We're happy to announce the new release 5.10.0 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management program!

The ChangeLog for this version is as follows:

Changed

• View-related actions formerly found in the "Settings" menu were moved to the "View" menu.
• Make options "Display Labels in Thumbnail View" and "Display Categories in Thumbnail View" reachable via the "View" menu and allow both actions to be assigned keyboard shortcuts (Implements: #145346).
• Store the untagged tag information inside the index.xml file instead of the Settings (Implements: #461206).
• Change scroll direction in the annotation dialog's date edit fields to match common (western) expectations and the date picker.
• Prevent scrolling past the occupied areas of the date bar.
• Files are now always created with group read/write permissions (Fixes: #438128).
• When exiting the demo mode, the demo database is now always saved if it isn't deleted.

Dependencies

• CMake: 3.18
• Qt5: 5.15
• KDE Frameworks: 5.78

Fixed

• Improve readability of "Show Tooltips in Thumbnails Window" tooltip.
• Fix image selection order for newly added images (Fixes: 442325).
• Improve date bar behavior when zooming the date bar and changing views (Fixes: 357237).

Removed

• Default shortcut for "View" images was removed.
  Pressing "Enter" to open the viewer is now the preferred way. To restore the old behavior, reassign the shortcut via "Settings | Configure Keyboard Shortcuts...".

Thanks to everybody having contributed to this release! The authors were (according to git log and in alphabetical order):

• Christophe Giboudeaux
• Tobias Leupold
• Luigi Toscano
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Have a lot of fun with the new version!

— Tobias

As you probably have heard by now the lastest development versions of Plasma and KDE Frameworks require Qt6. This transition has been in the works for a few years by now, but it was only somewhat recently that we took the plunge and started relying on Qt6 exclusively for Plasma. Plasma 5.27 is the last Plasma 5 release and continues in bugfix-only mode.

For people who want to hack on Plasma features this raises the obvious question: How do I build Plasma 6 to hack on it?

Before diving into this, a word of warning: Current Plasma master is in no way “ready for production”. There are known-broken things and things may temporarily regress at any time. That said, the only way to get towards a stable thing is to dig in and fix things. So let’s see how to do that.

For this explanation I’m assuming you have build KDE software with kdesrc-build before. If not we have some extensive documentation for that. First you need at least Qt 6.4 installed. The usually best way to get that is from your distribution. If your distribution does not have Qt6 packaged yet please complain^Wtalk to them. CMake should complain about any missing Qt6 modules/development files, but make sure you have the qtpaths tool installed beforehand. It should be named something like qtpaths6 or qtpaths-qt6.

Now we need to teach kdesrc-build to build Plasma with the right configuration (git branches, CMake arguments etc) for building with Qt6. The easiest way to do that is by using a separate kdesrc-buildrc file. kdesrc-build comes with a sample Qt6 configuration file that you should use as a starting point. Replace the line include ~/kde6/usr/share/kdesrc-build/kf6-qt6-build-include with a path to your existing kdesrc-build installation. For me that would be include ~/kde/src/kdesrc-build/kf6-qt6-build-include. You can also apply other customizations that you usually do in your kdesrc-buildrc. Then save the file as e.g. ~/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc. This configuration will download, build, and install everything under ~/kde6. Currently it is very important to keep Qt5-based and Qt6-based builds separate since there will be conflicts between the installed files.

Now you can invoke kdesrc-build as usual, with one slight difference. Passing --rc-file=/home/user/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc will make it use the Qt6 configuration. If you omit the --rc-file argument it will use the old, Qt5-based configuration, so you can keep building Qt5- and Qt6-based stuff in parallel (but installed into different locations). Since kdesrc-build --rc-file=/home/user/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc is a bit of a mouthful you might want to configure a shell alias like kdesrc-build6 for it.

Now you can do kdesrc-build --rc-file=/home/user/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc workspace to build Plasma. Note that it’s expected that not all modules successfully build since not all of them are adjusted to Qt6 fully yet.

Once Plasma is build you want to log into the new session. To do that go to ~/kde6/build/plasma-workspace and run sudo ./login-sessions/install-sessions.sh once. Then you can select the new session at login in SDDM.

Now for some question that might be on your mind:

Q: Is it stable?

A: No, see above.

Q: When will it be stable?

A: Time will tell. It will be several more months before we can consider a Plasma 6 release.

Q: I tested it and found a problem, what should I do?

A: Report it to bugs.kde.org, and state that you are using Plasma master. Or try fixing it yourself.

Q: I want to work on a Plasma feature, what should I do?

A: Try developing it against Plasma master. If you find yourself blocked by anything please tell us.

Q: Does this apply to other KDE software as well?

A: Yes. Note that most applications allow building against Qt5 and Qt6 from the same branch though. And some apps aren’t ported to Qt6 at all.

Q: I did not understand a word of what you just said but I’d still like to help.

A: One way to help is by donating to KDE. Your donations help me have time to do things like working on Qt6 support or writing this blog post

After the recent release of KBibTeX 0.9.3.2 as the last release of the 0.9.x branch, it is now time to make a stable release of KBibTeX 0.10.0. Tar-balls are as usual available at KDE’s download mirrors. Some of the changes were documented more than two years ago in a pre-release (0.9.90), but here are the highlights taken from the ChangeLog:

• New online search: Semantic Scholar
• Migrating Inspire Hep to REST API
• Fixing and revamping ACM's Digital Library (a.k.a. ACM Portal) online search
• Refactoring NSA ADS to use official API
• Updating BibSearch code: cover page improved, preparing code for translations, adding progress bar
• Tabs in the entry editor can show short messages to use, e.g. in which tab DOIs or URLs are to be entered
• Fixing UI issues with ColorLabelWidget
• Using KRatingPainter instead of home-made StarRating's paint function
• Various improvements and refactoring when (PDF) files get associated with an entry
• Use Qt's own QOAuth1 class instead of external library QOAuth
• Having ICU as an optional dependency only, provide internal, static translation from Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) characters to ASCII-only representations
• Greatly refactoring and modernizing CMakeLists.txt files, generation of camel-case headers, private/public linking to libraries, ...
• Updating translations (contributions by various authors)
• KDE Bug 421612: When suggesting entry ids, do not count ‘small words’
• KDE Bug 424033: Can't associate a file with a relative path without having the file copied
• KDE Bug 423976: When formatting IDs, non-word characters should be used as word separators
• KDE Bug 426856: File encoding is not always stored
• KDE Bug 379443: Slowdown when loading citation with many authors
• KDE Bug 433005: Cannot unselect entry list view columns in BibLaTeX mode
• KDE Bug 433084, KDE Bug 453455: Fixing crash when opening .bib file
• KDE Invent issue 1: Properly handling letter modifiers such as \c{e} instead of \ce
• Adding and extending numerous automated tests
• Numerous other fixes, clean-ups, refactoring, ...

Thank you to everyone who contributed. Happy compiling and packaging!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-12.

twenty-five years of curl | daniel.haxx.se

Tags: tech, tools

Happy Birthday curl! This project is really focused and popular.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/03/20/twenty-five-years-of-curl/

The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

Tags: tech, microsoft, browser, surveillance

This browser is really an horrible data harvesting platform for Microsoft’s benefit. They never learn…

https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/03/18/the-dark-defaults-of-microsoft-edge.html

Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring’s Blog

Tags: tech, web, browser, surveillance

It’s clearly way too reliable. This needs explicit hardening.

https://www.bitestring.com/posts/2023-03-19-web-fingerprinting-is-worse-than-I-thought.html

Meta gives up on NFTs for Facebook and Instagram - The Verge

Tags: tech, facebook, nft, funny

How surprising, did they realize this was one more fad they were helping to fuel?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23638572/instagram-nft-meta-facebook-quits-digital-collectibles

The climate cost of the AI revolution • Wim Vanderbauwhede

Tags: tech, climate, ai, neural-networks, gpt

The climate constraints are currently not compatible with the ongoing arm race on large neural networks models. The training seems kinda OK, but the inferences… and it’s currently just rolled out as shiny gadgets. This really need to be rethought.

https://limited.systems/articles/climate-cost-of-ai-revolution/

The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models | Quanta Magazine

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, complexity, emergence

Now, this is interesting research. With all that complexity, emergence is bound to happen. There’s a chance to explain how and why. The links with the training data quality and the prompts themselves are interesting. It also explains a lot of the uncertainty.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316/

Hallucinations Could Blunt ChatGPT’s Success - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

Now this is a properly balanced piece which looks beyond the hype. Usable yes, if hallucinations don’t have a high impact. Can the hallucinations be solved? To be seen, I personally have my doubts with the current architecture… at least banking it all on human feedback is being very naive about the scale of the task.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-hallucination

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow - The Verge

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, google, microsoft, criticism, fake

Training sets are obviously already contaminated… now it’ll be a race of hiding such mistake under the carpet with human interventions. That’ll be a boon for misinformation. That’s what we get for a useless large models arm race.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/22/23651564/google-microsoft-bard-bing-chatbots-misinformation

ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!—Stephen Wolfram Writings

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

Now, this starts to become interesting. This is a first example of trying to plug symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches together in the wild. This highlights some limitations of this particular (quite a bit rough) approach, we’ll see how far that can go before another finer approach is needed.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its-wolfram-superpowers/

Epic’s new motion-capture animation tech has to be seen to be believed | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, ai, 3d, animation

Now this is a truly impressive technology! This will make facial motion capture a really smoother process.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/epics-new-motion-capture-animation-tech-has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed/

Image Codec Comparison

Tags: tech, photography, codec, art

Interesting benchmark, this seems to point toward AVIF and JPEG-XL as two great codecs for pictures.

https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/image-comparison/

ThumbHash: A very compact representation of an image placeholder

Tags: tech, graphics, frontend, hash

Interesting algorithm for generating image placeholders.

https://evanw.github.io/thumbhash/

TinyVG

Tags: tech, graphics, vector

Looks like an interesting vector image format. Let’s see if it gets some buy in.

https://tinyvg.tech/

Modern Font Stacks

Tags: tech, frontend, web, fonts

Very nice approach to avoid the font bloating on the web. I’m slightly concerned about the maintenance over time but at least it has proper fallbacks and the fonts used seem widespread enough (for now).

https://modernfontstacks.com/

Introducing Ares - The Fastest Way to Decode Anything

Tags: tech, tools, cryptography, encodings

Still a bit young but looks like an interesting and fast tool to decode random data.

https://skerritt.blog/introducing-ares/

Envio is a command-line tool that simplifies the management of environment variables

Tags: tech, tools, command-line

This looks interesting, I especially like the fact that it’s easily encrypted, definitely a good thing regarding secrets. Now I wonder if that’s easy to couple with direnv…

https://github.com/humblepenguinn/envio

Why I Will Never Use Alpine Linux Ever Again | Martin Heinz | Personal Website & Blog

Tags: tech, docker

This is a very good point, it’s good to reduce containers size. Be careful of the cost though.

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/92

Laurence Tratt: How Big Should a Programming Language Be?

Tags: tech, programming, language

Interesting musing about a language size and how it evolves over time. There’s clearly tension between making it too big and keeping it relevant to modern uses.

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/how_big_should_a_programming_language_be.html

Why people misuse inheritance | Thoughts, solicited and otherwise

Tags: tech, object-oriented, programming

A good point… everybody should know at this point that delegation should be favor. So why do we keep turning to inheritance even in cases we shouldn’t? Convenience and writing less code mainly. Unfortunately that leads to bugs more often than not.

https://solicited-thoughts.bearblog.dev/why-people-misuse-inheritance/

System design and the cost of architectural complexity

Tags: tech, architecture, complexity, hr, bug, productivity

It’s been a while since I dived into reading a Ph.D thesis… I bumped into that one through an article which was trying to summarize it but I wasn’t super happy with it. That’s why I decided to go to the source.

It’s an interesting read, it has the benefit of making a clear difference between complicated and complex from the get go, which is welcome (generally a good sign for me). If you want the tl;dr it’s at the end of page 16: “we found that differences in architectural complexity accounted for differences in developer productivity of 50%, three-fold differences in defect density, and order-of-magnitude differences in staff turnover”.

Note the last point about the staff turnover should be taken with a grain of salt though. It is well explained in the limitations of the study, being a lot in the high complexity areas of the code can also be a sign of higher skills and thus more job opportunities.

Anyway, I think we all suspected some link between complexity and productivity but I always wondered how much. Seeing how the study was done it’s definitely not an absolute answer (very thorough and precise, even historical data taken into account over several releases… but in a single company). Still the value is in at last giving us some rough numbers on how far the impacts can go. Thus, the scale of those impacts are potentially huge.

Maybe it’s time to stop trying to find rockstar developers or mythical 10x developers (common “leprechauns” of our industry)… Let’s focus on tackling undue or uncontrolled architectural and code complexity instead, shall we? Even better if that’s done through the use of documented patterns when applicable.

Interestingly, the literature review part gives a few clues about why there is under-investment in architecture in general, or reworking the architecture on long term project. It’s unclear to organizations the costs of the undue complexity will carry. It’s exactly what this thesis tries to shed light on (see tl;dr above).

Also, it’s interesting to see confirmed that the perception of the architectural complexity we have is often wrong when looking at parts in isolation. The relationships need to be transitively mapped to start to grasp the presence of architectural complexity. That’s why only coordinated efforts can tackle it, it’s almost impossible to tackle for a single developer.

Of course I’d advise reading it in full, that requires investing some time into it though.

Very stimulating, I’d like to apply some of those tools on projects in the wild but I’m not sure there are ready made tools available. Also I’m wondering what we would find if I’d reuse some of those in ComDaAn to work on temporality of changes rather than dependencies. I think this could give interesting insights.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.¹⁄₇₉₅₅₁

Go slow to move fast - Thoughts on software and technical leadership

Tags: tech, project-management, technical-debt

Technical debt was an interesting metaphor to kickstart the conversation but has been overused. It can still be useful, especially with the proposed approach here to make it intentional and explicit. This can be factored in how to drive the project.

https://jordankaye.dev/posts/go-slow-move-fast/

Project Management for Software Engineers | Kevin Sookocheff

Tags: tech, project-management

This is a good summary of the most important points in the PMI body of knowledge. If you dabble in project management it’s worth looking at it.

https://sookocheff.com/post/engineering-management/project-management-for-software-engineers/

I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked – Emmanuel Maggiori

Tags: tech, business, agile, criticism

OK, not a perfect article, I think there are a couple of blind spots in the reasoning (I doubt all the estimates were as systematically bloated as presented here). Still, it’s another interesting account of the problems created by the cargo cult agile. It indeed seems to resonate with the fact that the tech sector is very hype driven. A lot of useless work then ensues.

https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-never-worked/

Why Construction Projects Always Go Over Budget — Practical Engineering

Tags: tech, engineering, estimates

For all we like to point out the software industry for blowing up estimates and budgets… it’s not a unique phenomenon, civil engineering is also struggling with it. This is a good reminder.

https://practical.engineering/blog/2023/3/21/why-construction-projects-always-go-over-budget

Culture Viruses | Stay SaaSy

Tags: management, hr, culture

Interesting way to frame the potential problems around organizational culture. This indeed influence behaviors quite a bit so should be in check. It also shows it’s a complicated problem you don’t want to overdo it, freeze the culture in place, and see it used mainly for blaming… it’d effectively turn into a cult.

https://staysaasy.com/business/2023/03/01/culture-viruses.html

Bye for now!

This blog introduces a new tool to make it easy to stream wayland windows and screens to existing applications running under Xwayland that don't have native pipewire support in an easy-to-use manner than retains full user control throughout.

Intro

On my Plasma wayland session right now if I use the screen share function in Discord, I'm presented with the following.

It doesn't work

I have no windows listed, even though I clearly have windows open. The full screen shares are blank.
The same will be true in MS Teams, Slack, Zoom as well as any other Xwayland apps that involve screencasts.

Linux enthusiasts - and by reading developer blogs you're definitely in this camp - will understand why this is and probably know some technique to avoid this involving changing my setup or workflow in some way to work round things on a per-app basis.

For our wider userbase this isn't enough. Wayland is a technical detail and we want any switch has to be as transparent as possible for as many apps as possible for all cases - including cases we haven't thought of.

Introducing XwaylandVideoBridge

With our new tool, written by Aleix Pol and myself, running the workflow is as follows: I click on the share button. Immediately I'm presented with an option to choose what windows or screens I wish to make available to X.

This is now selectable in my existing application. The stream continues until I stop sharing within the application.

Left: a prompt to choose windows to stream.
Right: How it appears after selection

Security

The bridge works via the same mechanisms as any "native wayland" video streaming tool would work, through the XDG Desktop Portals. Getting data through PipeWire as requested it through the portal with explicit user consent.
Whilst the bridge does mean that any X application could eavesdrop the shared window the user still remains completely at the helm of which windows are shared to X applications and most importantly when.

We could go the route of trying to be completely seamless to the X client with N fake windows all forwarding content on demand, but I like the demonstration that it's possible to not break existing user applications without having to compromise on our lofty wayland goals.

Performance

Technically there's an overhead, pragmatically it uses no CPU and any latency is negligible compared to the cost of streaming.

Installation

Grab a flatpak from: Our gitlab builder or from source.

Note it requires a non-released libkpipewire, something the flatpak resolves.

Whilst only tested on a Plasma wayland session, this should be usable by any Wayland desktop with a working xdg-desktop-portal, screencasting and standard system tray.
(Edit March 24th: User testing has shown some mixed results on Gnome with colours, and completely not working at all Sway)

Usage

Ensure our proxy is running in the background flatpak run org.kde.xwaylandvideobridge optionally setting it to autostart. After that everything should kick in automatically the next time an Xwayland application starts streaming.

How it works under the hood

The inspiration for this came from the debug tool to show pipewire streams in a window whilst we were working on Plasma remote desktop support. If we force that debug tool to run as an Xwayland client, it becomes visible to other Xwayland chat / streaming programs. We had 90% of the code already.

The only remaining step was some sneaky tricks to hide this X11 window from the user's view making it unfocussable, invisible and out of view. We then added detection for when we're being streamed by using the XRecord extension to monitor all clients redirecting the window we own.

It's an excellent example of X11 allowing you to do really, really stupid things, for novel and creative puposes.

Future Plans

This is only an initial Alpha release. How we take it in the future is not completely decided; it might remain a standalone tool moving to flathub or distros, we might proposed it into Plasma 6 by default. There's a possibility the Linux desktop might be at a point where this is redundant.

There's definitely some minor tweaks still to do on the exact workflow.

Please do give feedback and let us know!

http://disuss.kde.org thread

Working on the Nextcloud desktop client, I stumbled into a nasty little bug. If you tried to add or remove a user account, the app would often freeze for a while.

This was super annoying during testing, so I decided to look into it. Surprisingly this wasn’t a new bug I’d unwittingly introduced; tracing the source of the freeze led all the way down into QtKeychain, which is what the desktop client uses to store user credentials.

QtKeychain, like Qt itself, is great at making life easy for developers targeting multiple platforms as it abstracts away the different keychain/keyring/wallet implementations for the different platforms. Looking at the Objective-C++ code handling Apple platforms, QtKeychain’s different job classes called code using Keychain Services functions, as expected.

Fortunately the problem was pretty clear. All of the calls to the Keychain Services functions — SecItemUpdate, SecItemDelete, SecItemAdd, SecItemCopyMatching — block the calling thread. From Apple’s documentation:

SecItemUpdate blocks the calling thread, so it can cause your app’s UI to hang if called from the main thread. Instead, call SecItemUpdate from a background dispatch queue or async function.

This means that, when called on the main thread, doing any QtKeychain operations would lead to freezing the UI. Since this is not a problem on other platforms (that I know of!), it’s pretty easy to overlook this quirk of Keychain Services’ API. 

void DeletePasswordJobPrivate::scheduledStart()
{
    const NSDictionary *const query = @{
            (__bridge id) kSecClass: (__bridge id) kSecClassGenericPassword,
            (__bridge id) kSecAttrService: (__bridge NSString *) service.toCFString(),
            (__bridge id) kSecAttrAccount: (__bridge NSString *) key.toCFString(),
    };

    const OSStatus status = SecItemDelete((__bridge CFDictionaryRef) query);

    if (status == errSecSuccess) {
        q->;emitFinished();
    } else {
        const ErrorDescription error = ErrorDescription::fromStatus(status);
        q->;emitFinishedWithError(error.code, Job::tr("Could not remove private key from keystore: %1").arg(error.message));
    }
}

With use of Grand Central Dispatch, a fix was relatively straightforward. All that needed to be done was to call the offending functions from a different dispatch queue. I rewrote the Apple-specific keychain implementation in order to call the Keychain Services functions asynchronously from the global queue, passing an interface object that would call the relevant completion methods and signals on the read/write/delete QtKeychain jobs.

static void StartDeletePassword(const QString &service, const QString &key, AppleKeychainInterface * const interface)
{
    dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_BACKGROUND, 0), ^{
        NSDictionary * const query = @{
            (__bridge NSString *)kSecClass: (__bridge NSString *)kSecClassGenericPassword,
            (__bridge NSString *)kSecAttrService: service.toNSString(),
            (__bridge NSString *)kSecAttrAccount: key.toNSString(),
        };

        const OSStatus status = SecItemDelete((__bridge CFDictionaryRef)query);

        if (status == errSecSuccess) {
            dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
                [interface keychainTaskFinished];
                [interface release];
            });
        } else {
            NSString * const descriptiveErrorString = @"Could not remove private key from keystore";
            dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
                [interface keychainTaskFinishedWithError:status descriptiveMessage:descriptiveErrorString];
                [interface release];
            });
        }
    });
}

Note that after these changes, your application will need to either use QGuiApplication or you will need to initialise NSApplication yourself if you use QCoreApplication.

Testing the changes with a fresh build of QtKeychain, I was happy to see the freezes are now gone in the Nextcloud desktop client. 🙂

Thanks to Frank Osterfeld for reviewing the pull request!

What’s new in 2.10?

Worksheet

LabPlot’s worksheet comes with new visualizations and more advanced plots, including:

• Bar plots
• Plot templates that allow you to save and re-use custom plot configurations
• Error bars in histograms
• Rug plots for box plots and histograms
• More flexible and customizable box plots
• Reference ranges, that is, custom areas on the plot to highlight x- and y-ranges
• LaTeX error messages in text labels when rendering with LaTeX

Spreadsheet

The Spreadsheets gain more functions and operations to modify and generate data:

• Data sampling (random and periodic methods)
• Data flattening to convert pivoted data to column base format
• Baseline subtraction using the arPLS algorithm
• Heat-map formatting for categorical data in text columns
• Column statistics for text columns, including the frequency table, bar and Pareto plots
• Functions to access arbitrary cells of columns with cell (f(index), g(column, ..))
• Functions to work with column statistics (size, mean, stddev, etc.)
• Ability to specify the seed number when generating random numbers

Analysis

The new analysis tools added to LabPlot 2.10 include:

• Maximum likelihood estimation for several distributions
• Guess start values of fit parameter for polynomial models by linear regression
• Export the results of a computation to a new spreadsheet
• Fourier filtering for DateTime data

Import/Export

LabPlot 2.10 adds support for new file formats and multiple optimizations to improve import performance:

• Import of Excel .xlsx files
• Export spreadsheet and matrices to Excel .xlsx format
• Import of Binary Log File (BLF) files from Vektor Informatik
• HDF5: support VLEN data import
• Reduced memory consumption when importing from a database table into a spreadsheet
• Reduced memory consumption during the spreadsheet export to SQLite databases
• Faster import of files with a large number of columns

Notebook

The 2.10 release Improves the variable panel and plot export:

• Show the type of a variable, its size (in Bytes), and its dimension (number of rows and columns) for backends that provide this information
• Properly show the values of Octave’s row vectors and matrices
• Allow to copy variable names and values to the clipboard
• Export plot results to vector graphic formats (PDF and SVG)

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-11.

MoonRay Production Renderer

Tags: tech, foss, 3d, movie

This is a huge! DreamWorks Animation releasing its rendering pipeline as free software.

https://openmoonray.org/

Who reads your email?

Tags: tech, email, decentralized, self-hosting

This is very very centralized. No good surprise here unfortunately… and still email is really tough to fully self-host.

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/mx-diversity.html

Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams

Tags: tech, ai, microsoft, ethics, gpt

Well, people asking relevant questions slow you down obviously… since the goal about the latest set of generative models is to “move them into customers hands at a very high speed” this creates tension. Instead of slowing down they seem hell bent at throwing ethics out of the window.

https://www.platformer.news/p/microsoft-just-laid-off-one-of-its

GPT-4’s successes, and GPT-4’s failures - by Gary Marcus

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, ethics, science

The lack of transparency is staggering… this is purely about hype and at that point they’re not making any effort to push science forward anymore.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/gpt-4s-successes-and-gpt-4s-failures

Vim Best Practices For IDE Users

Tags: tech, tools, ide, vim

Very thorough overview of everything you can do with vim but also your IDE vim emulation.

https://betterprogramming.pub/50-vim-mode-tips-for-ide-users-f7b525a794b3

What a good debugger can do

Tags: tech, debugging, tools

I find debuggers to be underused at quite a few places. A shame when you see what they can do nowadays, and they keep improving!

https://werat.dev/blog/what-a-good-debugger-can-do/

Git Worktree: Enhance your Git Workflow

Tags: tech, tools, git

An often forgotten feature of git. That said it is very convenient when we need to juggle several branches at the same time. This can save some time and space.

https://www.dylanpaulus.com/posts/git-worktree

macige • mobile app CI workflow generator

Tags: tech, ci, mobile

Early days but could turn out useful when it gets more complete. Good way to easily have a CI pipeline targeting mobile platforms.

https://macige.tramline.app/

GitHub - huytd/comby-search: A code search tool based on Comby

Tags: tech, tools, refactoring

Looks like it completes Comby nicely for the search only case.

https://github.com/huytd/comby-search

Remote Synthesis | The Price Developers Pay for Loving Their Tools Too Much

Tags: tech, react, culture, tools

Excellent post about getting too invested in a single tool. We can loose flexibility in the process. Also in the case of React, I didn’t realize until now that half of the web developers have never known a time when React didn’t exist!

https://remotesynthesis.com/blog/the-price-of-developer-tools/

In Defense of Crusty Old Swiss Army Knives // Zach Goldstein

Tags: tech, django, htmx, react, frontend, backend

Nice exploration of Django + HTMX + web components for a CRUD use case. Interesting insights and highlights some of the limitations with HTMX.

https://zachgoldstein.engineering/posts/crusty-knives/crusty-knives/

Choose boring tools – Eduards Sizovs

Tags: tech, architecture, complexity

Definitely this. If it’s too fancy and fashionable you’re likely to pay it in later with the undue complexity it introduced.

https://sizovs.net/boring/

Debugging Architects - The Architect Elevator

Tags: tech, system, architecture, organization

Indeed, it’s important for architects to get their “hands dirty”. Organizations where it’s not the case prevent their architects to challenge their assumptions pushing them to stay in their ivory tower. It’s a good way for bad decisions to pile up over time.

https://architectelevator.com/transformation/debugging-architect/

Jade Rubick - Advice for new directors

Tags: tech, management

Interesting advises for higher management roles. The information gathering and the distorsion fields are key factors to have in mind to not loose perspective. Otherwise it’s when you’ll start doing more harm than good.

https://www.rubick.com/advice-for-new-directors/

Research: Do People Really Get Promoted to Their Level of Incompetence?

Tags: management, hr, career

Interesting, this seems to empirically confirm the Peter Principle, at least in sales. Also shows that companies are trying to workaround it. Dual career ladders seem to be an interesting path for this.

https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-do-people-really-get-promoted-to-their-level-of-incompetence

No heroes needed

Tags: tech, team, management, project-management

Definitely this as well. Having “heroes” brings obscurity and hide the problems, this prevents management from knowing and handling the issues. This also create lots of missed opportunities for collective learning and improvements.

https://rpadovani.com/no-heroes

Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely | TechTarget

Tags: tech, remote-working, hr, hiring

The report is very US centric. Still it looks like the future standard for developer jobs will be more and more remote.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/news/365531979/Nearly-40-of-software-engineers-will-only-work-remotely

See the First Complete Map of an Insect’s Brain | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

Tags: science, neuroscience

Very import milestone for brain mapping. Far from more complex animals of course and an insane amount of work each time. Still the common fruit fly is already revealing interesting new facts about neurology.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-the-first-complete-map-of-an-insects-brain-180981778/

Shoshikantetsu

Tags: culture, japan

Interesting japanese term. “Complete what was originally intended”. A few more proposed at this end of this short post.

https://asnewman.github.io/shoshikantetsu

Bye for now!

KBibTeX 0.9.3.2 got released, tar-balls are available at KDE’s download mirrors. This is the last release of the 0.9.x branch. Next is 0.10, where I will prepare release candidate tar-balls in the next few days and hopefully we will see a final release 0.10.0 this Spring.

A number of issues got fixed, including but not limited to:

• Bugs 463398, 459150, 464607, and 464606.
• Various online searches got revamped and should work again.
• Building against newer Qt versions (thanks to Albert Astals Cid)

See the full ChangeLog for all the details.

Some spoilers about what is happening in the ‘master’ branch: I have been working on an exporter to Microsoft Word’s bibliography XML. Writing scientific manuscripts with references in Word is a painful experience, but this exporter allows you to continue to use your favorite BibTeX editor even under dire circumstances.

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After three months of active maintenance and other bugs triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.10.0 of its open source digital photo manager.

See below the list of most important features coming with this release.

Bundles Internal Component Updates

As with the previous releases, we take care about upgrading the internal components from the Bundles. Microsoft Windows Installer, Apple macOS Package, and Linux AppImage binaries now hosts: