Edge TV Now Online-Only
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
If there is anybody else besides me who wondered what happened to Edge
TV, as of the beginning of this month it is no longer on Freeview, it
can now only be viewed as an online stream
<https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/113928839/the-edge-tv-remo...>.
In the last few days of June, there was a promo announcing that it
was going HD, but I don’t recall it mentioning that it was leaving the
broadcast airwaves.
Quote:
MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson says the move is in
line with audience trends, which show people primarily consume
music videos online.
While that may be mostly true, personally I would go look for videos on
YouTube after seeing them first on Edge TV.
1 month, 1 week
mailman server upgrade
by Peter Reutemann
Hi everyone
The university will be upgrading the mailman server on Monday Sept
2nd, which also hosts the WLUG mailing list. Unfortunately, the email
I received notifying me about the upgrade did not state when or how
long the outage will be, only that the new admin interface will be
available after 5pm (NZ time).
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
9 months
Intel Engineer Launches Working Group To Bring Rust 'Full Parity With C'
by Peter Reutemann
'Someone from the Rust language governance team gave an interesting
talk at this year's Open Source Technology Summit. Josh Triplett (who
is also a principal engineer at Intel), discussed "what Intel is
contributing to bring Rust to full parity with C," in a talk titled
Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming.
An anonymous reader quotes Packt:
Triplett believes that C is now becoming what Assembly was years ago.
"C is the new Assembly," he concludes. Developers are looking for a
high-level language that not only addresses the problems in C that
can't be fixed but also leverage other exciting features that these
languages provide. Such a language that aims to be compelling enough
to make developers move from C should be memory safe, provide
automatic memory management, security, and much more...
"Achieving parity with C is exactly what got me involved in Rust,"
says Triplett. Triplett's first contribution to the Rust programming
language was in the form of the 1444 RFC, which was started in 2015
and got accepted in 2016. This RFC proposed to bring native support
for C-compatible unions in Rust that would be defined via a new
"contextual keyword" union...
He is starting a working group that will focus on achieving full
parity with C. Under this group, he aims to collaborate with both the
Rust community and other Intel developers to develop the
specifications for the remaining features that need to be implemented
in Rust for system programming. This group will also focus on bringing
support for systems programming using the stable releases of Rust, not
just experimental nightly releases of the compiler.
Last week Triplett posted that the FFI/C Parity working group "is in
the process of being launched, and hasn't quite kicked off yet" -- but
he promised to share updates when it does.'
-- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/08/31/1540225
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
9 months
Should the Linux Kernel Accept Drivers Written In Rust?
by Peter Reutemann
'Packt's recent story about Rust had the headline "Rust is the future
of systems programming, C is the new Assembly."
But there was an interesting discussion about the story on LWN.net.
One reader suggested letting people write drivers for the Linux kernel
in Rust. ("There's a good chance that encouraging people to submit
their wacky drivers in Rust would improve the quality of the driver,
partly because you can focus attention on the unsafe parts.")
And that comment drew an interesting follow-up:
"I spoke with Greg Kroah-Hartman, and he said he'd be willing to
accept a framework in the kernel for writing drivers in Rust, as long
as 1) for now it wasn't enabled by default (even if you did "make
allyesconfig") so that people don't *need* Rust to build the kernel,
and 2) it shows real benefits beyond writing C, such as safe wrappers
for kernel APIs."'
-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/31/2138249
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
9 months
Microsoft Office’s New “Save Experience”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
It should be so simple. Windows has a File Save dialog built in.
Developers can call the API, with options to customise it if need
be. Well, two APIs actually: the old Common File Dialog and the
Common Item Dialog introduced in Windows Vista.
But this was not good enough for the Office team and in Office
2010, Microsoft introduced the Backstage as a document management
feature.
...
If you are not so lucky and the location you want does not appear
in the Backstage, you click Browse, and the old Windows Save dialog
appears. In this case, instead of saving you time, the Backstage
has added an extra step.
There is a further wrinkle to the Backstage. In Options, you can
set "Don't show the Backstage when opening or saving files with
keyboard shortcut." As this option implies, this means you do not
see the Backstage when invoking Save with Ctrl-S, but you do if you
go to "File – Save As". However you do not if you go to "File –
Save", even with an unsaved document. Consistency, who needs it?
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/30/saving_documents_in_microsoft_of...>
9 months
Fwd: [nzpug] some CC licensed ebooks (PDF)
by Peter Reutemann
Apologies for cross-posting, but these ebooks may be of interest to you.
Cheers, Peter
-------- Original Message --------
From: "Guy K. Kloss" <guy(a)kloss.nz>
Sent: August 27, 2019 6:01:51 PM GMT+10:00
To: New Zealand Python User Group <nzpug(a)googlegroups.com>
Subject: [nzpug] some CC licensed ebooks (PDF)
Kia ora,
there's a Python book here as well, but I didn't check the quality of
it. But there are a bunch of other books of varying levels of quality.
All licensed in open source (CC-SA) and published (I think) by Stack
Overflow.
https://goalkicker.com/
The odd one might be interesting to the odd one ...
Cheers,
Guy
--
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wenn jeder sagen würde | ... guy(a)kloss.nz ...
"wo kämen wir hin?" | Phone: +64-9-550 8499
und keiner ginge los, | Mobile: +64-210 2323 715
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--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
9 months, 1 week
Knoppix 8.6 - anyone have the iso?
by Ian Young
I have not so far been able to download the 4.3 gig DVD iso file after a
number of attempts from various mirrors - I have not found any in New
Zealand.
Anyone have the iso?
Professor Knopper has it seems removed systemd from Knoppix.
"The still controversial startup systemd, which has been a little
outrageous due to security vulnerabilities just recently
<https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-linux-systemd-security-holes-uncovered/>,
has been integrated in Debian since Jessie [8.0], and has been removed
since Knoppix 8.5. I bypass hard dependencies on the boot system with my
own packages.
To still get a systemd-like session management, and thus retain the ability
to shut down and restart the system as a normal user, I run the session
manager "elogind" instead. This bypasses systemd's interference with many
system components and reduces the complexity of the overall system. If you
want to start your own services at startup, you do not need to create any
systemd units, but simply enter them in the text file */etc/rc.local*,
which contains explanatory examples."
9 months, 1 week
KDE Konsole v19
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Just did my roughly-monthly Debian Unstable upgrade. The most
noticeable change so far (apart from Linux kernel 5.2) is a new version
of the KDE Konsole terminal emulator, going from version 18 to version
19.
This one has close icons by default on each tab, which I have decided
(after closing one tab I didn’t mean to) are too dangerous to click
accidentally, so I have turned them off. Another change is that the
shortcuts for moving tabs left/right have changed from
ctrl-shift-left/right to ctrl-alt-left/right. This means I have to move
my fingers slightly from the ctrl-shift-T shortcut that creates a new
tab, to the ones for reordering it. On the other hand, I don’t do that
too often ...
9 months, 1 week