wlug August 2019

wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz

7 participants
64 discussions

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

For quite a while now, I’ve been annoyed by the system notification volume going to 100% on my Debian systems, regardless of my attempts to set it to a lower level. For example, when I open the KDE System Settings app, change something, then try to close the window, the sound that accompanies the save/discard/cancel alert is always startlingly loud. I think I have finally found a fix: in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, put in a line saying flat-volumes = no (You should find an existing comment “; flat-volumes = yes” that indicates the default.) You can make this new setting take effect in the current session immediately without having to logout or reboot, by executing the following as the currently-logged-in user: pulseaudio -k (This kills and restarts the PulseAudio daemon for your user session.) There are several discussions of the pros and cons of this issue online, going back some years. For example, here <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267>. Also a mention about the “flat-volumes” setting in the ever-reliable Arch Linux Wiki here <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio>.

6 months, 2 weeks

How Qualcomm Shook Down The Cell Phone Industry For Almost 20 Years

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

A pretty sobering read <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cel…>: Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips. Sound familiar? Judge Koh draws a direct parallel to licensing behavior that got Microsoft in legal trouble in the 1990s. Microsoft would offer PC makers a discount if they agreed to pay Microsoft a licensing fee for every PC sold—whether or not the PC shipped with a copy of MS-DOS. This effectively meant that a PC maker had to pay twice if it shipped a PC running a non-Microsoft operating system. There’s a lot more--the article reads like a catalogue of gangster-like tactics. All of which is perfectly all right under the US interpretation of “Free Enterprise”, of course ... Also, reading the details of how Qualcomm managed to sabotage Intel’s efforts to develop 5G chips, it seems to me that Qualcomm is directly responsible for the situation today where US companies are lagging behind Chinese ones like Huawei in 5G capability.

11 months, 3 weeks

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-remove…>. 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 year, 3 months

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/

1 year, 11 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/

1 year, 11 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/

1 year, 11 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_offi…>

1 year, 11 months

Fwd: GovHack 2019

by Peter Reutemann

Please see attached flyer for details. The venue at uni is open to non-university people as well. Cheers, Peter -------- Original Message -------- From: David Nichols <david.nichols(a)waikato.ac.nz> Sent: August 30, 2019 1:23:09 PM GMT+10:00 To: cs-staff(a)waikato.ac.nz, cs-phd <cs-phd(a)waikato.ac.nz> Subject: GovHack 2019 Hi, could you advertise GovHack in your Moodle course instances and lectures? ========================================= Can you make something useful from government data sources? A weekend of protoptying, hacking and collaborative fun: https://govhack.org/events/hamilton/ The event is free and there are usually some cash prizes put forward by the sponsors: https://www.waikato.ac.nz/news-opinion/media/2016/govhack-nz-success-for-un… <https://elearn.waikato.ac.nz/%20https:/www.waikato.ac.nz/news-opinion/media…> ====================================== thanks Dave -- Dr David Nichols Department of Computer Science University of Waikato Hamilton 3240, New Zealand https://cs.waikato.ac.nz/~daven/ https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0321-7267 -- 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/

1 year, 11 months

How Insurance Companies Are Fuelling A Rise In Ransomware Attacks

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

The cost to a business of trying to recover “kidnapped” documents from backups is often so high that it becomes cheaper to simply pay the ransom. And insurance companies seem happy to go along with this <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/how-insurance-compan…>. And the consequence, of course, is that the crims get even more bold and more demanding ...

1 year, 11 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 -- ----> µ wisdom brought to you by Guy K. Kloss <---- »Wo kämen wir hin, 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 um zu sehen, wo wir hinkämen« -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "New Zealand Python User Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to nzpug+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nzpug/7f89885c-0c08-407b-d9bc-571c2028ed8…. -- 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/

1 year, 11 months

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wlug August 2019