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FFmpeg 6.1 “Heaviside”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Seems there is another numbered-version release of FFmpeg <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/24/ffmpeg_6_1/>. I didn’t even notice: I did a fresh build a few days ago, and I fetch my upstream from <git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg>, and it appears that repo now actually points to <http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git>. And I just build whatever happens to be at the head of the master branch at the time. This FFmpeg version is named “Heaviside”, after Oliver Heaviside, a major figure in the whole 19th-century ferment over electromagnetic theory, Maxwell’s equations, the development of the associated mathematical techniques of vector analysis, quaternions and all that jazz. If you are interested, here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M12CJIuX8D4> is an entertaining exposition on the very human figures involved in these developments, from a presenter who combines an enthusiasm for the subject with the patience to dig up a remarkable amount of detail (including personal foibles, naturally) about what went on. Why build FFmpeg yourself? Because then you can enable combinations of options that are not legally allowed in any prebuilt binary package. For example, you can have both “--enable-gpl” and “--enable-nonfree”, and end up with a build that is marked “unredistributable”. FFmpeg is both a set of command-line tools, and a set of libraries underlying them, that can also be built into other custom applications. For those intimidated by the truly breathtaking array of options in the command-line tools, there are GUI front-ends to make the functionality more approachable. I hear HandBrake is quite popular. Though I was disappointed to discover that, instead of being a simple GUI wrapper around the command-line tools, it builds its own application directly around the libraries. The downsides of this are that it limits the functionality it can make available, and also makes it harder to keep up with changes to that functionality.

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Roll On The ARM-Based Supers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Report on the status of ARM-based supercomputing <https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/28/hpc-pioneers-pave-the-way-for-a-flo…>. The Fugaku machine was top of the Top500 list from June 2020 to November 2021, which was a pretty decent run. That Fujitsu A64FX chip also powers other supers on the list. But now more entrants are on the way. In terms of user experience, the article reports quite a mixed bag. Some apps are yet to be tuned to wring maximum performance out of ARM hardware, while others build and run nicely without any drama at all. And of course, at some point we should see the first RISC-V machine(s) enter the list.

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MyACC Offline After “Fraudulent Activity”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

ACC’s self-service web portal for accident victims has been temporarily taken down after “apparent fraudulent access” <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/myacc-offline-after-fraudulent-activity…>. Here’s hoping it’s not yet another mass compromise of user data ...

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OpenZFS Data-Corruption Bug
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Seems OpenZFS has a problem which, under rare conditions, can turn parts of your data into rubbish <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/openzfs_2_2_0_data_corruption/>. Initially it was thought this bug was introduced in version 2.2.0, but now there is some indication that it goes back much earlier. It certainly seems difficult to reproduce, and at least one commenter on the article is saying not to worry about it, it’s not going to affect most “traditional” users (whatever that means). It seems the issue does date back to after Oracle closed the source on the original ZFS project and made it proprietary again. Open-source ZFS has long been a controversial issue. Linus Torvalds is not impressed with its performance, for example <https://list.waikato.ac.nz/archives/list/wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz/thread/C…>. Also, many have said that the licence it uses, the CDDL, is deliberately designed to be incompatible with the GPL used by the Linux kernel and many other projects. Ubuntu seem to disagree, and are happy to include OpenZFS with their Linux distro. Interestingly, Oracle also offer a Linux distro. And they have never offered ZFS with that, even though there is clearly demand for such a feature. Some interpret this as a tacit admission that the licence _is_ indeed GPL-incompatible. Because if Oracle bundled CDDL-licensed software with that made available under the GPL, then under the terms of the latter, they also give permission to anybody else to do the same. The implication is, they don’t want to do that.

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PHP 8.0 End of Life Is Today, November 26, 2023
by Peter Reutemann 27 Nov '23

27 Nov '23

'Slashdot reader sysadminafterdark writes: Released on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 brought many optimizations and powerful features to the language.Fast forward to today, and PHP 8 is getting the boot in favor of 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 with 8.4 in development. This leaves some websites at risk of breaking and potential security issues. Hearing of this news, I upgraded my own blog and wrote an article on how to add the Remi repository and update. I run Enterprise Linux (The best distro out there) so if you are standing up new boxes, just keep in mind the PHP in the repo is deprecated.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/11/26/1826247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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util-linux Collection
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Nov '23

26 Nov '23

I was looking at the source repository for the util-linux package <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux>, and discovered that the collection of tools is larger than I thought. There are also a few items listed that aren’t (yet?) in the installed package on my Debian Unstable system. For example, I recently discovered that the “mount” command not only does mounting and unmounting of volumes, but without any options it will also output a list of all current mounts, and this can be done by nonprivileged users. But util-linux includes a more powerful command for this purpose called “findmnt”, which includes more elaborate options for obtaining information about mounted filesystems, including monitoring changes to them. In that repo, I also found “lsfd”, which is meant to be a replacement for “lsof” that takes advantage of newer capabilities specific to the Linux kernel. Also there is “lsns”, which displays information about namespaces. Firefox, in particular, seems to use a whole lot of these, presumably as part of its mechanisms for isolating its processes from each other. This is in addition to other useful ones like “lscpu”, “lspci” “lsusb”, “lsmem”, “lsblk”, “lslocks” and “lsirq”. Interesting that quite a few of these commands support JSON output format. If you don’t want to go this far, you can explicitly specify which columns are included in the output; this is recommended if you want to parse the output in scripts, instead of relying on the default output format not changing. And yes, I have seen some over-elaborate scripts that went to a whole lot of trouble to extract the information they needed from some command, instead of using options in the command to output that information directly.

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Microsoft Windows And The “USB Cart Of Death”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Nov '23

26 Nov '23

For all Microsoft’s efforts, it seems Windows and USB have never sat entirely easily together. Here <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/25/windows_usb_cart_of_death/> is a story from the early days, of how QA people (remember when Microsoft had QA people?) would torment kernel developers by wheeling in a cart laden with USB devices, all daisy-chained together, plugging them in to the test machine, pulling the plug out again, and watching the resulting crash. "The goal," said Chen, "was to get it to the point where you could plug in the USB Cart of Death and unplug it anytime you wanted, and everything would still work... and I think they made it." Note that “I think”. I suppose things are better nowadays, somewhat. I remember when I was starting to learn Android development, I was bemused to discover that Windows required a special USB driver in order to allow live debugging on a connected Android device. This was not necessary on any other platform--their built-in USB support was quite sufficient. And wouldn’t you know it, that limitation still applies to current versions of Windows <https://developer.android.com/studio/run/win-usb>.

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Microsoft’s “Project Silica”: Glass-Based Archival Storage
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Nov '23

24 Nov '23

A group at Microsoft is researching the potential of being able to store data in slabs of quartz glass, at densities comparable to hard drives or even higher <https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/11/22/microsoft-silica-glass-based-storage/>. The data is encoded optically in the glass, using femtosecond laser pulses. There can be hundreds of layers of data within a single block of glass. However, reading back the data involves processing scanned images of the glass layers through a “machine learning algorithm”. This can take some time. That means verification of a backup you just did is going to be just as slow.

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Firefox 120 Ready With Global Privacy Control, WebAssembly GC On By Default
by Peter Reutemann 24 Nov '23

24 Nov '23

'Firefox 120 will be available tomorrow, bringing support for the Global Privacy Control "Sec-GPC" request header to indicate whether a user consents to a website or service selling or sharing their personal information with third parties. It's also enabling the WebAssembly GC extension by default, opening up new languages like Dart and Kotlin to run in the browser. Phoronix's Michael Larabel highlights some of the other features included in this release: - Ubuntu Linux users now have the ability to import data from Chromium when both are installed as Snap packages. - Picture-in-Picture mode now supports corner snapping on Windows and Linux. - Support for the light-dark() CSS color function that allows setting of colors for both light and dark without needing to use the prefers-color-scheme media feature. This allows conveniently specifying the preferred light color theme value followed by the dark color theme value. - CSS support for the lh and rlh line height units. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/11/20/2132231 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Ditching an IDE for hacking on Inkscape
by Ben Cottrell 23 Nov '23

23 Nov '23

I’ve acquainted myself with many IDE’s: Visual Studio, Qt Creator, CLion, and I’ve found it counter-productive to reconfigure projects and/or build environments within an IDE. Instead, I can use nvim, the MSYS MINGW x64 shell and environment (I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have the misfortune of choosing an NVIDIA GPU, so, GNU/Windows is my mainstay). I don’t mind IDE’s if the project can be well defined within a ‘solution’ file, but even so, with Visual Studio, you may have to go through many config windows to pass the correct build flags. Other IDE’s like Qt Creator are pretty similar where you have to recreate config cache files for minor build setting changes. I feel better to forgo the latter in favour of text editors, like Notepad++ or NeoVim, even if you lose autocomplete and fancy highlighting and a nice GUI inspectors for piece-wise debugging. Building and hacking on Inkscape is going easier this way. Do you use an IDE often, or do you prefer using a special emacs setup or something similar, please share 😊 Cheers, Ben

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