Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-29.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood • The Register

Tags: tech, foss, community

This is indeed a problem. Somehow it became much harder to attract younger developers.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/15/opinion_open_source_attract_devs/

“Privacy-Preserving” Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again

Tags: tech, browser, mozilla, privacy

You’d expect Mozilla to know better. This is disappointing, they’re no living up to their responsibility.

https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/

Commission sends preliminary findings to X for breach of DSA

Tags: tech, twitter, social-media, law

The European Commission starts showing it’s muscles. Twitter is an obvious one to pursue since it became the X cesspool.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_3761

Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, economics, ecology, criticism

I’m rarely on the side of a Goldman Sachs… Still this paper seems to be spot on. The equation between the costs (financial and ecological) and the value we get out of generative AI isn’t balanced at all. Also, since it is stuck on trying to improve mostly on model scale and amount of data it is doomed to plateau in its current form.

https://www.404media.co/goldman-sachs-ai-is-overhyped-wildly-expensive-and-unreliable/

Facebook Is the ‘Zombie Internet’

Tags: tech, ai, social-media, facebook

Or examples of the collapse of a shared reality. This has nothing to do with “social” media anymore. Very nice investigation in any case.

https://www.404media.co/email/24eb6cea-6fa6-4b98-a2d2-8c4ba33d6c04/

AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach

Tags: tech, security, leak

Wow! This is a really bad data breach. Apparently related to the recent data theft on the Snowflake end.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/12/att-phone-records-stolen-data-breach/

git-pr: A new git collaboration service

Tags: tech, git, codereview, tools

Interesting approach to building a new code review system. I somehow doubt it’ll get traction unfortunately but it has nice ideas baked in.

https://pr.pico.sh/

gpu.cpp: portable GPU compute for C++ with WebGPU – Answer.AI

Tags: tech, c++, gpu, computation

Looks like an interesting library to build portable GPU compute workloads. Cleverly tries to leverage WebGPU.

https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-07-11–gpu-cpp.html

C++ Design Patterns For Low-Latency Applications

Tags: tech, c++, performance, optimization, pattern

A paper listing patterns to reduce latency as much as possible. There are lesser known tricks in there.

https://hackaday.com/2024/07/13/c-design-patterns-for-low-latency-applications/

22 Common Filesystem Tasks in C++20

Tags: tech, c++

Nice little reference of what can be done with std::filesystem.

https://www.cppstories.com/2024/common-filesystem-cpp20/

C++ Must Become Safer

Tags: tech, c++, safety, memory

Definitely this. C++ isn’t going away anytime soon. Rewrites won’t be worth it in important cases, so improving the safety of the language matters.

https://www.alilleybrinker.com/blog/cpp-must-become-safer/

Django Migration Operations aka how to rename Models

Tags: tech, django, databases

Django doesn’t always generate the migration you’d expect. Read them before going to production. Also it’s fine to adjust them.

https://micro.webology.dev/2024/07/15/django-migration-operations.html

Gotchas with SQLite in Production

Tags: tech, backend, sqlite, databases

Where are the limitations of using SQLite in production for web applications? Here is a good list.

https://blog.pecar.me/sqlite-prod

SQLite Transactions

Tags: tech, databases, sqlite

Some improvements coming in SQLite transactions. Here are some early tests.

https://reorchestrate.com/posts/sqlite-transactions/

Tests you love to read, write and change

Tags: tech, tests

Three good advices on writing automated tests. This is necessary but not sufficient though.

https://jaywhy13.hashnode.dev/tests-you-love-to-read-write-and-change

Lessons learned in 35 years of making software – Jim Grey

Tags: tech, career

Quite a few good lessons in there. Again it’s more about social skills than technical skills.

https://dev.jimgrey.net/2024/07/03/lessons-learned-in-35-years-of-making-software/

Story Points are Pointless, Measure Queues

Tags: tech, project-management, product-management, estimates, agile

A bit long and a couple of mistakes when pointing out the flaws of story points. Still, it’s definitely a worthwhile read. Quite a lot of the criticism of story points is warranted and the proposed approach based on queue theory is welcome. This is stuff you can find in Kanban like approaches and mature XP.

https://www.brightball.com/articles/story-points-are-pointless-measure-queues

Managing Underperformers | Jack Danger

Tags: management

Nice advices to deal with underperforming teams or individuals. Making the distinction between refusal to align or failure to execute is particularly useful.

https://jackdanger.com/managing-underperformers/

All I Need to Know About Engineering Leadership I Learned From Leave No Trace - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, leadership, engineering, ecology, funny

Funny experiment at drawing parallels between engineering leadership and how you should behave when hiking in nature. This works surprisingly well.

https://jacobian.org/2024/jul/12/lnt-for-engineering-leadership/

Progress can be slow

Tags: work, life, improving, coaching, habits

This one is more self-help than I’m usually comfortable with… somehow something rung true to me with it. It’s indeed a good reminder that changing habits takes a while. It’s an exercise in patience and there are good reasons for it.

https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/progress-can-be-slow?isFreemail=true&post_id=146457673

German Navy still uses 8-inch floppy disks, working on emulating a replacement | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, hardware, storage, history

We keep finding floppies in use at surprising places. There’s clearly lot of inertia for technologies getting replaced.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/german-navy-still-uses-8-inch-floppy-disks-working-on-emulating-a-replacement/

Bye for now!

What’s new in 2.11?

Worksheet

This release includes more visualisations, usability improvements and a new worksheet preview panel:

• You can now use Lollipop, Q-Q and KDE plots
• We have implemented error bars for bar plots
• There is a new preview panel for all available worksheets in the project
• You can use the navigation panel in the presenter widget to select, zoom and navigate in the presenter mode
• You can lock worksheet elements to prevent accidental changes
• LabPlot 2.11 allows you to show or hide the entry in the legend for all supported plot types and not just xy-curve
• You can give your worksheets a fresh new look with the Dracula theme

Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets gain more functions and operations to modify, generate and understand the data:

• We have extended the search and replace features
• You can check statistical properties of the parent in a new child spreadsheet
• We have added sparklines in the header of a spreadsheet
• LabPlot 2.11 comes with spreadsheet linking to synchronize the number of rows across multiple spreadsheets
• We have implemented triangular distributions for PDF, CDF, and pseudorandom number generation
• Equidistant value generation has been extended

Analysis

Analysis tools added to LabPlot 2.11 include:

• Note showing the fit results
• Faster computation of the baseline removal (we switched to Eigen3 internally)

Import/Export

LabPlot 2.11 adds support for new file formats and multiple optimizations to improve the handling of edge-case scenarios:

• You can now import Open Document Spreadsheet (ODS) files.
• Templates for ASCII and Binary import filters allow you to save and load current filter settings
• There is a new feature that allows you to to specify the data range to be read (start/end values for columns and records) when importing from SQL databases
• LabpPlot can now gracefully handle out-of-memory situations when importing large amounts of data
• LabPlot 2.11 displays better error messages during the import
• We provide additional information about BLF files (application name with which the file was created with, etc.)
• We have made several fixes and improvements to the import of Origin’s OPJ files

Notebook

The 2.11 release adds a number of usability enhancements to the Notebook interface:

• You can now export the notebook to PDF
• We provide statistics and a “plot data” action from the context menu in the project explorer for variables created in the Notebook
• There is a new option in the application settings to run a selected CAS engine on startup

Profiling displays is already not a super simple thing on its own, but things get more complicated when you try to profile your display in Wayland - profiling applications don’t support Wayland yet, some APIs on the compositor side to make it work well are still missing, and there’s a general lack of information on the topic. So today I’ll show you how to profile your display in the Plasma Wayland session.

I did this in Fedora 40, but you can follow these steps in other distributions as well.

Step 1: Install DisplayCal and start it

This sounds easy, but

• it’s not packaged for Fedora. That’s being worked on, but right now it’s not an option | edit: turns out there is a COPR for it
• installing it with pip just gave me a bunch of compilation errors, and I haven’t figured out how to fix them
• the package on Flathub is really old and broken

To work around that, I used distrobox to install the Arch Linux package for DisplayCAL:

sudo dnf install distrobox
distrobox create --name archinabox --image archlinux:latest
distrobox enter archinabox
sudo pacman -S displaycal
distrobox-export --app displaycal
exit

After running these commands, DisplayCAL can be started from any app launcher, like Kickoff or KRunner.

Step 2: Setup

To get correct measurement results, the compositor needs to pass the pixel data from the profiling app directly to the display, and not do any color management itself. This will be automated at some point, but for now you need to manually ensure that

• HDR is disabled
• the color profile of the display is set to “None” in the display settings
• night light is off, or at least suspended in the system tray
• all KWin effects that modify colors, like the color blindness correction effect, are disabled
• if you’re on a new-ish AMD laptop and want to profile the internal display, that you’re either plugged in to a power source, or have the power profile set to performance, to disable a power saving feature that changes the colors

Now start DisplayCal and head to the Calibration tab. Here it’s important to set the tone curve to “as measured”, and untick interactive display adjustment, as those don’t work correctly right now and will mess up the profile.

You’ve done everything correctly if the button on the bottom of the application shows “Profile only”.

Last but not least, you also need to adjust the display settings to what you want to use with the profile later, as the profile is only correct for one specific set of display settings. This includes the brightness of the display!

Step 3: Profile

In the profiling tab of DisplayCAL, select your desired settings - in most cases the default will be sufficient - and click “Profile only”. When it asks if you want to continue with the current calibration curves, select “use linear calibration instead” and de-select “embed calibration curves in profile”. Then put the colorimeter in the center of the screen, and let it do its thing.

Once it’s done, it’ll ask you to install the profile. Installing it will not automatically enable that profile to be used, but it’ll save the profile in ~/.config/color/icc/devices/display/ and you can select that file in the display settings.

Step 4: Verification (optional)

If you’d like to make sure the profile is correct or accurate enough, you can use DisplayCAL to verify the result. Make sure you’ve set the profile in the display settings, switch to the verification tab in DisplayCAL and select your newly created profile in the “settings”

Here again, because DisplayCAL doesn’t support Wayland yet, you need to adjust a few settings for everything to work correctly. You need to select the simulation profile “Rec.709 ITU-R BT.709”, select “Use simulation profile as display profile” and set the tone curve to “Gamma 2.2”. Afterwards, click on “Measurement report”, choose a location to save it in, put the colorimeter in the center of the screen again and wait for it to complete.

Don’t be alarmed if the result says the whitepoint is wrong, this is simply caused by DisplayCAL assuming we want to target the whitepoint of the simulation profile, which doesn’t necessarily match the whitepoint of your display.

What about calibration though?

To calibrate the display, that is, to adjust brightness, tone curves for non color managed applications and the whitepoint of the display, DisplayCAL uses an X11 API to set the gamma lookup tables of the GPU. That API doesn’t work in the Wayland session and the profiling process doesn’t handle that situation properly, which is why all calibration needs to be disabled for the created profile to be correct.

DisplayCAL (or ArgyllCMS, which does the actual profiling) could add support for applying a lookup table in the application instead of having the compositor do it, but we can also handle calibration entirely on the compositor side instead, which offers a bit more flexibility.

Changing the tone curves for non color managed applications doesn’t make sense in the Plasma Wayland session, as all windows are always color managed, so that part is already dealt with. Adjusting the brightness on screens that don’t have any native means of brightness control is already implemented for Plasma 6.2, and I have a working proof of concept for changing the whitepoint of the display without needing a new ICC profile too, so we should be at feature parity soon. I’ll talk more about these adjustments in a future post.

Week 7 of my 14-week GSoC project has finished, which means that it’s time for a midterm update! Many things have happened since the last update.

I added support for KI18n, KGuiAddons, KNotifications, KUnitConversion and KXMLGui. That was faster than expected. I also created a small unit conversion demo using KUnitConversion (it’s written in Python):

We have decided to move on to upstream the bindings to their corresponding repositories. For that, I set up a development environment and I’m now adding the code to each library.

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After five months of active maintenance and long bugs triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.4.0 of its open source digital photo manager.

Long time bugs present in older versions have been fixed and we spare a lot of time to contact users to validate changes in pre-release to confirm fixes before deploying the program in production.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-28.

Take action to stop chat control now!

Tags: tech, politics, law, privacy

It’s time to push European governments to abandon this nonsense.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/take-action-to-stop-chat-control-now/

VLMs are Blind

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, computer-vision

Those brand new models keep failing at surprisingly simple tasks.

https://vlmsareblind.github.io/

Universal Code Execution by Chaining Messages in Browser Extensions

Tags: tech, browser, security

This is a concerning finding. One can escape from the browser to the system with such chaining.

https://spaceraccoon.dev/universal-code-execution-browser-extensions/

Let’s talk about supply chain attacks and backdoored dependencies

Tags: tech, security, supply-chain, dependencies

Good tour of all the way dependencies might get compromised in your supply chain. Getting this easy to detect is needed.

https://kerkour.com/supply-chain-attacks-and-backdoored-dependencies

Ubuntu Security Updates Are a Confusing Mess | Grey Lumpy Dinosaur

Tags: tech, ubuntu, security

The title is a bit pushing it. Still, I didn’t realize some of the fine prints of the Ubuntu support schemes.

https://gld.mcphail.uk/posts/ubuntu-security-updates-are-a-confusing-mess/

An Empirical Study of Rust-for-Linux: The Success, Dissatisfaction, and Compromise | USENIX

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, rust

It’s nice to have a balanced view on the matter. It’s not just roses and rainbows. This gives a good overview of the current limitations and where Rust can give most benefits in the kernel.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc24/presentation/li-hongyu

A new way to develop on Linux

Tags: tech, linux, system, systemd

Interesting approach to test system changes. Especially welcome on immutable systems.

https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2024/A-new-way-to-develop-on-Linux/

nmbl: we don’t need a bootloader

Tags: tech, linux, uefi, boot, system

Looks like GRUB days as the standard bootloader are counted. Booting straight using the Linux kernel could bring interesting benefits. Probably not doable on every hardware platform though.

https://fizuxchyk.wordpress.com/2024/06/13/nmbl-we-dont-need-a-bootloader/

Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?

Tags: tech, linux, packaging

An interesting puzzle to pursue. Is it possible to rebuild exactly the same binary distribution packages?

https://blog.josefsson.org/2024/07/10/towards-idempotent-rebuilds/

Binary Search Tree with SIMD

Tags: tech, simd, performance

Another interesting algorithm to handle using SIMD.

https://clement-jean.github.io/simd_binary_search_tree/

Making Python Less Random — Andrew Healey

Tags: tech, linux, system

It’s really a good reminder of how powerful ptrace is. You can nicely intercept and change the behavior of syscalls with it.

https://healeycodes.com/making-python-less-random

Cryptomator: end-to-end encrypt files in any cloud

Tags: tech, cloud, storage, cryptography, security, tools

Looks like a nice tool indeed. Might be handy.

https://www.andreagrandi.it/posts/cryptomator-end-to-end-encrypt-files-in-cloud/

Dirty writes – Surfing Complexity

Tags: tech, databases

A simple explanation about dirty writes during database transactions.

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2024/07/05/dirty-writes/

PostgreSQL and UUID as primary key

Tags: tech, databases, uuid, performance

Forced to use UUID as primary key in a table? Then make sure to use them properly to not kill the performance more than necessary. Ideally use something else though.

https://maciejwalkowiak.com/blog/postgres-uuid-primary-key/

Unravelling attribute access in Python

Tags: tech, programming, python

Ever wondered how attributes work in Python under the hood? Here is how.

https://snarky.ca/unravelling-attribute-access-in-python/

Making an iterator out of a function | mathspp

Tags: tech, programming, python

An interesting Python construct to make iterators based on a simple function.

https://mathspp.com/blog/til/making-an-iterator-out-of-a-function

State of Text Rendering 2024

Tags: tech, gui, fonts

Very long read but will be an essential resource to have a fine understanding of text rendering in its current form.

https://behdad.org/text2024/

the software crisis

Tags: tech, quality, craftsmanship, engineering, complexity, history

Interesting musing about the “software crisis” which was declared in the late 60s. We’re coping with it by piling levels of abstractions but clearly we’re still not out of it. Our craft still needs to grow.

https://wryl.tech/log/2024/the-software-crisis.html

Standups: Individual → Teammate - by Kent Beck

Tags: tech, team, organization, agile

Good reminder that teams are made out of people. It’s good to look at the daily standups less as a technical management tool and more as a need to get into the work.

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/standups-individual-teammate

Bye for now!

OPC UA client code that relies on hardcoded NodeIds is brittle and often only works with a specific OPC UA server instance. This article shows the proper way to write robust and portable OPC UA client code.

Continue reading OPC UA: Programming against Type Descriptions at basysKom GmbH.

Hi there! The past few weeks have been really busy with my final exams, so I had to slow down my work. Here’s a brief status report on my progress over the past 4 weeks:

I created a SubtitleEvent class to help us better manage subtitle event information, which can replace the original SubtitledTime class. To distinguish subtitles from different layers, I also added basic display support for subtitle layers as multiple subtitle tracks.

Currently, I’m focused on refining these features. There are still some minor tasks to complete and bugs to fix. You can find more information at this MR.

Stay tuned!

The second maintenance release of the 24.05 series is out.