462, upstream PR). The latter took a while since Ruby isn’t one of my languages, but hey, I’ve tackled much harder side quests. I NMUed ruby3.1 for this since it was showing up as a blocker for openssl testing migration, but haven’t done the other active versions (yet, anyway).

OpenSSL vs. cryptography

I tend to care about openssl migrating to testing promptly, since openssh uploads have a habit of getting stuck on it otherwise.

Debian’s OpenSSL packaging recently split out some legacy code (cryptography that’s no longer considered a good idea to use, but that’s sometimes needed for compatibility) to an openssl-legacy-provider package, and added a Recommends on it. Most users install Recommends, but package build processes don’t; and the Python cryptography package requires this code unless you set the CRYPTOGRAPHY_OPENSSL_NO_LEGACY=1 environment variable, which caused a bunch of packages that build-depend on it to fail to build.

After playing whack-a-mole setting that environment variable in a few packages’ build process, I decided I didn’t want to be caught in the middle here and filed an upstream issue to see if I could get Debian’s OpenSSL team and cryptography’s upstream talking to each other directly. There was some moderately spirited discussion and the issue remains open, but for the time being the OpenSSL team has effectively reverted the change so it’s no longer a pressing problem.

GCC 14 regressions

Continuing from last month, I fixed build failures in pccts (NMU) and trn4.

Python team

I upgraded alembic, automat, gunicorn, incremental, referencing, pympler (fixing compatibility with Python >= 3.10), python-aiohttp, python-asyncssh (fixing CVE-2023-46445, CVE-2023-46446, and CVE-2023-48795), python-avro, python-multidict (fixing a build failure with GCC 14), python-tokenize-rt, python-zipp, pyupgrade, twisted (fixing CVE-2024-41671 and CVE-2024-41810), zope.exceptions, zope.interface, zope.proxy, zope.security, zope.testrunner. In the process, I added myself to Uploaders for zope.interface; I’m reasonably comfortable with the Zope Toolkit and I seem to be gradually picking up much of its maintenance in Debian.

A few of these required their own bits of yak-shaving:

• python-aiohttp 3.10.0 needed fixes in blinkpy (#1077981, upstream PR) and python-yalexs (#1077985, upstream PR).
• twisted 24.7.0 needed fixes in pytest-twisted (cherry-picked existing upstream commit), python-daphne (cherry-picked existing upstream PR), and python-tornado (#1078411, upstream PR).

I improved some Multi-Arch: foreign tagging (python-importlib-metadata, python-typing-extensions, python-zipp).

I fixed build failures in pipenv, python-stdlib-list, psycopg3, and sen, and fixed autopkgtest failures in autoimport (upstream PR), python-semantic-release and rstcheck.

Upstream for zope.file (not in Debian) filed an issue about a test failure with Python 3.12, which I tracked down to a Python 3.12 compatibility PR in zope.security.

I made python-nacl build reproducibly (upstream PR).

I moved aliased files from / to /usr in timekpr-next (#1073722).

Installer team

I applied a patch from Ubuntu to make os-prober support building with the noudeb profile (#983325).

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month.

Quite a bit of time went into helping organize the FrOSCon FOSS on Mobile dev room (day 1, day 2, summary) but that was all worth it and fun - so was releasing Phosh 0.41.0 (which incidetally happened right before FrOScon). A three years old MR to xdg-spec to add call categories landed (thanks Matthias) allowing us to finally provide proper feedback for e.g. IM calls too. The rest was some OSK improvements (around Indic language support via varnam and layout configuration), some Cell Broadcast advancements (thanks to NGI0 for supporting this) but also some fixes. Here's the details:

Phosh

• Debug crash when swiping away keyboard on lockscreen (MR).
• Fix outdated clock when swiping back from lockscreen plugins (MR)
• Avoid deprecation warning (MR)
• Better handle mobile network generation bit masks (MR)
• Improve docs that end up in the libphosh-rs docs (MR)
• Modernize ModemManager backend in preparation for Cellbroadcast support (MR)
• Remove hacks from Cell Broadcast support MR (MR). Still draft but not much todo left once the ModemManager side landed
• Remove deprecated UI props and add a check so they don't creep back in (MR)
• Allow to use ASAN when feedbackd is a subproject (MR)
• Fix crash when Wi-Fi hot spot quick setting gets disabled (MR)
• Don't allow to change hotspot state on the lock screen (MR)
• Prepare and release Phosh 0.41.0~rc1 and Phosh 0.41.0
• Prepare 0.41.1 (MR)

Phoc

• Don't reject gesture when we cross another surface (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Drop redundant enums (MR)
• Remember last used panel (MR)
• Fix initial state of move up/down popovers (MR)
• Allow to select OSK layouts (MR). This ensures only actually available layouts can be selected. Currently used by phosh-osk-stub but can easily be extended to squeekboard once it provides the information.

libphosh-rs

• Allow to run doc build locally and fix CI (MR)
• Release 0.0.2

phosh-osk-stub

• Allow to open OSK Settings panel when screen is not locked (MR)
• Unswap Enter and Backspace (MR)
• Bug fix release 0.41.1
• Use varnam_learn() for better completions in the varnam completer (MR)
• Export layout information (MR)
• Reduce flicker when launching settings (MR)

phosh-wallpapers

• Avoid new event sounds not being picked up due to stale caches (MR)
• Improve phone-hangup sound (MR)

meta-phosh

• Add release helpers (MR)

phosh-recipes

• VM images to test nightly packages https://salsa.debian.org/agx/phosh-recipes (based on Mobian's recipes)

Debian

• Upload Phosh 0.41.0~rc1 and 0.41.0 releases
• Robustify release script a bit (MR)
• Enable binding lib in phosh (MR)
• Move govarnam and varnam schemes packages into the input method team
• Upload varnam schemes to sid (MR)
• Make varnam-schemes reproducible, add autopkgtests and run upstream test during build (MR)
• Build wlroots with xcb-errors support (MR)

Mobian

• Help mobian-recipes with newer debos: (MR)

ModemManager

• Rework most bits of Cell Broadcast to move it closer to undraft status (MR). (Remaining bits affect enabling of unsolicited messages and setting channels).

Calls

• Use official notification category (MR)
• Use AdwAboutDialog (MR)

gnome-bluetooth

• Fix some deprecations (MR)
• Make pairing dialog adaptive (MR)
• Allow to use with Phosh without imposing more API/ABI guarantees (MR

gnome-settings-daemon

• Fix crash when hitting an error condition (which could then bring down the whole session): (MR)

feedbackd

• Install the udev rule via meson (MR to makes it easier for distros to pick up rule changes
• Sync packaging with Debian (MR)
• Document used gsettings (MR)

Chatty

• Update information at matrix.org (MR)
• Implement more unified push bits: (MR
• Document things a bit (MR
• Chase libcmatrix API changes (MR)

Libcmatrix

• More cleanups (MR, MR, MR)
• Publish docs (MR)
• Ship introspection data (MR)
• Release 0.0.2 (MR) (Release announcement)

Eigenvalue

• Catch up with libcmatrix API changes (MR)

kunifiedpush

• Avoid broken URLs when using ntfy (MR)

gir-rustdoc

• Improve error message when not running in CI (MR)

python-dbusmock

• Drop outdated comments (MR)

matrix spec

• propose some hints for Mobile clients (MR)

sound-theme spec

• propose new sound name for cell broadcasts (MR)

varname-schemes

• Make reproducible (MR)
• Don't ignore errors in build scripts (MR)
• Allow to run test against installed schemes (MR
• Fix build with recent ruby (MR)

FroSCon

• Helped a bit to setup the event
• Gave a short Phosh status update

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations. This includes a list of hardware we want to improve support for. Thanks a lot to all current and past donors.

I asked Zyxel for a source dump for GPLed firmware on their GS1900-8HP switches, and after months, they finally obliged (they seemingly had no idea that it should just be, well, available). So I'm dumping it here in case anyone else wants it.

I haven't tried actually building it, but notably, it seems to contain the entire CLI, since they base it on Quagga's vtysh (which is GPL).

In the last month we focused on fixing bugs, improving the behaviour of things, speeding-up performance issues - building on the changes from our last release. We also added some new features which we would like to introduce to you in this newsletter.

For an in depth overview of the Tryton issues please take a look at our issue tracker or see the issues and merge requests filtered by label.

Changes for the User Sales, Purchases and Projects

Now Tryton warns the user when submitting another complaint for the same origin.

Accounting, Invoicing and Payments

Now Tryton allows to copy account moves from closed periods. When copy a move from a closed period we now set the period of the duplicate to the current period and the date to the actual date, while informing the user about the changes.

Stock, Production and Shipments

Our sendcloud integration now adds package weight and warehouse as shipping method criteria.

User Interface

Now we add a searcher for summary fields, which searches the whole description.

We’ve now merged the HTML edit and translate buttons into a single button that asks for the language before opening, with the current language pre-selected.

System Data and Configuration

Now you can configure the license key for TinyMCE.

Now Tryton supports the UTR (United Kingdom Unique Taxpayer Reference) identifier.

New Documentation We've created or updated the following documentations:

• Server Modules (ir, res, report): look-up changes…
• account_es_sii: look-up changes…
• account_invoice_correction: look-up changes…
• account_invoice_history: look-up changes…
• account_invoice_line_standalone: look-up changes…
• account_invoice_secondary_unit: look-up changes…
• account_payment_braintree: look-up changes…
• account_payment_sepa_cfonb: look-up changes…
• account_statement_coda: look-up changes…

New Releases

We released bug fixes for the currently maintained long term support series
7.0 and 6.0, and for the penultimate series 7.2.

Authors: @dave @pokoli @udono

1 post - 1 participant

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Review: Reasons Not to Worry, by Brigid Delaney

Publisher: Harper Copyright: 2022 Printing: October 2023 ISBN: 0-06-331484-3 Format: Kindle Pages: 295

Reasons Not to Worry is a self-help non-fiction book about stoicism, focusing specifically on quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Brigid Delaney is a long-time Guardian columnist who has written on a huge variety of topics, including (somewhat relevantly to this book) her personal experiences trying weird fads.

Stoicism is having a moment among the sort of men who give people life advice in podcast form. Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive, has made a career out of being the face of stoicism in everyone's podcast (and, of course, hosting his own). He is far from alone. If you pay attention to anyone in the male self-help space right now (Cal Newport, in my case), you have probably heard something vague about the "wisdom of the stoics."

Given that the core of stoicism is easily interpreted as a strategy for overcoming your emotions with logic, this isn't surprising. Philosophies that lean heavily on college dorm room logic, discount emotion, and argue that society is full of obvious flaws that can be analyzed and debunked by one dude with some blog software and a free afternoon have been very popular in tech circles for the past ten to fifteen years, and have spread to some extent into popular culture. Intriguingly, though, stoicism is a system of virtue ethics, which means it is historically in opposition to consequentialist philosophies like utilitarianism, the ethical philosophy behind effective altruism and other related Silicon Valley fads.

I am pretty exhausted with the whole genre of men talking to each other about how to live a better life — Cal Newport by himself more than satisfies the amount of that I want to absorb — but I was still mildly curious about stoicism. My education didn't provide me with a satisfying grounding in major historical philosophical movements, so I occasionally look around for good introductions. Stoicism also has some reputation as an anxiety-reduction technique, and I could use more of those. When I saw a Discord recommendation for Reasons Not to Worry that specifically mentioned its lack of bro perspective, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Reasons Not to Worry is indeed not a bro book, although I would have preferred fewer appearances of the author's friend Andrew, whose opinions on stoicism I could not possibly care less about. What it is, though, is a shallow and credulous book that falls squarely in the middle of the lightweight self-help genre. Delaney is here to explain why stoicism is awesome and to convince you that a school of Greek and Roman philosophers knew exactly how you should think about your life today. If this sounds quasi-religious, well, I'll get to that.

Delaney does provide a solid introduction to stoicism that I think is a bit more approachable than reading the relevant Wikipedia article. In her presentation, the core of stoicism is the practice of four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The modern definition of "stoic" as someone who is impassive in the presence of pleasure or pain is somewhat misleading, but Delaney does emphasize a goal of ataraxia, or tranquility of mind. By making that the goal rather than joy or pleasure, stoicism tries to avoid the trap of the hedonic treadmill in favor of a more achievable persistent contentment.

As an aside, some quick Internet research makes me doubt Delaney's summary here. Other material about stoicism I found focuses on apatheia and associates ataraxia with Epicureanism instead. But I won't start quibbling with Delaney's definitions; I'm not qualified and this review is already too long.

The key to ataraxia, in Delaney's summary of stoicism, is to focus only on those parts of life we can control. She summarizes those as our character, how we treat others, and our actions and reactions. Everything else — wealth, the esteem of our colleagues, good health, good fortune — is at least partly outside of our control, and therefore we should enjoy it when we have it but try to be indifferent to whether it will last. Attempting to control things that are outside of our control is doomed to failure and will disturb our tranquility. Essentially all of this book is elaborations and variations on this theme, specialized to some specific area of life like social media, anxiety, or grief and written in the style of a breezy memoir.

If you're familiar with modern psychological treatment frameworks like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, this summary of stoicism may sound familiar. (Apparently this is not an accident; the predecessor to CBT used stoicism as a philosophical basis.) Stoicism, like those treatment approaches, tries to refocus your attention on the things that you can improve and de-emphasizes the things outside of your control. This is a lot of the appeal, at least to me (and I think to Delaney as well).

Hearing that definition, you may have some questions. Why those virtues specifically? They sound good, but all virtues sound good almost by definition. Is there any measure of your success in following those virtues outside your subjective feeling of ataraxia? Does the focus on only things you can control lead to ignoring problems only mostly outside of your control, where your actions would matter but only to a small degree? Doesn't this whole philosophy sound a little self-centered? What do non-stoic virtue ethics look like, and why do they differ from stoicism? What is the consequentialist critique of stoicism?

This is where the shortcomings of this book become clear: Delaney is not very interested in questions like this. There are sections on some of those topics, particularly the relationship between stoicism and social justice, but her treatment is highly unsatisfying. She raises the question, talks about her doubts about stoicism's applicability, and then says that, after further thought, she decided stoicism is entirely consistent with social justice and the stoics were right after all. There is a little bit more explanation than that, but not much. Stoicism can apparently never be wrong; it can only be incompletely understood.

Self-help books often fall short here, and I suspect this may be what the audience wants. Part of the appeal of the self-help genre is artificial certainty. Becoming a better manager, starting a business, becoming more productive, or working out an entire life philosophy are not problems amenable to a highly approachable and undemanding book. We all know that at some level, but the seductive allure of the self-help genre is the promise of simplifying complex problems down to a few approachable bullet points. Here is a life philosophy in a neatly packaged form, and if you just think deeply about its core principles, you will find they can be applied to any situation and any doubts you were harboring will turn out to be incorrect.

I am all too familiar with this pattern because it's also how fundamentalist Christianity works. The second time Delaney talked about her doubts about the applicability of stoicism and then claimed a few pages later that those doubts disappeared with additional thought and discussion, my radar went off. This book was sounding less like a thoughtful examination of one specific philosophy out of many and more like the soothing adoption of religious certainty by a convert. I was therefore entirely unsurprised when Delaney all but says outright in the epilogue that she's adopted stoicism as her religion and approaches it with the same dedicated practice that she used to bring to Catholicism. I think this is where a lot of self-help books end up, although most of them don't admit it.

There's nothing wrong with this, to be clear. It sounds like she was looking for a non-theistic religion, found one that she liked, and is excited to tell other people about it. But it's a profound mismatch with what I was looking for in an introduction to stoicism. I wanted context, history, and a frank discussion of the problems with adopting philosophy to everyday issues. I also wanted some acknowledgment that it is highly unlikely that a few men who lived 2000 years ago in a wildly different social context, and with drastically limited information about cultures other than their own, figured out a foolproof recipe for how to approach life. The subsequent two millennia of philosophical debates prove that stoicism didn't end the argument, and that a lot of other philosophers thought that stoicism got a few things wrong. You would never know that from this book.

What I wanted is outside the scope of this sort of undemanding self-help book, though, and this is the problem that I keep having with philosophy. The books I happen across are either nigh-incomprehensibly dense and academic, or they're simplified into catechism. This was the latter. That's probably more the fault of my reading selection than it is the fault of the book, but it was still annoying.

What I will say for this book, and what I suspect may be the most useful property of self-help books in general, is that it prompts you to think about basic stoic principles without getting in the way of your thoughts. It's like background music for the brain: nothing Delaney wrote was very thorny or engaging, but she kept quietly and persistently repeating the basic stoic formula and turning my thoughts back to it. Some of those thoughts may have been useful? As a source of prompts for me to ponder, Reasons Not to Worry was therefore somewhat successful. The concept of not trying to control things outside of my control is simple but valid, and it probably didn't hurt me to spend a week thinking about it.

"It kind of works as an undemanding meditation aid" is not a good enough reason for me to recommend this book, but maybe that's what someone else is looking for.

Rating: 5 out of 10

 We're doing fairly well: Debian release team have been working really hard on a double point release today. Final release for Bullseye as 11.11 as it moves to LTS.

12.7 Bookworm install media finishing tests - it's been quite a long day so far.

For 11.11 we're part way through media tests.

We've been joined by a lot of enthusiastic folk from Cape Town who've been a great help. Always nice to see old friends and new people join us on IRC - and they've just joined us for a short video call.

This has gone well: two release day media checking and bug-squashing groups on two continents is excellent.

Dear Cape Town - feel free to join us for the next time and we'll hold the video call open for longer. If we don't see any of you here in Cambridge for mini-Debconf, we'll meet up in Brest for Debconf 25.

Bruce Schneier and Kim Córdova wrote an insightful article about the changes that corporations make to culture as technical debt [1]. We need anti-trust laws to be enforced before it’s too late!

Bruce Schneier posted the transcript of an insightful lecture he gave on rethinking democracy for the age of AI [2].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful blog post about companies that are “too big to care” [3]. We need to break up those monopolies.

Science Alert has an interesting article on plans to get renewable energy by drilling into the magma chamber of an active volcano [4]. What I want to know is whether using the energy could reduce the power of an eruption or even prevent it from happening.

Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting article about Crowdstrike and the market incentives for brittle systems [5]. Also we need to have more formally proven software and more use of systems like seL4.

Dave’s Garage on YouTube has an interesting video about modern Mainframes [6]. Their IO capacity dwarfs the memory bandwidth of most PC servers.

Framework has an interesting YouTube video about the process of developing a RISC-V motherboard for their laptops [7].

The documentary series Who Broke Britain by ABC news gives a good insight into the harm caused by austerity policies [8].

Rolling Stone has an interesting story about the consequences of being a CIA agent in al Quaeda [9].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2d49n8al
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/26vnjl6e
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/27njkm72
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/yvrnxq6w
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/298p9zxv
• [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouAG4vXFORc
• [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMwepyyaj8I
• [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW2NSrzcrIQ
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2dfgty8z

Related posts:

1. Links July 2024 Interesting Scientific American article about the way that language shapes...
2. Links June 2024 Modos Labs have released the design of an e-ink display...
3. Links August 2023 This is an interesting idea from Bruce Schneier, an “AI...

 A quick follow up to the last post:

1) I spelled scalable wrong in the title; hopefully it's fixed.

2) The svg partial logo that rendered in Blogger did not render on the Planet Python feed.

3) The logo svg is too big for Blogger. I need to find a way to make a smaller (file size) one.

One more try with svg in Blogger. The png DAG Hamilton logo first:

And one more attempt:

In 2020, Google introduced Core Web Vitals metrics to measure some aspects of real-world user experience on the web. This blog has consistently achieved good scores for two of these metrics: Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint. However, optimizing the third metric, Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures unexpected layout changes, has been more challenging. Let’s face it: optimizing for this metric is not really useful for a site like this one. But getting a better score is always a good distraction. 💯

To prevent the “flash of invisible text” when using web fonts, developers should set the font-display property to swap in @font-face rules. This method allows browsers to initially render text using a fallback font, then replace it with the web font after loading. While this improves the LCP score, it causes content reflow and layout shifts if the fallback and web fonts are not metrically compatible. These shifts negatively affect the CLS score. CSS provides properties to address this issue by overriding font metrics when using fallback fonts: size-adjust, ascent-override, descent-override, and line-gap-override.

Two comprehensive articles explain each property and their computation methods in detail: Creating Perfect Font Fallbacks in CSS and Improved font fallbacks.

Interactive tuning tool

Instead of computing each property from font average metrics, I put together a tool for interactively tuning fallback fonts.1

Instructions

1. Load your custom font.

2. Select a fallback font to tune.

3. Adjust the size-adjust property to match the width of your custom font with the fallback font. With a proportional font, it is not possible to achieve a perfect match.

4. Fine-tune the ascent-override property. Aim to align the final dot of the last paragraph while monitoring the font’s baseline. For more precise adjustment, disable the “Set line height” option.

5. Modify the descent-override property. The goal is to make the two boxes match. You may need to alternate between this and the previous property for optimal results.

6. If necessary, adjust the line-gap-override property. This step is typically not required.

The process needs to be repeated for each fallback font. Some platforms may not include certain fonts. Notably, Android lacks most fonts found in other operating systems. It replaces Georgia with Noto Serif, which is not metrically-compatible.

Tool

This tool is not available from the Atom feed.

Results

For the body text of this blog, I get the following CSS definition:

@font-face { font-family: Merriweather; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; src: url("../fonts/merriweather.woff2") format("woff2"); font-display: swap; } @font-face { font-family: "Fallback for Merriweather"; src: local("Noto Serif"), local("Droid Serif"); size-adjust: 98.3%; ascent-override: 99%; descent-override: 27%; } @font-face { font-family: "Fallback for Merriweather"; src: local("Georgia"); size-adjust: 106%; ascent-override: 90.4%; descent-override: 27.3%; } font-family: Merriweather, "Fallback for Merriweather", serif;

After a month, the CLS metric improved to 0:

Recent Core Web Vitals scores for vincent.bernat.ch About custom fonts

Using safe web fonts or a modern font stack is often simpler. However, I prefer custom web fonts. Merriweather and Iosevka, which are used in this blog, enhance the reading experience. An alternative approach could be to use Georgia as a serif option. Unfortunately, most default monospace fonts are ugly.

Furthermore, paragraphs that combine proportional and monospace fonts can create visual disruption. This occurs due to mismatched vertical metrics or weights. To address this issue, I adjust Iosevka’s metrics and weight to align with Merriweather’s characteristics.

1. Similar tools already exist, like the Fallback Font Generator, but they were missing a few features, such as the ability to load the fallback font or to have decimals for the CSS properties. And no source code. ↩︎

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!