After having participated to both Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy, I ended up going to a few more conferences in September.
I went to Nextcloud Conference just after going back from Akademy. Unfortunately I was quite tired from Akademy and Qt Contributor Summit and I only stayed Saturday morning. Still it was great to meet some old colleagues there.
The Matrix Conference happened the weekend after the Nextcloud conference. This was the first Matrix Conference and a gathering of all types of actors involved in Matrix. From the grassroots community to companies deploying Matrix based solutions to their customers. The NeoChat team was there and we were super productive into bringing back the Android version, thanks to the help of Volker Krause. This resulted in many patches in NeoChat itself but also one patch in Kirigami.
Special mention to the food and coffee offered at the conference, which was always excellent and either vegan or vegetarian. Outside of the venue, food was also execellent with a lot of middle eastern food choice.
Here some photos of the event and the food:
It was my second time going to the Linux Days in Dornbirn and while the weather wasn’t as welcoming as last time, the local Linux community was again super welcoming!
During the event, I did a talk in German about Plasma 6. This was my first time doing a talk in German and I hope I did okay. I also hosted a KDE stand with Simon Österle, who offered his help with the stand. His help has been invaluable to me, so huge thanks to him.
Like last year, after the conference, all helpers, presenters and stand holders went to a local restaurent to enjoy Käsespätzle. It was again delicious.
Here some photos of the event and the food:
This release focuses on SiteSettings feature, so I will try to introduce it here.
This feature tries to enable per site configuration / settings of multiple options per website host / domain. It consist of having global / default options and site / local settings.
These options can be changed for the given site in the “Site Info” dialog.
The default options for HTML5 can be changed in “Preferences > Privacy”
The default QtWebEngine / site options can be changed in the Browsing tab or in place where they where configured until now.
In the preferences it is only possible to change existing modified permissions for given sites. At the moment it is not possible to manually add sites to the list, this can only be done from within “Site Info” dialog.
These features will be done at a later unspecified date.
The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.1.1, the first bugfix release for Amarok 3.1 "Tricks of the Light"!
3.1.1 features a number of small improvements and bug fixes, including miscellaneous fixes for toolbars and the return of tag dialog autocompletions, a functionality that initially got lost during the Qt5/KF5 port. However, most of the work has again happened under the hood to improve the codebase's Qt6/KF6 compatibility. For the 3.2 version coming up later this year, the KDE frameworks dependency will be raised to 5.108. This should allow replacing the remaining deprecated KF5 functionalities; one of the final barriers preventing Qt6/KF6 based builds from succeeding.
In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.1.1 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.
You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.
Three weeks ago, I attended KDE Akademy 2024 in Würzburg, Germany. It was pretty exciting to meet my KDE friends after one year since last Akademy 2023!
Ideally whole trip should’ve taken just ~18 hours door-to-door but thanks to Lufthansa whole travel turned out to be of 48 hours in total including layovers. Flight cancellation and rebooking caused by travel to start way earlier than planned (Thursday 5:00 AM instead of planned 07:00 PM) and had to spend insane amount of time in layover.
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-39.
Tags: tech, matrix, ux
Definitely a big announcement for Matrix. Could it be the beginning of going mainstream? I suspect it’ll be now or never. I’m slightly concerned about the desktop support being apparently ignored, the UX there is far from great still.
https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-server-suite-are-ready/
Tags: tech, mozilla, privacy, surveillance, gdpr
It was to be expected that complaints against Mozilla could happen in Europe. They’ve been asking for it lately…
https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-feature
Tags: tech, data, culture, history, ecology
Excellent piece, we’re a civilisation whose culture is built on shifting sands and… toy plastics. Guess what will survive us?
https://lilysthings.org/blog/no-data-lasts-forever/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism, law
This is clearly less high profile than the Scarlett Johanssen vs OpenAI one. Still this shows it has the potential to become a widespread (even though shady) practice. This might need some regulation fairly soon.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/they-stole-my-voice-ai
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, science
This is indeed important to be able to run such models locally. Will still require more optimization but it’s slowly getting there. The reproducibility it brings is especially necessary for science.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02998-y
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security, safety
People are putting LLM related feature out there too hastily for my taste. At least they should keep in mind the security and safety implications.
https://owasp.org/www-project-top-10-for-large-language-model-applications/
Tags: tech, automotive, security
Could we just stop connecting cars with web access for features we don’t really need? Please?
https://www.wired.com/story/kia-web-vulnerability-vehicle-hack-track/
Tags: tech, c++, security, safety
Lots of good stuff definitely coming. This should definitely help make it more approachable to lots of people.
https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2024/blob/main/Presentations/Peering_Forward_Cpps_Next_Decade.pdf
Tags: tech, c++, rust, security, safety
Excellent proof of why you don’t want to “rewrite it all in Rust”. It’s important to respect the old code and focus on applying safety practices on the new code. This is also why the upcoming changes to C++ are worth it, it might improve the interoperability factor almost for free.
https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html
Tags: tech, linux, kernel, rust
Despite the drama, Rust is slowly making its way into the kernel.
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991062/b0df468b40b21f5d/
CarlSchwan
io_uringTags: tech, linux, system
Wondering what io_uring is for? This is a good explanation.
https://mazzo.li/posts/uring-multiplex.html
Tags: tech, cpu, portability
Nice list of common portability issues one can encounter at the machine architecture level. But don’t be fooled, this doesn’t have implications only for C and C++, those problems leak in higher level languages as well.
https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2024/09/23/overview-of-cross-architecture-portability-problems/
Tags: tech, python
Interesting problem I didn’t realize PyPI had. Indeed I hope they start looking into reproducibility issue to reduce the bandwidth and space they use.
https://kristoff.it/blog/python-training-wheels/
Tags: tech, python, refactoring
Interesting trick to help with project wide renames for Python codebases.
https://jackevans.bearblog.dev/refactoring-python-with-tree-sitter-jedi/
Tags: tech, tools
What can I say? I love Makefiles as well.
https://switowski.com/blog/i-like-makefiles/
Tags: tech, tools, version-control, git
Ooh! This looks like a really neat improvement. I wonder how reliable this is, I’ll definitely test it.
https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb
Tags: tech, software, design
Nice short post about cohesion in software design. Also gives clue about what proxy we can use to gauge this cohesion.
https://explaining.software/archive/similar-but-different/
Tags: tech, architecture, microservices, reliability, research
I’m obviously not in love with the complexity this type of architecture brings. That being said, this thesis brings an interesting approach to better detect failure scenarios in such systems.
https://christophermeiklejohn.com/publications/cmeiklej_phd_s3d_2024.pdf
Tags: tech, architecture, organization, conway
This law is unfortunately too little known. Here is a nice and short primer. Be careful though, it’s short but packed with information, might require more reading around the concepts highlighted in this article.
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Conway%27s+law
Tags: tech, project-management, quality, metrics
When I read the content of this article I wonder how useful the metrics really were. I mean clearly they helped the team realize which changes to bring… but the practice changes were all somewhat conventional in a way. You go a long way when you focus on quality and create the space for it.
https://medium.com/booking-com-development/dora-metrics-at-work-46c835a86a89
Bye for now!
The beta of Kubuntu Oracular Oriole (to become 24.10 in October) has now been released, and is available for download.
This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours.
Pre-releases of Kubuntu Mantic Minotaur are not recommended for:
They are, however, recommended for:
The Beta includes some software updates that are ready for broader testing. However, it is an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.
We STRONGLY advise testers to read the Kubuntu 24.10 Beta release notes before installing, and in particular the section on ‘Known issues‘.
You can also find more information about the entire 24.10 release (base, kernel, graphics etc) in the main Ubuntu Beta release notes and announcement.
To enable Flatpaks in KDE’s Discover in Kubuntu 24.10, run this command:
sudo apt install flatpak plasma-discover-backend-flatpak
To enable the largest Flatpak repository, run this command:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Log out and log back in (or restart) to re-initialize the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable, otherwise, newly installed Flatpak apps will not run or appear in the startup menu.
This blog post provides the heads-up about planned tablet input changes that are brewing for Plasma 6.3. KWin provides support for the tablet input protocol, but things are different on the client side. Some apps support it, some do not. If an application supports the tablet input protocol, great, it will receive tablet input events as is. On the other hand, if the application does not support the tablet input protocol, then KWin will fake tablet input as pointer input. In Plasma 6.3, KWin will stop doing that and I think that we should briefly talk what led us to such a decision and what impact it will have.
Originally, when the tablet input protocol support had landed in KWin, there were still pretty few applications and toolkits that supported it. Emulating tablet input was a fairly reasonable decision, otherwise you would have likely not been able to use tablet in the Plasma Wayland session at all. As time went by, more and more clients gained native support for the tablet protocol. Unfortunately, in meanwhile, we had also started noticing various issues with tablet emulation.
So, what’s the reasonable thing to do about it? Fix the bugs of course. And we did. But there is still a set of issues that cannot be addressed without bringing more complexity in already too complex code that we are struggling to keep afloat. Enough is enough.
A: Starting since 6.3, tablet input emulation will be deprecated and disabled by default. Note that you can enable it back by setting the KWIN_WAYLAND_EMULATE_TABLET=1 environment variable.
A: There is no concrete milestone at the moment.
A: Hopefully, nothing. The major toolkits such as GTK, Qt, and SDL already provide support for the tablet protocol, so does Xwayland. So, you should be able to use tablet without any issues in X11 applications or Wayland native applications that use the aforementioned toolkits. Chromium/Electron still does not provide native support for tablet input on Wayland, but it’s also worth noting that most of those applications run through Xwayland by default unless the user sets some command-line arguments.
If your favorite application does not work with tablets, please tell it to the developers of that application so they know that there’s demand for such an operation mode.
A: Please add support for tablets! If your toolkit already supports the tablet input protocol, wonderful, no work to do. \o/
A: No, it is not. Mutter (the Wayland compositor in GNOME Shell) doesn’t emulate tablet input either.
Deprecating tablet emulation is disappointing but the options that we have are not great either. It’s either bring in more complexity in order to fix the existing issues (plus even more code to ensure that the pointer focus is managed correctly when using both pointer and tablet) into an already too complex codebase or just do nothing special about applications that don’t opt in into tablet input. Hopefully, the remaining applications and toolkits that still miss tablet support add it in the near future. If you have more thoughts about it, please reach out to us at our matrix room.
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-38.
Tags: tech, tor, privacy
The quick answer is yes. The longer answer is that more effort is still required to ensure the network has enough diversity of nodes to stay healthy.
https://blog.torproject.org/tor-is-still-safe/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, economics, criticism
This is a very harsh and bleak view on the current generative AI craze. Clearly it survives on some sort of weird faith that things will magically improve. Some decision makers clearly run fully on said faith and lost all kind of realistic view of the situation. They are just very disconnected from the user’s needs.
There’s even a funny quote in there: “Generative AI must seem kind of magical when your entire life is either being in a meeting or reading an email”.
When this bubble bursts, it’s hard to predict what the fallout will be on the tech industry… for sure it won’t be pretty. It also begs the question: what is this industry going to do next? There’s clearly no plan after generative AI.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, ecology
Need to illustrate how much the current AI arm race is an ecological and social problem? Here is a very pathological case. This is what you get when you let the tycoons behind this completely unchecked.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/nx-s1-5088134/elon-musk-ai-xai-supercomputer-memphis-pollution
Tags: tech, oracle, surveillance
People are gasping in horror with Larry Ellison’s latest claims… but really they should realize he’s not dreaming big. All of that is already here in one form or another. Maybe it was time to protest years ago?
https://www.404media.co/larry-ellisons-ai-powered-surveillance-dystopia-is-already-here/
Tags: tech, security, war, battery
Or why we should all be concerned and condemn the latest pager and walkie-talkie attacks. They clearly opened a Pandora’s box, it’d be surprising not to see more of those from various organizations. The funds and efforts required make it affordable enough.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/turning-everyday-gadgets-into-bombs-is-a-bad-idea/
Tags: tech, javascript, trademark, law, oracle
This is a good initiative. It makes no sense for Oracle to still cling onto JavaScript as a trademark.
Tags: tech, c++
Interesting proposal for a superset of C++ bringing a safe subset. Could it be a way to improve C++ use for the coming decade?
Tags: tech, asynchronous, multithreading, io
Or why going through an event loop might be more work initially but will make some things easier longer term. Nice way to frame how threads are bringing some opaque state.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/ThreadsAsyncIOAndCancellation
Tags: tech, linux, kernel, realtime
Definitely good news if you have to maintain a real-time Linux system for industrial use. No more patches to carry over.
Tags: tech, kernel, rust
An interesting endeavor to create you own OS using another language than one of the usual ones.
Tags: tech, databases, sqlite, backup
Wish to use SQLite in production? You better have a good backup strategy. This article explains the main available options.
https://oldmoe.blog/2024/04/30/backup-strategies-for-sqlite-in-production/
Tags: tech, shell, scripting
Shell scripts deserve to be well designed like this indeed.
https://nochlin.com/blog/6-techniques-i-use-to-create-a-great-user-experience-for-shell-scripts
Tags: tech, shader, vulkan, directx
This is good news. DirectX being the other big graphics API if it adopts SPIR-V as interchange format it’ll open the way to more shader reuses.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-adopting-spir-v/
Tags: tech, web, frontend, webgpu, 2d, graphics
Looks like an interesting tool to have in the box for 2D effects on the web.
Tags: tech, gui, html, web, frontend, complexity
A good list to design HTML forms. The bar is indeed high and there’s value in simplicity.
https://daverupert.com/2024/09/good-forms/
Tags: tech, web, frontend, css
This is indeed an interesting new CSS selector. Opens the door to doing more in a declarative way and with less Javascript.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/has/
Tags: tech, management, metrics
We should definitely be more wary of metrics indeed. They help for a while, but at some point you’ll necessarily get unfortunately burnt by them. The only fallback is “good judgement”… do what you can with this.
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/goodharts-law-in-software-engineering/
Tags: tech, team, management
Nice tricks to help the team jell. I should try this more.
https://brittonbroderick.com/2024/08/18/building-aggressively-helpful-teams/
Bye for now!
