We at the @kde-sig are happy to announce we have created a COPR repository which currently contains the KDE Plasma 5.27.0 Beta (aka: 5.26.90).

We intend to use this COPR repository in the future for KDE beta releases so that those Fedora users who want to help the KDE Community can test and report bugs to the KDE developers.

Enabling this COPR repository is very simple:

sudo dnf copr enable @kdesig/kde-beta
sudo dnf update

Your system should now have the Plasma Beta:

For our users using Kinoite, you should check out this blog post by @siosm

That’s all for now.

Feel free to join us at our Matrix room!.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-03.

AI’s Jurassic Park moment - by Gary Marcus

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, ethics

Very good piece about that dangerous moment in the creation of the latest large language models. We’re about to drown in misinformation, can we get out of it?

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/ais-jurassic-park-moment

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour: Exclusive | Time

Tags: tech, ethics, ai, machine-learning, gpt

The human labor behind AI training is still on going. This is clearly gruesome and sent over to other countries… ignoring the price for a minute this is also a good way to hide its consequences I guess.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

U.S. No Fly List Left on Unprotected Airline Server

Tags: tech, airline, security

That’s an “interesting” leak, both for how it happens and what it contains. I shows serious biases in the “no fly list” used by airlines.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/no-fly-list-us-tsa-unprotected-server-commuteair/

New T-Mobile Breach Affects 37 Million Accounts – Krebs on Security

Tags: tech, security

That’s really a massive leak again! The amount of personal data in the wild… will likely help with identity theft too.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/01/new-t-mobile-breach-affects-37-million-accounts/

Jack’s Blog - Revisiting KDE

Tags: tech, kde

Nice to see kind words out there. A couple of issues are pointed out of course but nothing which seems critical I think.

https://jackevansevo.github.io/revisiting-kde.html

How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many | Chris Warrick

Tags: tech, python

Yes… python packaging is a mess. I wonder when it’ll get properly unified and get a proper single tool and workflow.

https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2023/01/15/how-to-improve-python-packaging/#summary

The Elusive Frame Timing | by Alen Ladavac | Medium

Tags: tech, 3d, performance

Excellent analysis and explanation of the stutter problem people experience with game engines. It’s an artifact of the graphics pipeline becoming more asynchronous with no way to know when something is really displayed. Extra graphics APIs will be needed to solve this for real.

https://medium.com/@alen.ladavac/the-elusive-frame-timing-168f899aec92

Use.GPU Goes Trad — Acko.net

Tags: tech, web, webgpu, 3d, frontend

This WebGPU framework is getting interesting. Definitely something to keep an eye on and evaluate for productive uses. Obviously requires WebGPU to be widely available before banking on it.

https://acko.net/blog/use-gpu-goes-trad/

Examples of floating point problems

Tags: tech, programming, mathematics

Nice set of problems encountered when using floating point numbers. Definitely to keep in mind.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/01/13/examples-of-floating-point-problems/

Examples of problems with integers

Tags: tech, programming, mathematics

Problems with integers now. Kind of better known usually, still to keep in mind as well.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/01/18/examples-of-problems-with-integers/

We invested 10% to pay back tech debt; Here’s what happened

Tags: tech, programming, technical-debt

Excellent piece about technical debt. The approach proposed is definitely the good one, it’s the only thing which I know to work to keep technical debt at bay.

https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/tech-debt-day

From Story Points to Slam Dunks — Planning for Success

Tags: tech, project-management, estimates, kanban

Interesting approach regarding estimates. Might especially make sense combined with kanban like project management.

https://medium.com/agileinsider/from-story-points-to-slam-dunks-planning-for-success-c3e067354d9b

The CARL framework of reflection | The University of Edinburgh

Tags: tech, project-management, hr, management, interviews

It’s coming from the job interview domain… but I wonder if it could be more largely useful due to how simple it is (but not easy mind you). I guess I’ll experiment with it for my next project postmortem.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/reflecting-on-experience/carl

Writing Is Magic - Marc’s Blog

Tags: tech, communication, writing

A reminder for me, I write quite a bit, but I feel that I don’t write nearly enough. It’s very important for plenty of cases though.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/11/08/writing.html

These Gorgeous Photos Capture Life Inside a Drop of Seawater | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

Tags: photography, science, biology

Really amazing pictures! All this life we usually can’t see with our own eye.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-gorgeous-photos-capture-life-inside-drop-seawater-180981297/

Bye for now!

Carl Schwan already announced it on discuss.kde.org and at @neochat@fosstodon.org.

In this blog we’ll see how it was done and how you can publish your KDE app in the Microsoft Store.

Reserving a Name and Age Rating Your App

The first step requires some manual work. In Microsoft Partner Center you need to create a new app by reserving a name and complete a first submission. How to do this has been described by Christoph Cullmann in the Windows Store Submission Guide. Don’t hesitate to reserve the name of your app even if you are not yet ready for the first submission to the Microsoft Store. Once a name is reserved nobody else can publish an app with this name.

The first submission needs to be done manually because you will have to answer the age ratings questionnaire. NeoChat was rated 18+ because it allows you to publish all kinds of offensive content on public Matrix rooms. Filling out the questionnaire was quite amusing because I did it together with the NeoChat crowd at #neochat:kde.org.

On the first submission of NeoChat I chose to restrict the visibility to Private audience until it was ready for public consumption. I created a new customer group NeoChat Beta Testers with the email address of my regular Microsoft Store account in Microsoft Partner Center and then selected this group under Private audience. This way I could test installing NeoChat with the Microsoft Store app before anybody else could see it.

Don’t spend too much time filling out things like Description, Screenshots, etc. under Store Listings because some of this information will be added automatically from the AppStream data of your app for all available translations.

Semi-automatic App Submissions

The next submissions of NeoChat were done semi-automatically via the Microsoft Submission API with the submit-to-microsoft-store.py script while writing this Python script and the underlying general Microsoft Store API Python module microstore. The script is based on a Ruby prototype (windows.rb) written by Harald Sitter.

The idea is that the script is run by a (manual) CI job that the app’s release manager can trigger if they want to publish a new version on the Microsoft Store.

To run the script locally you need the credentials for an Azure AD application associated with KDE’s Partner Center account. Anything else you need to know is documented in the script’s README.md.

Making NeoChat Publically Available

The last step of the process to get NeoChat published in the Microsoft Store was another manual submission which just changed the visibility to Private audience. This could also have been done via the Microsoft Submission API (but not with the current version of the script), but I think it’s good to have a last look at the information about the app before it is published. In particular, you may have to fill out the Notes for certification, e.g. if your app cannot be tested without a service or social media account. For NeoChat we had to provide a test account for Matrix.

Moreover, you may want to fill out some details that are currently not available in the AppStream data, e.g. a list of Product features, the Copyright and trademark info, or special screenshots of the Windows version of your app.

What’s Next

On our GitLab instance, we want to provide a full CI/CD pipeline for building and publishing our KDE apps on the Microsoft Store (and many other app stores). A few important things that require special credentials or signing certificates are still missing to complete this pipeline.

And we want to get more KDE apps into the Microsoft Store.

If you need help with getting your KDE app into the Microsoft Store, then come find me in the #kde-windows room.

Updates after publication:

• 2023-01-31: Updated link to script after merge of the MR

New year, new RISC-V Yocto blog post \o/ When I wrote my last post, I did really not expect my brand new VisionFive-2 board to find its way to me so soon… But well, a week ago it was suddenly there. While unpacking I shortly pondered over my made plans to prepare a Plasma Bigscreen RaspberryPi 4 demo board for this year’s FOSDEM.

Obvious conclusion: “Screw it! Let’s do the demo on the VisionFive-2!” — And there we are:

After some initial bumpy steps to boot up a first self-compiled U-boot and Kernel (If you unbox a new board, you need to do a bootloader and firmware update first! Otherwise it will not boot the latest VisionFive Kernel) it was surprisingly easy to prepare Yocto to build a core-image-minimal that really boots the whole way up.

Unfortunately after these first happy hours, the last week was full of handling the horrors of closed-source binary drivers for the GPU. Even though Imagination promised to provide an open source driver at some time, right now there is only the solution to use the closed source PVR driver. After quite a lot of trying, guessing and and comparing the boot and init sequences of the reference image to the dark screen in front of me, I came up with:

• a new visionfive2-graphics Yocto package for the closed source driver blobs
• a fork of Mesa that uses a very heavy patch set for the PVR driver adaptions; all patches are taken from the VisionFive 2 buildroot configurations
• and a couple of configs for making the system start with doing an initial modeset

The result right now:

VisionFive-2 device with Plasma-Bigscreen (KWin running via Wayland), SD card image built via Yocto, KDE software via KDE’s Yocto layers, Kernel and U-Boot being the latest fork versions from StarFive

Actually, the full UI even feels much smoother than on my RPi4, which is quite cool. I am not sure where I will end in about 3 weeks with some more debugging and patching. But I am very confident that you can see a working RISC-V board with onboard GPU and running Plasma Shell, when you visit the KDE stall at FOSDEM in February

For people who are interested in Yocto, here is the WIP patch set: https://github.com/riscv/meta-riscv/pull/382

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-02.

A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, culture

A very interesting metaphor. Indeed on social media we’re not dealing with gardens.

https://powazek.com/posts/3571

Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens

Tags: tech, automotive, ux

Not very scientific, but indeed thought provoking and taps into safety considerations.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-finds-that-buttons-in-cars-are-safer-and-quicker-to-use-than-touchscreens

I scanned every package on PyPi and found 57 live AWS keys

Tags: tech, security, secrets, python

This is apparently a somewhat common mistake. Something is apparently not easy enough to handle and error prone.

https://tomforb.es/i-scanned-every-package-on-pypi-and-found-57-live-aws-keys/

The yaml document from hell

Tags: tech, yaml

A few examples of why yaml is getting out of control. It is very very error prone at this point.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

How to store your app’s entire state in the url

Tags: tech, web, browser

Interesting approach although you probably don’t want to do this systematically. For some applications it is a good idea.

https://www.scottantipa.com/store-app-state-in-urls

Introduction - Just Programmer’s Manual

Tags: tech, tools, command-line

Interesting little tool. I usually use make for this kind of things, but it seems to bring some benefits for non build tasks.

https://just.systems/man/en/

Makefiles for Web Work – Ross Zurowski

Tags: tech, command-line, tools, unix

A love letter to Makefiles. A couple of interesting tricks in there.

https://rosszurowski.com/log/2022/makefiles

What Happens When A CPU Starts

Tags: tech, cpu

Nice nugget reminding us the early steps and basic mechanisms of the CPU life at boot.

https://lateblt.tripod.com/bit68.txt

The Power of Prolog

Tags: tech, programming, logic, prolog

Nice resource to get started with Prolog.

https://www.metalevel.at/prolog

Architecture diagrams should be code - BAM Weblog

Tags: tech, architecture, diagrams

I’m more and more tempted by this kind of approach. Managing architecture models using code seems fairly neat. That said I wish we’d have better free software tooling for that, I find it still fairly limited. Maybe I should check out the Haskell library which is mentioned.

https://brianmckenna.org/blog/architecture_code

Shopify: Say no to meetings | UNLEASH

Tags: tech, management, meetings

Always a good idea to seek reduction in time spent in meetings. I’ve seen this being too often a drain. Can get quickly out of control.

https://www.unleash.ai/hr-technology/shopify-encourages-employees-to-say-no-to-meetings/

Epochalypse

Tags: tech, unix, date, funny

It’s comiiing! OK… not quite yet. But if that prevents your sleep here is an easy way to check.

https://www.epochalypse.today/

The science of why you have great ideas in the shower

Tags: science

Finally, we have an idea of why we get ideas in “strange” moments. Fascinating stuff.

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2022/08/the-science-of-why-you-have-great-ideas-in-the-shower

Bye for now!

I am pleased to announce Linux-Stopmotion release 0.8.6! The last release was three years ago and this is the first release since Stopmotion became a KDE incubator project.

About Stopmotion

Stopmotion is a Free Open Source application to create stop-motion animations. It helps you capture and edit the frames of your animation and export them as a single file.

Technically, it is a C++ / Qt application with optional dependencies to camera capture libraries.

Changes in release 0.8.6

• New build system using CMake. The qmake one is deprecated and will be removed.
• The test executable can be executed as a CMake test target (make test-stopmotion && make test).
• Fixed various warnings from Clang, GCC, and Qt 5.15.
• We have a build pipeline executing automated builds and tests.

Future plans

• We decided to renamed the application to KStopmotion, as Linux is trademarked.
• Transition from Qt 5 to version 6.
• We should integrate better to KDE's tech stack: Internationalization, using KDE libraries, update and reformat documentation.
  

Get involved!

If you are interested, give Stopmotion a try. Reach out to our mailing list kstopmotion@kde.org to share ideas or get involved.

You can also help to improve Stopmotion. For example, we started the transition to Qt 6 and we welcome any helping hand.

Happy new year! Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-01.

BREAKING: Meta prohibited from use of personal data for advertisment

Tags: tech, attention-economy, surveillance, facebook

This could be huge if properly enforced. This would reduce profits of personalized ads quite a bit.

https://noyb.eu/en/breaking-meta-prohibited-use-personal-data-advertisment

In 2022, web3 went just great - Molly White

Tags: tech, web3, scam

Maybe they’ll finally realize it just make no sense? It’s time for this absurdity to be put to rest.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/in-2022-web3-went-just-great

I am not a supplier - Software Maxims

Tags: tech, foss, commons, supply-chain

Friendly reminder, if you’re not paying authors of FOSS libraries, they owe you nothing.

https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

Journalists (And Others) Should Leave Twitter. Here’s How They Can Get Started | Techdirt

Tags: tech, attention-economy, twitter, fediverse

Let’s hope journalists hear that call. It’s indeed sad that so far it’s mostly words and not many actions to move away from Twitter in that profession.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/04/journalists-and-others-should-leave-twitter-heres-how-they-can-get-started/

The internet wants to be fragmented - by Noah Smith

Tags: tech, social-media, internet

Interesting take, let’s see if it’s true and things will decentralize (or at least audiences fragment, the author seems to confuse both) more in the future.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented

Bring back personal blogging - The Verge

Tags: tech, web, blog, culture

Let’s hope it’s one good resolution for 2023 that plenty will go for. We need blogs to be back, massively. It would be better for everyone.

https://www.theverge.com/23513418/bring-back-personal-blogging

The state of HTTP in 2022

Tags: tech, http, web

That’s a lot which happened in this community over the past year. It’s important that is keeps pushing forward and luckily it does.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-state-of-http-in-2022/

The Rise of Monolithic Software

Tags: tech, web, protocols, http, vendor-lockin

Interesting piece. It shows quite well what users have lost with the over reliance on HTTP for everything. Moving more and more things in the brother fosters walled gardens indeed. Compound this with branding obsession from most company and you indeed end up with an absurd situation.

https://itnext.io/the-rise-of-monolithic-software-9e538cfec6e4

You Want Modules, Not Microservices

Tags: tech, microservices, architecture, organization

Excellent piece, looking back to history to justify why microservices are mostly a fad. Check what your needs really are and depending on them pick the right way to decompose the problem or organize your teams.

https://blogs.newardassociates.com/blog/2023/you-want-modules-not-microservices.html

Parallelizing C++ using Execution Policies | Azeem Bande-Ali | Engineering Manager

Tags: tech, multithreading, c++

A little reminder that those too often forgotten execution policies for C++ algorithms actually exist and can give interesting results nowadays.

https://azeemba.com/posts/cpp17-execution-policy.html

Performance of WebAssembly runtimes in 2023 | Frank DENIS random thoughts.

Tags: tech, performance, webassembly

Time to look a bit at the maze of WebAssembly runtimes. Good overview on how they currently perform and how well they are documented or easy to use.

https://00f.net/2023/01/04/webassembly-benchmark-2023/

Microfeatures I’d like to see in more languages • Buttondown

Tags: tech, programming

Since I’m also a bit of a nerd of nice programming language features, that’s an interesting list (mostly) coming from less known languages. Some of that syntactic sugar would be welcome in more main stream languages I think.

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/microfeatures-id-like-to-see-in-more-languages/

Test Desiderata. Go placidly amid the noise and haste… | by Kent Beck | Medium

Tags: tech, tests, tdd

This what we should strive for with our tests. I like how he keeps it flexible though, again it’s likely a trade-off so you can’t have all the properties fully all the time. Still you need to know what you give up, how much of it and why.

https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/test-desiderata-94150638a4b3

Fast Path to a Great UX – Increased Exposure Hours — UX Articles by UIE

Tags: tech, ux

A bit old but interesting finding. Kind of confirms my own view about it: it’s best when everyone (not just designers) can interact with the users of the system you’re building.

https://articles.uie.com/user_exposure_hours/

Sign-up Versus Assignment - by Kent Beck - Geek Incentives

Tags: tech, project-management, management

It’s clearly a choice in management style. For such choices, always keep in mind the trade offs this create, maybe it’ll push you to revise your choice.

https://geekincentives.substack.com/p/sign-up-versus-assignment

Navigating power dynamics as a manager

Tags: management, empathy

Like it or not (I’m part of those who don’t like it) but the role of manager will necessarily create power imbalances. This article is thus a must read to managers at any level to know how to deal with it properly.

https://leaddev.com/communication-relationships/navigating-power-dynamics-manager

Conversation Skills Essentials – Tynan.com

Tags: culture, empathy

Interesting list of tips for better conversations. Some of them are common knowledge at that point, some others less so.

https://tynan.com/letstalk/

Tangram Heightmapper

Tags: tech, 3d

OK, this is really cool for all your realistic height map needs!

https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/

Why the super rich are inevitable

Tags: economics, politics

Very interesting model, I didn’t know about this one. As pointed out you can’t really base policy decisions upon it but that’s still powerful since it explains some of the phenomena at play in the real world. In this way it is enough to debunk some of the assumptions taken a bit too much for granted.

https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/

Bye for now!