So, 2022 was a successful year for Qt - and we highlight the Qt 6.3 and Qt 6.4 releases, Qt World Summit, and Qt Contributor Summit.
And our community members keep up with the activity by writing diligent bug reports, contributing patches, giving technical advice, or helping out other users in forums and mailing lists.
The Joystick KCM is pretty bad shape right now, for numerous reasons:
So one of my big “Plasma 6” goals is to rewrite the KCM with a few goals in mind:
I’ve been collaborating with Jeremy Whiting on this project, and it’s been going through some technical turmoil but it’s making solid progress:
Next month hopefully we’ll be able to get a proper UI working, now that mapping buttons is mostly sorted.
See my merge request and Jeremy’s UI merge request.
I landed a bunch of features in Tokodon this month, including some much needed bugfixes for some rough edges of the project.
[Feature] I landed support for the web+ap url scheme used to open ActivityPub objects in Tokodon! Just like matrix.to links in NeoChat, these allow linking to ActivityPub objects online. Once everything is in place, we will be one of the first clients to support it!
If you can’t wait, it’s also possible to open up regular https linked posts in Tokodon by passing it as an argument, if you want to hook it up somehow in your browser.
See the merge request and the wishlist bug.
[Feature] You can now select the language you’re posting in! You can’t view a post’s language or filter them from within Tokodon yet, but it’s a start1. Your preferred languages (chosen through the Languages & Formats KCM if you’re using KDE) is shown at the top of the list.
See the merge request.
[Feature] Tokodon has supported viewing polls already, but not posting them. Now you can create polls! All of your usual options are exposed, including some not even shown on Mastodon Web. This is not merged yet, but will be soon.
See the [merge request]https://invent.kde.org/network/tokodon/-/merge_requests/152).
[Bugfix] One thing that always irked me with NeoChat is the notification badge. The number never feels right, and no matter how many rooms I read it never changes:
Now the badge will actually update based on your current notification count, hurrah! See the merge request.
[Feature] Last month I redid the Window Decoration KCM, and this month I did the same for the PulseAudio KCM, although the changes needed where much smaller.
See the merge request.
[Bugfix] For Kirigami, I tried to focus on fixing up Dialog behavior to mixed results. I wanted to change the dialog closePolicy, but that’s been more complex than expected. I attempted to fix the extra horizontal scrolling bug in Dialogs2, but that has unintended regressions in Discover and I’m not really happy with the solution. I also have a bunch of OverlaySheet fixes that I need to rebase3 :) So a bunch of half-baked things I should start finishing next month!
[Bugfix] I noticed an issue where Breeze Icons on Android wouldn’t work if you had a custom icon theme in your application - which I tried to fix but I’m not happy with the solution. It looks like the built-in icons index.theme is not installed properly, and I want to figure out if we can fix that first.
[Bugfix] For qqc2-desktop-style, I fixed an odd case where you could select text in TextAreas that explicitly disabled it by using the right-click context menu.
Oliver landed the Plasma Welcome redesign for 6.0, which looks wonderful. As with all great features, this has had it’s fair share of technical issues which I had the pleasure of helping with, including fixing this bug:
Embedded KCMs create and manage their own QML engine. Objects like Kirigami.ApplicationWindow are separated though, because that exists in Plasma Welcome’s engine and not the KCMs, which breaks a lot of things including the global toolbar. I figured out that you can inject your own QML engine to KDeclarative, which will fix most of the issues. While doing this, I also simplified embedded KCMs in Plasma Welcome which will help developers creating their custom pages.
There’s one lingering issue – KDeclarative get’s a little bit too greedy with the engine we give it and will try to destroy it to due to std::shared_ptr shenanigans, but fixing it will require changes to the framework. Right now we work around the issue by not assigning a parent, but I want to look into changing that soon.
See Oliver’s merge request.
This month we had a strange incident where api.kde.org fails to generate a page for IconItem, but why?
Of course the first thing I tried was running kapidox locally for plasma-framework, but there’s still a doc page for IconItem generated. Huh. So I started looking into what the binary factory actually does to see if there’s some inherent issue with our system. What I ended up with is a bash script which emulates what binary factory does, but locally.
What I noticed is terrifying, the doc page doesn’t show up here! So I had an idea, what if the problem is that the name is colliding? After some quick global code searches using our LXR, I discovered that Maui recently introduced a new type called IconItem which coincidentally fits within the timeline of IconItem disappearing. How can this even happen in the first place?
I’m no expert in doxygen (is anyone?) but there is something called “tags” which is basically an index of every type that doxygen indexes. Doxygen also uses these tags to interlink doc pages together, so what’s going wrong? Well, kapidox actually runs the doc generation twice, once initially and then another time to interlink dependencies. What I theorize is that when it’s plasma-framework’s turn to generate, doxygen sees that “IconItem” is already in Maui’s tagfile and refuses to generate the page again.
With this new caveat in mind, I submitted two MRs to hopefully fix the documentation problems:
… Except that I forgot about the KF5/KF6 split, which makes this harder. Next month will be focusing on rebasing those into KF5, and then creating KF6-specific MRs if needed (but a lot of fat is being cut here, so it might not be).
I took the responsibility of converting the bit-rotting kdevelop.org site to Hugo, which should be live soon! Most of the old site content is brought over (and converted to Markdown) while pages are updated where needed. The new site is now live at kdevelop.org!
See the new repository.
I opened an MR to update the matrix.to redirector hosted at go.kde.org which should include a link to open in NeoChat! Once it’s merged, I plan on replacing the links on the KDE Community Wiki with these instead of the WebChat links we have now.
This is something that’s been sitting on my backlog, but I’m super annoyed about the ordering of notification history. Whenever I miss a notification4 I scroll through my notification history. However, it’s ordered seemingly randomly, because it’s sorted by “type and urgency”. That’s not too helpful because neither criteria is really exposed in the UI. I propose changing it to “Date” which makes way more sense for a history view of notifications.
See the merge request.
If you’re looking for a way to configure the default posting language, it’s unfortunately not exposed in the Mastodon API yet, including some other preferences. Since the issue hasn’t moved much, I want to look into another way to easily access those settings. ↩︎
Ivan looked into this issue recently and is fixing the issue on the Flatpak KCM end, so my fix may not be needed after all. ↩︎
OverlaySheets were recently overhauled, so these fixes only apply to KF5 now. ↩︎
Which happens surprisingly often, despite me using the default notification timeout… ↩︎
I don’t know if it’s early spring and articles I found interesting are sprouting anywhere… In any case this week issue is massive. Brace yourselves and let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-08.
Tags: tech, google, greenwashing, ecology, ethics
This is indeed a massive greenwashing operation right there. And then they will claim things like “AI for good” or such…
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/17/google-cloud-saudi-aramco-oil/
Tags: tech, cpu, performance, energy, architecture
Interesting position from AMD regarding the race on the next super computers. They’re all being caught up by energy efficiency so it’ll need to be addressed both at the processor architecture level but also at the software architecture level. How we design our computing tasks will matter more and more.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amd-eyes-supercomputer-efficiency-gains
Tags: tech, github, criticism, foss
Definitely agree with this, Github benefited from a powerful network effect and now a good chunk of important projects are “trapped” there. This can’t be good long term.
https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html
Tags: tech, social-media, science, criticism
Lengthy but thorough. The evidences are now getting much clearer. Admittedly, the most worrying bit I find is that getting off the social media wagon might not help the impacted people to get better… indeed they might still be isolated if everyone else is still trapped on social media.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
Tags: tech, attention-economy
If you didn’t have an adblocker yet (who doesn’t really?) it’s time to really think about it. When even the FBI starts to advocate for ad blockers it’s a sign of how bad the online ad market has become.
https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/fbi-recommends-ad-blocker-online-scams-b1048998.html
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, search
Inaccuracies, contradicting itself, conflating events, misquoting sources… all of that mixed with some correct facts, it’s a perfect misinformation spreading machine. This just can’t be trusted at this point. Those experiments should be stopped in my opinion, better do proper homeworks first, then relaunch when this can be better trusted.
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, google
Excellent piece as usual from Cory Doctorow. It quite clearly point out why Google is anxious and running off the chatbot cliff
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, programming
Or why they are definitely not a magic tool for programming. Far from it. This might help developers a tiny bit, at the expense of killing the learning of students falling for it and the creation of a massive amount of low quality content.
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks
Interesting strategy, shows a fascinating blind spot in the typical AIs used for Go nowadays. It kind of hints to the fact that the neural networks abstract knowledge much less than advertised.
Tags: tech, ai, generator, art, funny, surprising, culture
Interesting and surprising limitation. This makes a lot of sense when you think about the set of images used for training though. Also says something about our own art history.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/ai-generated-art-hands-fingers-messed-up
Tags: tech, fediverse, twitter
Indeed people still seem to assume Mastodon is just a Twitter clone. This is a good reminder that it’s not, it’s just one front to the Fediverse and that’s much more interesting than a Twitter clone.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/02/breadth-fediverse
Tags: tech, self-hosting
It is indeed getting easier every day to self host a website. Some other services or email are a different story though.
https://grifel.dev/decentralization/
Tags: tech, geospatial, map
Interesting set of tools for displaying maps and managing their tiles.
https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-replacing-mapbox-with-open-source-solutions/
Tags: tech, security, ssh
This is actually an interesting feature to know when a key changes.
https://bytes.zone/posts/what-is-the-randomart-image-for/
Tags: tech, java, kotlin, type-systems
I think it’s the single one reason which makes Kotlin tempting to me every time I dabble in the Java ecosystem.
https://itnext.io/null-safety-kotlin-vs-java-3d774bffd92d
Tags: tech, java, object-oriented
Interesting move. Looks like Java will get value types at last. Coming from C++ this feels long overdue.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3687670/project-valhalla-a-look-inside-javas-epic-refactor.html
Tags: tech, refactoring, tools
Looks like an interesting tool for scripting refactorings. Seems lightweight and more forgiving than Semgrep, looks like there’s space for both in our tool belts.
Tags: tech, programming, c++
To me that looks like a fine advice even outside of C++. If conditions get at least a bit complex moving them out of the if to assign them to const booleans is always a good idea.
https://raymii.org/s/blog/Named_Booleans_prevent_bugs.html
Tags: tech, c, safety, memory, static-analyzer
Interesting approach. There’s still a lot we can achieve with static analysis in those good old languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05331
Tags: tech, programming, rust
That’s an interesting perspective. Rust definitely gets in the way of iterating quickly indeed which might be a problem to test ideas. Introducing it gradually later is thus a better path. That being said it doesn’t always have a great story for mixing with other languages, there are a few tools to help, but nothing I’ve seen really used in the wild so far (this will probably come though).
https://www.propelauth.com/post/i-love-building-a-startup-in-rust-i-wouldnt-pick-it-again
Tags: tech, search, postgresql, databases
Yet another article about Postgres full test search features. This one has the advantage of giving us a glimpse about the other available options. Sometimes you want something typo resistant for instance.
https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-full-text-search-vs-the-rest
Tags: tech, python, performance, profiling
perf now available also to Python programs. This definitely can be useful for proper profiling.
https://www.petermcconnell.com/posts/perf_eng_with_py12/
Tags: tech, python, django, portability
Another impressive feat from the people behind the Cosmopolitan project. A self contained and portable binary which run your Django application on almost any platform? Apparently doable. The versions used for the dependencies are a bit old but that’s clearly something which will be solved soon.
Tags: tech, rust, 3d, webgpu, webassembly, distributed
Looks like an interesting runtime. Seems to make it easy to create multiplayer 3D experiences. Maybe too easy to be true? I guess I need to find an excuse to test it.
https://www.ambient.run/post/introducing-ambient
Tags: tech, programming, debugging, profiling, gaming
Alright, that’s an impressive set of tools they created to build their games. Lots of efforts went into this, very inspiring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE
Tags: tech, frontend, web, react
A bit of a rant, but even though React is well established at that point and here to stay (shake a tree and half a dozen React developers fall from it), it doesn’t mean it can’t be criticized. It does a good job at listing the main ergonomics problems React is suffering from. The funny part is towards the end, the envisioned solutions for another framework look eerily familiar to a Qt developer, it talks about signals and what looks like property changed notifications. :-)
https://emnudge.dev/blog/react-hostage
Tags: tech, gui, ux
Indeed, quite a lot of spinners and progress bars are not tied to anything meaningful. This definitely creates uncertainty from the user perspective.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/faux-progress/
Tags: tech, microservices, architecture
Interesting explanations of the main drawbacks of microservices. Nothing is magical so you need to know what you loose, in this case this is mostly about increased coordination efforts and latency in feature availability.
https://sheepcode.substack.com/p/devlife-5-microservice-hell
Tags: tech, programming, culture, small
In praise of the little ideas and the small achievements. They are often overlooked but definitely needed.
https://census.dev/blog/insignificant
Tags: tech, xp, yagni
YAGNI is one of the easiest to misunderstood ideas behind eXtreme Programming. That’s why I think it’s a good thing it stays under active discussion. Often people understand it too literally which can create issues. That’s why people talking about “PAGNI” (probably are gonna need it) are right. After all, people who also conceptualized YAGNI wrote back then: “This doesn’t mean you should avoid building flexibility into your code”.
https://bytes.zone/posts/advice-you-might-as-well-take/
Tags: tech, project-management, xp, agile
Interesting to see the beginning of Kent Beck’s thinking about scaling Extreme Programming. This was clearly missing. First by looking at dependencies which are definitely a problem which arises quickly at scale.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/scaling-extreme-programming-dependencies
Tags: tech, agile, ux, criticism
Excellent response to an article full of misconceptions about the Agile approaches. This turns in a good summary of cargo cult agile we see in the wild and the original intent. I especially like how it points out approaches to properly integrate UX as well.
https://jchyip.medium.com/the-age-of-cargo-cult-agile-must-end-9408e1d13e1d
Tags: tech, product-management, velocity
Admittedly biased thought experiment but there’s definitely some truth in there. Focusing on the impact of what you release is way more important than focusing on releasing lots of features.
https://itamargilad.com/velocity-vs-impact/
Tags: hr, management
This is a sound advice, it’s better if it’s a conversation. Some companies push for that some don’t. If they don’t the proposed plan is a good one.
https://quad.writeas.com/how-i-give-formal-written-feedback
Bye for now!
Manjaro ARM is proud to present the packages for Plasma 5.27.0 together with the packages for Plasma Mobile Gear (soon to be regular Gear) 23.01.0 for the mobile devices.
These packages are currently being tested in our Unstable branch and will soon be transferred to Testing and then finally to Stable branch when the time comes..
This also makes our next Beta images (Beta 15) the last that will be tagged as Beta. We are preparing to include PinePhone and PinePhone Pro images into our main release cycle from either 23.04 or 23.06.
If you want to try this early, you can switch your current Manjaro system running Plasma mobile to Unstable branch and update this way:
redstrate
@redstrate:pyra.shsudo pacman-mirrors -aS unstable
sudo pacman -SyyuNew features in this release/update includes, but are not limited to:
And a couple of screenshots:
I am happy to announce Tokodon 23.02. This release contains around one month’s worth of improvements, and while it is only one month, this release is feature packed! This was an exciting month for me in general, I started working at KDAB, went to FOSDEM in Brusels where I meet a bunch of other KDE folks, and spend time enjoying my new life in Berlin.
Fortunately I still found some time to contribute to Tokodon, and Joshua Goins has also been a very active contributor. The number of contributors is also growing with a bunch of new faces: Aakarsh MJ, Harshil Jani, Mohit Marathe, Raphael Gaschiganrd, Rishi Kumar who also contributed some code in this release.
So what is Tokodon? Is is basically a client for the federated social network Mastodon. It is built with Kirigami with the goal to have a great integration with Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile, but it also works on other desktop environments, and even Windows and macOS.
You can download Tokodon 23.02.0 from Flathub and from F-Droid using the KDE repo. Currently we don’t offer binaries for Windows and macOS but if you want to help with that, please get in touch on Matrix.
As part of this release, we reworked the post composer considerably. This is the central area of your interaction with Mastodon and we wanted it to be more reliable.
It is now possible to add an alternative description to images and videos sent via Tokodon. This is very important for accessibility as images without alternative description are invisible for screen readers. (Carl Schwan, Link)
It is also now possible to see the upload progress when uploading an attachment, giving you some visual feedback that something is happening. (Carl Schwan, Link)
An error message will be displayed when sending a message didn’t work. The post composer will only be closed once the message is sent, so if there is an network error the post you wrote is not lost and you can try posting it again. This should make Tokodon much more reliable for interacting with Mastodon. (Joshua Goins, Link).
Another big thing is that we are now supporting editing posts, so in case you made a typo you don’t need to delete your post and post it again. (Joshua Goins, Link)
And finally Tokodon respects your default sensibility and visibility preferences when posting, and when replying to a message, the visibility of the message will be inherited in your reply. So if you are replying to a private message, the reply will automatically be set to be also private. (Carl Schwan, Link)
Aside from the improvements to the post editor, we continued to polish the timeline.
The models for timelines has been completely refactored. Aside from making the code nicer to work with and a bit faster, it also made it possible to show the avatar of who boosted or liked a post. (Carl Schwan, Link)
Tokodon now doesn’t only support image as attachments, but we now also have a prelimary support for videos and gifs. (Joshua Goins, Link).
Additionally the previews for attachements should be better displayed with correct aspect ratio. (Joshua Goins, Link 1, Link 2)
Other ways to interact with a post are now available in an overflow menu for posts adding actions like a “Copy link to post” feature (Joshua Goins, Link), a bookmark feature (Joshua Goins, Link) and the previously mentioned edit feature (Joshua Goins, Link)
There are now some new special pages available in the sidebar to display your bookmarks as well as your favorite posts. (Joshua Goins, Link)
We now handle notifications for poll updates (Riya Bisht, Link), and when a post you interacted with gets updated (Harshil Jani, Link)
There are now placeholders for when you currently don’t have any notifications or conversations instead of showing you an empty view (Mohit Marathe, Link)
The search field introduced during the last released got a nice visual refresh…
… And it now supports searching for hashtags. (Joshua Goins, Link)
It is now possible to configure the color scheme used by Tokodon independently from the Plasma color scheme. (Joshua Goins, Link but most of the code was copied in good tradition from NeoChat)
We added the missing separators in the settings pages (Rishi Kumar, Link)
It is now possible to directly edit your account from your profile page (Joshua Goins, Link)
The user’s avatar in the profile page now uses the standard Kirigami.Avatar component (Joshua Goins, Link)
The behavior of selectable text fields is now consistent (Aakarsh MJ, Link)
A bug that broke loading the timeline in some conditions has been fixed (Carl Schwan, Link)
We fixed rendering of some attachments caused by a bug in the blurhash decoding. (Joshua Goins, Link)
Storing the account settings is now using the account username and instance hostname as a unique identifier. This fixes situations where someone had multiple accounts with the same username on a different instance. (Raphael Gaschiganrd, Link)
Aside from the many new features, there were several large re-factorings of the code base to cleanup some code that younger-me wrote. The C++ code base now has a coverage of 36%, this is a small increase compared to the previous release. Rishi Kumar is also working on integration tests as part of his Season of KDE project.
If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Tokodon matrix channel (#tokodon:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.
I’m also regularly posting about my progress on Tokodon (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)
And in case, you missed it, as a member of the fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.
You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-07.
Tags: tech, cpu, intel, amd
Interesting, this is likely a good thing for everyone to have AMD very much alive and the dominance of Intel fading away a bit. I wonder how the ARM based processors will position themselves in the server space in the future, this is still not much there (contrary to mobile).
Tags: tech, apple
This is really a stupid rule they got there. I really don’t get why makers would turn to this ecosystem it makes everything difficult.
https://www.bennettnotes.com/notes/why-does-apple-restrict-hobby-development/
Tags: tech, api, gpt, politics, ethics
There’s really something rotten in this AI “arms race”… they’re clearly making mistakes to go fast for PR purposes and using tools the wrong way. This can only lead to large scale disinformation if they don’t correct course quickly. This has more political impacts than it looks at first sight.
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
Tags: tech, law, copyright, ai, gpt
For all the conversations about how chat GPT might displace jobs, there’s a big untold: how much of copyright is violated in the process? It’s also very concerning about how much data it collects when interacted with.
Tags: tech, ai, security, gpt
Are we surprised? Not really no… you don’t own any of the data you’re feeding it. Keep it away from your secrets.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/chatgpt-is-ingesting-corporate-secrets.html
Tags: tech, knowledge, gpt, ai
So transformer models produce things that look plausible… and that’s it. What would it look like if we started to make hybrid models in which a transformer model is also tied to proper computation tools with general knowledge? This piece is a good illustration of what it could provide.
Tags: tech, linux, complexity
Indeed we’re clearly in a transition period on the Linux ecosystem. If it all comes out to fruition it’ll be better for everyone… in the meantime this throws quite some complexity at everyone (in particular for portability and deployment).
https://pierre.equoy.fr/blog/posts/2023/02/a-promising-mess/
Tags: tech, ecology, quality, metrics
Interesting plugin for SonarQube to evaluate the footprint of a mobile application. This should complete well what exists for desktop applications and web frontends.
https://github.com/green-code-initiative/ecocode-mobile
Tags: tech, ecology, desktop, kde
Cool! It’s nice to see this handbook published. Should help quite a bit to have more desktop applications certified.
Tags: tech, command-line, config, rust, tools
Oh, that looks very interesting. I’d definitely have use for this. I tend to manage several aws or ssh configs per customers and it’s not always easy to deal with. This could lead to a nice separation.
https://github.com/queer/boxxy
Tags: tech, web, frontend
The article is a bit confused about what is really about SPAs in general or React in particular. Still it is clear they raise questions regarding accessibility and navigation. In turn, this requires a lot of careful implementation to make sure the user experience is acceptable.
https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2023/single-page-applications-criticism/
Tags: tech, architecture, web, frontend, react
Nice demonstration that web frontend can and should be organized like a regular GUI application (like a desktop application for instance). This will bring the same benefits in term of maintainability and modularity.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/modularizing-react-apps.html
Tags: tech, frontend, web
Looks like a nice editor to use in web frontends.
https://github.com/YousefED/BlockNote
Tags: tech, python, asynchronous
This is clearly a dangerous pitfall in the asyncio API.
https://textual.textualize.io/blog/2023/02/11/the-heisenbug-lurking-in-your-async-code/
Tags: tech, c++
Nice talk about what’s new about C++23. Claims to cover only four features but uses nice presenter tricks so that you also take a quick peek at other features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyFVoYcaORg
Tags: tech, performance, python, c++
A bit of a sarcastic tone but a few good point in there. Also shows interesting alternatives to C++ to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your code whatever the platform it runs on. Of the three options explored I knew only about Numba really.
https://hackernoon.com/the-real-c-killers-not-you-rust
Tags: tech, c++, physics
A very simple flight model which seems to do wonders.
https://www.jakobmaier.at/posts/flight-simulation/
Tags: tech, rust, programming, safety, multithreading
It’s good to also see articles which point out the problems with Rust. Overall I find it an interesting language but people tend to oversell it too much. This is a nice reminder it already carries complexity issues.
https://mmapped.blog/posts/15-when-rust-hurts.html
Tags: tech, encodings
This is a cool encoding I find. Might come in useful sometimes.
https://re-factor.blogspot.com/2023/02/proquint.html?m=1
Tags: tech, agile, project-management
This can indeed quickly become a problem. This slows down everything and can bring with it a silent killer: context switching. It is avoidable though, there are good strategies to prevent WIP to go out of control.
https://jchyip.medium.com/fixing-too-much-wip-ba4d254048a3
Tags: tech, agile, retrospective
Interesting first set of antipatterns… I clearly already encountered the “In the soup” and “Loudmouth” ones. This is like a long advertisement to the book of course but I think I’ll try to get my hands on it.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/retrospective-antipatterns.html
Bye for now!
Call for proposal ends this Saturday 18th of February.
I'm sure there's lots of interesting things you have to talk about so head over to https://linuxappsummit.org/cfp/ and press the "Submit your talk" button :)
After the announcement upstream, Fedora’s @kde-sig follows up by making KDE Plasma 5.27.0 available on Fedora 36 and Fedora 37.
There’s a catch though: you will have to use our COPR.
The regular update on Fedora repositories will follow shortly, I will keep you all posted.
Feel free to join us at our Matrix room!.
Glaxnimate is proud to announce the release of version 0.5.2. This latest update brings several exciting new features and improvements to enhance your animation creation experience.
Earth and Moon graphics are from Noto Emoji
One of the major additions in this release is the ability to animate objects along a path. This is a feature that allows you to animate elements in a more natural and organic way by having them move along a custom path instead of a straight line. With this feature in Glaxnimate, you can create animations of objects following a curved path, like a bouncing ball or a spaceship flying through space.
After you add position keyframes to an object, the path can be adjusted with the edit tool, giving you full control over the motion of your elements, and the ability to fine-tune your animations until they look just right.
The interface layout has also been updated with new presets to provide better display on smaller screens, and the ability to set custom shortcut settings for plugins has been added.
To make your workflow even easier, a new export option as an image sequence has been added to the menu.
This release also brings support for loading and saving Rive animations, improving the quality of video exports, and adding command line options for rendering images without starting the GUI.
Issues with loading Glaxnimate and old Lotties files have also been resolved, as well as a crash on SVG export.
For developers and advanced users, the new release features a function to render a node at a specific frame, providing even more control over your animations.
This release also includes several bug fixes, including resolution of issues with loading Lotties with hidden fill and stroke, improved previews in the stroke style view, and proper application of duration changes in the startup dialog to all layers.
Additionally, Glaxnimate 0.5.2 includes the addition of Flatpak, improved Freedesktop file naming and metainfo, and the ability to view contributors. Messages are also logged to a file for better tracking of errors and issues.
The Select tool has also been improved, allowing for better handling of ungrouped shapes, making your editing process smoother and more efficient.
We are confident that these new features and improvements will enhance your experience with Glaxnimate and look forward to continuing to bring you the best vector animation application.
If you're interested in trying it out, head over to our download page to get started. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us via our issue tracker.
Thank you for your continued support of Glaxnimate!
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-06.
Tags: tech, valve
Very in depth article about the Steam Deck. Interesting look back at it story and situation after a year in the wild.
https://www.techspot.com/article/2620-steam-deck-pc-gaming-moment/
Tags: tech, kde
Nice and thorough review of Plasma. Well done everyone!
https://fossforce.com/2023/02/kde-plasma-full-featured-desktop-thats-surprisingly-easy-on-resources/
Tags: tech, privacy, microsoft
Are we really surprised? This continues a trend they started a few years ago, they don’t want to be left behind Android in that regard.
https://www.techspot.com/news/97535-windows-11-spyware-machine-out-users-control.html
Tags: tech, ai, google, gpt
Or why you can’t trust large language model for any fact or knowledge related tasks…
https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/IsabelNAngelo/status/1623013720011194368
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, politics
Its limits and biases are well documented. But, what about the ideologies of the people behind those models? What can it tell us about their aims behind those models? Questions worth exploring in my opinion.
https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, generator
Interesting work, trying to get back to the source material used by a generative model. This is definitely necessary as well.
https://www.stableattribution.com/
Tags: tech, data
Interesting post with a good perspective on big data projects over time. It confirms that most people don’t fall in the big data bucket, it’s likely less than a percent of the projects which would qualify.
https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/
Tags: tech, dns, security
Looks very interesting, I guess I will switch some of my devices to using this and we’ll see how it goes.
Tags: tech, statistics, profiling
Good explanation about how sampling works. Does a good job explaining why it shines and where it is limited.
https://research.swtch.com/sample
Tags: tech, energy
Looks like a young but interesting tool to assess the power consumption of a service. There’s been quite some work in this domain on the client side, not so much on the server side. This is welcome.
https://github.com/hubblo-org/scaphandre
Tags: tech, c++
This is lesser known and probably should stay obscure… don’t do that at home kids. Those alternative operators (more like tokens really) don’t help with readability at all and make not much sense with UTF8 code bases.
https://www.cedricmartens.com/articles/alt_ops
Tags: tech, type-systems, python, mypy
This is a big milestone reached for that project. Let’s hope it’ll drive adoption up.
https://mypy-lang.blogspot.com/2023/02/mypy-10-released.html
Tags: tech, python, lua
Early days but could become an interesting alternative to Lua for an embedded scripting language in some projects.
Tags: tech, culture, memory
I very much agree with this. It is a real concern with our industry, we seem indeed to keep reinventing the wheel a lot. How do we stop forgetting? How do we move forward?
https://www.ufried.com/blog/continuous_amnesia_issue/
Tags: tech, culture, criticism
Very good essay on why we shouldn’t look down on the Luddite. They had plenty of their questioning right and it’s actually pervasive now. We use the term as libel only because back then they lost…
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
Bye for now!
