today''s leftovers

• Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Continues Speeding Ahead For Open-Source Mali Graphics

  Panfrost only made its initial debut as part of the recent Mesa 19.1 release for providing open-source Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard graphics driver support on Linux independent of Arm and their official binary driver. While the resources are limited, so far Panfrost is making stellar progress.  Panfrost continues making terrific progress for providing open-source Arm Mali graphics support. In part, this is made by possible by lead developer Alyssa Rosenzweig currently interning for the summer at Collabora where she appears to be primarily working on this currently OpenGL ES 2.0 class driver and continuing to strive for competitive performance with Arm's official Linux GLES driver.

• The big Civilization VI "June 2019 Update" for Gathering Storm is now live

  Firaxis Games, Aspyr Media and 2K today put out a rather large update to Civilization VI, the June 2019 for Gathering Storm adds in some new features and comes with plenty of balance changes and bug fixes.

• Free and open source software is being sold commercially in the Microsoft Store

  Ever since Microsoft, one of the original and squarely proprietary tech giants, pivoted from software to services some years back, its relationship with free and open source software seems to have improved. For one thing, Microsoft replies on such things as open source flagship Linux for its cloud infrastructure. And the company also made a series of moves indicating it was now a better, gentler version of its old self, seeking not only to use open source software but also contribute back to it.

• The Best Free Photoshop Alternatives

  GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is more than just a photo editor. It also has sophisticated image manipulation tools, which will appeal to pros as well as regular uers.   GIMP has the expected assortment of basic features, including cropping and straightening to adjusting brightness, contrast, and color balance to name a few. Plus it has more advanced tools, like layers, content rescaling, and animation, plus the ability to add blur, noise, and distortion, among other effects. In fact GIMP offers most of the features that Photoshop has, even if it is missing things like other color modes besides RGB and the capability for non-destructive editing. Even better, GIMP’s interface is very customizable, and its features are expandable. Since it is open source, GIMP community members can create plugins, and they often do, sharing them to the rest of the community for free.

• Nvidia and ARM join forces to eighty-six x86 supercomputers

  Team Green, which has a thing for making lunchbox-sized supercomputers, will be making its CUDA-X AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software work nicely with the ARM ecosystem, which means a load of processors based on CPUs and architectures coming out of the Cambridge chip designer.

• When the Atari ST Was the Future of Computing

  The Atari 520ST was Atari's first 16-bit salvo in the personal computer wars of the 1980s. A

• New vulnerabilities may let hackers remotely SACK Linux and FreeBSD systems

• Linux Kernel Bug Knocks PCs, IoT Gadgets and More Offline

• Oregon prisons ban dozens of technology and programming books over security concerns

  “There’s absolutely nothing in there that would pose a security risk. The books are written for consumers - people at home,” he said. “There’s very little about there in networking and there’s certainly nothing about breaking into networks.” Prison officials said the bans aren’t arbitrary or a blanket prohibition on technology-focused books. Instead, they’re a reflection of the resources available to inmates. “We allow our folks in custody to have a lot of access to computers,” said Kelly Raths, the department’s central mailroom administrator. Inmates in Oregon facilities can have USB drives, allowing them to store college papers or legal pleadings and transport them between computers, Raths said. Classrooms inside prisons have networked computers.

• Slimbook Launches New "Apollo" Linux PC, First Beta for Service Pack 5 of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Is Out, NVIDIA Binary Drivers for Ubuntu Growing Stale, DragonFly BSD v 5.6 Released and Qt v. 5.12.4 Now Available

  Slimbook, the Spanish Linux computer company, just unveiled a brand-new all-in-one Linux PC called the "Apollo". It has a 23.6 inch IPS LED display with a 1920x1080 resolution, and a choice between an Intel i5-8500 and i7-8700 processors. It comes with up to 32GB of RAM and integrated Intel UHD 630 4K graphics. Pricing starts at $799.

Linux Distributions for IoT: A Guide to Making the Right Choice

Linux distributions may be popular for IoT initiatives, but making the wrong choice can have dire consequences. Also: Kontron unveils Whiskey Lake-UE module and updates Coffee Lake COM to 9th Gen chips

Programming/Development: C++, Go, Mozilla/Firefox and Python

• Deliverable 1 : [✓]

  Seems okay, far better than the initial results. Although I should say, I deviated from what I thought I would need to write. First I assumed that I don’t have to write another boost::graph wrapper for KisPaintDevice, but I had to. That was one heck of an experience. In one of the last few posts, I ranted on Dmitry’s interpretation of the Graph, turns out we were on the same page but I understood his explanation the wrong way. I should put more attention to details from now on I guess. All the pixels are connected to each other, but they only have an edge between them if they are adjacent. If in center, the out degree would be 8, if in corners, 3 and if in edges, 5. There are some other cases too, but I will leave them for the moment. While writing the wrapper, I also got to know some of the cool features and techniques of C++, which I will be writing posts on as soon as I get some time, concepts, traits, avoiding virtual functions and what not. It is commendable that how boost approaches boost::astar_search, there is not a single virtual function, you don’t have to inherit anything (you can though for safety), just templates and traits, you are done.

• Go Creeping In

  I’ve seen the inside of the Google and Amazon tech stacks. There are common threads that run through them and also, I bet, through most BigTechCos. Here and there down the stack is a lot of C++ and vestigial remnants from earlier days, Perl or PHP or whatever. Out in front of humans, of course, JS. But in between, there are oceans and oceans of Java; to a remarkable degree, it runs the Internet. Except for, here and there, you find a small but steadily increasing proportion of Go.

• Stand by for FPR14 SPR1 chemspill

  Mozilla has shipped a fix for MFSA2019-18 in Firefox 67.0.3 and 60.7.1. This exploit has been detected in the wild, and while my analysis indicates it would require a PowerPC-specific attack to be exploitable in official TenFourFox builds (the Intel versions may be directly exploited, however), it could probably cause drive-by crashes and we should therefore ship an urgent fix as well. The chemspill is currently undergoing confidence tests and I'm shooting to release builds before the weekend. For builders, the only change in FPR14 SPR1 is the patch for bug 1544386, which I will be pushing to the repo just as soon as I have confirmed the fix causes no regressions.

• PyPI Now Supports Two-Factor Login via WebAuthn

• Understanding Python assignment

• How to Publish Your Own Python Package to PyPI

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #373 (June 18, 2019)

• EuroPython 2019: Community Discounts

• EuroPython 2019: Inviting European Python Conference Organizers